DEWEY ON RACE PRIOR TO DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION

Prior to the publication of Democracy and Education, Dewey addressed race only two times. The first time was in a 1909 speech to the National Negro Conference, a group that would form the basis of the National Association for Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), for which Dewey was a founding member. In his brief two-page address, Dewey reported that recent scientific research had disproven the doctrine of the transmission of acquired characteristics, known as neo-Lamarckianism, which was the mechanism used by many nineteenth-century racial theorists to explain how and why the white races had risen to the top of the social, cultural, and biological hierarchy. Dewey saw great promise in the rejection of neo-Lamarckianism and optimistically asserted, “There is no inferior race, and the members of a race so-called should each have the same opportunities of social environment and personality as those of the more favored race.”Footnote ⁷ This was a radical position to take in 1909, because most leading social scientists at the time continued to espouse the biological inferiority of people of color. The second time Dewey addressed race prior to 1916 was in chapter 8 of his coauthored book, Schools of To-morrow (1915), which explored school No. 26 in Indianapolis, which was “located in the poor crowded colored district of the city and has only colored pupils.” Dewey and his daughter Evelyn praised the approach depicted in the racially segregated school as an example of adapting the curriculum to local conditions, and they boldly suggested that the “success of the experiment would mean a real step in solving the ‘race question.’”Footnote ⁸ These two examples do not give the historian much to work with. However, drawing on these and Dewey's other writings and letters between 1896 and 1916, we can reconstruct the racial and cultural views embedded in Dewey's philosophy prior to the publication of Democracy and Education.

Prior to 1916, Dewey shared four basic beliefs with leading white social scientists of the time: first, that all the societies of the world could be placed along a single, linear path leading through the universal sociological stages of savagery, barbarianism, and civilization; second, that all the individuals of the world could also be placed along a single, linear path leading through specific psychological stages; third, that these sociological stages more or less corresponded with these psychological stages; and fourth, that nonwhite populations such as Africans, African Americans, Native Americans, and aboriginal Australians were stuck in an earlier psychological-sociological stage of development.

Virtually every influential social scientist and educator during the closing decades of the nineteenth century, including Herbert Spencer, Edward Burnett Tylor, Frank Lester Ward, Franklin Giddings, Thorstein Veblen, William Torrey Harris, G. Stanley Hall, and James Mark Baldwin made repeated and direct reference to societies and individuals moving along a linear path of progress through the stages of savagery, barbarianism, and civilization.Footnote ⁹ The influential cultural anthropologist Henry Lewis Morgan had even outlined specific sublevels within each stage, such as “lower,” “middle,” and “upper” savagery.Footnote ¹⁰ Although Dewey did not believe in the existence of these categories in predetermined or absolute terms, he nevertheless adopted the language of linear development throughout his early and middle years. For example, Dewey asserted in How We Think, that were it not for education, “the story of civilization would be writ in water, and each generation would have laboriously to make for itself, if it could, its way out of savagery.” The next year Dewey argued that the lessons of past cultures “absolutely must be transmitted to the succeeding and immature generation if social life itself is not to relapse into barbarism and then into savagery.” In his essay, “Some Stages of Logical Thought,” Dewey outlined the stages of sociological growth more specifically as the static belief stage, discussion and argumentation stage, the modern experimentation stage, and the contingency stage. All societies that progressed to civilization, Dewey argued, had passed through this linear sequence.Footnote ¹¹

Dewey's pedagogy at the University of Chicago (1894–1904) coordinated the sociological stages in the history of mankind with the psychological stages of individual growth, because he viewed the development of the human race as taking place in a similar manner to the development of the individual. As Dewey averred in “Some Stages of Logical Thought,” the stages he outlined represented “modes of thinking, easily recognizable in the progress of both the race and individual.”Footnote ¹² In practice, at the University of Chicago Laboratory School he founded, this meant coordinating the earliest stages of psychological development with the savage stage of sociological development. The lab school curriculum was based upon the historical reenactment of the social progress of the human race leading from savagery to civilization.Footnote ¹³ In fact, two of the first visitors to the lab school specifically commented on the savage-child analogy. As one visitor complained, “Their purpose for why we should inflame the minds of our little civilized Aryans with the ideal of a savage Indian life, I can't see.” Another early visitor described how a Dewey schoolteacher directed her “to a class in primitive life where children had spent some weeks in working out, with the aid of the teacher, what the earliest people must have done when they had no clothing, or food, or shelter, or means of defense.”Footnote ¹⁴

Throughout his pre-1916 work, Dewey made the savage-child analogy repeatedly. For example, in School and Society Dewey wrote, “Many anthropologists have told us there are certain identities in the child's interests with those of primitive life. There is a sort of natural recurrence of the child mind to the typical activities of primitive peoples.”Footnote ¹⁵ In the conclusion to Schools of To-morrow, the Deweys reiterated, “When a child learns by doing he is reliving both physically and mentally some experience which had proved important to the human race; he goes through the same mental processes as those who originally did these things.”Footnote ¹⁶ Dewey's approach of having students relive the social occupations of the human race was an innovative way to combine academic and vocational content, but it consequently cast nonwhite hunter-gatherer societies as previous steps in the universal, linear stages of sociological development in accordance with contemporaneous anthropological theory.

Dewey not only believed that the young child and the savage were psychologically-sociologically equivalent, but he confirmed that these childlike savage communities were still present on the earth. For example, in a letter he wrote to a teacher outlining his initial plan for his lab school, Dewey explained how the “child's interest in present forms of living” should “lead him back to social groups organized in that way [for example]—hunting and fishing to the Indians.” Dewey continued, “This is geography as well as history because practically all stages of civilization are now presented somewhere on earth's surface.” A few years later in School and Society, Dewey asserted that geography “presents the earth as the enduring home of the occupations of man.”Footnote ¹⁷ In other words, like most of his contemporaries, Dewey suggested that native, primitive, and aboriginal societies did not merely represent different or alternative cultures, but instead they represented earlier stages of living that modern, civilized culture had moved beyond in a linear path of progress. As James Tufts explained in the Ethics (1908) textbook he coauthored with Dewey, “It is beyond question that the ancestors of modern civilized races lived under the general types of group life which will be outlined, and these types of their survivals are found among the great mass of peoples today.” For Dewey and Tufts, all previous and current societies of the world could be arranged hierarchically along a single continuum of ethical development from the primitive to the civilized. In the Ethics textbook he co-wrote with Dewey, Tufts specified that primitive form of ethics were best exemplified by “the so-called totem group, which is found among North American Indians, Africans and Australians, and was perhaps the early form of Semitic groups.” In the introduction to Ethics, Dewey and Tufts asserted that the collaboration of the chapters were “in sufficient degree to make the book throughout a joint work”— confirming that Dewey shared the outlook expressed by Tufts.Footnote ¹⁸ These primitive “totem” groups, Dewey and Tufts believed, had survived into the modern world and thereby provided a rare window into the earlier stages of sociological development.

Although Dewey believed that many immigrant and nonwhite populations were socially deficient compared to the civilized, his pragmatic view of race distinguished him from many of his peers. Dewey denied the philosophical notion—associated with the teleology of Spencer and Hegel—of latent biological potentials and static essences. That is, Dewey rejected the idea that certain individuals or societies had a latent potential to achieve or not achieve a certain stage of culture based on their biological makeup. Dewey's rejection of latent potentials sharply distinguished him from scientific racists and eugenicists of the time, who believed that allegedly inferior races could not overcome the latent potential of their heredity.Footnote ¹⁹ Dewey's pre-1916 philosophy was color blind in the sense that one's stage of psychological-sociological development was not linked directly to his/her skin color and heredity. Rather one's stage was a contingent outcome of his/her interaction with a mediating social environment. Nevertheless, Dewey placed these mediating social environments along a single cultural continuum leading through the universal stage of savagery, barbarianism, and civilization. White, European American culture just happened to be at the forefront of progress, but it did not necessarily need to be. History had just turned out that way.

In summary, Dewey rejected the idea that one's skin color and/or hereditary makeup reflected a latent potential and/or static essence aligned with a certain level of sociological or cultural development. Accordingly, in 1913, Dewey defined culture as “the habit of mind which perceives and estimates all matters with reference to their bearing on social values and aims.” Dewey suggested that culture was a way of approaching the world critically by creating products and ideas that were valued by the entire society, not merely the elites. However, these products and ideas also had to contribute to the growth of the social environment. “In other words,” Dewey asserted, “manual and industrial activities at once acquire a cultural value in education when they are appreciated in light of their social context, in their bearing upon social order and progress.”Footnote ²⁰ That is, culture was generic, shared, and accessible to all; it was an evolving, but organic, holistic social activity that cut across social and racial groups. Dewey was egalitarian in his insistence that both academic and industrial activities were cultural when approached by the proper perspective and informed by the proper context. But, for Dewey, culture did not uncritically preserve the old; it had to contribute to the “social order and progress” of the new.

Dewey insisted that his definition of culture appreciated the contingent nature of knowledge and denied that culture was the unraveling of a latent potential. He recognized that there was no predetermined path toward an idealized culture. All cultural knowledge was the result of contingent new ideas that furthered the social occupations of the entire human race. Although Dewey's definition of progress recognized the open-ended nature of emerging knowledge, it was entirely based upon the interaction of “new contacts” and “new expansions of life.”Footnote ²¹ As a result, primitive, savage, and barbarian societies had nothing to contribute to the progress of the human race, other than being studied as prior steps toward the present. Premodern societies provided pedagogical value by offering insight into the history of the human race, but they did not provide any intrinsic cultural value beyond that. For Dewey, culture was not a variety of contingent outcomes at every stage of development, but only those outcomes at the highest civilized stage on the vanguard of knowledge that contributed to the progress of the entire human race.

Ultimately, Dewey addressed race so rarely prior to 1916 because he did not view race as a useful or legitimate category of analysis. Racial categories implied the idea of a static essence and/or latent potential. But culture, for Dewey, was completely separate from race; anyone could achieve the highest form of sociological development if provided with the right opportunities, environment, and education. Dewey argued that the cultural and sociological deficiency of the African American community described in Schools of To-morrow was not a result of their inherent or biological worth, but rather a result of their contingent deprivation from the civilized world. In fact, the Deweys’ consideration of the innovative schools described in Schools of To-morrow— published a year before Democracy and Education—and how these schools assimilated immigrants and educated African Americans reinforced his previous linear views on race and culture. He continued to flesh out his linear stage theory the next year in his magnum opus, Democracy and Education.

THE SAVAGE IN DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION

Consistent with his previous work, Dewey made repeated references to the universal stages of psychological-sociological growth throughout Democracy and Education, and he elaborated on how these stages coordinated with one another. Specifically, Dewey outlined the “three fairly typical stages of growth” and how they related to subject matter. At the first stage, “knowledge exists as the content of intelligent ability-power to do.” At the second stage this knowledge is then “surcharged and deepened through communicated knowledge or information.” At the third stage, “it is enlarged or worked over into rationally or logically organized material—that of one who relatively speaking is expert in the subject.” In reference to the psychological-sociological stages he had worked out at his lab school, Dewey was actually referring to the second, third, and fourth stages of growth. The final stage referenced was the “consciousness of calling” stage that corresponded with the thinking of the disciplinary expert. In fact, as Dewey explained, chapters 15, 16, and 17 of Democracy and Education specifically addressed “the successive stages in that evolution of knowledge which we have just been discussing.” In accordance with his curriculum at his lab school, these chapters addressed “Play and Work in the Curriculum,” “The Significance of Geography and History,” and “Science in the Course of Science,” which corresponded with the linear sequence of the historical development of social occupations. The first stage was the age of working and playing for immediate satisfaction. As Dewey explained, “the play and work stage correspond point for point, with the traits of the initial stage of knowing, which consists … in learning how to do things and in acquaintance with things and processes gained in the doing.” The second stage was the age of history and geography, because these subjects initiated movement out of savagery and barbarism by providing “background and outlook, intellectual perspective, to what might otherwise be narrow personal actions or mere forms of technical skill.” The third stage was the age of science: “Both logically and educationally, science is the perfecting of knowing, its last stage.”Footnote ²²

Dewey referenced the stages of sociological development again in his chapter on “Intellectual and Practical Studies.” During the first stage, that of the savage, “Experience itself primarily consists of the active relations subsisting between a human being and his natural and social surroundings.” At the second stage, that of the “Greeks and people of the Middle Ages,” the content of social life “tremendously facilitate selection of the sort of activities which will intellectualize the play and work of the school.” At the third stage, the “progress of experimental science” characterized life. Dewey reiterated that, educationally speaking, “the movement of activity must be progressive, leading from one stage to another.” In other words, appropriate activities and content were not merely those subjects that expanded the consciousness and engendered reflective thinking, but specifically those subjects that accomplished these two objectives and relived the stages of the race experience in the linear sequence of progress. As demonstrated above, Dewey shifted his terminology regarding these stages and applied them somewhat inconsistently between 1895 and 1916. Nevertheless, the stages of psychological-sociological growth played a central role in his educational philosophy and underscored his overall genetic approach to psychological-sociological development of individuals and societies.Footnote ²³

Like in his previous work, Dewey's conception of the savage played a central role in Democracy and Education. By page 2, Dewey introduced the savage as the antithesis of all things democratic and scientific, terms that Dewey essentially used as synonyms for the civilized, scientific world. Accordingly, Dewey approached the savage as an example of all that was undemocratic, unscientific, and uncivilized, and as a symbol of the distant undeveloped past of Western ideas and institutions. Savagery represented everything that needed to be overcome in a democratic society. Education was the key to moving the individual and society along the continuum of social progress from savagery to barbarism to civilization. In savage tribes, Dewey argued, the gap between adults and children is minimal, but with “the growth of civilization” this gap widened, increasing the need for formal education, which alone prevented a culture from relapsing into the stages “of barbarism and then into savagery.” Thus, for Dewey, savage tribes did not merely represent a different, alternative culture (as anthropologist, Franz Boas and his former students were arguing at the time); instead savages represented a less developed form of living. This reinforced his belief that savages had more in common with children than they did with civilized man.Footnote ²⁴

In Democracy and Education, Dewey reiterated how, despite the contingent inferiority of primitive humans, the difference between savage and civilized societies was not a result of their biological inheritance or their psychic potential, but rather was an outcome of their deficient social environment. Dewey argued, “The mind of savage peoples is an effect rather than a cause of its backward institutions … the savage deals largely with crude stimuli; we have heighted stimuli [italics in original].” “We” in this case referred to Dewey's civilized white readers, and the “savage” represented the nonwhite hunter-gatherer societies on the American and European periphery. In another contrast, Dewey explained how a savage adapts himself to the environment, but a civilized man subordinates the environment, therefore: “A savage is merely habitualated; the civilized man has habits which transform the environment.” That is, civilized society was a positive outcome of its social inheritance, specifically in how it used its advanced scientific knowledge and advanced culture to subordinate the environment further and more effectively than the savage culture had. The same actions and stimuli for the savage and civilized man had hierarchically different meanings based on the efficiency of its meanings and outcomes. “Yet in meaning what has been accomplished,” Dewey explained, “measures just the difference of civilization from savagery.”Footnote ²⁵ Dewey confirmed that the savage was not inherently inferior. S/he was contingently inferior, the result of a socially deficient environment over which s/he had no control.

Specifically, in Democracy and Education, Dewey argued that savage societies were held back by superstition, ancestor worship, animism, and magic. Dewey outlined the differences between the savage and civilized man succinctly with the following: “One who is ignorant of the history of science is ignorant of the struggles by which mankind has passed from routine to caprice, from superstitious subjection to nature, from efforts to use it magically, to intellectual self-possession.” Yet, as Dewey had previously explained in an 1902 essay on the savage mind, both the primitive and civilized man were psychically the same, and they had the same potential for scientific thought. “What we call magic was with respect to many things the experimental method of the savage; but for him to try was to try his luck, not his ideas,” Dewey explained “… savages are simply falling back upon habit in a way that exhibits its limitations.” The savage did the best s/he could, but without exposure to the innovations and symbols of the civilized man, s/he could only go so far.Footnote ²⁶

In Democracy and Education, Dewey's view of the savage was both egalitarian and dismissive. He awarded the savage with all the potentials of the civilized human and considered the savage's lack of culture as a contingent outcome of his/her isolation from technology and his immersion in a contingently deficient social environment. Yet these savage communities—which, as demonstrated above, Dewey believed had survived into the present world as nonwhite hunter-gatherers— were also undeveloped, backward, ignorant, and simple. Dewey did not consider the discrepancies among the world's societies as mere cultural differences, but rather as steps along a universal scale of human progress leading to Western civilization. “With increased culture,” Dewey argued, clearly using the term in a linear, quantitative sense, “… progress takes place.” Dewey equated social progress with science and democracy. “Civilization is the mastery of [science's] varied energies,” he explained, “… Science is experience becoming rational … past experiences are purified and rendered into tools for discovery and advance.”Footnote ²⁷ Science, in Dewey's sense of the word, was not a body of accumulated skills and knowledge, but rather was an intellectual disposition necessary for democratic, civilized living. Without science, one could never reach the highest level of psychological-sociological development.

CULTURAL PLURALISM IN DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION

In addition to his meticulous stage theory, in Democracy and Education Dewey also presented a more recently acquired theory of cultural pluralism that does not quite fit with his earlier cultural stage theory. “A modern society is many societies more or less loosely connected,” Dewey explained in chapter 7 of Democracy and Education, “The intermingling in the school of youth of different races, differing religions, and unlike customs creates for all a new and broader environment.” Dewey insisted that democratic man associated “in all kinds of ways and for all kinds of purposes … in a multitude of diverse groups,” that created “varied and free points of contact with other modes of association.” Such “back and forth play” and “diversity of stimulation” among the cultural groups were essential to bringing forth novel ideas that would contribute to progress.Footnote ²⁸

At approximately the same time Dewey began using the term “associated form of living” to describe democracy, he began referring to “cultures” in the plural—first in Democracy and Education and again that same year in his essays on “Nationalizing Education” and “Education and Culture.” In the first essay, Dewey insisted that there was a danger in refusing to accept “what other cultures have to offer” and in trying to accept one component of culture as the “pattern to which all other strains and cultures are to conform.”Footnote ²⁹ In the second essay, Dewey insisted on the importance of liberating modern society from the “class cultures of the past.”Footnote ³⁰ Likewise, in Democracy and Education Dewey demanded that a reformation of education required that “the ideas and ideals which are inherited from older and unlike cultures” be reevaluated.Footnote ³¹ It is not likely that Dewey consciously started using “cultures” in the plural. It is nevertheless suggestive that the term suddenly appeared in 1915–1916, when he began reconsidering the necessity of pluralistic interaction. By 1915 Dewey even accepted the label of “pluralist,” but only after some encouragement by a peer.

Scudder Klyce, a former naval officer and eccentric independent scholar, wrote a lengthy letter to Dewey in April explaining how Klyce planned to use Dewey's ideas in a philosophical research project he was currently working on. As Klyce bluntly informed Dewey in a letter, “you are an infinite pluralist, explicitly; Kant was one, James was one: … most scientists are very vaguely but actually pluralists.”Footnote ³² After reflection upon Klyce's description of his pragmatic position, Dewey replied with the following revelation:

In this letter, Dewey seems to have discovered three significant things. First, he admitted that twenty years prior—that is, when he first began sketching out his pedagogical vision for the lab school—he was in essence a “monist.” In the letter to Klyce he suggested that what he had been criticizing as latent potentials was actually the idea of finite pluralism—the Spencerian notion that all was moving toward a predetermined, static essence. Although Dewey never subscribed to the idea of a predetermined essence, he had for many years identified the modern world as moving toward a more “generic” and/or “objective” social consciousness.Footnote ³⁴ By 1915 he no longer believed this, at least not in those terms. Second, having realized this transformation, Dewey reconsidered the long-term goals of his philosophy. Dewey had been so occupied with the immediate educational and logical implications of his theory that he had not given ample attention to the actual end point of his scheme. For Dewey, there was no end point; growth led to more growth, and reconstruction led to more reconstruction. His pluralism was, indeed, infinite. Perhaps, at this point, Dewey realized fully that his pluralism was not leading to a more socialized, more generic and scientific future; it was not necessarily leading anywhere. Third, he adopted the term “pluralism” as an alternative description of his approach. If we follow the first and second realizations to their logical conclusions, then we can see that cultural pluralism and diversity were absolute necessities for infinite reconstruction; they were the very material from which infinite reconstruction would come. Dewey's acceptance of “infinite pluralism” can be seen in an important essay on social psychology, in which he not only endorsed some of his emerging ideas, but also subtly reconstructed some of his older ones.

In 1916, Dewey was asked to speak to the American Psychological Association (APA) on the occasion of their twenty-fifth anniversary, and he chose the topic of social psychology because he considered the subdiscipline as the most promising course for the future of the field, which by 1916 was moving in a more behaviorist direction. Dewey argued that psychologists should approach the mind from a “pluralistic basis.” Accordingly, Dewey defined mind as “reorganization of original activities through their operation in a given environment. It is formation, not a datum; a product, and cause only after it has been produced.” Essentially endorsing the functionalist approach to psychology—but stripped of its reliance on psychological stages—Dewey underscored the significance of social and cultural environment on mental development. The mind was not merely a deductive distillation to its essential, pristine form— or what he called misguided idea of “progressive unfolding of original potencies latent in a ready made mind.” Instead the mind was the product of native tendencies (or what he once called interests and instincts) realized in the plurality of associated living—a conclusion, he insisted, that was “confirmed by the development in the life of every infant now observable.”Footnote ³⁵ Dewey stated forcefully a conviction that he had always held, but which now had immediate consequences for the education of nonwhites and immigrants: sociological and cultural environment trumped biological and hereditary inheritance. For Dewey, the most significant factor in explaining the development of the mind, especially as his “infinite pluralism” was emerging, was the interaction among different social ideas in a heterogeneous environment. Change for the individual occurred, Dewey explained, “in connection with interaction with new elements in its surroundings.”Footnote ³⁶

The term pluralism began to appear in Dewey's work with greater frequency after 1915. For example, in one essay Dewey declared, “science is always a plurality of diverse interacting and changing existences.”Footnote ³⁷ Two years later, in reference to the evolution and growth of the individual, Dewey wrote that “the organism is in and of the world, and its activities correlated with those of other things in multiple ways … these connexions [sic] are of diverse kinds. … In this sense, pluralism, not monism, is an established empirical fact [italics in original].”Footnote ³⁸ The reconstruction of knowledge that occurred as a result of these “connexions” was dependent upon a diversity of native capacities emerging from the individual, as well as a plurality and heterogeneity of ideas in the social environment.

Dewey displayed his new pluralistic view of society and culture most fully in chapter 7 of Democracy and Education, one of the most original and influential passages he ever wrote. In this section, Dewey outlined the necessity of diversity to democracy and progress. “The realization of a form of life in which interests are mutually interpenetrating, and where progress, or readjustment, is an important consideration,” Dewey explained, “makes a democratic community more interested … in deliberate and systematic education.” Because democratic citizens ultimately had to rule themselves instead of depending upon the traditional ruling elite and its prescribed knowledge, they not only had to be informed about the present situation, but they needed the tools to envision a better future. According to Dewey, such a vision was dependent upon the ability for ideas and attributes to be “mutually interpenetrating,” and an educational system that fostered and modeled these ideals. In theory, Dewey's vision for cultural pluralism required a diverse student population within the school, classroom, and society. An education that broke down “barriers of class, race and national territory,” Dewey insisted—in a rare instance of clearly using “race” in a pluralistic way instead of in reference to the broader human race—“would lead to the liberation of a greater diversity of personal capacities which characterize a democracy.” Dewey concluded, “only diversity makes change and progress.”Footnote ³⁹ In order for the social and educational environment to remain heterogeneous, the cultural traits of different races and religions would need to be celebrated and maintained indefinitely.