American Pragmatism - Literature review Example

American Pragmatism Everyone agrees that education should enhance overall development. This subject however, has infrequently and inadequately been the focus of thorough scientific research. Studies that have been conducted in this aspect of education have primarily been concerned with understanding how an improved classroom experience acts to improve the learning experience with regard to the comprehension of intangible concepts. Relatively few studies, however, have been conducted to determine how the understanding of prescribed concepts leads to an improved schooling experience. This experience is defined as an increase of the student’s cognitive awareness along with the substance retained resulting from utilizing a theory. In an attempt to address the deficiency, this discussion examines John Dewey’s writings which promoted the combination of aesthetic experiences with education to build on the concept of an idea-based experience, a pragmatic approach. Pragmatists propose that the value of ideas is ultimately determined by the end result. The fundamentals of pragmatism include “an insistence that propositions be tested by their consequences, by the difference they make and, if they make none, set aside” (Posner, 1991, p. 35). When applying this concept to education, pragmatism stresses the point that the actual value of education is its capability to provide students with an ever increasing ability to gain knowledge. John Dewey’s pragmatic philosophy is specifically relevant to this issue. “The experience should be not only the means of education but its end” (Dewey, 1933). Dewey understood the role that scientific concepts play in the overall aesthetic educational experience. For example, art and music class has the ability to “quicken us from the slackness of routine and enables us to forget ourselves by finding ourselves in the delight of experiencing the world about us in its varied qualities and forms” (dewey, 1958a, p. 104). According to Dewey, the influence of the arts allows students to more fully expand their areas of learning outside one’s own environment. The purpose of the arts is not to provide students with a temporary diversion from reality but rather allows for a more profound understanding and appreciation of the educational experience. The arts act to transport the student “into a world beyond this world which is nevertheless the deeper reality of the world in which we live our ordinary experiences” (dewey, 1958a, p. 195). While students participate in the artistic endeavors, they undergo what Dewey referred to as an ‘experience.’ This experience, more than the physical act of performing the art itself, is at the center of Dewey’s aesthetic viewpoint. The arts simply serve as a method for understanding what it means to sense the experience. Dewey developed his theory of aesthetics to supplement his theory of experience. To accomplish this, “he turned to the arts because he felt that successful participation in the arts epitomized a particular type of aesthetic experience, what he called an experience” (Jackson, 1998). The interactions with art objects epitomized Dewey’s characterization of an experience. According to Dewey, the arts do not simply provide students with momentary periods of amusement, they increase students’ perspectives while adding meaning and thus value to forthcoming experiences in their lives. “They [the arts] modify our ways of perceiving the world, thus leaving us and the world itself irrevocably changed” (dewey, 1958a, p. 33). In his book, ‘Art as Experience’, Dewey defines an experience and how participation in the arts symbolizes an experience. The importance of the arts, according to Dewey, is that they permit students to more fully experience educational endeavors. The arts do not provide students with a momentary escape from this world, but are instead taken to a deeper understanding and appreciation of concepts outside the immediate geographic and social setting. “The arts carry us into a world beyond this world which is nevertheless the deeper reality of the world in which we live our ordinary experiences” (dewey, 1958a, p. 195). Ordinary human experiences, in the customary use of the term, are not comprehensive, are seldom fulfilling and lack wholeness. They are frequently disorderly, or interrupted without reaching a conclusion. “We put our hands to the plow and turn back; we start and then we stop, not because the experience has reached the end for the sake of which it was initiated but because of extraneous interruptions or of inner lethargy” (dewey, 1958a, p. 35). A Dewey defined experience has completeness because the information experienced, or learned, concludes in accomplishment. The completeness comes because the experience “is so rounded out that its close is a consummation and not a cessation. The consummation results from anticipation having reached a conclusion” (dewey, 1958a, p. 35). It is the escalation and final creation of this consummation that gives an experience its completeness. The completeness of the Dewey experience gives it a uniqueness which distinguishes it from the everyday living experiences. An experience has a unifying emotion as an element of its completeness and uniqueness. This emotion is associated to the increase of anticipation with respect to a consummation. “This consummation, moreover, does not wait in consciousness for the whole undertaking to be finished. It is anticipated throughout and is recurrently savored with special intensity” (dewey, 1958a, p. 54). Just as a theater performance is bound together and keeps the audience attentive by use of suspenseful emotion, an experience is also bound together and driven by emotion. In an experience, “emotion is the moving and cementing force” (dewey, 1958a, p. 42). In addition, an experience brings with a sense of satisfaction and purpose. Each experience is, in some measure, not simply the means to an intended result but “it contains its own rewards. It is intrinsically worthwhile” (Jackson, 1998, p. 10). “It is meaning enjoyed for its own sake, as opposed to having a practical or utilitarian force” (Jackson, 1998, p. 29). While characteristics such as uniqueness, completeness and a unifying emotion define an experience, they certainly do not adequately articulate its significance. An experience is valued for the built-in implications and its significance only becomes apparent when the development of meaning and of broad perception is achieved. “An experience may vary in its degree of completeness, uniqueness, and unifying emotion, but unless there is an expansion of meaning and attainment of full perception then it is not an experience” (Jackson, 1998, p. 112). In an experience, a student learns to attach meaning to the subject at hand and value the encounter from a fresh point of view. The arts are unequivocally created for this purpose and, from Dewey’s point of view, its objective is to “reawaken our sensibilities, causing us to see once again what we have come to overlook” (Jackson, 1998, p. 27). The arts serve to alter the ordinary educational experience and intensify certain inner aspects that allow students to perceive these characteristics again in future experiences that would otherwise have been deemed ordinary. For example, in a discussion of aesthetics and art education, Dewey illustrated how Van Gogh’s well-known painting of a pair of peasant boots focused people’s attention and perception of the boots which consequently directs them to a learned and involuntarily expansion of their perception of the normal or commonplace. According to Dewey, the perception of the exhaustion yet quiet nobility embodied in Van Gogh’s illustration of an ordinary item cognitively prepares the observer to view the ordinary environment with a newfound methodology and not simply to envision boots on a canvas. A pragmatic approach to education encourages students to reach past surface interpretations and to “reach down toward a level of meaning that only a steady gaze and calm reflection have the power to reveal” (Jackson, 1998, p. 32). Essentially, a student that is the recipient of pragmatic learning experiences enjoys broader observations of a particular subject, ingesting the material in more deeply personal and dynamic ways. This enhanced method of perception is complemented by anticipation, emotion and is appreciated for its inherent value. These experiences are profoundly responsible for the transformation of a student’s relationship with the methods by which they learn. During the course of expanding perceptions, students discover how to better interact within new activities and knowledge in an original way, to view the process differently and assign different meanings to learning. By following pragmatic forms of education, students transform not only themselves, but help society to progress as well. It is well known that the propagation of quality education has a positive ripple effect on society as a whole. Dewey’s definition of experience may well be better termed with the more descriptive ‘transformative’ experiences. Dewey believes that ideas are the crucial element in developing a theory of learning. This viewpoint conflicts with the Cartesian theories of dualism which teaches that there is a distinct separation between the human mind and the world (Prawat, 1996). Therefore, to more fully grasp Dewey’s usage of the term ‘idea,’ the term must be situated within the context of this non-Cartesian philosophy. “From the earliest days of his academic career, Dewey and pragmatism as a whole sought to rid philosophy of the Cartesian dualistic thinking that separated mind and world” (Russell, 1993). Dewey considered that this type of accepted wisdom leads to various other dualistic concepts which creates problems of conflict and hinders an effective educational process (Prawat, 1995). Because of this, one of Dewey’s principal endeavors was the expansion of the transactional view of an educational experience so as to evaporate the separation of mind and world philosophy. In Dewey’s first published work that identified a transactional view of experience ‘The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology,’ he criticized the reflex arc concept which put forward the theory that stimulus causes response which insinuates that the awareness of stimulus is separate from thought and deeds. Dewey maintained that this was not only the inherently flawed dualistic view but a simplistic one as well. He further argued that the two cannot be so conveniently separated. “Reflex is not an arc where the stimulus causes the response, but rather a circuit where the response also determines the stimulus” (Mounce, 1997). As an example, consider a lit fireplace as a stimulus for a child. The impact of this stimulus is dependent upon the child’s previous encounters and subsequent reactions. “If the child has reached for the flame and been burned before, the child will likely respond by not reaching for it again. This shows that the stimulus derives its significance, derives its status as a stimulus, from the way it enters into the child’s life” (Mounce, 1997, p. 130). The stimulus-response pattern should be viewed as an interactive path, not an inaccessible arc. The fundamental aspect of Dewey’s theories and to pragmatic thought is the insistence that ideas are verifiable. By the continued testing of ideas, the natural relation between student, humanity and the outside world is scientifically established and therefore reliable. Dewey’s early works first were patterned after methods that mirrored strict empirical scientific testing. “Dewey was influenced by the scientific movement taking place at the turn of the century” (Sleeper, 1986). Dewey believed that an idea could not be intellectually defined by its composition but only by its intended purpose and usefulness. “Whenever a doubtful situation or undecided issue helps us to form a judgment and to bring inference to a conclusion by means of anticipating a possible solution is an idea, and nothing else is” (Dewey, 1933, p. 136). In later works, Dewey’s attitude towards the implementation of a verification process adopted a more personal, aesthetic characteristic. This differing type of verification process perhaps can be better understood by re-examining the concept of pragmatism itself. A significant precept of pragmatism is that the value of ideas is judged solely by the outcome produced without bias regarding whether the results are good or bad. According to Dewey, an idea initiates a positive change if it transforms the student’s perceptions of learning in a way that makes the learning experience more meaningful. “Ideas are worthless except as they pass into actions which rearrange and reconstruct in some way, be it little or large, the world in which we live” (Dewey, 1988, p. 111). ‘Rearrange and reconstruct’ is a term Dewey utilized to explain his supposition that ideas provide educational encounters as well as everyday events with new emphasis and perceived value. To clarify this argument, Dewey offered his formula for the pragmatic testing of a teaching philosophy. “Does it end in conclusions which, when they are referred back to ordinary life-experiences and their predicaments, render them more significant, more luminous to us, and make our dealings with them more fruitful? Or does it terminate in rendering things of ordinary experience more opaque than they were before, and in depriving them of having in ‘reality’ even the significance they had previously seemed to have?” (Dewey, 1958b, p. 7). Consequently, the value of an idea is measured in the somewhat intangible terms of how that idea ultimately benefited a person their day-to-day living. “Judgments about the worth of an idea are based on what the idea does for the individual, the extent to which it opens up new experiences for a person as he or she interacts with objects and events in the environment” (Prawat, 1998, p. 204). Ever-evolving scientific techniques and ideas devoted to discovering improved methods for imparting knowledge is opening up new concepts and perceptions of understanding for students. Educators and parents should demand the pragmatic process be implemented in order to determine if ideas presently in use are actually enriching students’ overall learning experience. The conception of a transformative, idea-based system defines the precepts of a practical approach to educational techniques, one that ultimately leads to an enhanced learning experience. When utilized by educators, the application of Dewey’s theories involving aesthetic pragmatism will enrich the education journey and thus the overall understanding and lives of students. Works Cited Dewey, J. How We Think: A Restatment of the Relation of Reflective Thinking to the Educative Process. Boston, MA: D.C. Heath and Co., (1933). Dewey, J. Art as Experience. New York: Capricorn Books, (1958a). Dewey, J. Experience and Nature. New York: Dover, (1958b). (Original work published 1929). Dewey, J. “The Quest for Certainty.” John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925-1953. J. A. Boydston (Ed.). Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, (1988). (Original work published 1929). Jackson, P.W. John Dewey and the Lessons of Art. New Haven: Yale University Press, (1998). Mounce, H. O. The Two Pragmatisms. New York: Routledge, (1997). Russell, D.R. “Vygotsky, Dewey and Externalism: Beyond the Student/Discipline Dichotomy.” Journal of Advanced Composition. Vol. 13, N. 1, (1993), pp. 173-97. Posner, R.A. “What Has Pragmatism to Offer Law?” Pragmatism in Law and Society. M. Brint & W. Weaver (Ed.). Boulder, CO: Westview Press, (1991), pp. 29-46. Prawat, R.S. “Misreading Dewey: Reform, Projects, and the Language Game.” Educational Researcher. Vol. 24, N. 7, (1995), pp. 13-22. Prawat, R.S. “Constructivisms, Modern and Postmodern.” Educational Psychologist. Vol. 31, N. 4., (1996), pp. 215-25. Prawat, R. S. “Current Self-Regulation Views of Learning and Motivation Viewed Through a Deweyan Lens: The Problems with Dualism.” American Educational Research Journal. Vol. 35, N. 2, (1998), pp. 199-224. Sleeper, R. W. The Necessity of Pragmatism: John Dewey’s Conception of Philosophy. New Haven: Yale University Press, (1986). Read More