Getting It Right from the Beginning: Imagination and Education in John Dewey and Kieran Egan

I. Introduction

John Dewey’s theory of education, despite having become a reference point for the pedagogical sciences, has been subjected to much criticism. One of the most significant attacks came from Jerome Bruner (1962), who questioned Dewey’s principles as set forth in his “My Pedagogic Creed” (1897).¹ Bruner chose that book for criticism because it foreshadowed much of the later writing on education by the American philosopher, and he assessed the five articles of faith contained therein against the background of the deep changes that had occurred in conceptions of society, social institutions, and man. Then, paralleling Bruner, Kieran Egan (2002) stressed more recently the necessity to reconsider some of Dewey’s presuppositions from the viewpoint of contemporary advances in understanding, especially where new discoveries and theories in the developmental psychology of children are concerned.²

On the other hand, there have also been attempts to give new life to Dewey’s legacy. As for his greatest educational work, Democracy and Education (1916), Hansen (2006) has edited a collection of essays that engage critically with its contents and provide examples of how one might make use of them today in research and practice.³ Having been the most translated of all Dewey’s works, and having become popular in such different contexts as educational research, humanities, social sciences, and many others, it is a classical text in I. Calvino’s sense, that is, something that has never finished saying what it has to say and will always provide insights and suggestions, as well as fostering debates and critiques.

Without disputing Bruner’s and Egan’s approaches and denying the value of their remarks, the present research focuses on one aspect of Dewey’s teaching methodology—the role of imagination—that, though not fully developed into a coherent theory within his writings on education, and hence underestimated in the subsequent secondary literature, stands up to criticism and still proves to be viable. In the second section of the article I outline the contours of Dewey’s “problem of education,” as explicated in Democracy and Education, and explain how his learning by doing pedagogy originated as an appropriate solution, and, at the same time, is consistent with his general theory of language and meaning. In the third section I review the few but important passages where, within this classical work, the use of mental images by learners is recognized as necessary for the proper understanding of contents. Subsequent to this, works other than Democracy and Education are considered in order to better clarify the nature of imagination and its connection with other aspects of child psychology operative in the educational setting. Further imaginative processes are described in section four so as to broaden, as much as possible, the set of elements to draw on after in the comparative analysis. In order to demonstrate the present-day validity of these ideas, in the fifth section I summarize the core of Egan’s criticism of Deweyan activism and progressivism—indeed, one of the most effective negative assessments—and show how his methodological proposal is built on the attribution of a key function in imagination, both in the cognitive development of children and in the teaching practices of educators. From this perspective, and quite paradoxically, the former’s theory turns out to be indirectly one of the best corroborations of the latter’s conclusions. Finally, the conclusion sums up briefly the achievements of the paper, suggests two connections that are worth considering from a historical-comparative viewpoint (they can possibly provide, as research prospects, further interdisciplinary support for Dewey’s claims), and dwells on some key theoretical points concerning the way the two pedagogues understand the ability to imagine.

II. Dewey’s “Problem of Education” and Its Solution

In Democracy and Education (1916), Dewey maintains that the historical development of democracy as a kind of social life has led to a contradiction between what a society believes and what it actually does. On the one hand, modernity—the experimental method in the sciences, the biological...