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PRAGMATISM AND EDUCATION
Prof Gert Biesta
University of Exeter, England
www.gertbiesta.com
SESSION 2:
EDUCATIONAL THEORY :
- EDUCATION-AS-COMMUNICATION
- FROM PRAGMATISM TO DECONSTRUCTION
***
JOHN DEWEY: THE MAN AND HIS WORK
born 1859 (Burlington, Vermont)
secondary school teacher, with interest in philosophy
PhD in Philosophy (Johns Hopkins University)
position at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
1894: Professor of Education and Psychology at the
(new) University of Chicago
established ‘Laboratory School’
1904: Professor of Philosophy, Columbia University New
York, plus work at Teachers College
married, 5 children + 2 adopted
dies 1952
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most famous as an educationalist
also influential as a philosopher
and psychologist
important figure in ‘progressive education tradition’ in
USA and internationally
(but highly critical of idea of child-centeredness)
public figure in USA,
progressive third party movement,
& ‘the people’s lobby’

focus on participatory democracy
international travels (3 years in China) and
consultancies (e.g., secularisation of educational system
in Turkey)
many publications:
My Pedagogic Creed (1897)
The School and Society (1899)
The Child and the Curriculum
Studies in Logical Theory (1903)
How We Think (1909)
Democracy and Education (1916)
Human Nature and Conduct (1922)
Experience and Nature (1925)
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The Quest for Certainty (1929)
A Common Faith (1934)
Art as Experience (1934)
Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (1938)
A Theory of Valuation (1939)
philosophy: influence in North American discussions
until late 1950s
then: logical positivism & analytic philosophy
Richard Rorty:
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979)
Consequences of Pragmatism (1982)
revival of pragmatism
education: influence in USA at the level of ideas until
late 1950s
then: ‘Sputnik’ and critique of progressivism (ongoing),
but renewed interest for educational ideas, and focus
on democratic education
***
purpose for this lecture: reconstruction of Dewey’s
educational philosophy
& discussion of ‘limits’ of pragmatism

deconstruction – Derrida
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THE COMMUNICATIVE TURN IN DEWEY’S
PHILOSOPHY
modern philosophy (since Descartes) takes
consciousness as its point of departure
(which results in the problems discussed yesterday)
Habermas: “the tradition of the philosophy of
consciousness”
Dewey (1925): Experience and Nature

“Of all affairs, communication is the most wonderful”
mind, consciousness, thinking, subjectivity, meaning,
intelligence, language, rationality, logic, truth etc. only
come into existence as a result of communication
for example:
“communication is a condition of consciousness”
“language is a function of human association”
“the import of logical and rational essences is the
consequence of social interactions”
etcetera
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What ‘is’ communication?
[1] the sender-receiver model
 transmission of information from A to B
 encoding – transporting – decoding
 is adequate model to describe transportation of bits
of information from A to B (e.g., television) but not for
human communication

because someone needs to make sense of the
information
[2] Dewey: communication as co-operation
communication is “the establishment of co-operation in
an activity in which there are partners and in which the
activity of each is modified by the partnership”
communication as
‘the making of something in common’

to successfully do something together (e.g., hunting) we
need to adjust our idiosyncratic ‘views’ of the situation
(our habits) to build up a shared understanding

practical (not theoretical) intersubjectivity
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Where did this theory of communication originate?

Democracy and Education (1916)
reflection on the question ‘How is education possible?’
led Dewey to his philosophy of communication
EDUCATION AS A PRACTICE OF
COMMUNICATION
Dewey’s formulation of ‘the problem of education’

not: individual development
not: adaptation to the existing social order
(not psychology, not sociology)
but:
the problem of education lies in the co-ordination of
the individual and social factors (1895)
how can ‘the child’ and ‘the curriculum’ be connected?

communication
or: “the communication that ensures participation in a
common understanding”
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What is participation?
- not simply being together
- not simply working together
- but: the situation where people work together “and
are all cognizant of the common end and are all
interested in it”
difference between being in a social environment and
having a social environment

where one cannot perform one’s own activities without
taking the activities of others into account
difference between training and education

training: where one does not really share in the purpose
of the activity
education: where one has an interest in (the
accomplishment of) an activity
this is how meaning is communicated, how a common,
joint, shared understanding is brought about
therefore:
we do not need agreement or common understanding
before we can act together; acting together brings
about common understanding (but only a particular kind
of acting together  where all have an interest)
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EDUCATIONAL IMPLICATIONS
(1) the importance of social practices
How can a child learn the meaning of a traffic light?
through experimentation with the traffic light (trial
and error)?

the meaning of the traffic light is not located in the
thing but in the practices that are mediated/regulated
by the thing

meaning can only be learned through participation in
the practices which embody these meanings
implications for curriculum

not as an abstract representation of ‘the world’, but as
a representation of practices (e.g., the practice of
mathematising or the practice of historising)

see Dewey’s Laboratory School (Chicago)

organised around ‘occupations’

project method
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also:
- this explains why the hidden curriculum is so
effective (because it is a practice)
- it also explains that the thing successful students
learn best is the practice of ‘schooling’ itself
- and: all this is a critique of Montessori, who assumed
that meaning exists in things
(2) teaching is not ‘direct input’
it is about the creation of social situations and
opportunities for (real) participation
“We never educate directly but indirectly by means of
the environment.”
this is not a child-centred but a
communication-centred philosophy of education
and teaching is about the stimulation of reflection:
responding not to things/events ‘as they are’ but to
their meaning

so that action can be transformed into intelligent
action
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(3) democracy and education
it is the quality of the social situation that makes it
educative
we can judge the quality of social situations by asking:
-How many different interests and points of view are
represented?
How many opportunities are there for full and free
interplay and interaction?
To what extent are interests consciously shared?
This gives us an indication of the democratic quality of
social situations (see Democracy and Education)

an educative definition of democracy

democracy as a situation of plurality, interaction,
communication and learning
against isolation and disengagement

towards the creation of a shared world, which is not a
common world
***
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THE WIDER PHILOSOPHICAL PICTURE
modern philosophy is philosophy of consciousness

pragmatism: communicative turn
(see also Jürgen Habermas)
from a ‘metaphysics of essence’

to a ‘metaphysics of existence’
but still a ‘metaphysics of presence’

Jacques Derrida (1930-2004)
Western philosophy as a continuous attempt “to find a
fundamental ground, a fixed centre, an Archimedean
point, which serves both as an absolute beginning and
as a centre from which everything originating from it
can be mastered and controlled.”

an origin that is self-sufficient and present to itself
the origin that is present is considered to be pure,
simple, normal, self-sufficient, self-identical, so that
everything that follows from it is a derivation,
complication, accident, etc.
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Why is the metaphysics of presence a problem?
because ‘presence’ always requires the ‘help’ of
something that it is not, something that is absent
e.g., ‘good’ only has meaning because it is not evil, so
the presence of good is only possible because of its
relationship to what is not good
more generally: the ‘otherness’ that is excluded to
maintain the impression of pure and uncontaminated
original presence is constitutive of that which presents
itself as such
what makes presence [e.g., good] possible [evil] is also
what undermines it

condition of possibility is condition of impossibility

deconstruction
e.g., the deconstructive nature of teaching: in order
for teaching to have an impact, students need to make
sense of teaching, but they do this in their own ways:
so what makes teaching possible (interpretation) also
‘undermines’ it
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deconstruction is not a method or a technique

metaphysics, as the attempt to identify an origin or a
ground, is always “in deconstruction”

the task is to ‘witness’ metaphysics-in-deconstruction
Why?
to do justice to what is made invisible by the
metaphysics of presence but yet is necessary to make
this presence possible

deconstruction is not negative or destructive, but
affirmative: an affirmation of what is other (totally
other)
deconstruction wants to open up systems in order to
‘make place’ for what cannot be thought of in terms of
the system and yet makes the system possible

affirmation of ‘the incalculable’ or ‘the impossible’ =
what cannot be foreseen (calculated) as a possibility
This is not an attempt to overcome metaphysics.
It is not an attempt to become post-metaphysical or
anti-foundational

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because in that case we would have no place to stand
and would have no tools to do something
Derrida wants to ‘shake’ metaphysics by showing that it
is itself always already ‘shaking’

This is a form of post-modernism, since it tries to
expose some of the problems of modern philosophy by
being attentive to what is ‘outside’, to what is excluded.
from a modern perspective this looks like relativism,
anything goes, etc.
but from a deconstructive perspective this reads like a
shift from questions about knowledge and reality
(epistemology and ontology) to taking ethical and
political questions seriously (without reducing them to
questions of knowledge or reality)
***
back to Dewey and his philosophy of communication

Is this a problem for Dewey’s philosophy of
communication?
The pragmatic answer might be: as long as Dewey’s
philosophy results in better consequences than the
philosophy of consciousness, we should go for it.
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With Derrida we can now ask a different question

Does Dewey’s philosophy of communication ‘produce’
any exclusions?
(1)
It is based on a Western, secular, scientific worldview
(evolution theory)

this is not universally shared

so we cannot ‘use’ this philosophy to convince others
that they should become pragmatic or democratic

because we would then totalise communication before
it can happen (which is the problem with Habermas
who, in a sense, specifies what the outcome of our
communication should be before it has happened)
(2)
but what does it mean to take the communicative
‘ethos’ of pragmatism seriously?

traditional theories of communication would say that
identity of meaning from A to B is the norm, and
transformation of meaning the exception

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Dewey: transformation of meaning is the norm, identity
of meaning the exception

communication is transformative and creative
We ‘offer’ our truths, etc. in communication, knowing
that what will come out of communication will be
different.

We should also do this at the level of our philosophies
of communication, i.e., we can offer them in our
communication with others, but without an attempt
that this can ‘fix’ the outcome of communication in
advance

deconstructive pragmatism
[to take pragmatism’s philosophy of communication
seriously we have to give it up, so the condition of
possibility is the condition of impossibility at the very
same time]
responding to the ‘ethos’ of pragmatism, not using it as
a foundational philosophy

also in education
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AFTERWORD: “BEYOND LEARNING”
an attempt to develop a theory of education that is not
based upon a truth about the human being

but rather focuses on how human beings ‘come into the
world’ through their engagement with otherness and
difference
modern educational theory (since Kant):
aim of education is to ‘produce’ rational autonomous
individuals, because this is what human nature is
ultimately ‘about’
the question: what is excluded by such a view of what it
means to be human
e.g., those who cannot become autonomous; those who
are considered to be non-rational, those who are
considered to be pre-rational
also: the uniqueness of each human being (because as
rational autonomous individuals we are all instances of a
general definition)
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what makes us unique (when does it matter that I am I
and you are you)?

in relationships of responsibility, when we are ‘asked’ to
respond to the other

see The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in
Common
versus the Rational Community
our social roles versus our uniqueness, to be found at
the limits of language

implications for the organisation of education (How
difficult should education be?) and for democratic
education (Towards a political conception...)
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