Exploring Linkages between Dewey's Educational Philosophy and Industrial Reorganization

Abstract

The paper begins by pointing out that Dewey in his preface to Democracy and Education (1916) stated that his goal was to show how his philosophy of education was related to experimentalist and evolutionary features of science, the growth of democracy and the need for industrial reorganization. The argument is made that Dewey's interest in the linkages between education and industrial reorganization has been among the least explored features of his work. The paper is organized around three topics: (1) an explication of Dewey's discontents with American industrialism and education, (2) an analysis of Dewey's thesis that science may be viewed as a mode of learning and a moral enterprise which may be linked to democratic values, (3) an account of how this way of viewing science was related to his arguments for a parallel reorganization of industry and education to support the values of democratic humanism. The paper explores Dewey's contention that the humanist potential of science as a model for human growth was being perverted into 'scientific technique', a tool for the pursuit of pecuniary and material gain. Illustrations of the consequences for industries and schools are provided. Then Dewey's counter argument of the need for a conjoint re-organization of both schools and industries to make them 'good work' places is developed. Included are examples of his own efforts along these lines in the work of the Dewey Laboratory School at the University of Chicago (1896-1904). The dominant vocation of all human beings at all times is living intellectual and moral growth. (Dewey, 1916: 362). The moral function of... [all] institutions is in last analysis educative. (Dewey, 1908: 405)