Ian Westbury
Abstract
I reflect on Dewey’s ways of thinking about curriculum change and improvement in his essay "The Educational Situation: As Concerns the Elementary School" to compare them with the ways in which we think about this same problem today. I ask (1) How our understanding of the problem of curriculum change or "reform" has shifted, changed, and/or developed when compared to the understanding Dewey offered a century ago? and (2) What might the conclusions of a reflection on this question mean for our contemporary understanding of curriculum theory and research and of the theory/practice relationship? The claim is that Dewey’s conclusions around "the educational situation as concerns the elementary school" still hold in virtually every respect. But the modes of analysis of this problem within contemporary curriculum theory and research are arguably less sophisticated than were Dewey’s analysis of 100 years ago.
The educational situation: as concerns the elementary school
The question is just this: Why do the newer studies, drawing, music, nature study, manual training, and the older studies, the three R’s, practically conflict with instead of reinforcing one another? Why is it that the practical problem is so often one of outward annexation or mechanical compromise? Why is it that the adjustment of the conflict is left to the mere push and pull of contending factors, to the pressure of local circumstances and of temporary reactions? (p. 266)
The turn-of-the-century John Dewey was an advocate of a conception of a new education, of experience-based forms of learning which sought to form habits of inquiry and co-operation that would secure a democratic life. His question in "The educational situation: as concerns the elementary school" was why the then-curriculum was not clearly changing in the new ways -- despite the earnest and persistent advocacy of this new, progressive, vision of education by educational leaders, the development of new subjects and new ways of learning and teaching, and the near-total acceptance of the desirability and necessity of the "reform," at least among the "leaders" of teachers. The task Dewey undertook in this essay was to spell out his understanding of this problem, this "situation." In this article I will draw on my reading of this essay to ask (1) How our understanding of the problem of curriculum change or "reform" has shifted, changed, and/or developed when compared to the understanding Dewey offered a century ago? and (2) What might the conclusions of a reflection on this question mean for our contemporary understanding of curriculum theory and research and of the theory-practice relationship? My claim will that Dewey’s conclusions around the educational situation of the school still hold in virtually every respect.
"The educational situation: as concerns the elementary school" begins with a trenchant analysis, best expressed in Dewey’s own words, of a disjunction which had emerged within educational discourse in the 19th century between "theory" and "practice."2
Horace Mann and the disciples of Pestalozzi did their peculiar missionary work so completely as to intellectually to crowd the conservative to the wall. For half a century after their time the ethical emotion, the bulk of exhortation, the current formulae and catchwords, the distinctive principles of theory have been on the side of progress, of what is known as reform. The supremacy of self-activity . . . the priority of character to information, the necessity of putting the real before the symbol, the concrete before the abstract . . . ; all these ideas, at the outset so revolutionary, have filtered into the pedagogical consciousness and become the commonplace of pedagogic writing and of gatherings where teachers meet for inspiration and admonition.It is, however, sufficiently obvious that while the reformer took possession of the field of theory and enthusiasm and preaching, the conservative . . . was holding his own pretty obstinately in the region of practice. He could afford to neglect all these sayings: nay, he could afford to take a part in a glib reiteration of the shibboleths because as a matter of fact his own work remained so largely untouched. . . . So the "great big battle" was fought with mutual satisfaction, with each side having an almost complete victory in its own field. (pp. 260--261)
However, as Dewey saw it, in the last years of the 19th century this political and rhetorical settlement between the (progressive) leaders of teachers and the (conservative) leaders who ran the schools had become unstable: "The unconscious insincerity in continually turning the theory over and over in terms of itself, the unconscious self-deceit in using it simply to cast an idealized and emotional halo over a mechanical school routine with which it was fundamentally at odds, became somewhat painfully apparent . . . " (p. 261). As a result new subjects and content had been introduced into the curriculum of the elementary school, i.e., drawing, music, nature study with its field excursions and school gardens, manual training, the activity-based kindergarten, stories, the biographies, and anniversaries of heroic history, etc., what Dewey significantly called the "working counterparts of the comments to follow nature, to secure the complete development of the child, to present the real before the symbol" (p. 261). He described this development as an "emancipation of the child" as opposed the "the emancipation of the educational theorist" (p. 261) -- but this movement was failing because, as he saw it, the new subjects had become merely additive to the curriculum. They stood in an uneasy and fragile relationship with the traditional three R’s, and their priority waxed and waned depending on transitory political considerations.
This was the educational "situation" that Dewey’s essay sought to articulate and prescribe for. As he explained (and we recognize), the uneasy relationship between the old subjects and the new was not inherent in any theoretical or philosophical understanding of the essential character of education. Both sets of subjects needed to co-exist in that each set expressed a vital force: the traditional subjects were "the symbols of the intellectual life," of the "tools of civilization," while the new subjects were symbols of the need for a direct enrichment of the life-experience of the child. However, no popularly accepted, organic understanding of the need for synthesis of these "vital tendencies" was at hand. The heart of his essay is an exploration of the forces which lay behind the lack of any popular, public understanding of the possibility of such a synthesis.
As Dewey saw it, the explanation of this "situation" went much deeper than the understanding that was implied by a simplistic juxtaposition of "conservatism" and "progressivism" as political, cultural, or ideological labels. Moreover, the problem was not in the public’s (or politicians’) innate conservatism, or in the needs of power of any kind. Turn-of-the-century Americans of all stripes believed passionately in "education." Given this shared belief, the question had to be What was impeding the public’s acceptance of the new synthesis as a more complete education than that which was offered by the old framework? "The educational situation: as concerns the elementary school" argued that the answer to this question had to be sought in the interaction between the public’s understanding of the new forms of teaching and schooling and its deeply-held beliefs about the appropriate character of an education.
In making this claim, Dewey was arguing, to use contemporary language, that the key to any understanding of the turn-of-the-century "situation" around the curriculum centered on the cathexis of public understanding of the idea of education around the organization of the school. Inevitably the "school," as the pervasive agency of (the idea of) education, created and instantiated the public’s sense of "education." Therefore, the necessary starting point was the need for an analysis of the character of this institutionalized world-view. To seek such an understanding he directed his attention towards the school and school system, undertaking what we would term a sociology of public knowledge, i.e., an analytic description of what "everybody" knows to be "true."3 In other words, he turned away from a normative curriculum theory and instead sought to offer a realistic curriculum theory by way of an "empirical" understanding of where American were coming from as they thought about education.
As he addressed at the school in this way, Dewey highlighted three interrelated forces which played the critical roles in determining what everybody knew about schools as the public and professional instantiation of the idea of education:4
• the "machinery," or organizational structure, of the school;• the hold of the symbols that this machinery created on public understanding of "school," and thus education; and
• the vested interests which live off and on those structures and understandings. 5
The most important of these processes -- because it lay at the heart of the issue of educational (or "curriculum") change -- circled around what he termed the "machinery" of the school:
The studies of the symbolic and formal sort represented the aims and material of education for a sufficiently long time to call into existence a machinery of administration and of instruction thoroughly adapted to themselves. This machinery constituted the actual working scheme of administration and instruction. These conditions persist long after the studies to which they are well adapted have lost their theoretical supremacy. The conflict, the confusion, the compromise, is not intrinsically between the older group of studies and the newer, but between the external conditions in which the former were realized and the aims and standards represented by the newer. (p. 267; emphasis added)
In short, the historically-developed organizational frame of the school, which Dewey saw in terms of the structure of graded classes, the consequent need for curricula and thus a concept of curricular progression, the resulting standards and expectations for the ordered and orderly movement through the curriculum, and the external supervision of curricula, and teaching, and mastery had come to instantiate the public’s understanding of "education." The "new education" and/or "reform" had to fit this structure if it was to have legitimacy.
But, as he went on to note, this machinery, and the vested interests it had spawned, also affected teachers in profoundly significant ways. Within this curriculum-based system for the co-ordination of schooling teachers had become merely agents of the curriculum. And, as agents, they did not have to work through the "educative bearing" of the matter the curriculum were required them to teach. They did not have to understand themselves as what they necessarily were, the points of contact between the forms of an evolving, yet necessarily integrated, culture and their children.
In other words, the structures which "underlie and regulate [the personal and face-to-face contact of teacher and child] dominate the educational situation" (p. 268). These structures were not "something comparatively external and indifferent to educational purposes and ideals" (p. 267); rather, they determined what legitimate education was understood to be. The curricular forms associated with the turn-of-the-century ideologies of "reform" and "progress" had collided with, and had been bested by, the demands of the thoroughly institutionalized world of the school -- with the result that these ideologies all too often served only to give "a halo of sentiment . . . about it, or a great wish-wash of superficiality covering up the residuum of grind" (p. 280). At best they had become naturalized into the environment created by the organization that was the school.
Given this analysis of the interaction of the school and the public’s understanding of legitimate forms of education Dewey was inevitably led to ask how can meaningful curriculum change occur? He concluded his essay with an expression of his hope. "With our minds possessed by a sane and coherent view of the whole situation, we may attempt such gradual, yet positive modification of existing procedures as will enable us to turn theory into practice" (p. 280). But we must not be "too precipitate . . . in demanding light upon what to do next" (p. 280). We need enlightened experimentation; we need to attack the problem as reformers &endash; "not at large and all over the entire field, but at the most promising point . . . and concentrate all . . . efforts upon educating alike the community, the teacher, and the child" (p. 281; emphasis added). Later "blind experimentation might give way to something more directed" (p. 281). In other words, the focus of all educational reform and change had to center on the practice of education: reformers had to create an awareness on the part of both publics and teachers of the educative possibilities in new kinds of real-world schooling; they had to create new agentive frames for a new idea of education and find ways to give those new forms public legitimacy. Such work had to be local, situated and pragmatic; the results of such local work in creating new curricular forms had to be "registered," noted, accepted so as to become points of cathexis for new local understandings on the part of both public and teachers of possibilities around the idea of "education." Large-scale change could only come about as such small-scale and local developments coalesced in ways that could change the legitimating institutionalized understandings of the public at large.
The educational situation: as concerns the elementary school -- today
Dewey published "The educational situation: as concerns the elementary school" in book form in 1902. It seems appropriate 100 years later to ask how our understanding of the conditions and nature of fundamental curriculum change has advanced over the analysis Dewey offered in that essay. The exploration of the conditions around the real-world enhancement of schooling is, when all is said and done, the raison d’être of the study of all curriculum theorizing and research.
The Dewey who wrote "The educational situation: as concerns the elementary school" was not optimistic about the immediate possibilities for realization of the then-new progressive education. He did not see sweeping changes in schools as immediately possible and put his faith instead in continuing "experiments" that would create the conditions for an institutionalization of the new curriculum. But no institutionalization of Dewey’s brand of progressivism has occurred; and most historians, and contemporary observers, are pessimistic about the yield of any of the major educational "reforms" that have been attempted over the course of the century that has passed since his essay was published. Dewey’s situation remains as our situation.
We can also ask in what ways our understanding of the problem of curriculum reform has advanced over the understanding Dewey offered a century ago? What lessons have we forgotten -- or not learned from this essay? Most reflective observers are also pessimistic about what institutionalized curriculum (and educational) research’s analyses, strategizing, and interventions have produced over that century.
In the first pages of "The educational situation: as concerns the elementary school" Dewey described the character of the progress that he discerned around turn-of-the-century schooling: "Interest was transferred from the region of pedagogic principles and ideals, as such, to the child as affected by these principles and ideas. The formulae of pedagogics were reduced in importance, and the present experience of the child was magnified" (p. 261). The "emancipation of the educational theorist" was being succeeded by "the emancipation of the child" (p. 261) -- as was promised by emergence of new and concrete subjects and forms of teaching offering new educative possibilities for children. However, as Dewey also clearly saw, these developments were being naturalized so as to fit with the organizational frame of the school, with the implication that their authentically educative potential was being lost. They had become forms of mere recreation that relieved the inevitable burden of the institutionally legitimated, "real" core of the work of the school, the teaching and learning of the three R’s.
As we acknowledge the continuing salience of this turn-of-the-century insight and put its reality alongside the omnipresence of Dewey’s vision as the ideal of the leaders of teachers, we see that the "emancipation of the child" that Dewey saw and sought became merely another discourse of the "educational theorist." Just as the "progressivism" of Horace Mann and Pestalozzi had become firmly incorporated within the 19th-century settlement between the leaders of teachers and the managers of the schools, a parallel 20th-century settlement left Deweyan missionaries in command of the world of educational and curricular ideology while the managers remained in command of the school. In this comfortable settlement theory continued to be "theory" and "rhetoric" happily disconnected from practice. But in this essay Dewey sought to make us aware both of that situation and of the intellectual, sociological, and organizational complexity of any reform. "The educational situation: as concerns the elementary school" sought to offer curriculum theorists and reformers a different understanding of what they must do. They must leave their platforms and instead engage practice by way of "enlightened" social experiments which recognize the place of schools as the necessary agencies of an institutionalized educational vision. And such experimentation had to be directed not only at teachers; it had also to create new understandings on the part of the public about what schooling might be.
In this context it is curious -- although not surprising in the light of Dewey’s own analysis -- that "Dewey" as a foundational icon, as a source of a doctrine of the educational theorist, a symbol of a body of ideas outside of action, was to replace his Horace Mann and Pestalozzi as the 20th-century’s dominating symbol for educational theories of "reform" and "progress." Today, of course, while Dewey’s iconic place remains for some, he has been joined "in the commonplace of pedagogic writing and of gatherings where teachers [and researchers] meet for inspiration and admonition" by Jürgen Habermas, Pierre Boudieau, Michel Foucault, Paolo Freire, Jerome Bruner, Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky, etc. -- as well as by a host of others advocating the foundational reality of subjects, learning, skills, intelligence(s), aptitude(s), motivation, class, race/ethnicity, gender, sexuality, culture, this or that view of curriculum improvement, etc.. We continue to live happily within the 19th-century settlement Dewey described: we in the academy seeking our "emancipation" as educational theorists while conservatives reign in the "region of practice."
We might, of course, reject this conclusion as representing too cynical a view of the past century’s curriculum theory and research. But if we take the past and present work of educational and curriculum research to be a serious and sustained attempt to explore the issues around the improvement of schooling, we still need to confront the heart of the tension between theory and the institutionalized practice of schooling which Dewey identified in "The educational situation: as concerns the elementary school."
There were, for Dewey, no privileged and necessary "foundations" for a practice which stood outside the immediate world of practical action. Thought, as a particular form of action, was for Dewey only one source of perspective or enlightenment within every practice. But, in the tradition of 19th-century educational theory, we have seen our work as a search for a foundational "science" that unlocks the essence of education and of the facticity of forces of power, race, gender, etc. in impeding the real-world acceptance or understanding of this form of education,6 we will continue, as did our forebears, to see the school in the terms of our theoretical starting points, as a (good or bad) expression of an underlying framework, not as an agency, a form of machinery, which must address organizational and institutional, as well as educational, needs and ends. As Dewey wrote, "Our difficulties of today come . . . from the multiplication of means clear beyond our present powers of use and administration" (p. 265). It is those "means," as the agentive instantiation of education, which create the institutionalized social form of the school with its very real cultural meaning. It is not the multiplication of further means by way of educational or curriculum theory that gives us our task. Instead the curriculum task is derived, on the one hand, from the "use and administration" of the experimental means for schooling that we have in abundance and, on the other hand, from the need to change institutionalized public understandings of the range of legitimate forms of education.
The public’s understanding of schooling comes about not from educational or curriculum theory but, as Dewey saw, as a result of the experience of the "machinery" of the school as the legitimate agency of education, as this is communicated by teachers, as carriers of the school’s practices, customs, and understandings, and as amplified by the vested interests which live off that world. A century after he wrote his essay we can ask how much attention curriculum research gives to the idea of the institutionalized school as the reality which we must seek to change through the purposeful, practical "experimentation" that Dewey advocated in this essay. If we were to follow the lead of his analysis, the core concepts of curriculum research and theory would revolve around notions like his local experimentation, and around organization-building, and social mobilization as the mechanisms of social change.7 We would put the institutionalized school at the forefront of our concerns and, at best, the doctrines of the educational theorist would offer only one body of platforms for possible action. Curriculum theory would become a source of enlightenment within a practical pursuit.
In short, in the view of the Dewey of "The educational situation: as concerns the elementary school," the problem facing the curriculum reformer at the turn of the century (and today) was (and is) not one of one of articulating a vision of some essence of education. Instead the problem centered (and centers) on developing organizational means for the use and administration of one or another new way, and on convincing the public of the educational legitimacy of that way. Such work requires an empirical understanding of the practices of the school and of the nature of the legitimating symbols around the idea of education -- and then concrete, practical action based on that understanding. This action must not be symbolic, directed at the idea or the ideology of a curriculum, but at the development, at what Dewey called "their most promising points," of forms of enlightened real-world practice. It is only such real-world practices which can provide the seeds around which public instincts about what is valuable for children can cathect. We have to recognize, with Dewey, that "if . . . the American public fails, in critical cases, to stand by the educational newcomers, it is because these latter have not yet become organic parts of the educational whole -- otherwise they would not be cut out. . . . They are still insertions and additions"(p. 263).
Notes
1. John Dewey (1902) The Educational Situation Contributions to Education, Number III (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), ch. 1. The essay is reprinted in John Dewey The Middle Works, 1899-1924: Volume 1: 1899-1901, ed. J. A. Boydston (Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1976), 257-313. The references given here to The Educational Situation are to this 1976 edition of the essay.
2. Dewey also picks up this theme in other essays in this period. In his "The Relation of Theory to Practice in Education" in John Dewey, The Middle Works, 1899-1924: Volume 3: 1903-1906, ed. J. A. Boydston (Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1977), published in 1904, he writes "of the dualism, of the unconscious duplicity, which is one of the chief evils of the teaching profession. There is an enthusiastic devotion to certain principles of lofty theory in the abstract -- principles of self-activity, self-control, intellectual and moral -- and there is a school practice taking little heed of the official pedagogic creed. Theory and practice do not grow together out of and into the teacher’s personal experience" (p. 255).
3. For this perspective, see Jean I. Martin, The Migrant Presence: Australian Responses 1947-1977: Research Report for the National Population Inquiry (Sydney: George Allen & Unwin, 1978), ch. 1.
4. This framework is interestingly similar to the "institutionalist" understanding of schooling that has been offered in the centrally important writing of John Meyer (see, for example, E. H. McEneaney and J. W. Meyer, "The Content of the Curriculum: An Institutionalist Perspective," in Handbook of the Sociology of Education, ed. M. T. Hallinan (New York: Kluwer, 2000), pp. 189-211.
5. As examples of vested interests Dewey mentions textbook publishers and the political systems around school boards. The Australian curriculum reformer and theorist Bill Hannan has described the influential groups with a vested interest in what works as "principals, parents, professors, examiners, journalists and pundits." See Bill Hannan, Review of Designs on Learning: Essays on Curriculum and Teaching by Garth Boomer," Curriculum Perspectives, 21 (April, 2001), pp. 58-59.
6. See, for example, Kathleen Cruikshank, "The Prelude to Education as an Academic Discipline: American Herbartianism and the Emergence of a Science of Pedagogy," Paedagogica Historica, Supplementary Series, Vol. 3: History of Educational Studies (1998): 99-120. See also Stefan Hopmann (1999). The Curriculum as a Standard in Public Education. Studies in Philosophy and Education 18 (1999), pp. 89-105.
7. See Morris Janowitz "Theory and Policy: Engineering or Enlightenment Models," in M orris Janowitz On Social Organization and Social Control, ed. J. Burk (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), pp. 86-95.