Twice a month, The duty challenges enthusiasts of philosophy and the history of ideas to decipher a topical issue based on the theses of a prominent thinker.
Lately, everything is accelerating for the world of education in Quebec. The reform piloted by Minister Bernard Drainville provides for the creation of a National Institute of Excellence in Education (INEE), the emasculation of the Higher Council for Education (CSE) and the abolition of the Accreditation Committee for teacher training (CAPFE). This reform contributes, directly or indirectly, to rethinking the role of the general education of students and teachers.
At a time when compulsory courses in general college education are deemed “uninteresting”, “flat” and lacking in flexibility by the Quebec Federation of Collegiate Students (FECQ), we must reread John Dewey, a philosopher whose thought and reputation were nevertheless called into question on October 4, 1957.
What world event took place on this date? First clue: he is not American, but Soviet, and that is the whole drama. Second clue: its only function was to emit a “beep” on a radio frequency. This is Sputnik!
The putting into orbit of the first human satellite around the Earth is a real scientific and technical feat which inaugurated the beginning of the conquest of space, but it was also experienced in the United States as a political trauma. Compared by the press at the time to a technological “Pearl Harbor”, it proved, according to her, that the Soviets had the technology necessary to send a nuclear missile to the American continent.
A question quickly grew: how did we get here? What had been missing in the American educational system to miss this historic appointment? According to historian Hyman Rickover, the conservative press then accused the progressive school of not giving students a solid enough scientific and literary culture. He was criticized for a lack of intellectual rigor in his teaching methods and programs.
In particular, the leader of this progressive education, John Dewey, was criticized. “The clamor that was already swelling against the education system became a deafening din. The outcry was general: the president, the vice-president, the admirals, the generals, the undertakers, the grocers, the shiners of shoes, the bootleggersreal estate agents, racketeers, all groaned because we too didn’t have a piece of metal orbiting the Earth, blaming this tragedy on the sinister Dewey Disciples who had conspired to keep little Johnny from learn to read,” write Douglas Miller and Marion Nowak in The Fifties: The Way We Really Were (1977).
In 1958, the government passed the National Defense Education Act, intended to increase funding to schools for basic skills programs. Back to classic and serious culture. And that was the end of an era of pedagogical innovation and educational experimentation in the United States. John Dewey’s name then fell into oblivion for many decades.
On the cover of Time
John Dewey is the philosopher whose historian HS Commager wrote in 1950 that “for a generation no major question was clarified before Mr. Dewey spoke”. And indeed, few philosophers can boast of having had their picture on an American postage stamp or on the cover of the magazine. Time. Such has been the fame and influence of this Columbia University philosophy professor.
John Dewey was born the year the Americans drilled their first oil well (1859) and died the year the military first tested the hydrogen bomb (1952). These two historical events allow us to imagine the magnitude of the technical advances made during this period, as well as the societal upheavals that ensued. He was thus a professor of philosophy at a time when American society and its educational system were changing at full speed.
Deeply democratic, John Dewey believed in education to form a new society, fairer to everyone and more creative to allow everyone to be free and happy. Education was for him the engine of this democratic revolution, provided that it was accessible to all.
And that is why in 1935, during a radio broadcast, he violently attacked the ruling classes of the country who, according to him, had prevented education from producing the equality of opportunity that democracy so badly needed. “Studies essential to producing the skills and intelligence that society needs have been eliminated. […] This is due to depression [économique] on the one hand, and on the other, to the control exercised by the lower class which represents the most parasitic part of the community and the nation, those who live on rent, interest and dividends,” he wrote. in 1935 (The Teacher and the Public).
This explains why, again in 2005, the conservative weekly Human Events ranks John Dewey’s major work, Democracy and Educationin fifth position among the 10 most dangerous books published in the last 200 years, even before the Capital by Karl Marx.
The place of culture
But should we see in him a pedagogue keen on educational experimentation, ready to burn classic works to let everyone choose the culture they wish to acquire according to their own desires? Can we so directly oppose liberal, progressive pedagogues to the conservative guardians of classical culture? Things are not that simple…
First of all, the so-called classical culture is not for John Dewey a stock of knowledge in deposit, but a heritage of human experiences which must constantly be re-examined and reconstructed by today’s society according to its questions and its expectations. These past experiences are useful only if they make it possible to face the problems of today and to build the desires of the future.
As such, the culture taught by general education courses is an indispensable invisible library, because without it, humanity would have no memory, and therefore no way to compare and understand what it is currently facing in relation to problems encountered in the past.
Then the culture is not for John Dewey the organization a priori knowledge according to a certain divine or immutable order, an order that the school program should reflect. Indeed, our lived experience creates for each of us a personal zone of interests, desires and passions for certain cultural objects or practices. This is our starting point for learning, and this area is meant to grow based on the stimulation we receive in school. If the teacher manages to know the culture of his student, he can then, little by little, take him outside his comfort zone to allow him to discover new things.
Thus, the classic culture of compulsory college courses is essential to the development of students. But neither list, nor order of reading, nor method of transmission can legitimately freeze as the only guarantors of this culture.
Freedom and the program
Should we then dust off the general education programs dating from 1993, as proposed by the FECQ in a brief presented to the college affairs commission last year? And propose, like some, to launch a new Parent commission? John Dewey would surely favor this idea. However: reform, yes, but for what purpose?
Indeed, we must be wary of the idea that classical culture is only desirable for some. The Highborn, those who are interested and who have the time and money to cultivate themselves. And that we leave the others alone? John Dewey will be there to remind us that the opposition between a classical “humanist” culture and a “practical” professional culture is flawed in more ways than one, because it reproduces a social opposition. “Our conception of culture is still colored by the heritage of the period of aristocratic isolation of a class of leisure – leisure which means the relief of participation in the work of a world of work”, writes- he in The Educational Situation (1901).
However, reproducing these social and cultural inequalities from the college level by making this classical culture optional risks further fracturing an already fragmented society. But if, on the contrary, we decided to promote a true democratic culture, then decompartmentalising compulsory college courses to open them up to new subjects, new authors and new teaching methods would make it possible to better share the experiences of each, between equal. This effort, we know, is demanding, but it is the very price that education owes to democracy for “the establishment of a common heritage, a common work, a common destiny”, argues Dewey.
For him, we must therefore bet on opening education to a culture most common to all, between us living, but also with the dead of the past and the not-yet-born of the future. Thus, John Dewey’s bet basically asks us a single question: what do we know that is worth sharing with those who were there 1000 years before us and those who will be there 1000 years after us?
It is this kind of decompartmentalization that we propose to explore this summer at the Société de philosophie du Québec. From June 5 to 8, at the Cégep de Limoilou, in Quebec, we invite all those who wish to come and reflect with us on general education at CEGEP, on the place of culture and philosophy within the college and on the democratic future of education.
Suggestions ? Write to Robert Dutrisac: [email protected].