Dewey's Continuing Relevance to Thinking in Education

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Dewey's Continuing Relevance to Thinking in Education

Philip CAM

Abstract

This chapter sets out Dewey's conception of inquiry and traces the chain of connections that he established between thinking and inquiry, inquiry and experience, and experience and education. Dewey also stressed the social nature of thought, from which he took individual reflection to be derivative, in a way that parallels the work of Vygotsky and underlines the importance of group activity and discussion. After nearly a century, Dewey's account of thinking remains a spur to educational reform and provides a theoretical basis for inquiry-based education and collaborative learning in schools.

Introduction

John Dewey made the bold assertion that “all which the school can or need do for pupils, so far as their minds are concerned … is to develop their ability to think” (1966, p. 152). He was not just claiming that developing good habits of thinking in school is a matter of some importance, as everyone would agree. Rather, he meant to imply that the teaching of factual knowledge and intellectual skills cannot be separated from the development of the student's ability to think if we are to do what is needful in school education. According to Dewey, unless it is connected to thinking, the traditional attempt to impart information and teach skills does not cultivate the student's intelligence but actually works against it. In fact, “information severed from thoughtful action is dead, a mind-crushing load” and “a most powerful obstacle to further growth in the grace of intelligence”. Shorn of its connection with thinking, a skill is “not connected with any sense of the purposes for which it is to be used” and leaves an individual “at the mercy of his routine habits”, without nurturing the capacity for initiative and independent application. By contrast, says Dewey, “Thinking is the method of intelligent learning, of learning that employs and rewards mind” (pp. 152–153).

Dewey's Account of Thinking

What is the “method of intelligent learning” that Dewey equates with thinking? First of all, by “thinking”, Dewey means an “active, persistent, and careful consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the grounds that support it, and the further conclusions to which it tends” (1991a, p. 6). This involves looking into the grounds of any supposed claim to knowledge, examining the assumptions upon which it rests and exploring its consequences. It includes making appropriate connections between ideas, working out the implications of various hypotheses, testing them against what we know and reaching well-grounded conclusions. In short, the kind of thinking to which Dewey refers is what we call “inquiry”. It does not matter whether we are talking about scientific inquiry or, say, historical, mathematical or aesthetic inquiry. While different kinds of inquiry employ somewhat different and often specialised techniques and procedures, they all involve thinking that has the general characteristics indicated above. So, Dewey's equation of thinking with the method of intelligent learning is none other than the identification of thinking with inquiry.

Dewey wrote extensively about this method, in both accessible and more scholarly terms (Dewey, 1991a, 1938). In brief, we can say that inquiry according to Dewey is a regulated pattern of activity that has the following features:

It begins with a problematic state of affairs. The situation may involve conflicting possibilities, unexpected consequences or untoward symptoms.
We must judge that the situation is problematic. That is to say, for inquiry to begin, it is not enough for a situation to be problematic. We must see it as such. A situation may be judged to be problematic in terms of our beliefs or understandings, expectations or desires. We may be struck by the possibility that things are other than we took them to be, or we may be surprised by the fact that the ends we were striving for have unexpectedly eluded us, or we may simply find ourselves in circumstances that we consider to be undesirable.
We must attempt to articulate the problem that needs to be addressed and to formulate questions that may help us resolve it, such that, together with an understanding of the ends we seek, they will help shape and give direction to our thought. Indeed, by seeing the nature of the problem or by raising pertinent questions, we have already moved some way towards a resolution. By contrast, if we have formulated the problem badly, or asked inappropriate questions, then we have taken a step in the wrong direction and, at least temporarily, set back the course of our inquiry.
We must search for relevant details or information that needs to be taken into account in trying to resolve the situation. These are “the facts of the case”, the conditions that any adequate resolution must take into account.
We need to cast around for suggestions or ideas—possible solutions, remedies, explanations or hypotheses—that might lead to a resolution. In the spirit of inquiry, we must always be on the lookout for alternative candidates, different possibilities, rival hypotheses or other viewpoints that need to be considered.
We need to evaluate these suggestions in light of the facts of the case and against whatever criteria we use to measure the adequacy of the resolutions they supply. This means not only weighing the evidence that we have both for and against various possibilities, but it may also require a search for fresh evidence and involve reassessing the facts, refining our criteria, examining our assumptions, and making needful distinctions and connections of all kinds.
Having completed the process of testing and evaluation, we are ready to adopt a suggestion and act accordingly. This may mean executing a plan of action, implementing a set of recommendations, employing a new working hypothesis, working with a different conception, or any number of other things, depending upon the nature of the problem being addressed.
Finally, insofar as we are able to carry our inquiry to a satisfactory conclusion, the situation with which we began will be resolved or transformed. As Dewey puts it, we will have converted a situation in which the constituents “do not hang together” into one that is a “unified whole” (1938, p. 105).

Needless to say, the above is a description of a process that is less tidy in practice than in theory. There are likely to be false starts, missteps, backtracking, premature closures, and barriers of all sorts—not to mention inquiries within inquiries, inquiries that are overtaken by the pressure of circumstance, and the ones that get bogged down or simply run out of steam. Yet, while the picture presented is obviously idealised, it does capture the general features of inquiries of all sorts. From an educational point of view, those who become adept at inquiry in one field or another will have learnt to think in the disciplines that underlie the curriculum, and they have in general a well-developed capacity for reflective thought. Furthermore, they will have learnt what Dewey says they should have learnt from their school education.

Thinking, Experience and Education

Further exploration of this topic leads us to the connections between Dewey's account of thinking and his conceptions of experience and education. In Democracy and Education, Dewey offers us a definition of education in terms of experience: “It is that reconstruction or reorganization of experience which adds to the meaning of experience, and which increases ability to direct the course of subsequent experience” (1966, p. 76). This is an exceptionally abstract definition, but we can begin to understand what it means by noting that, in Dewey's scheme of things, thinking is nothing but reflective experience. Thus, Dewey tells us that experience “involves a connection of doing or trying with something which is undergone in consequence” and that thinking is “the accurate and deliberate instituting of connections between what is done and its consequences” (p. 151). So, thinking is the act of variously articulating or constructing connections that are implicit within our experience.

Let me expand on this. According to Dewey, experience has two interconnected phases:

The nature of experience can be understood only by noting that it includes an active and a passive element peculiarly combined. On the active hand, experience is trying—a meaning which is made explicit in the connected term experiment. On the passive, it is undergoing. When we experience something we act upon it; then we suffer or undergo the consequences. We do something to the thing and then it does something to us in return: such is the peculiar combination (p. 139).

The connection with experimentation is worth spelling out. Experience, we might say, has the nascent form of an experiment. Experience is an interaction with the world in which we try to see how things are connected by acting upon something and discovering what happens. As Dewey says, the young child who naively sticks his finger into a flame connects that action with the ensuing burn. It constitutes an episode in his experience. In making this connection, he has also learnt from the experience. “Henceforth,” Dewey remarks, “the sticking of the finger into flame means a burn” (p. 140). Otherwise put, the experience was educational, in that the child has derived meaning from the encounter, increasing his ability to better direct his subsequent encounters with his world.

It is easy to see how this relates to Dewey's conception of thinking as inquiry. On the intellectual side, the child's encounter involves the discernment of a relationship between what he did and its consequences. It is akin to an experiment and forms an elementary occurrence of thought. Not all inquiries are so straightforward, of course. The discernment of relations may be far more complex and comprehensive. Even so, they all exhibit the same educational form. An educational experience is one in which we actively try things out and draw connections between what we do and what happens as a consequence. The antithesis of Dewey's conception of learning by inquiring is that of the learner as the passive recipient of material assembled by the teacher or presented in the textbook. Here the teacher's effort is focused upon conveying material to students, with little or no attention paid to developing their ability to think about it.

Thought and Dialogue

Dewey claims that thought comes to fruition only through communication and that its realisation is most complete when we think together in “face-to-face relationships by means of direct give and take”, or dialogue (1991b, p. 218). Dialogue is the natural form of linguistic thought, with internal monologue being derivative or incomplete. The latter begs for a respondent, for someone who listens to what is said and offers advice or consolation. Little wonder that private monologue so easily gives way to those more obviously derivative episodes where we become our own interlocutor and converse inwardly with ourselves. Plato was onto something when he said that in thought the soul communes with itself. Plato's image is somewhat misleading, however, in that language is primarily a social phenomenon and linguistic thought is not primarily an internal communication with oneself but a form of engagement with others.

In a little-known passage, Dewey (1916) offers a conjecture about the origins of reflective thought that is worthy of consideration, if only because it echoes a well-known psychological theory of the social basis of forms of thought in the individual.

No process is more recurrent in history than the transfer of operations carried on between different persons into the arena of the individual's own consciousness. The discussion which at first took place by bringing ideas from different persons into contact, by introducing them into the forum of competition, and by subjecting them to critical comparison and selective decision, finally became a habit of the individual with himself. He became a miniature social assemblage, in which pros and cons were brought into play struggling for the mastery—for final conclusion. In some such way we conceive reflection to be born (p. 158).

Dewey's conjecture that the roots of individual reflection are to be found in the practice of interpersonal deliberation bears obvious comparison with the concept of internalisation in the educational psychology of Lev Vygotsky. According to Vygotsky (trans. 1978):

Every feature in the child's cultural development appears twice: first on the social level, and later, on the individual level; first between people (interpsychological), and then inside the child (intrapsychological). This applies equally to voluntary attention, to logical memory, and to the formation of concepts. All the higher psychological functions originate as actual relations between human individuals (p. 57).

Dewey's surmise about the origins of reflective thought is given evidential warrant in Vygotsky's empirical work, and we may express their claim succinctly as the Dewey—Vygotsky thesis. Reflective thought involves the orchestration of all the higher psychological functions needed for inquiry, and the Dewey—Vygotsky thesis is that the acquisition of the habits of reflective thought by the individual comes about through the internalisation of forms of social practice.

Given that thought is primarily a matter of communicated experience, and experience takes the form of inquiry, we can conclude that, for Dewey, reflection has its natural home in collaborative inquiry, from which the habits of individual reflection and deliberation may breed. This is a conception very much at odds with the idea that thought is primarily or even solely a matter of private in-the-head ratiocination, an idea which permeates so much of school education; and therefore it has significant consequences for rethinking the ways in which thinking is to be engendered in the classroom.

Dewey's Continuing Relevance

While more could be said to illuminate Dewey's conception of thinking, let me use the little space remaining to make some brief remarks about its continuing relevance to education today. If we believe, along with Dewey, that education should focus upon developing our students' ability to think, then we need to do what we can to make provision for it in designing the curriculum, in thinking about pedagogy and in assessing student performance. Unfortunately, space prevents me from dealing in any meaningful way with the extended implications for the curriculum, pedagogy and assessment, so I will confine myself to some general remarks on inquiry-based education and collaborative learning.

Inquiry-based education

Students have so much information at their fingertips these days that it is educationally anachronistic to try to turn them into walking encyclopaedias, as if, in any case, there were some fixed store of memorised knowledge, if only they could retain it, that would provide them with what they need to conduct their lives. It also needs to be remembered that they have grown up in an era of omnipresent electronic media that will continue to expose them to all kinds of values and opinions that we cannot hope to counter by insisting upon outward conformity to the traditional standards of the home and the school. In the world of the Internet and the sound bite, our students are more than ever before in need of the means of assessing unfiltered information and unsupported opinion. Unless they are used to critically examining alternatives and testing out suggestions, they will not have the powers of thought that are necessary to deal effectively with the information and opinions with which they are bombarded.

Similarly, students who have been raised on a curriculum that avoids the problematic, and who are restricted to reproducing set answers and solving routine problems, will not be served well when it comes to dealing with a world of rapid and often unpredictable change. The truth is that most of the problems and issues they will face do not have established right answers, or algorithms for computing them; and while they need to become numerate and literate, to be successful in life they will also have to be able to analyse issues and articulate problems, to probe into them by asking insightful questions, and to be able to look at issues and problems from different points of view, to critically assess alternative possibilities and to exercise good judgment. In short, they will need to be able to do the kinds of things that an inquiry-based education equips them to do.

Collaborative learning

What difference might it make to the development of our students' ways of thinking to extensively employ dialogue in their education? Let me make three points.

There is typically a two-way movement in dialogue. A suggestion is made and then it is considered. A tentative explanation is offered and then assessed. A hypothesis is stated and then put to the test. A rough idea is put forward and then worked upon. We can describe this two-way movement as the interplay of creative and critical thought. Since this kind of interplay is inherent in dialogue, it provides a natural basis for students to learn to think at once critically and creatively.
To temper our experience by submitting it to the judgment of others is to become more reasonable. I have in mind such things as learning to listen to other people's points of view and to concede the implications of our own opinions, as well as learning to explore our disagreements reasonably and to change our minds when that is warranted on the basis of reason and evidence. Reasonableness and associated traits, such as fair-mindedness, open-mindedness and tolerance, are the hallmarks of a thoughtful person, one whose thinking is socially well developed.
By extension, in exploring different points of view, discussing disagreements reasonably and keeping an open mind, students will develop forms of regard and practices of exchange that help sustain an open and harmonious society. Such ways of thinking and forms of regard are desperately needed if we are to live in harmony at home and to promote peace in the wider world.

References

Dewey, J. (1916). Essays in Experimental Logic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Dewey, J. (1938). Logic: The Theory of Inquiry. New York: Henry Holt.

Dewey, J. (1966). Democracy and Education. New York: Free Press.

Dewey, J. (1991a). How We Think. New York: Prometheus Books.

Dewey, J. (1991b). The Public and Its Problems. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press.

Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Edited and translated by M. Cole, V. John-Steiner, S. Scribner & E. Souberman. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (Original works published 1930–1933.)