Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education

“All communication is like art. It may fairly be said, therefore, that any social arrangement that remains vitally social, or vitally shared, is educative to those who participate in it. Only when it becomes cast in a mold and runs in a routine way does it lose its educative power.”

In Dewey’s view, a social component is vital to education. He seeks to end the compartmentalization of education, for example, by primarily focusing on its formal, intellectual features rather than active interactions with the outside world. To Dewey, participating in social relationships has educational value of a learning experience.

“Hence one of the weightiest problems with which the philosophy of education has to cope is the method of keeping a proper balance between the informal and the formal, the incidental and the intentional, modes of education.”

Throughout this book, Dewey argues against binaries and artificial oppositions of any kind. Here, he suggests that one of the key goals of education is to ensure that it comprises different aspects without compartmentalizing them.

“We conclude, accordingly, that the use of language to convey and acquire ideas is an extension and refinement of the principle that things gain meaning by being used in a shared experience or joint action; in no sense does it contravene that principle.”

For Dewey, education must have an interactive component with the outside world and society. And it is language that is the basis of communication and communal life.