Craig A. Cunningham

Dewey’s Metaphysics and the Self

In “Self Realization as the Moral Ideal” (1893), John Dewey announced his intention to banish metaphysics from “ethical science.” The reason was that metaphysics “seems to solve problems in general, but at the expense of the practical problems which alone really demand or admit action“ (EW 4: 53).2 Practical problems, Dewey believed, require empirical inquiry into the details of particular situations, rather than theoretical speculation about general categories or abstractions. Ethical science deals with the moral growth of individuals rather than species, and so it must be rooted in an exploration of the specifics of each individual self. Only “an ethics rooted and grounded in the self,” could supplant the discredited poles of “hedonistic ethics on one side and theological ethics on the other.” Dewey looked toward the emerging science of psychology to avoid the metaphysical baggage of previous conceptions of the self. Ethical science would only reach its potential when it “purge[d] itself of all conceptions, of all ideals, save those which are developed within and for the sake of practice” (EW 4: 53). Ethics would be reconstructed to imcorporate the lessons of psychology, not to determine categorical imperatives or rules of maximizing utility but rather to provide guidance for the practical problems involved in forming moral individuals and societies.

Teachers and Teaching

The complexities of teaching, teachers, and of teacher education are explored using some of the concepts previously introduced together with the important role of intersubjectivity and caring in classrooms. School leaders need to trust teachers and provide them with professional autonomy to allow their own unique potentials to flourish.

Learners and Learning

The complexities of learners and of learning are explored in greater detail using Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Systems Theory and other concepts from systems theory. Diversity is examined closely, with attention to Aristotle’s eudaimonistic conception of what it means to develop as a person, with additional ideas from Dewey. The concept of unique potential is offered to help understand and to value individual variations among students.

Epilogue: Emergent Principles of Democratic Schooling

The book ends with a set of principles that emphasize the generic traits of existence, systems theory, complexity, diversity, unique potential, inquiry, and democracy. Together these principles offer a compelling vision of schools as communities contributing to democracy and human flourishing.

The Nature of Nature

John Dewey’s philosophy of experience offers a view of the nature of nature than can help us to reconceive schooling. Dewey offers us a set of the generic traits of existences, including interaction, temporality, complexity, and qualitative uniqueness. When we experience doubt or uncertainty, we examine distinctions and relations as part of inquiry, which is how we deal with environmental complexity. We acquire habits, including knowledge and meaning, through the use of intelligence and imagination in the attempt to secure desired goods. An example of social inquiry is given and discussed, with an emphasis on the difference between standards and criteria.

The Complexities of Schooling

An ecological approach to understanding schools is introduced, along with discussion of some of the reasons that the systems involved in schooling are complex. These include diversity and the complexities of humans, of learning, and of contexts. Approaches to leading and managing complex schools are explored, including barriers to change and an effective change process.

The Schooling We Have

American schools are organized like factories, which doesn’t work well, partly because humans are not interchangeable parts. Educational policy-makers use a rhetoric of crisis to impose simplistic solutions that fail to address central issues. Instead of asking what schools are really for, we offer a vague and incoherent curriculum that reduces everything to isolated bits of knowledge and fails to give students a sense of the big picture. A combination of John Dewey’s pragmatic naturalism and systems theory can offer an alternative conception.

The Schooling We Need

A variety of alternatives to standardization are offered, and specific suggestions are made for a curriculum for human flourishing in a democracy, including the need to personalize learning, adapt it to the twenty-first century, develop critical thinking, include attention to the arts, sustainability, and cosmopolitanism, and help students to understand the nature of nature and complexity and strive for wisdom.