ES 2306:  THEORISING INCLUSIVE  EDUCATION

 Dewey, growth and inclusion

How might education contribute to the creation and continuance of an inclusive community?

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last updated 22.11.11.

   

Life as growth

 

So long as there is life there is growth.  Dewey observes: ‘The most notable distinction between living and inanimate things is that the former maintain themselves by renewal’ (Dewey, 1966: 1).  The essence of life is activity: ‘Life is a self-renewing process through action upon the environment’ (Dewey, 1966: 2). 

 

Growth, immaturity and inclusion

 

Dewey rejects the idea that immaturity is ‘mere lack’, and instead connects it to ‘a positive force or ability - the power to grow’ (Dewey, 1966: 42).

 

Dewey’s view is that the young are not beings who will become, they are constantly becoming.  Dewey writes: ‘Where there is life, there are already eager and impassioned activities.  Growth is not something done to them; it is something they do’ (Dewey, 1966: 42).

 

Dewey is suggesting that education cannot be a process that simply happens to persons. 

 

Plasticity, growth and ontological inclusion

 

Dewey writes of the ‘plasticity’ of the young, by which he denotes,

 

the ability to learn from experience; the power to retain from one experience something which is of avail in coping with the difficulties of a later situation. This means power to modify actions on the basis of the results of prior experiences, the power to develop dispositions. (original emphasis, Dewey, 1966: 44)

 

Learning as growth involves, then, not simply the mastery of skills or the attainment of more knowledge, not, that is, simply learning to act or speak in a different way – it is, instead, learning to be in learning: it occurs when one ‘acquires  a habit of learning’, when one ‘learns to learn’ (Dewey, 1966: 45).

 

When Dewey writes of ‘habits’ he refers to ways of being that are active, that are purposive and reflective:

 

Any habit marks an inclination — an active preference and choice for the conditions involved in its exercise… A habit also marks an intellectual disposition… There is a definite way of understanding the situations in which the habit operates. (Dewey, 1966: 48)

 

The change that the learning habit brings is relational: is dwells between the learner and the world.  Here is the ontological dimension of growth: the habit of learning brings more than new information, knowledge and skills – it brings us into a new way of being in, a new way of reaching out and learning from, the world.     

 

Growth, communication and communion: Illuminating the possibilities of inclusive education

 

Persons do not become a society by living in physical proximity, any more than a man ceases to be socially influenced by being so many feet or miles removed from others.  A book or a letter may institute a more intimate association between human beings separated thousands of miles from each other than exists between dwellers under the same roof.   Individuals do not even compose a social group because they all work for a common end… Consensus demands communication.  (Dewey, 1966: 4-5)

 

As with Freire, the emphasis here is on communication.  Communication, for Dewey, is the very life breath of any society.  Thus he writes: ‘Society not only continues to exist … by communication, but it may fairly be said to exist in … communication’ (1966: 4).

 

To communicate is to be and to become:

 

Not only is social life identical with communication, but all communication (and hence all genuine social life) is educative. To be a recipient of a communication is to have an enlarged and changed experience. (Dewey, 1966: 5)

 

Communication, which begins in lived experience, acts to expand possibilities for future, deeper experience. 

 

The habit of learning – created and sustained by communication – is a way of being that us ever alert to educational possibilities, here living is learning.   Thus, Dewey writes: ‘[T]he inclination to learn from life itself and to make the conditions of life such that all will learn in the process of living is the finest product of schooling’ (Dewey, 1966: 51). 

 

Growth and education: Education as its own end

 

Dewey asserts: ‘Since growth is the characteristic of life, education is all one with growing; it has no end beyond itself’ (Dewey, 1966; 49-50).

 

There is no end point of education: growth begets growth.  

 

 

 

How does education perpetuate social exclusion?

 

Exclusion and the failure to communicate

 

Like Freire, Dewey is concerned by the contradiction in the classroom, in which the teacher is positioned as expert and the student as a subject of this expertise.  This is a contradiction which connects the learning of the young with their ‘storing away what others pour into them’ (Dewey, 1966: 159).

 

For Dewey, communication can never be from one unto another – it must be mutual, involving two persons thinking for themselves about common idea or problem.  Dewey writes:

 

[N]o thought, no idea, can possibly be conveyed as an idea from one person to another.  When it is told, it is, to the one to whom it is told, another given fact, not an idea. The communication may stimulate the other person to realize the question for himself or it may smother his intellectual interest and suppress his dawning effort at thought.  But what he directly gets cannot be an idea.   Only by wrestling with the conditions of the problem at first hand, seeking and finding his own way out, does he think. (original emphasis, Dewey, 1966: 159-160)

 

Dewey is making a distinction here between ideas and facts.  Students may receive a multitude of facts from their teachers, but, he argues, until they learn to think for themselves - until they engage with their learning and connect it to their own experiences - their lives will not be enriched and enlarged through the comprehension of ideas. 

 

Dewey’s distinction between receiving and being in communication connects with Freire’s passive and active consciousness.   Of the essentially active character of communication, Dewey says:

 

Except in dealing with commonplaces and catch phrases one has to assimilate, imaginatively, something of another’s experience in order to tell him intelligently of one’s own experience.  All communication is like art…  Only when it becomes cast in a mold and runs in a routine way does it lose its educative power. (Dewey, 1966: 6)

 

In other words, communication which springs from the experience of just one person is empty.  Words spoken from the teacher onto the student do not constitute an act communication.

 

In education,

 

The short-sighted method which falls back on mechanical routine and repetition to secure external efficiency of habit, motor skill without accompanying thought, marks a deliberate closing in of surroundings upon growth. (Dewey, 1966: 49)

 

In the absence of communication between teacher and pupils, ‘the attitude of pupils must, upon the whole, be one of docility, receptivity, and obedience’ (Dewey, 1963: 18). 

 

Dewey argues that we fall to passivity as soon as we find ourselves following ‘unthinking habits’ or ‘habits that possess us instead of our possessing them’, and we surrender our plasticity (Dewey, 1966: 49).   When this occurs in education the consequence is a ‘lack of interest in the novel, aversion to progress, and dread of the uncertain and the unknown’ (Dewey, 1966: 51). 

 

References

 

Dewey, J. (1963) Experience and education (New York, Collier)

Dewey, J. (1966) Democracy and education: An introduction to the philosophy of education (New York, The Free Press)