Education After Dewey by Paul Fairfield (review)
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In Education After Dewey, Paul Fairfield advocates a philosophy of education that combines John Dewey’s thinking with ideas drawn from continental European philosophy and 20th century social theory. In particular, Fairfield argues that putting Dewey in conversation with philosophers such as Hans-Georg Gadamer and Martin Heidegger can lead to needed improvements in contemporary ideas about education. Education after Dewey seeks to rehabilitate Dewey’s thought for students of European philosophy and for humanities educators. It argues for the merits, and concedes the limitations, of Dewey’s educational emphasis on experience. The many connections that Fairfield establishes between Dewey’s educational thinking and the works of Continental European philosophers is a boon to Dewey studies, and his argument that we need better ideas about education should find adherents among contemporary Deweyans and humanists generally.
Education After Dewey is divided into two parts. The first three chapters, on “The Educative Process,” begin by establishing the relevance of Dewey’s philosophy in the context of contemporary educational practice. These longer chapters then discuss how resources found in Gadamer’s and Heidegger’s philosophies can improve Dewey’s conceptions of experience and thinking. In the book’s second part, six shorter chapters on “Education in the Human Sciences” address educational issues in philosophy, religion, ethics, politics, history, and literature. These chapters do not merely apply Dewey’s philosophy to contemporary teaching practice; they also explore and extend Dewey’s ideas through dialogue with Friedrich Nietzsche, John Caputo, Hannah Arendt, Paolo Freire, Michel Foucault, and Paul Ricoeur.
Chapter 1 establishes educational philosophy—and particularly Dewey’s educational philosophy—as a critical resource for contemporary educational reform. Beginning with a brief history of Dewey’s criticisms of both child-centered progressives and curriculum-focused traditionalists, Fairfield asserts that Dewey remains relevant to what he characterizes as today’s outworn educational debates, specifically, over “oppositions of student-centered or curriculum-centered education, critical thinking or factual knowledge, [or] active or passive learning.”1 He dismisses scientistic approaches to educational research and practice, contending [End Page 107] that these flawed models of scientific and economic rationality already dominate school learning. He also critiques the proposals of Allan Bloom and E.D. Hirsch. These educational conservatives argue that schools fail to adequately acculturate young people, but they misconceive acculturation as the accumulation of information or as a process of normalization. Instead, as Dewey’s educational philosophy makes clear, learning itself is acculturative, and education is “entirely consistent with the basic human practice of making ourselves at home in the world through understanding.”2 Fairfield argues that philosophy can aid in making experience (not vocational preparation or other external ends) the model for school learning.
Chapter 2 develops Dewey’s focus on experience in education by putting Dewey in conversation with Gadamer and with German philosophy’s Bildung tradition. Specifically, Fairfield characterizes Dewey as reconceiving education as Bildung, which Dewey defined as “the conscious and deliberate formation of human personality through assimilation of the spiritual products of the past.”3 Fairfield characterizes Dewey’s idea of experience as critical to Dewey’s groundbreaking educational arguments about curriculum and knowledge. He situates this idea in the history of Enlightenment thinking and philosophical empiricism. Fairfield also likens Dewey’s ideas to phenomenological philosophy, noting that both reject empiricists’ ideas about subjectivity and mind. Similarly, both emphasize intentionality, consciousness’s implication in the world, and experience’s continuity. In education, Dewey’s idea of experience should lead educators away from traditional teaching practice and toward the inculcation of intellectual virtues such as flexibility, open-mindedness, and originality. In other words, this idea implies that education has more than instrumental value. Fairfield contends that Gadamer’s philosophy in particular can extend this implication into a critique of technique or scientific method—a critique that Dewey did not pursue. Drawing himself on the Bildung tradition, Fairfield argues that Dewey might have also written more about experience’s dialectical and narrative qualities.
Chapter 3 compares and contrasts Dewey’s and Heidegger’s accounts of thinking. Through this treatment, Fairfield...
