Education as Direction

Learning to fly in the water, Sadie Winslow and Cecilia Irrizari near San Juan, Puerto Rico, February 2011.

“Direction expresses the basic function, which tends at one extreme to become a guiding assistance and at another, a regulation or ruling” (p. 28).

“In general, every stimulus directs activity. It does not simply excite it or stir it up, but directs it toward an object” (p. 29).

“To some extent, then, all direction or control is a guiding of activity to its own end; it is an assistance in doing fully what some organ is already tending to do” (p. 29).

“Focusing and ordering are thus the two aspects of direction, one spatial, the other temporal” (p. 30).

“Speaking accurately, all direction is but re-direction; it shifts the activities already going on into another channel” (p.30).

“Those engaged in directing the actions of others are always in danger of overlooking the importance of the sequential development of those they direct” (p. 31).

Teaching is, without a doubt, directing (or re-directing) activities in a particular direction.  Re-direction activities seem to fall along a spectrum with guidance and control on the two ends.  However as Dewey discusses we are not always conscious of what is directing us, and how it is doing it.

“But the more permanent and influential modes of control are those which operate from moment to moment continuously without such deliberate intention on our part” (p. 31).

This makes me think predominantly of schedules, the time allotted to various activities, but also of the hierarchy of authority, disciplinary procedures and rules and their implementation, discussions and the qualitative feel of the classroom environment.  Through the way all of these are used by others, our students learn to use them.

“We are even likely to take the influence of superior force for control, forgetting that while we may lead a horse to water we cannot make him drink; and that while we can shut a man up in a penitentiary we cannot make him penitent. In all such cases of immediate action upon others, we need to discriminate between physical results and moral results” (p. 31).

“When we confuse a physical with an educative result, we always lose the chance of enlisting the person's own participating disposition in getting the result desired, and thereby of developing within him an intrinsic and persisting direction in the right way” (p.32).

To sum up the argument: obedience is not education.  Physical actions are different than intrinsic actions.

“This other method resides in the ways in which persons, with whom the immature being is associated, use things; the instrumentalities with which they accomplish their own ends” (p. 32).

By identifying things, such as the list regarding the overall educational landscape above, the young can learn how we use them, or potentially criticize how we use them.  Of course this is true for any thing, though I sense that a major concern for Dewey (and Maxine Greene) are with those things which are continuous from moment to moment.

“There is not, in fact, any such thing as the direct influence of one human being on another apart from use of the physical environment as an intermediary” (p. 33).

“But as matter of fact, it is the characteristic use to which the thing is put, because of its specific qualities, which supplies the meaning with which it is identified” (p. 34).

“The difference between an adjustment to a physical stimulus and a mental act is that the latter involves response to a thing in its meaning; the former does not” (p. 34).

“And not till he knew what he was about and performed the act for the sake of its meaning could he be said to be "brought up" or educated to act in a certain way. To have an idea of a thing is thus not just to get certain sensations from it. It is to be able to respond to the thing in view of its place in an inclusive scheme of action…” (p. 35).

The above seem to be some more criteria of separating education from obedience... acting on the meaning, rather than simply physically acting.

“But if each views the consequences of his own acts as having a bearing upon what others are doing and takes into account the consequences of their behavior upon himself, then there is a common mind; a common intent in behavior” (p. 35).

“But when he makes a back and forth reference, his whole attitude changes…In that way, he also no longer just gives way to hunger without knowing it, but he notes, or recognizes, or identifies his own state. It becomes an object for him. His attitude toward it becomes in some degree intelligent” (p. 36).

“…physical things do not influence mind (or form ideas and beliefs) except as they are implicated in action for prospective consequences… persons modify one another's dispositions only through the special use they make of physical conditions” (p. 36).

To become intelligent begins with the identification of things as objects (even actions or qualities) (and is usually connected with language) and in order to identify these things we must use them, not simply be used by them.  So I'm still thinking about the overall educational landscape... it seems difficult to become awake to it, or its various aspects, without acting through it in some way, or perhaps minimally by having pieces of it pointed out, discussed, and acted on in reflection and imagination.

“But language would not be this efficacious instrument were it not that it takes place upon a background of coarser and more tangible use of physical means to accomplish results” (p. 37).

“The prevailing habits of using the products of human art and the raw materials of nature constitute by all odds the deepest and most pervasive mode of social control” (pp. 37-38).

“But these "minds" are the organized habits of intelligent response which they have previously required by putting things to use in connection with the way other persons use things. The control is inescapable; it saturates disposition. The net outcome of the discussion is that the fundamental means of control is not personal but intellectual” (p. 38).

This last citation reminds me of Wittgenstein's "modes of life."

“Mind as a concrete thing is precisely the power to understand things in terms of the use made of them; a socialized mind is the power to understand them in terms of the use to which they are turned in joint or shared situations. And mind in this sense is the method of social control” (p. 38).

“Imitation of means of accomplishment is, on the other hand, an intelligent act. It involves close observation, and judicious selection of what will enable one to do better something which he already is trying to do. Used for a purpose, the imitative instinct may, like any other instinct, become a factor in the development of effective action” (p. 41).

“Only failure to take account of the situations in which persons are mutually concerned ( or interested in acting responsively to one another) leads to treating imitation as the chief agent in promoting social control” (p. 41).

“If we add one other factor, namely, that such appliances be not only used, but used in the interests of a truly shared or associated life, then the appliances become the positive resources of civilization” (p. 43).

Here I think Dewey is using the term "appliances" as he used "tools" in E&N, and it is combined with the idea of intelligent direction for a better society... the aim of education.

“…things as they enter into action furnish the educative conditions of daily life and direct the formation of mental and moral disposition” (p. 43).

“The emphasis in school upon this particular tool [language]has, however, its dangers -- dangers which are not theoretical but exhibited in practice…education is not an affair of "telling" and being told, but an active and constructive process, is a principle almost as generally violated in practice as conceded in theory” (p. 43).

“But its enactment into practice requires that the school environment be equipped with agencies for doing, with tools and physical materials, to an extent rarely attained” (p. 44).

“Not that the use of language as an educational resource should lessen; but that its use should be more vital and fruitful by having its normal connection with shared activities” (p. 44).

“We may secure technical specialized ability in algebra, Latin, or botany, but not the kind of intelligence which directs ability to useful ends” (p. 44).

To summarize these last citations, simply being given knowledge, facts, is not to be educated; education requires the active use of objects in the construction of ideas.  I know this point comes up in more detail later in the book.  I am wondering if the active use of objects could be in imagination, I think I remember later in the book Dewey discussing building castles in the air as using objects?  I feel that physically using objects would lead to richer experiences, filled with more meaning and understanding; and maybe this type of use is more like "theorizing," which may or may not play out as expected in future experience.