Dewey was a product of his time--an age optimistically embracing science and technology in the name of evolution and progress. But because Dewey was educating for industry, his attitude toward nature was incredibly anthropocentric, utilitarian and exploitative.
Take the following quote as an example: “…there is a conscious distinction between man and nature…The problem with which humanity is unceasingly engaged” is “how to master and use nature so as to make it tributary to the enrichment of human life. The great advances in civilization have come through those manifestations of intelligence which have lifted man from his precarious subjection to nature, and revealed to him how he may make its forces co-operate with his own purposes.”
According to Dewey, children should be educated to enter seamlessly the modern, democratic, industrial society of Dewey’s time, a society which is positively perceived by Dewey as evolutionarily advanced. Because his educational concerns are anthropocentric, “The unity of all the sciences is found in geography” which “presents the earth as the enduring home of the occupations of man.”
I can’t emphasize enough the enormous fascination with evolution, science and technology and drive for industrialization that characterized so much of American culture during Dewey’s life. It has been dubbed “The Age of Invention” and our current “Computer Revolution” is merely an extension of it. Even John Muir, father of the American conservation movement, was fascinated by gadgets and was an inventor in his youth. It wasn’t until a decade after Dewey’s death in 1952 that the environmental costs of unbridled “progress” began to be widely perceived.
But now it’s time to re-evaluate John Dewey’s legacy.
Where Dewey advocated the study of geography as the “unity of all the sciences,” I would substitute the study of ecology, for, while Dewey’s view of geography is anthropocentric, ecology has no center and is inherently integrative and holistic. In our schools, an ecologically oriented curriculum is an integrated curriculum where, ideally, every subject is studied in terms of every other subject. This approach would naturally include the human sciences and would not exclude such studies as religion and philosophy. Such an integrated approach to education has always been part of what is considered a liberal education and accords in many ways with Dewey’s own educational philosophy.
For me, Dewey’s philosophical flaws were his assumptions: his anthropocentrism, erroneous assumption about man’s relation to nature, and his naïve belief about technology as a manifestation of evolution and progress. I am alarmed to hear many people even today (maybe as part of Dewey’s philosophical legacy) express the belief that somehow technology alone will solve our environmental problems. I believe technology can be part of the solution but must be accompanied by a reverence for life and a deep investigation of and appreciation for quality of life issues.
At the beginning of the Dhammapada, the Buddha instructed, “With our thoughts we make the world.” If we think nature is here to be “mastered,” unhappiness will follow us as surely as carbon dioxide is emitted from a coal burning power plant.
“With our thoughts we make the world.” If we teach our children (and ourselves!) to think ecologically, humbly and compassionately, harmony will pervade our world like sunlight in a clear, clean sky.