Authority, Social Change, and Education: A Response to Dewey’s Critics

Authority, Social Change, and Education: A Response to Dewey's Critics James Scott Johnston Introduction In this paper, I want to examine and challenge certain criticisms of Dewey's conception of authority. These criticisms are, broadly speaking, of two species. The first set of criticisms involves what critics have labeled Dewey's "strong" authority. These critics, the so-called "Illinois Revisionists," argue that embedded in Dewey's social and educational philosophy are assumptions about authority that lead the critics to speculate that the legitimation of authority is predicated upon an expert, professional class. This class maintains power and social control through the use of scientific, technical , and rational means. In terms of education, these critics conclude that schooling is a vehicle for the inculcation of positive values regarding science and technology and their importance in the modern world. A second set of criticisms comes from the historian John Patrick Diggins, who argues Dewey as having a "weak" conception of authority. The argument here is that, as Dewey presupposes no metaphysical ends, and no fixed historical knowledge to draw upon, little is left over to hitch authority onto in terms of social control. What is left are individual experiences; clearly not enough to make value judgments regarding social issues. Furthermore and with respect to education, as teacher authority is said by Dewey to be minimal , and no fixed, philosophical educational "ends" are allowable, there is little to guide authority in determining future educational direction. I intend to explore these arguments further, and then to challenge them. This will occur through a reconsideration of Dewey's position on authority-both social and educational. After completing this reconsideration, I will be in a position to bring the completed results to bear on the criticisms themselves . My thesis is that, while Dewey is clearly able to refute certain of these criticisms, others continue to hold. In particular, I concur with those arguments that read Dewey as having posited no metaphysical or educational "ends" and further positing that these ends are necessary ones if anything other than a contingent authority is to evolve. I maintain that Diggins and those who agree with him will not be satisfied by Dewey's response. Part 1: The Challenge to Authority There have been several challenges to Dewey's estimation of the role and scope of authority. A number of these challenges developed out of an increasing discomfort with the socially and economically conservative American political scene of the 1950's. Pragmatism, viewed as a philosophical tool for increasingly authoritarian government, came into disrepute in the 1960's, as a more broadly leftist, revisionist assault on American politics and culture emerged. Works such as Cristopher Lasch's The New Radicalism in America, critical as it was of the Liberal state and in particular, pragmatism and its later progressivist manifestation, led to a flurry of theses to the effect that "the manipulative note was rarely absent from their writings: the insistence that men could best be controlled and directed not by the old crude method of force but by 'education' in its broadest sense...[T]he progressives' faith in education...often served as a rationalization for a crude will to power on the part of the intellectuals themselves" (1965, p. 146). Of course those fearful of the effects of the growing bureaucratic technocracy did not maintain a stranglehold on criticism of the progressivist movement. Inasmuch as progressivism was tied to the larger philosophical base that was pragmatism, social critics of the more traditionalist bent who insisted on a firm metaphysical foundation for social planning found Dewey and his followers short on provisions as well. A metaphysically bereft philosophy left nothing but an anemic conception of authority based not upon timeless principles, rather the vagaries of science and experimentation . Robert Hutchins provides a clear example of this line of thinking. "The difference between us and Mr. Dewey is that we can defend Mr. Dewey's [social] goals and Mr. Dewey cannot. All he can do is say he is for them. He cannot say why, because he can appeal only to science, and science cannot tell him why he should be for science or for democracy or for human ends" (1944...