Trained Capacities: John Dewey, Rhetoric, and Democratic Practice

John Dewey, W. E. B. Du Bois, and a Rhetoric of Education

John Dewey, W. E. B. Du Bois, and a Rhetoric of Education Keith Gilyard John Dewey’s conception of democratic culture and of the attendant traits of fair play, dialogic deliberation, and social equality floated above his underlying sense of the productive possibilities of rhetoric. Of course rhetorical practice of some kind will obtain in any instance and help to instantiate any number of ends, some profoundly undemocratic. But Dewey rode boundless hope, as he expressed most clearly over the closing pages of The Public and Its Problems, on the exercise of critical intelligence—that is, the careful forwarding and evaluating of propositions by an informed and educated citizenry (204–19). A consultative, negotiating, debateready , artfully expressive human articulate functioned as the linchpin in his imagined network of amiable reconciliations.1 Moreover, in Dewey’s view, the necessary habits of mind would best be inculcated through formal education; thus, though he never stated it quite in these terms, he considered education to be a form of rhetorical preparation. Furthermore, I maintain, his educational philosophy, especially as detailed in “My Pedagogic Creed,” functions as rhetorical theory, particularly with respect to invention given that proposals can be derived from and weighed against a taxonomy that can be constructed from Dewey’s precepts. One especially intriguing set of proposals belongs to W. E. B. Du Bois, the most distinguished African American educator-activist in American history, who, in the words of Arsene O. Boykin, emerged as Dewey’s envisioned “wise parent,” meaning that Du Bois became an exemplary proponent of Deweyan pedagogical ideals and thereby developed an explicit Deweyan strand inside the African American discourse on education (Boykin). He was the foremost advocate for directing African American critical intelligence toward the solution of social problems. This is not to imply that Du Bois’s educational views were merely derivative of Dewey’s or that the two were always akin ideologically. Du Bois, as indicated by some of his 126 Keith Gilyard earliest writings, did not wait on Dewey to assume the lead. In addition he chanced a public engagement with formal leftist thought that Dewey never dared.2 And we must remember, as Derrick Alridge points out, that Du Bois was steeped in a black intellectual tradition that included the educators Alexander Crummell, Booker T. Washington,Anna Julia Cooper, Kelly Miller, Nannie Helen Burroughs,Alain Locke, Carter G. Woodson, Mary McLeod Bethune, Charles H. Thompson, and Horace Mann Bond (Alridge). Nonetheless, because of Dewey’s eventual prominence and the fact that Du Bois reached out to him on occasion, it is indeed fair to characterize Dewey as not necessarily a straightforward influence on Du Bois—they both could have arrived at an insistence on the development of human powers directly through Emerson—but an unmistakable one while Du Bois authored over the decades, in works such as The Souls of Black Folk, The Education of Black People, his Crisis editorials , and the novel Mansart Builds a School, an extensive program of study for African Americans keyed to notions of democratic possibility.3 To discuss the essential parameters of what can be regarded, therefore, as a Dewey-Du Bois cocrafted rhetoric of education, one with pressing implications for all of current American culture, is the overriding purpose of this essay. Dewey first published his creed in School Journal at the outset of 1897. To tease out his basic suggestions and cast them in the affirmative, education must 1) stress the social welfare of the groups to which students belong, 2) be informed by psychological insight, 3) reflect sensitivity to social conditions, 4) allow for development of every student’s full capacities, 5) assume as a process the character of democratic communities, 6) foster an active mode for students, 7) position teachers as guides to expose students to and help them respond to influences, 8) include study of language, science, and art at every grade level, 9) emphasize the students’ power of imagery, 10) reconcile individualistic and institutional ideals (“My Pedagogic Creed” 442–54). Dewey thus laid a rational and ethical foundation upon which to construct more elaborate pedagogical arguments and appeals, including some of his own. For example, in The Public and Its Problems he asserted, following Tocqueville, that popular government is peculiarly educative in that it“forces a recognition that there are common interests, even though the recognition of what they are is confused; and the need it enforces of discussion and publicity brings about some clarification of what they are” (207).4...