Every fall semester I meet (via Zoom) with fifteen to twenty graduate students from Western Carolina University. I always enjoy doing it, as the students, all majoring in experiential and outdoor education, remind me of me fifty years (a half century!) ago. Some of them are classroom teachers, but most are naturalists, environmental educators, or wilderness trip leaders trying to better understand the educational philosophy behind the work that they do. I am always encouraged when I meet young adults who still care about this stuff.
Class this semester was unlike previous years, as the planned date of my visit was cancelled due to Hurricane Helene. I suggested to Paul Stonehouse, instructor of the course, that we skip our meeting altogether, but he asked if I could appear at a later date for just a few minutes. The students read my book Rediscovering Dewey for class, and even if it is just a quick encounter, Paul thought that the students got something from interacting with the author of one of their required texts.
After getting online with the students, I thanked them for reading my book and followed up by telling them that Rediscovering Dewey, more than anything else I’ve ever written, was something I’d like to have back for a major revision. I’ve thought this for a long time, but last week was the first time I’d told anyone. I think that the reason for mentioning it now has much to do with this year’s Presidential election.
When I wrote Rediscovering Dewey I wanted to accomplish two things. One, I wanted to study John Dewey for myself. For much of my professional career I’d gone back and forth on whether my own educational philosophy coincided with Dewey’s, and I sometimes felt that my uncertainty was due to an incomplete understanding of Dewey’s basic educational tenets. Secondly, I wanted to put Dewey’s writings into plain English as a way to make them accessible to those who find Dewey confusing and/or too academic. I succeeded in my first objective, but fell short on the second. I did restate Dewey’s philosophy of education more simply than the original texts, but I didn’t take it far enough. As a result, Rediscovering Dewey works well with graduate students in experiential education, but comes nowhere close to appealing to a general audience.
None of this would matter except for the fact that Dewey’s educational philosophy is inseparably linked to education for democracy. Dewey believed that if even one generation of young Americans was not taught how to think for themselves, democracy would fail to function properly. Oligarchs with power, money, and access to the media would seize the opportunity to indoctrinate Americans to a particular way of thinking. The great American experiment in democracy would die.
I fear that Dewey’s warning may be coming to fruition. I realize that readership for all of my books is small and the impact they make is negligible, but I still wish I’d written a more accessible book.
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