Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

John Dewey 73
dangers in the latter. In particular, there is “the standing danger that the material of formal
instruction will be merely the subject matter of the schools, isolated from the subject matter of
life-experience. The permanent social interests are likely to be lost from view.” In Rethinking
Intelligence, Kincheloe notes that Dewey maintained the educational psychology of his day
was “antithetical to preparation for life in a democratic society.” He goes on to stress that
Dewey was “especially critical of those psychologists and educators who argued that many
students ...were incapable of working with their minds.” Dewey believed that IQ testing, along
with noninterpretive psychology in general, ran counter to the ideals of a democratic society. He
saw its implementation as a means of maintaining the status quo.
Just as importantly for Dewey, as Perkinson points out in Since Socrates, “the emerging
democratic society required more than simply taking the traditional education previously given
to the few and extending it to the many. ...Ademocraticsocialorderstoodinneedofanewkind
of education, a democratic education.” It was such an education that Dewey envisioned for the
Laboratory School in Chicago, one where children learned from living and working with and for
one another in daily tasks. In this way they learned not only subject matter but also what it meant
to share and to come together to form community.
FIFTY YEARS LATER
In contemporary discussion, John Dewey could most obviously be associated with educational
psychologists in the constructivist camp and even with critical pedagogy. As constructivists believe
in the ongoing assimilation of new information into one’s being, Dewey makes clear, in
My Pedagogic Creed, that he too believed that education was “a continuing reconstruction of
experience.” The constructivist psychology teaches that the process of learning is an internal
process unique to the individual. This belief runs counter to the behaviorist belief that persisted in
schools of Dewey’s time and persists in schools today. Just as he recognized that viewing knowledge
as existing outside the individual and applicable outside of context is folly, constructivists
today resist the notion that testing knowledge void of context is somehow relevant. He assumed
each child came with understandings and knowledge based on their lived experiences. These
experiences, “the child’s own social activities,” as Dewey put it according to Diane Ravitch in her
book Left Back, should be understood as the basis for how the child will receive and assimilate
new information. In keeping with this belief in the individual construction of understanding and
knowledge, and in the efficacy of “hands-on” discovery learning, Dewey promoted projects and
experiments over a preset curriculum.
Critical pedagogy also draws on Dewey’s educational psychology. Dewey believed, for example,
as do those in critical pedagogy, that relevance to the child’s life is of vital importance. He
said in My Pedagogic Creed that school “must represent present life.” In addition, the belief that
knowledge is not unchanging is common to both Dewey and critical pedagogy. Just as critical
pedagogy speaks of the inseparability of the knower and the known, of how knowledge is not
existent in space but only exists as a part of one’s psyche, he sees knowledge as always changing
and only valid in relation to the individual and how it relates to his or her life experience. Furthermore,
as does the critical pedagogue, Dewey believes that school is responsible for producing
socially aware, democratic citizens. In The School and Society, he makes clear that school needs
to provide a socially guided experience that prepares individuals for changing times and so should
be “an active community ...an embryonic society, instead of a place set apart in which to learn
lessons.”
In the same way that Dewey rejected the notion that some students were unable to work
their minds and recognized the use of tracking as a tool to suppress the economically deprived
and otherwise marginalized citizens, critical pedagogy also rejects blind adherence to so-called