John Dewey and Our Educational Prospect: A Critical Engagement with Dewey's Democracy and Education

6. Rediscovering the Student in Democracy and Education

6 Rediscovering the Student in Democracy and Education GARY D FENSTERMACHER Consideration of the student has all but disappeared from a good deal of the contemporary discussion about education. It is true that the student remains the object of this discussion, but he or she is left out of it nonetheless. I do not mean by this claim that students are not consulted, although they certainly are not. Rather, they are simply assumed or taken for granted. It is as if the current crop of policy analysts, law makers, researchers, and regulators is saying, “we are deeply concerned for students and care deeply about what is happening to them,” while at the same time paying little if any heed to what these same students bring to the educational setting, and what they desire, care about, consider important , and plan for. Students are the object of the discourse, but not its subject. This is a state of affairs that is impossible to imagine in the context of John Dewey’s Democracy and Education. One cannot read Democracy and Education—indeed most of the Dewey corpus—without encountering the student as a person, deserving of the deepest and most profound consideration in the processes of education. Students as intentional, independently capable, autonomydeserving persons are at the core of Dewey’s work. Yet not only is consideration of the student as person seldom encountered in much of the current educational rhetoric, it is also often absent in discussions of Dewey, particularly with regard to his landmark educational work, Democracy and Education. This chapter is an attempt to redress the loss 97 98 John Dewey and Our Educational Prospect of the student in our discourse about education and in our discussions of Democracy and Education. It explores the place of the student in Dewey’s text and examines how Dewey’s conception of the student would reconfigure contemporary discussions of teaching and learning in the setting of the school. The Student as Agent When David T. Hansen, first as organizer of a symposium at the 2005 annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, then as editor of this book, asked if I would write about what happened when I returned most recently to Democracy and Education, I was quick to reply in the affirmative. It had been more than five years since my last careful engagement with Dewey’s classic work and I was looking forward to rereading it to see if I might find connections with the work I was doing on democratic theory and forms of schooling. This work involves such matters as the contested relationship between pluralism and the formation of the commons in the democratic state, and how private alternatives to the public school effect this relationship. I thus began reading the text with every intention of exploring how Dewey’s work might connect with my current interests. I set out in much the same manner as I would guess Saul did when he departed for Damascus, without a clue that I was soon to be struck by an idea that was both unexpected and mind-altering. I do not know quite where I was in the book when this idea began to form. It was chapter 3, I think. Recall that the chapter is titled “Education as Direction ” and explores the meaning and uses of three important ideas: direction , control, and guidance. While reading this chapter, an idea crept into the basement window of my consciousness: The student is the point of origin for Dewey’s argument for the interconnectedness of democracy and education. Consider this quotation from the early pages of chapter 3: It is sometimes assumed, explicitly or unconsciously, that an individual’s tendencies are naturally purely individualistic or egotistic , and thus antisocial. Control then denotes the process by which he is brought to subordinate his natural impulses to public or common ends. Since, by conception, his own nature is quite alien to this process and opposes it rather than helps it, control has in this view a flavor of coercion or compulsion about it. Systems of government and theories of the state have been built upon this notion, and it has seriously affected educational ideas and practices. But there is no ground for any such view. (MW.9.28) 99 Rediscovering the Student in Democracy and Education About whom is Dewey speaking here? Clearly it is about a human being engaged in the...