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Rhetoric and Dewey’s Experimental Pedagogy Nathan Crick In John Dewey’s reading of Greek history, the Greek Sophists emerge as the first practitioners of democratic experimental pedagogy. Referring to them as “the first body of professional educators in Europe,” he treats the Sophists as “symptoms of the change from the regime of custom to the regime of analysis and reflective thought” who embodied “a certain opposition between social customs organized in institutions, and the procedure of critical, analytical intelligence” (Dewey, Democracy 330). In other words, for Dewey, the Sophists represented the tension between nomos and logos—that is, between tradition and invention, between culture and criticism, and between habits and language—that emerged in Greece during the fifth century b.c.e. when democracy became not only the dominant form of social life but also the highest manifestation of political power. The Sophists exploited these tensions by providing paying students the means to become successful in the new democratic order. By providing “skilled excellence in the arts, especially the political arts,” the Sophists gave citizens“power to command the attention of others which would assure civic preeminence” (Dewey, “Logic” 4). They also, if indirectly, provided them the capacity to reason, at least insofar as the training“to speak in private groups and in the public forum” formed the basis of “the beginnings of a kind of practical logic”(“Logic”4). In sum, Dewey understood the Sophists as employing experimental methods of education not for their own sake but as the most adequate technique for cultivating a critical, competent, and participatory citizenry necessary to sustain a democracy. Unique about Dewey’s reading of the Sophists is less the fact that he associates sophistical education and democracy than that he locates in their practice the origins of logic, which for him is the basis of the modern sciences. The Sophists thus represented for Dewey the beginnings of a form of education in which rhetoric 178 Nathan Crick has an important function in the training not just of logic but also of other more content-centered disciplines such as history, sociology, geography, and physics, as well as the practical arts. Although Dewey’s overall philosophy and character were far more Aristotelian then sophistical, the Sophists nonetheless embodied something that Aristotle did not—an attitude consistent with contemporary movements in democratic pedagogy. As I have defined elsewhere, the sophistical attitude represents “an experimental approach to things, people, events, and ideas that brings intellectual resources to bear on the means and ends of artistic production in order to generate new methods of invention necessary to master the contingencies of life and guide the flux of nature” (Crick,“Sophistical Attitude” 28). In other words, they viewed knowledge as an active, ongoing form of inquiry whose origin was found in problematic situations and whose end was found in its satisfactory resolution. For Dewey, then, the Sophists provided him with historical evidence that our interest in “theory” almost always grows out of an initial interest in “practice.” In short, they showed not that we became democratic by first becoming intelligent but that we became more intelligent by learning how to act democratically, and that we first learned how to reason through engaging in rhetoric and only afterward learned to improve our rhetoric by having become more reasonable. I use the Sophists to introduce an essay on the relationship between rhetoric and John Dewey’s experimental pedagogy in order to ground his theories in a long tradition of teaching the language arts in a democracy. As Susan Jarratt has pointed out, the Sophists have come to represent a starting point for progressive education. Thus she argues that for “teachers who wish to participate in the revitalization of our own democracy, the voice of sophistical rhetoric speaks out in playful, persuasive , and promising tones” (Jarratt 117). This essay follows this insight by showing how a more explicit sophistical attitude toward rhetoric might be incorporated into Dewey’s model of experimental education. Such an attitude would view communication primarily as a tool for generating ideas that serve as practical means for overcoming shared problems and obstacles, and it would view the creation, advocacy , criticism, and defense of theories and hypotheses as vital activities within this cycle of inquiry. In short, this essay shows not only how sophistical rhetoric can contribute to the maintenance of civic life in the way already expressed by contemporary critical pedagogy, but also how it plays an integral role in the teaching of experimental habits of...

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