Dewey Stands Firm

Unruffled by blasts from Buenos Aires' Luna Park and the University of Chicago's Midway, unshaken by waverings and defections in the ranks of his own followers. John Dewey at 84 stands rock-firm in his conviction that only through scientific inquiry can man become educated and thus free.

In authoritarian Buenos Aires last week one Jordan Bruno Genta, slim, bespectacled director of the new Teachers' School, addressed 25,000 teachers who had been required to attend on threat of dismissal. They listened glumly as he cried: "The pernicious influence of John Dewey . . . must be eradicated from Argentina's schools. . . . The progressive school must be replaced by the traditional school."

In Manhattan last March the Progressive Education Association, founded 25 years ago on John Dewey's doctrines, changed its name to American Education Fellowship. A shrinking membership and the antics of its lunatic fringe had been too much for it.

From the University of Chicago and elsewhere among the fellow spirits of Robert Maynard Hutchins has come a steady attack on the clutter of "undisciplined" schools and "practical" courses sprung up in Dewey's name, a steady insistence that U.S. education return to the fundamental wisdom of the "best books."

But writing in FORTUNE for August, Philosopher Dewey talks back. He calls the neo-scholastics of the Hutchins school "historical illiterates." In harking back to Greek and medieval ideals of education, says he, they forget that Greek liberal education was not only founded on first hand observation but was also reserved for the relatively small class of free men whose leisure was made possible by the vocational skills of their slaves.

Reliance on ancient wisdom was the trademark of the Middle Ages. It was the only education possible for a continent which had forgotten science and was just emerging from a state of barbarism.

Today, writes Dewey, "the attempt to re-establish linguistic skills and materials as the center of education, and to do it under the guise of 'education for freedom' or a 'liberal' education is directly opposed to all that democratic countries cherish as freedom. The idea that an adequate education of any kind can be obtained by means of a miscellaneous assortment of a hundred books, more or less, is laughable when viewed practically. A five-foot bookshelf for adults, to be read, reread, and digested at leisure throughout a lifetime, is one thing. Crowded into four years and dealt out in fixed doses, it is quite another thing. In theory and basic aim, however, it is not funny. For it marks a departure from what is sound in the Greek view of knowledge as a product of intelligence exercised at first hand. It marks reversion to the medieval view of dependence upon the final authority of what others have found out--or supposed they had found out--and without the historical grounds that gave reason to the scholars of the Middle Ages."

Educator Dewey readily admits that present educational practice and thinking are sadly awry. "Some of us ... agree that the present system (if it may be called a system) is so lacking in unity of aim, material, and method as to be something of a patchwork. . . . We agree that we are uncertain as to where we are going and where we want to go, and why.we are doing what we do."

But the cure for confusion, he declares, is not to fall back into the arms of the ancients. "The problem of going ahead instead of going back is ... a problem of liberalizing our technical and vocational education. The average worker has little or no awareness of the scientific processes embodied in the work he carries on. What he does is often to him routine and mechanical. To this extent the diagnosis the critics make of present vocational education is correct in too many cases.

But their reactionary remedy involves fixation of just that which is bad in the present system. Instead of seeking an education that would make all who go to school aware of the scientific basis of industrial processes, they would draw the lines still more sharply between those who receive a vocational training, deliberately kept illiberal, and the much smaller number who enjoy a liberal education -- after the Greek literary model. A truly liberal, and liberating, education would refuse today to isolate vocational training on any of its levels from a continuous education in the social, moral, and scientific contexts within which wisely administered callings and. professions must function."

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