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Comparing and contrasting Oakeshott and Dewey's philosophy of education.
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Michael Oakeshott, John Dewey, and The Philosophy of Education
Adrian Rutt
Michael Oakeshott and John Dewey take similar points of departure to form their philosophies of
education: the idea that the school, and education in general, should be removed or separated
from any outside influence of the world. Oakeshott believed that “the idea ‘school’ is that of
detachment from the immediate, local world of the learner, its current concerns and directions it
gives to his attention,” and Dewey, in a similar tone, claims “it is the business of the school
environment to eliminate, so far as possible, the unworthy features of the existing environment
from influence upon mental habitudes” (DE, 20). Putting aside for a moment the ambiguity of
Dewey’s phrase “unworthy features,” both thinkers believe that there is something undesirable in
students simply being submersed or indoctrinated into the everyday world around them, and that
the school should first and foremost make distinctions between these two worlds.
But for Dewey it isn’t that the school was something better than society or the
community, but rather he wanted it to be merely one morepart of the community: “school must
represent the present life. As such, parts of the student’s home life (such as moral and ethical
education) should take part in the schooling process… the teacher is a part of this, not as an
authoritative figure, but as a member of the community who is there to assist the student” (ibid.).
It is obvious that Oakeshott and Dewey are separated by more than just an ocean, so to
understand both the subtle and glaring differences in their respective philosophies of education it
is necessary to summarize their larger philosophical projects so that these subtleties are better
illuminated. As Timothy Fuller says of Oakeshott (which holds true for Dewey as well): “the
quest to identify distinctive features of important human activities has always been central to his
philosophical investigations… seeking and distinguishing features of teaching and learning are
inseparable from his work as a whole” (VLL, xvi). Using theirgeneral philosophies as a starting
point, one can put into perspective how both Oakeshott and Dewey thought the school should be
organized—from its character to its essential aims. One can see, then, that their philosophical
visions of the world go hand in hand with their philosophical visions of and for the school. For
both thinkers this latter task—that of trying to define the character of education—is abstract, but
is necessary as a foundation to understand why they then promote certain types of teachers and
curriculums. Both the role of teacher and how the curriculum is to be structured are two of the
most essential aspects of Oakeshott and Dewey’s educational systems, and thus, as will be
shown, the most specific as well.
The Larger Philosophical Project
Oakeshott sees the world as separated into different components, and in a posthumously
published essay titled Work and Play, he distinguishes two such ways of being active in the
world: “work” and “play.” He believes that the former eclipses the latter almost completely in
our lives. “Play” for Oakeshott is forgotten and replaced by “work”—something he believes the
ancients (Greeks, Romans, etc.) had a better appreciation and thus balance of. To be at “play” is
to “to try to understand and to explain the world,” and this “obviously entails an attitude towards
the world that is not one in which it is regarded as material that can be used to satisfy wants”
(emphasis mine) (WP). For Oakeshott the imbalance between work—an “activity that seeks the
satisfaction of wants”—and play is fostered in formal education and thus creates citizens that
only think in term of wants and how to get those wants. In short, Oakeshott thinks there’smore
than this (ibid).
But Oakeshott doesn’t want to banish “work;” he merely wants a distinction between
learning to exploit the world to get something we want and enjoying somethingfor its own sake.
School for him is the place that this distinction could be made explicit, where it “was understood
to be a place where one was introduced to those activities and attitudes towards the world that
were not concerned with satisfying wants, where one was introduced to those activities of
explanation and imagination that were ‘free’ because they were pursued for their own sake and
were emancipated from the limitations and anxieties of ‘work’ … [School] comes from a Greek
word skole , which means ‘leisure’ or ‘free time’” (ibid). The difference for Oakeshott is that
work is designed “to impress some temporary human purpose upon some component of the
world” while play is “to reveal the world as it is and not merely in respect of its potential to
satisfy human wants” (ibid). This is key to Oakeshott’s overall project: he wants humans to
recognize that “the greater part of what we have is not a burden to be carried or an incubus to be
thrown off, but an inheritance to be enjoyed” (VLL, 74). He even extends this thought into the
realm of education when he states that there are “some people who allow themselves to speak
‘As if arrangements were intended, For nothing else but to be mended’” (ibid). This attitude of
dissatisfaction toward the world is detrimental if it becomes all consuming, and “our
determination to improve our conduct does not prevent us from recognizing” that we should
enjoy arrangements as they presently appear to us (ibid).
However, Oakeshott is not so naive to think that practical influences wouldn’t pervade
every aspect of our human lives. He says, “There must, to be sure, be a place for learning how to
use the resources of the world for the satisfaction of human wants. But we are fortunate if we are
not encouraged to confuse the two quite different experiences of the world” (WP). In the end,
Oakeshott does not wish to rid ourselves of our practical pursuits, but only wishes to see that we
understand that there is a distinction between work and play and, ultimately, to retrieve the
importance of play in our everyday lives. In this important essay, Oakeshott connects his the idea
of play with his previous ideas about poetry when he says that inboth play and poetry “images in
contemplation are merely present; they provoke neither speculation nor inquiry about the
occasion or conditions of their appearing but only delight in their having appeared” (ibid). This
“delight” that Oakeshott refers to throughout his work is an attempt to reclaim the “voice” of
poetry that has been silenced by the practical and scientific since the Enlightenment. Poetry, like
the practical and the scientific, is just one more voice among many Oakeshott sees as joined in
the only way they can be: in a conversation.
It is also crucial, then, to understand Oakeshott’s use of the conversational metaphor. The
metaphor of conversation—something he refers to quite often throughout many of his
writings—is one in which he finds justification for many of his philosophical views. In a much
quoted passage he says of conversation:
In a conversation the participants are not engaged in an inquiry or a debate; there is no 'truth' to be discovered, no proposition to be proved, no conclusion sought. They are not concerned to inform, to persuade, or to refute one another, and therefore the cogency of their utterances does not depend upon their all speaking in the same idiom; they may differ without disagreeing… And voices which speak in conversation do not compose a hierarchy. Conversation is not an enterprise designed to yield an extrinsic profit, a contest where a winner gets a prize, not is it an activity of exegesis; it is an unrehearsed intellectual adventure. It is with conversation as with gambling, its significance lies neither in winning nor in losing, but in wagering. Properly speaking, it is impossible in the absence of a diversity of voices: in it different universes of discourse meet, acknowledge
each other and enjoy an oblique relationship which neither requires nor forecasts their being assimilated to one another (RP, 196198).
And later, connecting it with education, he says “Education, properly speaking, is an initiation
into the skill and partnership of this conversation in which we learn to recognize the voices, to
distinguish the proper occasions of utterance, and in which we acquire the intellectual and moral
habits appropriate to conversation. And it is this conversation which, in the end, gives place and
character to every human activity and utterance” (ibid). Here we see Oakeshott’s philosophy
culminating in what he calls the “conversation of mankind.” Oakeshott envisioned society being
in a constant and neverending conversation with our cultural inheritance, and that so our
association as citizens is “not of pilgrims traveling to a common destination, but of adventurers
each responding as best he can to the ordeal of consciousness in a world composed of others of
his kind” (OHC, 243). Both his conversation metaphor and pilgrim metaphor point to the same
idea: that there is no specific place our conversations nor society is supposed to go; no
preordained course to follow. Similarly, both metaphors imply that what is most important is
what is passing before us at the present moment, so education for Oakeshott is the “interval” in
which human beings gain a deeper and broader insight so that they may attend to this passing
before them both conversationally and as travellers.
It is also important to note that in his later writings Oakeshott was skeptical about the
joining of theory and practice. This, in short, is the breaking point between Dewey’s larger
philosophy and Oakeshott’s: both thinkers agree—rather unsurprisingly due to their mutual
contact with British Idealism and Hegel—on many issues, but on the role theory, philosophy,
and practice should play they are essentially on opposite sides.
While Oakeshott would agree with Dewey when he says that “men are not isolated
nonsocial atoms, but are men only when in intrinsic relations,” he would disagree with the
progressive line of thought that Dewey takes naturally from this idea (EW 1, 231). That “inquiry
is problemsolving, is historical and progressive, and is communal. We engage in inquiry as part
of a struggle with an objectively precarious but improvable environment.” Whereas Oakeshott 1
embraces a pluralistic, contingent society, Dewey acts as more of a visionary in his belief that
“there is almost always common ground between diverse groups, and this fact offers continuing
hope that challenges can be confronted as a unified public.” In short, Dewey sees the status quo 2
as a “crust of convention” to be broken through, and even defines morality as simply “growth.”
Democracy, then, was the ultimate goal for Dewey.
Even though Dewey believes in individual rights he thinks the community should and
would ultimately supercede people’s innate drives to selfishness. He therefore believes his
explicit promotion of teamwork and community in schools would naturally lead one to
promoting democracy. Education is absolutely crucial to bring about progress and his vision of
the world. As such, much of Dewey’s educational thought stems from his pragmatism; more
specifically, the “view that rejected the dualistic epistemology and metaphysics of modern
philosophy in favor of a naturalistic approach that viewed knowledge as arising from an active
adaptation of the human organism to its environment.” This empirical and “naturalistic 3
approach” for Dewey is—in modern terms—the scientific approach: much of his work on
education revolves around the use of the laboratory, experimentation, and modern (19th century)
science to bolster his views. His progressivism stems naturally from this pragmatic process:
1http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/deweypolitical/ 2 Hildebrand, p 140. 3 http://www.iep.utm.edu/dewey/
human beings need to be flexible, openminded, imaginative, and experimental if they are going
to meet the challenges of a future unknown world.
It is not hard to see where Oakeshott and Dewey diverge in terms of their larger
philosophical projects. Dewey envisages a fully democratic community as the ultimate end to
societal arrangement. He took what he saw as an end which allows the greatest flourishing of
individuals and then proceeded to backtrack and “analyze democracy’s pillars: education, the
economy, the media, and… the social sciences.” Oakeshott on the other hand purposely 4
sketches a limited and somewhat vague vision of ideal societal arrangements when he describes
society as “an association… of adventurers” (OHC, 243). In short, everything for Dewey traces
back to his staunch optimism in human progress; his belief in adaptation and growth being
absolutely crucial if humans are going to keep up with a constantly changing environment. While
Oakeshott wouldn’t disagree with Dewey’s analysis that the environment constantly changes, his
skepticism on the subject of conscious and social progress in light of this change shines through
in most of his work. To sum up, Dewey’s focus is on the progress a society can make, while
Oakeshott would rather focus on enjoying what is in front of us.
So whereas Oakeshott says that subjects like “Philosophy, science, and history are, then,
activities that belong not to ‘work’ but to ‘play,’” Dewey would say almost the exact opposite
(WP). He believes this gathering of philosophic, scientific, and historic knowledge are activities
to be used so that we might make use of them to make the world a better place in which to live
and, specifically, promote democracy. Again, Oakeshott does not deny the use of these subjects
for satisfying contingent wants and goals, but makes the suggestion that “this knowledge should
4 Hildebrand, p 95.
not be confused with scientific knowledge, and that winning this sort of knowledge is not to be
confused with the scientific enterprise of understanding and explaining” (ibid). Understanding
and explaining for Oakeshott are other ways of saying “play,” because they have no inherent
energy to move into the practical world of affairs. For Oakeshott, “play” is largely disinterested.
So Dewey explicitly thinks education is designed to, in Oakeshott’s words, “impress some
temporary human purpose upon some component of the world,” or gathering the necessary
knowledge to change the world for the better (ibid). Dewey complains, “the conception that the
mind consists of what has been taught, and that the importance of what has been taught consists
in its availability for further teaching, reflects the pedagogue’s view of life...It takes, in brief,
everything educational into account save its essence vital energy seeking opportunity for
effective exercise” (DE, 71). In short, Dewey thinks that—per his pragmatism and naturalistic
psychology—there can be no learning for the sake of learning just as there cannot be learning
only to be inculcated into the practical world around us. The two are one in the same for Dewey.
While not completely disagreeing with this, it is this wanting to change the world with the
knowledge acquired in school that Oakeshott thinks is overemphasized in the educational realm.
Both thinkers fear the explicit politicization of information learned in school, but due to
Oakeshott’s belief that the plurality of voices (and and all voices) should be allowed to develop
naturally he stays further away from this possibility than Dewey does. In other words,
Oakeshott’s educational system would have far fewer children learning things to promote
specific ends like democracy or equality, whereas Dewey encourages this type of environment
(albeit subtly). It would be no surprise, then, to see Dewey’s educational philosophy being used
for ends other than what he thought they should be used for—it can easily be geared toward the
promotion of Fascism or Communism. However it is not hard to see how being educated in
Oakeshottian fashion might lead to—using Dewey’s phrase—“aloofness and indifference…so
insensitive in his relations to others as to develop an illusion of being really able to stand act
alone” (DE, 44). Although Oakeshott’s view of education doesn’t lead to directly to “aloofness
and indifference” or individualism, “it is not without its difficulties… the most glaring of these is
its failure to balance its obvious concern with intellectual excellence with any sort of
consideration of equity or of other purposes education might serve in a democratic society” 5
Here we see the gap between Dewey’s collective education and Oakeshott’s individual education
widen.
But the two thinkers differ in degrees when it comes to this balance of work and play; the
impression that Dewey does not promote learning for its own sake or Oakeshott learning for
vocational purposes would be to misread their respective philosophies under a black and white
lens. It should be clear at this point that the reason Oakeshott wants the school separated from
ordinary life is because he believes life has more to offer than satisfying wants, while Dewey
wishes it to be separated so that students imagination and problemsolving skills aren’t stifled by
influences from the status quo world around them. In short, this difference between the two
educational philosophies can be most easily understood in light of their views about the
theorypractice distinction.
The “Character” of the School and the Aims of Education
5 Franco, p 124.
Where Oakeshott and Dewey disagree most is on the topic ofwhat exactly a school environment
should be like, or rather what purpose it serves and what means it employs to serve those ends.
The interest, attention, and the discipline of the student are important for both thinkers but for
opposite reasons: Dewey’s frustration stems from the fact that he believes “The inclination to
learn from life itself and to make the conditions of life such that all will learn in the process of
living is the finest product of schooling” (DE, 51). This creed, Dewey says, should be the
mission of every educational institution and any other aim than this the school all but destroys
the child’s innate tendency to be interested andvoluntarily active in the learning process. In other
words, to make this learning process go on outside of the school’s walls the school must spark
the interest of the child by connecting what is learned to their lives; the school must show the
student the relevancy of what is being taught to them. Otherwise “when material has to be made
interesting, it signifies that as presented, it lacks connection with purposes and present power: or
that if the connection be there, it is not perceived” (DE, 127). In short, Dewey uses his
naturalistic psychology to bolster his views about children’s and human’s natural tendency to
want to learn when they see how it affects their everyday lives. Here Dewey is working off the
assumption that people cannot learn unless they are motivated. The school today, by forcing
discipline and using external reward systems irrelevant to what is learned, destroys the chances
of education fostering “the inclination to learn from life itself.” He states rather forcefully that
“no one has ever explained why children are so full of questions outside of the school, and the
conspicuous absence of display of curiosity about the subject matter of school lessons” (DE,
155). Dewey’s most damning critique of the school system’s was just this: confusion abouthow
to go about teaching and learning; the schools either treated children as “the immature being who
is to be matured; the superficial being who is to be deepened" or they focused too much on the
child which Dewey saw equally detrimental to the learning process (DE, 238). To remedy this
confusion he states that “the child and the curriculum are simply two limits which define a single
process. Just as two points define a straight line, so the present standpoint of the child and the
facts and truths of studies define instruction" (CC, 278). Dewey’s pragmatism makes itself
known in this last statement by acknowledging the balance between wholly subjectcentered or
wholly childcentered approached. Both extremes are detrimental to the student.
In stark contrast to Dewey’s focus on naturalistic psychology, Oakeshott states that
education “begins with the appearance of a teacher with something to impart which is not
immediately connected with the current wants or ‘interests’ of the learner” (VLL, 68). Whereas
Dewey explicitly states that the student’s innate and present interest should be fostered,
Oakeshott says that upon entering the school the student should be “ready to embark” on the
“serious and orderly initiation into an intellectual, imaginative, moral, and emotional
intelligence…This is a difficult undertaking; it calls for effort” (VLL, 69). The contrast here, in
modern terms, is between Dewey’s more childcentered approach and Oakeshott’s
teacher/conversationcentered approach, and, as if Oakeshott were speaking to Dewey directly,
he states that “to corrupt ‘School’ by depriving it of its character as a serious engagement to
learn by study, and to abolish it either by assimilating it to the activities, ‘interests’, partialities
and abridgements of a local world” is one of two sides of the “current project to destroy
education” (VLL, 82). In short, the childcentered approach for Oakeshott is one based on the
interests, and thus whims of the student, rendering it unserious and unfocused. On the other
hand, Oakeshott sees himself as promoting a more serious engagement. But Oakeshott’s
characterization of the university and school in general shouldn’t be read broadly: he
acknowledged other types of educations such as vocational, but that the mixing of different types
that had different goals and outcomes was the core problem.
The Teacher
One of Oakeshott’s most remarkable commentaries is on the role of the teacher. “For whom can
a man be more deeply indebted than to the one to whom he owes, not his mere existence, but his
participation in human life? It is the Sage, the teacher, who is the agent of civilization” (VLL,
39). It is the types of education that focus solely on the material and subjects as facts to be
imparted that render the teacher useless in Oakeshott vision. To merely teach information or
subjects is to merely listen to “what a man has to say, but unless we overhear it in a mind at work
and can detect the idiom of thought, we have understood nothing” (VLL, 59). This is what
Oakeshott called “style”...“the choice made, not according to the rules, but within the area of
freedom left by the negative operation of the rules” (ibid.). This style was heard—not
surprisingly—through a conversation between the teacher and student. At this point, we can see
Oakeshott’s larger educational question: “whether the pursuit of university education is to
acquire knowledge of some specialized branch of learning, connected perhaps with a profession,
or whether it is for something else besides this” (VLL, 156). What a man has to say is not
necessarily subordinate for Oakeshott, but the “something else besides this”—his style—is just
as important for him. Furthermore, this latter “style” cannot be viewed from the outside by those
demanding to know what education is for (it can only be transmitted between the teacher and the
student in the immediate environment—it cannot be written down in a curriculum), so “we begin
to talk of ‘integrating courses’ and of ‘culture’” to appease those on the outside (ibid.).
Lastly Oakeshott believes the “business of the teacher is to release his pupils from
servitude to the current dominant feelings, emotions, images, ideas, beliefs and even skills, not
by inventing alternatives to them which seem to him more desirable, but by making available to
him something which approximates more closely to the whole of his inheritance” (VLL, 42).
This, in keeping with the idea that the school must be removed, was “an opportunity to put aside
the hot allegiances of youth without the necessity of acquiring new loyalties to take their place”
(VLL, 127). Here Oakeshott wants to shed wholly the idea that education is for something to
help us satisfy our wants whether that be money or a good job. He believes this narrow and
shallow way of thinking about education misses much of what is to be valued, namely, our
cultural inheritance.
Although Dewey belonged more to the childcentered camp, he no sooner separated
himself from them by acknowledging the extremely tough role of the teacher. Throughout
Democracy and Education, Dewey hints that the role of the teacher to be both flexible, effective,
and subtle—almost an impossibility in light of his pragmatism. “The business of the teacher is to
produce a higher standard of intelligence in the community, (emphasis mine)” Dewey claims
immediately distinguishing his collective education from Oakeshott’s individualistic education
(LW, 159). But the role of the teacher was equally as demanding—possible more so—than
Oakeshott’s: for Dewey, teachers need to be
intelligently aware of the capacities, needs, and past experiences of those under instruction, and secondly, to allow the suggestions made to develop into a plan
and project by means of the further suggestions contributed and organized into a whole by the members of the group (EE, 71).
Furthermore, they only create “a starting point to be developed into a plan through contributions
from the experience of all engaged in the learning process” and this process involves a
“reciprocal giveandtake, the teacher taking but not being afraid also to give” (ibid.). This latter
point coincides with Oakeshott’s idea of a conversation nicely: Dewey was frustrated with the
‘expert imparting knowledge onto a blank slate’ theory of education, that he too saw the role of
the teacher as a conversationalist. But he did not promote a whimsical, unstructured classroom as
some of his progressive contemporaries thought a childcentered approach should be, but rather
the teacher’s job was to keep students on track by imparting their “greater insight to help
organize the conditions of the experience of the immature [students]” (ibid.).However he says of
this imparting that, “frontal attacks are even more wasteful in learning than in war” (DE, 169).
This pragmatic balance between the teacher subtly guiding the direction of the curriculum and
letting the child’s experience and innate interest wander is a hard equilibrium to strike.
Dewey’s teacher, according to many critics, is an impossibility. To have a teacher be
attentive to the constantly changing needs of any given number of students every single day and
still fostering their innate and individual curiosities is a fantasy. The challenge for the teacher in
both Oakeshott’s view and Dewey’s is keeping the interest of the students. An Oakeshottian
teacher that can keep student’s attention about things unconnected to their lives is almost as
unrealistic as Dewey’s doingitall teacher. To be fair, Oakeshott doesn’t think aboutattention as
much as Dewey because he doesn’t think much of the caliber of students entering school in the
postwar period in which he is writing. The real problem with the universities wasn’t due to
incompetent teachers or a loosely structured curriculum, but “an influx of students unprepared to
take advantage of the opportunity to ‘stretch one’s sails to the wind’” (VLL, 127). Furthermore,
Oakeshott hopes that students realize there are different types of education all with the goal of
helping us get on in the world. To think that university education is the only option—as it seems
today—is both damaging to the character of the university and to the student. Both Oakeshott
and Dewey would probably admit that the teachers they envision as best exemplifying their
philosophy are rare. One could even argue that their respective attributes describing the teacher
are modeled off themselves, as both were successful and famous educators throughout their
lives.
What Is Learned
Throughout the essays in The Voice of Liberal Learning, Oakeshott constantly berates
“general education” or “an education concerned with the substance of culture” as
something undesirable in the educational environment (VLL, 21). “Substance of culture”
here must be differentiated from “cultural inheritance”: the former is the culture of the
present moment; our everyday surroundings while the latter is the whole of our culture;
its traditions, history, and everything up to this point. He goes on to say that this type of
education is “so anxious that everything shall receive mention that it can afford no more
than a fleeting glimpse of anything in particular. Here learning amounts to little more
than recognition; it never achieves the level of an encounter” (VLL, 21). At this point it is
clear that Oakeshott is in favor of aspecific education, one that has a narrow focus rather
than wide and unspecific—even if it leaves out a good amount of what is considered
general and required. This latter type of education produces nothing more than a “culture
philistine”: a person who only understands culture insofar as it helps them pursue and
satisfy contingent wants (ibid.). The culture philistine is shallow and lacks true
understanding. In response to Walter Moberly’s plea to present students with a “unified
conception of life,” or “a synoptic, integrated view of the moral and intellectual world,”
biographer Paul Franco writes that
Oakeshott finds nothing in all this but nonsense. In the first place, no such integration of the world of knowledge is currently available to us. Second, no such integration is necessary for the university to exercise its function. There is a way in which the various specialisms can come together in a meaningful way in the university without being integrated from above by some sort of Weltanschauung. 6
Here we see Oakeshott’s larger belief—that there are numerous ways to go about
education—tying in with his specific beliefs about what a curriculum should look like. In other
words, there is no overarching or unifying theme that explicitly answers the question ‘what is
education for?’
Without this serious—and specific—engagement to learn by study students miss “the
object of education”: “to enable a man to make his own thought clear and to attend to what
passes before him” (VLL, 156). Dewey would assuredly agree with Oakeshott and even echoes
him when he states that education “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” (DE, 76). And, in passage that Oakeshott could have written himself, says that
6 Franco, 118
education is meant prepare him for the future life which “means to give him command of
himself; it means so to train him that he will have the full and ready use of all his capacities”
(ibid.). For Oakeshott, his educational writings get as close to pragmatism than any other late
work. But whereas Dewey wants to explicitly state that what we learn should be used in how we
move about the world, Oakeshott only hints at this logical end. What Oakeshott fails to recognize
is that when a student—during this “interval”—spends time looking into the “mirror of [his or
her] cultural inheritance,” they will likely result in a better human being. Better in this sense is
the same as Dewey would describe: imaginative, reflective, moral, and being able to attend what
passes before them in a manner that requires these attributes. In short, Dewey would agree that
this is the ultimate object of education even if his larger philosophy hopes that the students
become Democratic, progressive, and worldchangers. Ultimately, Dewey believes that the sort
of education that Oakeshott or he himself would require would produce the same type of student.
Oakeshott, on the other hand, does not believe this to be the case, but rather believes that
Dewey’s students would produce exactly the kind of human who can only view things in terms
of how they can be used.
The tendency to lump Dewey into the “socialization” camp as Oakeshott sees it, is to
misunderstand Dewey’s goal: he wants to teach students “to think,” but unlike his more
progressive contemporaries, he does not wish to see this thinking unconnected with the subjects.
Both Oakeshott and Dewey do not believe thinking can happen in a vacuum, but their difference
lies in the structure of the curriculum. Again, Oakeshott sees the ability to think as a byproduct
of being engaged in a specific subject matter seriously and in a disciplined manner. Dewey, on
the other hand, sees the occasion as serious but the engagement as natural and thus discipline
stemming from the inherent usefulness of the subject matter for the student.
On matters of the specific curriculum Oakeshott was equally as frustrated. He claims that
....instead of teaching the languages and literature of the world it has become a school for training interpreters, that instead of pursuing science it is engaged in training electrical engineers or industrial chemists, that instead of studying history it is studying and teaching history for some ulterior purpose, that instead of educating men and women it is training them exactly to fill some niche in society (VLL,116).
In short, the subjects in school are being taught merely as means to an end and not as
ends in themselves. As mentioned earlier, Oakeshott promotes specific education because what
we have in front of us in terms of our inheritance “has no meaning as a whole; it cannot be
learned or taught in principle, only in detail” (VLL, 49). Oakeshott’s skepticism about being able
to present students with a coherent picture stems from the fact that he believesthere is none that
can be offered.
But to characterize Dewey as someone who promotes a “general” and unspecific
curriculum would be a disservice. Since Dewey makes no distinction between intellectual and
practical studies he has no reason to believe that there is one kind of education and another—as
Oakeshott sees it. He says, “the notion that knowledge is derived from a higher source than is
practical activity, and possesses a higher more spiritual worth, has a long history,” and traces this
back to Plato and Aristotle who he undoubtedly thinks made a misstep in believing there was
some higher knowledge (DE, 262). For Dewey, education leads to one outcome: action. There
can be no knowledge for its own sake because even this knowledge has practical bearing on our
actions and how we move about the world we inhabit. This Jamesian psychological position
amounts to saying that there really is no distinction between knowing for its own sake and
knowing for something else. The difference, then, lies in how knowledge is imparted for both
thinkers: Oakeshott wants to educate for education’s sake even if the outcome has practical
bearing on the student. Dewey merely acknowledges this latter point by saying education is
indeed for something else—a means to ends.
Conclusion
Obviously, Oakeshott reconciled with many of Dewey’s thoughts, but two major strands stand
out: that fullfledged democracy is the end to communal life, and that our thinking about most
matters should begin with the psychological or naturalistic. But to focus on the glaring
differences in their broader philosophies would be to miss the subtle similarities in their
educational philosophies. Both thinkers undoubtedly believe that the school should be its own
environment separated from the outside world, and for not all that dissimilar purposes: ultimately
the outside world represents something undesirable either as an influence on the school
(Oakeshott) or as a representation of the status quo (Dewey). Both thinkers believe the role of the
teacher is immensely challenging. Oakeshott would probably agree with Dewey when he says of
the teacher: "No one can be really successful in performing the duties and meeting these
demands of teaching who does not retain [their] intellectual curiosity intact throughout [their]
entire career" (LW, 343). Oakeshott and Dewey’s view of the teacher differ enormously from the
teachers in strictly subjectcentered or childcentered classrooms; the demand, discipline, and
intelligence simply isn’t there like it is in their philosophies.
Oakeshott’s ‘radical’ pluralism also seems to come to a head with Dewey’s idea that
there is no difference between thinking and doing or between intelligence and practical affairs. It
is hard to blame Dewey for wanting to blur this line for two reasons. The first being that he was a
serial optimist in his hope for humans to actively create a better world—using intelligence via
their education—for each subsequent generation. The second reason being his psychological
background: Dewey found that in most cases even the most remote knowledge had an affect on
human being’s actions. Oakeshott doesn’t want to blur this line, and although he realizes both
sides exist, he merely wants a distinction between the two types of knowledge. But applying
Dewey’s reasoning to Oakeshott’s view of education ends up being something very similar to a
practical education. Since there is no difference between purely intellectual affairs and purely
practical ones, Oakeshott’s education still ends upbeing good for something even if it is simply a
better human being. To be fair, Oakeshott seems to begrudgingly acknowledge this when he says
that all education is social, and that education in general presupposed the belief “that we live in
societies which, because they are associations of human beings, depend upon their members
being human, that is, being in some degree educated” (VLL, 79). The irreconcilable difference,
then, is that this almost platitudinous presupposition for Oakeshott—that human beings
inherently social—is Dewey’s starting point. In short, Dewey wants to use this inherent sociality
as the focus and springboard for his whole philosophy whereas Oakeshott shies away from this
so as to allow the intricacies and idiosyncrasies of each individual voice to be heard. In the end,
it might only be that Dewey’s voice is just one more among many for Oakeshott. But the same
should be said from Dewey’s perspective: that Oakeshott’s philosophy is just one more
welcomed voice in Dewey’s democratic Utopia.
Abbreviated References to the Works of Oakeshott & Dewey
(DE) Dewey, John. 1997. Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of
Education. New York: Free.
(EE) Dewey, John. 1938. Experience and Education. New York: Macmillan.
(LW) Dewey John and Jo Ann Boydston. 1981. The Later Works, 19251953. Carbondale:
Southern Illinois UP.
(OHC) Oakeshott, Michael. 1991. On Human Conduct. Oxford: Clarendon Pr.
(VLL) Oakeshott, Michael and Timothy Fuller. 2001. The Voice of Liberal Learning.
Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund.
(WP) Oakeshott, Michael. 1995. “Work and Play.” First Things.
1. Franco, Paul. 2004. Michael Oakeshott: An Introduction. New Haven: Yale UP.
2. Hildebrand, David. 2008. Dewey: A Beginner’s Guide. Oxford: Oneworld.
3. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/deweypolitical/
4. http://www.iep.utm.edu/dewey/