Summary: Dewey was not easily pigeon-holed; was he a philosopher, an educator, political theorist, all three and more? We do know that he had academic credentials and was employed as a psychologist. At the University of Chicago he [as faculty member and theorist] and his wife [as principal and school leader] earned much deserved early fame for the Laboratory School. I won't summarize his 1918 Stanford lectures here (Human Nature and Conduct amounted to an editing and refinement of those lectures). I do want to work on one passage, however. I find it to be both familiar and refreshing; its insight, its use of older language and its combining of psychological, moral and social wisdom make the reading and thinking worthwhile.
In the Modern Library,English edition(1950 copyright) a notable passage (pp. 293-294) reads as follows (the numbers and letters are mine).
- (1)To say that the welfare of others, like our own, consists in a widening and deepening of the perceptions that give activity its meaning, in an educative growth, is to set forth a proposition of political import.
- (2) To "make others happy" except through liberating their powers and engaging them in activities that enlarge the meaning of life is to harm them and to indulge ourselves under cover of exercising a special virtue.
- (3) Our moral measure for estimating any existing arrangement or any proposed reform is its effect upon impulse and habits.
- (a)Does it liberate or suppress, ossify or render flexible, divide or unify interest?
- (b)Is perception quickened or dulled?
- (c)Is memory made apt and extensive or narrow and diffusely irrelevant?
- (d)Is imagination diverted to fantasy and compensatory dreams, or does it add fertility to life?
- (e)Is thought creative or pushed one side into pedantic specialisms?
- (4)There is a sense in which to set up social welfare as an end of action only promotes an offensive condescension, a harsh interference, or an oleaginous display of complacent kindliness.
- (5) It always tends in this direction when it is aimed at giving happiness to others directly, that is, as we can hand a physical thing to another.
- (6)To foster conditions that widen the horizon of others and give them command of their own powers, so that they can find their own happiness in their own fashion, is the way of "social" action.
- (7) Otherwise the prayer of a freeman would be to be left alone, and to be delivered, above all, from "reformers" and "kind" people.
Whether thinking as parent, educator or social planner. The greater gift in the long run is the harder one to give. In a family or school or community "oleaginous display of complacent kindliness" can be read as indulgence of desires on the short-term and perpetual dependence (and an ultimate and consequent resentment) on the long-term.
It[base ']s easy (if you have the resources) to grant an indulgence. It's harder to translate an expectation or demand for immediate indulgence into a quest for growth. But the struggle which leads, progressively to"command of their own powers" is all that allows, step by step, a "finding [of] ... happiness in their own fashion". It is the only path to an empowered and independent existence.
