“The school is primarily a social institution. Education being a social process, the school is simply that form of community life in which all those agencies are concentrated that will be most effective in bringing the child to share in the inherited resources of the race, and to use his own powers for social ends. Education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living.”
John Dewey
My Pedagogic Creed
1.) In order to interpret this correctly the reader must understand that Dewey was a Hegelian in his philosophy. Hegelians believed that the State is the idea of universal Spirit in the external manifestation of human Will and that the universal Spirit was God becoming. Hegel said,
“The State is the absolute reality and the individual himself has objective existence, truth and morality only in his capacity as a member of the State.”
Simply put, for Hegel and later his disciple Dewey, the State was God. This is important to understand for Dewey’s education is not child centered but state centered. We see this in the quote above with the repeated references to the word “social” serving as the adjective for the subsequent noun. For Dewey, the Hegelian, “social institution”, “social processes” and “social ends” means “state institution,” “state processes,” and “state ends.”
This is where the gulf of misunderstanding between modern parents and the educational system begins. Parents believe a child goes to school to learn skills to use in the adult world, but Dewey states specifically that education is “not a preparation for future living.” The Dewey educational system does not accept the role of developing a child’s talents but, contrarily, only to prepare the child to function as a unit in an organic whole — in blunt terms a cog in a wheel of an organic society. Whereas many Americans have moral values rooted in the individual, the value of the school system are rooted in the Hegelian concept of the State as the absolute.
That Dewey is channeling Hegel can be seen by yet another quote from Dewey,
“Education consists either in the ability to use one’s powers in a social direction or else in ability to share in the experience of others and thus widen the individual conscienceness to that of the race”
In each case the individual is lost in either the left wing Hegelian collective of the State (i.e. — social direction) or the right wing Hegelian collective of the race.
The point to be taken in all this is that modern education is geared towards training the child to be a cog in the machinery of a State that has become so overarching that the society, and every individual in it, is identified with the State. When children go to school they are being trained against Christianity which opposes the State as God.
2.) When Dewey says that “education is a process of living” he means to communicate that education is to the end of molding little people into the stream of societal consciousness. Students, in modern education, are not trained to think critically, or prepare for future living, they are trained in how to be good citizens. In contemporary education public schooling has the teleology of creating Borg. It does not have the teleology of training independent thinkers.
