Dewey’s Challenge to Teachers

Given the serious social problems confronting Americans and others worldwide, the authors propose that Dewey’s 1932 challenge to teachers is worthy of reconsideration by educators at all levels. In times similar to our own, Dewey challenged teachers to cultivate students’ capacities to identify their happiness with what they can do to improve the conditions of others. At fi rst glance, his challenge seems utopian. In order to justify their proposal for reconsideration, the authors explicate Dewey’s challenge by discussing two aspects of the thinking that lies behind it. Th ese are 1) Dewey’s concept of ethical love and his argument that it is a means to social reform and 2) Dewey’s concept of happiness and his argument that ethical love is the means to happiness. Th e authors conclude that in an educational climate focused principally on helping students earn a living, we need to be, like Dewey, equally concerned with helping students have a life worth living. In 1932, as America struggled to overcome the great economic depression and Hitler was taking power in Germany, Dewey issued a challenge to teachers. Based upon what he viewed as the principle by which to judge “the processes of education, formal and informal,” he urged teachers to embrace the following goal: “Education should create an interest in all persons in furthering the general good, so that they will fi nd their own happiness realized in what they can do to improve the conditions of others” (LW 7: 243). In setting this challenge to teachers, Dewey has in mind helping students develop their character in two ways. First, teachers should nurture students’ sensitivity to the impact of their speech and actions upon others. Second, they should cultivate students’ capacity to take the perspective of the “ideal spectator,” that is, to treat the interests of others impartially, with the same weight as their own (LW 7: 246). Th e fi rst sort of character development is primarily aff ective. Th e second