Hutchins and Dewey: Lessons for Education in a Material Society

An item in the news this week caught my attention.  As the Washington Post reported it,  Apple, now one of the largest corporations in the world, used a series offshore "entities" to avoid paying U.S. taxes on billions of dollars that it earned overseas.  While this kind of thing is fairly common among U.S. corporations, the Apple example was unprecedented because the overseas "entities" had no staff and no physical presence, according to Senate staffers.  Apple responded by saying that it paid all of the taxes due to the U.S., and that what it was doing was perfectly legal.  The real question, both sides seem to agree, is whether it should be legal.  What should be the obligation of a corporation to the society in which it operates?

The debate illustrates a dilemma that has become very visible in today's society:  What is the role of government in a democratic society?  Corporations have become increasingly powerful forces in our governmental processes these days.  The Supreme Court ruling that gave corporations unlimited ability to finance political campaigns is one example.  Apple's ability to legally hide otherwise taxable income from the citizens of the U.S. is another.  There seems to be a growing tension between social responsibility and material greed, a tension that could undermine the basic social contract on which democracy rests.

These are not new tensions.   In April 1941--as Europe was already at war and months before the U.S. joined in--University of Chicago President Robert Maynard Hutchins gave a series of lectures that were later collected in a book, Education for Freedom.  He noted the increasing materialism of American society, what he described as the doctrine "that material goods are an end in themselves" (p. 40) and that "the state is valuable if it helps to maximize profits, but is apparently to have little part in economic life beyond this and beyond fulfilling functions which are too big or too unprofitable for private enterprise” (p. 41).   What he said seventy years ago sounds awfully current today.

Hutchins, who had already established himself as an advocate for higher education reform, was alarmed by the broader, moral implications.  He wrote:

The state is not an end in itself, but a means to the virtue and intelligence, that is the happiness, of the citizens. It is held together by justice, through which it cares for the common good.  The common good, in fact, is little but justice most broadly conceived:  peace, order, and an equitable distribution of economic goods. Since the state is charged with responsibility for the common good, and since the production and distribution of material goods are one aspect of the common good, the economic order must be subordinate to the political order (p. 45).

The implication, he said,  is that “every act of every man is a moral act, to be tested by moral, and not by economic, criteria” (p. 46).   The individual's ability to assert moral power is critical, according to Hutchins.  "If we can no nothing about society," he said,  "if we can have only opinion about it, and if one man’s opinion is as good as another’s, then we may decide to get what we irrationally want by the use of irrational means, namely force” (p.31).

The move toward materialism had very direct implications for higher education, in Hutchins' view.   ". . .The aim of education is wisdom and goodness," he wrote, adding, "Studies that do not bring us closer to this goal have no place in a university .  .  . If you deny this proposition, you take the responsibility of asserting that a rational view of the universe and one's role in it is no better than an irrational one or none at all" (p. 26-27).  The implications for the curriculum were clear:  "If, then, we are to have standards of social criticism and social action, and if they are to be anything but emotional standards, they must result from philosophical and historical study and from the habit of straight thinking therein" (p. 29).

Hutchins' solution was an extension of the "Great Books" curriculum that he had proposed for Chicago in the 1930s.  It was that "education be concerned first of all with ideas, with principles, with the abiding and the permanent" (p. 57)--the "cultivation of intellectual virtues" that "can be accomplished through the communication of our intellectual tradition and through training in the intellectual disciplines" (p 60).  The vehicle he proposed was a two-year general education baccalaureate degree emphasizing study of

. . . the great thinkers of the past and present, scientific, historical, and philosophical.  It means a grasp of the disciplines of grammar, rhetoric, logic, and mathematics; reading, writing, and figuring.  It does not, of course, mean the exclusion of contemporary materials.  They should be brought in daily to illustrate, confirm, or deny the ideas held by the writers under discussion" (ibid.).

John Dewey had explored similar terrain in his 1915 book, Democracy and Education, but emphasized the idea that education, while it may use materials from the past, is about the present.   Noting that "an individual can live only in the present," Dewey argued:

The study of past products will not help us understand the present, because the present is not due to the products, but to the life of which they were the products.  A knowledge of the past and its heritage is of great significance when it enters into the present, but not otherwise.  And the mistake of making the records and remains of the past the main material of education is that it cuts the vital connection of present and past, and tends to make the past a rival of the present and the present a more or less futile imitation of the past (p.75).

 "The present, in short," Dewey added, "generates the problems which lead us to search the past for suggestion, and which supplies meaning to what we find when we search" (p. 76).  This led Dewey to a "technical definition" of education:  "It is that reconstruction or reorganization of experience which adds to the meaning of experience, and which increases ability to direct the course of subsequent experience" (ibid.).

What does this look backward mean as we look forward to the future of American higher education?  Two additional quotes from Hutchins may help to set the stage: 

"The American educational system will be engaged in the cultivation of whatever is honored in the United States" (p. 49).  

          and

"The alternatives before us are clear.  Either we must abandon the ideal of freedom or we must educate our people for freedom" (p. 17).

First, it is worth noting that, while some things have not changed, others have.  There are many reasons why education today has become so focused on material benefits--on preparing people for work.  Not the least is that we no longer live in a world of nation states, but instead in a global economy where technology has eliminated many geographic boundaries, so that competition for talent has never been greater.  American society needs a better trained workforce in order to compete for jobs at all levels.  That said, if Hutchins is correct that every act must be judged as a moral act, not an economic act, then we must also prepare our citizens for moral action in the increasingly complex culture in which the new work takes place.  How do we use the lessons of the past to inform present and future actions?  How do we educate people for freedom? 

A first step is to free the general education curriculum from the old discipline-centered "breadth and depth" distribution model that was adopted early in the Industrial Revolution.  Over the decades,  that system has come to be focused more on how the academic community defines itself and less on how the world itself works.

A second step is to replace the "breadth and depth" system with a highly interdisciplinary problem-centered curriculum that brings history, philosophy, and the social and physical sciences to bear on understanding the nature of today's society and the role of the individual in that society.  This curriculum must begin with a clear sense of purpose.  As Dewey suggested, it must use the experiences of the past and contextualize them around current problems to give students the ability to direct the course of their own subsequent experience.

A third step is to incorporate the social and, to use Hutchins' phrase, the moral purpose of the general education curriculum into the professional curriculum.  This can be done through research projects and problem-centered capstone experiences that require students to explore the social and moral implications of their new professional knowledge on the community around them.

For public institutions--land grant universities, state colleges and universities, community colleges--and private institutions that accept state/federal financial aid, the key step is to recognize our continuing obligation not only to individuals and their future employers, but to citizens in general, who have invested, through their taxes, in our mission.  Otherwise, the concerns of Hutchins and Dewey--that democracy will succumb to materialism--may well prove true.

References

Dewey, John.  Democracy and Education.  New York: The Free Press, 1966.
Hutchins, Robert M. Education for Freedom.  Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1944.

Smelling a Memory

When I was in high school, back in the mid-1960s, I worked at Little Italy, a family-owned Italian restaurant in what is now Hermitage, Pa.  The restaurant was operated by a mother-daughter team.  Mrs. Combine, her daughter, JoAnne Bishop, and her son-in-law, Richard Bishop.  They had operated the restaurant in the Hickory Plaza for a while and then renovated a larger, stand-alone site on the corner of State Street and Dutch Lane.  I came on at the opening of the new site.  I was around 17 when I started as a busboy and had been promoted to short-order cook by the time I left at the age of 18.

Little Italy was a true family restaurant.   Other members of the Combine family operated restaurants nearby in West Middlesex, and it wasn't unusual for them to gather at Little Italy.  A booth near the kitchen was often occupied by friends and relatives, including the Bishops' young daughter.   As a high school student, it was great to be surrounded by an active and close family.

After I left, I lost touch with the family, although I have always had very fond memories of my days at Little Italy.  Just recently, I happened across an obituary for JoAnne Bishop in the Sharon Herald, our local paper.  It noted that the family had relocated to Las Vegas and that, later in life, JoAnne had authored her own blog--"I Smell a Memory."  Her daughter has since re-posted some of her mother's blog entries at http://blog.dot-two-dot.com/?tag=i-smell-a-memory .  In "I Smell a Memory," she recalls favorite holidays with her family and the food that she made to celebrate.  Then, she adds recipes.  It is a wonderful legacy.

Making the Most of MOOCs

The idea of Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs) continues to attract attention in the education press and popular media.  As the idea evolves, we gradually are getting a better idea of where MOOCs might fit into the broader online learning environment and, indeed, what role they might play in the transformation of higher education as we adapt to the realities of life in a global information society.   In December, I posted some thoughts on where MOOCs might fit into the Land Grant mission.  Today, I want to look at them from a slightly different perspective.

There is one area where I want to be very clear:  The idea that a single MOOC should replace general education course taught at almost every college/university in the U.S. is misguided, at best.  This has been part of the MOOC discussion since the earliest courses came out.  It is an idea that has been around technology-based education since at least the 1980s, when PBS moved to satellite distribution and Walter Annenberg gave funds to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to create nationally distributed tele-courses, creating the idea that one great course with fantastic video lectures could ensure that every student got a good education in that topic.  But that's not how our educational system works.   We have more than 3,000 institution of higher education in the United States.  While many of them may use the same text to teach "Introduction to Sociology" or "Introduction to World History" or whatever, the strength of the system is that each institution has its own faculty members who teach the course using their own syllabus, each drawing on their own research and experience, and each responding to the individual needs and interests of their students, whether they be on campus or online.  This creates a kind of butterfly effect as students move into different classes and different majors, taking with them the nuances of their own experiences in these courses.   The resulting diversity is one of the strengths of the system.  We don't need--and, indeed, should avoid the homogenization of the curriculum by relying on MOOCs.

So, then, what do we need?   I see three areas where investment in MOOCs might have the greatest payoff for not just for the institutions that offer them, but for society in general.

The first of these I mentioned in my December 2012 posting on MOOCs:  MOOCs provide a powerful new tool for creating learning communities around research and technology transfer.  Over the years, I've seen the importance of academic conferences in disseminating the results of research and creating new discussions among researchers and between researchers and those who benefit from the results of their work.  Two great examples from Penn State's conferencing work in Outreach are (1) a series of conferences that brought together astronomers and statisticians and that eventually resulted in the creation of a new discipline, Astro-Statistics, and (2) the annual autism conference, which brings together a huge community of researchers, practitioners, and autistic children and their families.  MOOCs have great potential to more quickly and more broadly disseminate research findings and to create communities among diverse populations that have an interest in applying research.  It is a potentially powerful tool for academic outreach and engagement.

A second potential role is to build new pathways between higher education and schooling.  Currently in the U.S., about 39 percent of high school graduates go on to college.  The U.S. Department of Education has set a goal of increasing that to 60 percent by 2020--what they estimate the country will need to thrive in the information economy.  To get there, we will need to dramatically increase the percentage of high school students who are prepared to go to college.  MOOCs can help by providing a means by which higher education institutions can share content with high school teachers.  Imagine, for instance, a MOOC on high school chemistry.  Science Education faculty in our universities could develop video and computer-based instructional materials on critical science concepts at all K-12 levels.  These would be made available to teachers via a MOOC that would also contain sample lesson plans and other resources that the teachers would need.  Then, it would also serve as a meeting place where teachers could share their experiences in using the materials, get advice from both higher education faculty and peer teachers, and share materials that they have developed locally to contextualize the materials available via the MOOC.  The result:  a teaching community that would help even small, poor districts ensure that their students have access to high-quality learning.

We did this sort of thing back in the 1970s and 1980s through public television.  Penn State's public TV station worked with Dr. Paul Welliver in the University's College of Education to create "Science for the Seventies," a video series that captured key science concepts for elementary school students.  Dr. Welliver and his colleagues also tried to create a community of teachers who could share lesson plans, etc., but the lack of a medium for exchange made that difficult.  MOOCs offer a very fresh way to create this kind of teaching/sharing community to address important educational needs.

A third potential use of MOOCs relates to the new demographics of our world.  Today, Americans are living well into their 70s and 80s, but still retiring at 65 or earlier.  In his landmark book, The End of Work, Jeremy Rifkin noted that now need to prepare older adults for life after work--ideally, a third act of life where experienced adults can apply their talents and experiences in the social sector,  helping improve life in their communities.   In this arena MOOCs offer an interesting opportunity to bring older adults together with social sector organizations and university faculty to help prepare them for productive after-retirement contributions.  As with the other applications, a key element is not just the transfer of knowledge, but the creation of communities.

I hope these three examples illustrate the true potential of MOOCs as tools for community-building and engagement around research, technology transfer, and cross-sector partnerships.

I Won't Give Up

Jason Mraz is one of my very favorite singer-songwriters these days.  It started with "I'm Yours," but his most recent album, Love Is a Four-Letter Word, has some great songs that capture a spirit that I haven't heard in popular music for a long time.

Right now, my favorite is "I Won't Give Up."     I was listening to it this morning--the day after the Boston Marathon bombing--and realized that it pretty much captures how I feel about our country these days.  Our country has become fascinated with violence, greed, and, ultimately, the stubborn ignorance of radical ideology.  These have been with us for many decades, but, today, they have clouded the great light of caring and community that is American democracy at its best.  Still, in the face of this ugliness, as Mraz says, "I won't give up."   

Finding Courage

Our country's inability to better manage guns is appalling.  A few short months after 20 young people and 6 teachers were killed--and with many gun murders since then, including, most recently, a Texas prosecutor and his wife--our government seems not to have the courage to act.  It is the ultimate failure of a democratic government not to protect the lives of its citizens.

In our society, one must be licensed to drive a car.  One must pass a test to get that license and must renew the license annually in most states.  In addition, all cars must be registered and insured.   Some states also require that each car be inspected regularly to ensure that it is safe to use.  This is done to minimize highway deaths and property destruction caused by cars. 

We should take at least as much care with the public distribution and use of firearms as we do with automobiles:

1.  All gun users should pass a test that demonstrates their ability to use a gun safely and that they are of sound mental condition.  Only then should they be granted a license to use a gun.

2.  That license should be reviewed and renewed periodically, perhaps every two years.

3.  Purchase of a gun should include a background check to be sure that the person has a license and, thus, has the legal right to carry and use a gun.

4.  Guns themselves should be registered and that registration should be renewed every two years.

5.  Sale of a gun should be handled in the same way that the sale of a car is handled:  there is a title to the gun and that title transfers with appropriate review.

The active resistance to any form of government oversight of firearms by the National Rifle Association and gun manufacturers is but one example of how corporations and financial interests are undermining democracy today.  The logical result, if left unchecked, will be a new and destructive kind of autocracy.  It is important that we respond not only by advocating for national and state laws to control weapons, but by grassroots changes to the culture of violence in the U.S.  We need to make violence unpopular, the way we made smoking and anti-Semitism racism unpopular.   Let's start by rejecting violence in the media and computer games and by making it clear, as citizens, that assault weapons are not welcome in our homes and neighborhoods.  Let's strengthen sentences for crimes that involve deadly weapons.   Let's not make stars out of criminals and advocates of violence.

Mother Theresa once said that she pitied Americans because, despite all our riches, we are, in her words "poor in spirit."  The strength of American democracy is the balance between the spirit of independence and the spirit of community.  We need to strengthen the bond between the two.  We are not Americans unless we honor the individual in the context of community.

Taxes and a Moral Society

David Blandford, a Penn State colleague and fellow member of our local Torch Club, said something at a Torch Club meeting last year that has stuck with me.  How people feel about taxation, he said, has less to do with the amount that they are taxed and more to do with how those taxes are used.  Tax evasion in 17^thcentury Britain, he told the Club, was rooted not in the tax itself, but in the fact that the British government used the taxes to carry on foreign wars that were of no benefit to the average Englishman.   On the other hand, modern Scandinavians are among the most highly taxed citizens on earth, and they are also the happiest, because tax revenues are returned in the form of benefits:  health care, work release for new parents, old age benefits, etc. 

            Americans are currently taxed at a much lower rate than Scandinavians.  In fact, we are taxed at a lower rate today than was the case just a generation ago, before the so-called Reagan Revolution.  And yet, we are among the most unhappy of industrialized nations.  Mother Theresa pitied us, saying that we are poor in spirit.   Why?  Well, one reason may be that, like Britain in the 17^th century, we are increasingly disconnected from our government.  We are afloat, unmoored to our sense of citizenship that gives us identity and a sense of social purpose.  Our waste of public resources to support private greed is a symptom of a government that is attending more to business interests than to the needs and interests of its citizens—in short, a government that is failing to do its real job. 

            The recent mass murder in Aurora, Colorado, is another sign of our alienation not just from government but from community.  The tragedy sparked a brief national discussion of gun control, which noted that, among the 23 most industrialized nations, the U.S. ranks first in gun murders.  Why?  I suggest that one reason is that we increasingly are estranged from the communities that used to support us.  We are a nation of immigrants and, unlike the nations from which our ancestors came, our cultural heritage is thin.  Our connection with our geographically defined community is made thinner by globalization.

            Taking a longer view, this disconnect may also be a symptom of a broader change that is overtaking our society as technology and globalization redefine “community” and challenge us to seek a new identity.   I believe that the changes we are now experiencing are much more profound than we tend to recognized.   It think it is safe to posit that not only are we moving from the Industrial Era to a new Information Era, but that we have left Western Civilization behind in the process.  The 20^th century, with its two world wars and its ideological Cold War, was the last century of that old world.  The new civilization is just now taking form.  It is being shaped, in part, by technology and globalization, to be sure.  As Fareed Zakaria wrote in The Post-American World, the change is not about the downfall of Western life, but about the “rise of the rest”—a new global culture where power and influence are more distributed and diverse.

            I’ve been reading Grace Lee Boggs’ recent book, The Next American Revolution.  In it, she argues that, in this new world, the challenge is not simply to over-turn the existing power structure, but to revolutionize our interactions with community at all levels.  “We are beginning to understand,” she writes, “that the world is always being made and never finished; that activism can be the journey rather than the arrival; that struggle doesn’t always have to be confrontational but can take the form of reaching out to find common ground with the many ‘others’ in our society who are also seeking ways out from alienation, isolation, privatization, and dehumanization by corporate globalization” (p. 48).

            Boggs quotes Meg Wheatley, who describes the new culture as “this exquisitely connected world” and notes, “Because of these unseen connections, there is potential value in working anywhere in the system” (p. 50).  The implication is that, as individuals, we can help shape the new world from wherever we find ourselves in our society.  This is a powerful new way to think about the dynamics of change in a democratic society. It also describes the paradigm shift in social identity that we are experiencing:  a new social context that encourages individuals in a globalized society to reconnect with community at the local level and, perhaps, with professional and social communities that are not defined by geography.   Revolution, Boggs argues, is the cumulative impact of many, many local actions.  “In other words,” she writes on her own career as an activist, “our revolution had to be for the purpose of accelerating our evolution to a higher plateau of Humanity” (p.70).

            And this is where we have gone wrong in the years that span my adult life and those of many of us Baby Boomers who had such ambitions for our society.  Somewhere along the line, we’ve lost our passion for “accelerating our evolution to a higher plateau of Humanity” and settled for a kind of comfort that dulls our moral sense.  The rich get rich, but we are all the poorer for it.

The Sequester and Natural Law

The current budget sequester raises many questions about what America should do reduce our budget deficits and arrive at an ongoing budget scenario that (1) is sustainable in itself and (2) addresses issues that will ensure a healthy and sustainable society for our citizens.   In The Myth of Progress (2006, University Press of New England), Tom Wessels reflects on what the laws of nature can tell us about how we need to care for our societal ecology.  Wessels makes several important points in this concise book:

            First, we need to abandon the linear thinking that has tended to dominate economic theory and practice for the past century.  Linear thinking reflects an industrial approach to the economy:  that the world is like a machine—in which “each part works in a lockstep way with the other parts, so that the system always follows the exact same sequence of interactions between the parts” (p. 6).   In reality, he argues, we live in a nonlinear, complex system that is less predictable because the parts interact in multiple ways, so that the system is much greater than the sum of its parts.  Complex systems, Wessel notes, generate “emergent properties—things that couldn’t be predicted just by examining the parts” (p. 9).  He also notes that complex systems tend to be nested within each other, which helps to maintain system integrity.  

            Second, Wessels argues that, just as natural ecological systems depend on diversity to sustain themselves, our political ecology also benefits from diversity.  “The foundation of sustained progress lies in stable systems that increase diversity through time to resist perturbations” (p. 78).   Systems that lack diversity are more likely to be adversely affected by external changes because they lack means to adjust.  Wessel offers several examples of where the American economy is becoming less diverse and, in the process, less stable:  the rise of industrial farming over smaller family farms, increasing consolidation of the news media under less than two dozen large corporations, and the rise of corporate power that displaces small businesses.  A good example of the last change is Walmart, which has reduced economic diversity by killing small local retailers in communities across the country.

            Third, he notes, “Large-scale change in complex systems never comes from the top down; it always bubbles up from the bottom.  That means that large-scale social, political, and economic change comes from the citizenry, whom elected officials will follow when its collective voice becomes loud enough” (p. 60).

            What does this suggest for how we should deal with the federal deficit and the sequester?  For one, we should be aware of how budget cuts might create unanticipated “feedback loops” within our complex economic and political system.   Across the board cuts could have both positive and negative consequences; either way, we need to be sensitive to the potential for unforeseen consequences.   On one hand, it is essential that there be some discretion about how cuts are made.  On the other, it is important that we use the sequester to make real cuts that result in real change. 

            At the same time, we should use the sequester to eliminate subsidies to activities that work against economic diversity and that create instability.  For instance, this would be a good time to eliminate subsidies to large-scale corporate farming operations and to the oil industry.   We should invest some of the saved funds to support small, family farms and local cooperatives and to support innovation in wind, solar, and other sources of energy in order to diversify our food and energy resources and allow us to be more responsive to climate change and other external threats to stability.  

            I am a firm believer that the final solution will require more than just an across the board cut in expenses.  New revenues should be at least one quarter of the total solution, which assumes closing existing loopholes in federal income taxes.  Beyond that, however, we will need significant cuts, even if the hatchet approach of the sequester can be avoided.   Let’s hope that, in both sides of the process, we keep Wessels’ ideas in mind and find solutions that recognize that our society—and our economy—is a complex, rather than linear, system.