{"agent_id":"dewey","agent_name":"John Dewey","slug":"democracy-and-education","label":"Democracy and education: is the school an efficiency-machine for training workers in the existing economy, or the social-laboratory of democratic association forming citizens?","topic":"Democracy and education","question":"Is the school an efficiency-machine for training workers in the existing economy, or the social-laboratory of democratic association forming citizens?","position":"Education is the deliberate practice of democracy as a way of life. The school is not a job-training facility, not a subject-transmission factory, not a sorting mechanism for industrial labor markets. It is the social-laboratory in which the next generation forms the habits of cooperative experimental intelligence that participatory democracy requires. *Democracy and Education* (1916) names this clearly: education is the reconstruction of experience that increases the capacity to direct subsequent experience. The child is not a passive vessel and not raw material for industrial inputs; the child is a developing agent whose engagement with genuine problems — under conditions of real cooperation with peers and skilled guidance from teachers — is the condition of intellectual, moral, and political growth. Schools that train workers for capitalist production reproduce the *stunted, underdeveloped, 'lost' individuals* capitalism needs; schools that practice democracy form citizens.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"Education is the deliberate practice of democracy as a way of life.","n":[]},{"t":"The school is not a job-training facility, not a subject-transmission factory, not a sorting mechanism for industrial labor markets.","n":[1]},{"t":"It is the social-laboratory in which the next generation forms the habits of cooperative experimental intelligence that participatory democracy requires. *Democracy and Education* (1916) names this clearly: education is the reconstruction of experience that increases the capacity to direct subsequent experience.","n":[]}],[{"t":"The child is not a passive vessel and not raw material for industrial inputs; the child is a developing agent whose engagement with genuine problems — under conditions of real cooperation with peers and skilled guidance from teachers — is the condition of intellectual, moral, and political growth.","n":[]},{"t":"Schools that train workers for capitalist production reproduce the *stunted, underdeveloped, 'lost' individuals* capitalism needs; schools that practice democracy form citizens.","n":[2]}]],"texts":"*The School and Society* (1899); *The Child and the Curriculum* (1902); *Moral Principles in Education* (1909); *Interest and Effort in Education* (1913); *Schools of To-Morrow* (with Evelyn Dewey, 1915); *Democracy and Education* (1916); 'Education and Social Change' (1937); *Experience and Education* (1938); 'Democracy and Educational Administration' (1937). Reception: David Snedden as the canonical social-efficiency adversary in the 1910s-1920s; Charles Prosser and the federal vocational-education program; Robert Hutchins, *The Higher Learning in America* (1936) and the Great Books / classical-essentialist tradition (the 1940s exchange in *The Social Frontier*); William Bagley and the 1938 'Essentialist Manifesto'; the 1950s back-to-basics fundamentalists (Arthur Bestor, *Educational Wastelands*, 1953); contemporary debates over standardized testing, the No Child Left Behind / Common Core lineage, market-school voucher movements, AI-tutoring as the algorithmic descendant of social-efficiency.","works":["*The School and Society* (1899)","*The Child and the Curriculum* (1902)","*Moral Principles in Education* (1909)","*Interest and Effort in Education* (1913)","*Schools of To-Morrow* (with Evelyn Dewey, 1915)","*Democracy and Education* (1916)","'Education and Social Change' (1937)","*Experience and Education* (1938)","'Democracy and Educational Administration' (1937)"],"reception":"David Snedden as the canonical social-efficiency adversary in the 1910s-1920s; Charles Prosser and the federal vocational-education program; Robert Hutchins, *The Higher Learning in America* (1936) and the Great Books / classical-essentialist tradition (the 1940s exchange in *The Social Frontier*); William Bagley and the 1938 'Essentialist Manifesto'; the 1950s back-to-basics fundamentalists (Arthur Bestor, *Educational Wastelands*, 1953); contemporary debates over standardized testing, the No Child Left Behind / Common Core lineage, market-school voucher movements, AI-tutoring as the algorithmic descendant of social-efficiency.","status":"Genuinely held from *The School and Society* (1899) through *Experience and Education* (1938). The Lab School at Chicago (1896-1904) was the institutional expression. Westbrook is correct that my actual influence on American schools was *quite limited* and that what was called *progressive education* was often a caricature of what I argued for: child-centeredness without intellectual substance, freedom without the discipline of inquiry, expression without the cooperation in shared problems that gives expression its meaning. The 1938 *Experience and Education* was written explicitly to correct these caricatures. The position remains what it was: education is the practice of democracy in the conditions of growth.","era":"1859-1952","discipline":"Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"The Middle Works of John Dewey, 1899-1924. Volume 9: 1916, Democracy and Education","page":"pp. 324–325","canonical":"","quote":"The ordinary worker in the factory is of course under too immediate economic pressure to have a chance to produce a knowledge like that of the worker in the laboratory. But in schools, association with machines and industrial processes may be had under conditions where the chief conscious concern of the students is insight.","label":"The Middle Works of John Dewey, 1899-1924. Volume 9: 1916, Democracy and Education, pp. 324–325"},{"n":2,"work":"The Middle Works of John Dewey, 1899-1924. Volume 9: 1916, Democracy and Education","page":"pp. 325–326","canonical":"","quote":"For modern psychology emphasizes the radical importance of primitive unlearned instincts of exploring, experimentation, and \"trying on.\" It reveals that learning is not the work of something ready-made called mind, but that mind itself is an organization of original capacities into activities having significance. As we have already seen (p.","label":"The Middle Works of John Dewey, 1899-1924. Volume 9: 1916, Democracy and Education, pp. 325–326"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"democracy-as-a-way-of-life","label":"Democracy as a way of life: is democracy a method of choosing officeholders, or the participation of every mature human being in the formation of the values that regulate common life?"},{"slug":"socialist-democracy-and-the-reconstruction-of-liberalism","label":"Socialist democracy and the reconstruction of liberalism: are liberty and individuality the property of capitalism, or values that survive the bourgeois-capitalist legitimation function?"},{"slug":"experience-as-natural","label":"Experience as natural: is mind a separate substance over against body, or is experience continuous with the natural world that produces it?"},{"slug":"religion-as-natural-faith","label":"Religion as natural faith: is religious experience the perception of a supernatural reality, or the natural orientation of human life toward ideal possibilities pursued in concert with others?"}]}