CAN SCHOOLS PROVIDE THE E-TICKET RIDE?

Kal Alston
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Palermo ends his very provocative paper with a caveat, “If one today would like to implement Dewey’s occupational simulation in the schools, the first task is to ask how these pedagogical techniques reflect the real world.”¹ I would like to respond to Palermo in three parts: a revisiting of Dewey’s use of occupations; a take on the hyper-real and its conservatism; and finally, both a suggestion to Palermo regarding the signification possibilities of occupations and a challenge to their significance in radical pedagogy.

There is something immediately engaging and exciting about bringing Dewey’s theoretical forays into the possibilities of social change through education to the table and potentially to task. Dewey’s progressivism on the one hand seeks a meeting of the past, present, and future in the educative experiences of the child in school. On the other hand, the same spirit of progressivism carries its own seeds of resistance to the possibilities of democratic social change. Dewey’s critique of the traditional relation of schooling to social and moral life may be illustrative here. The bifurcation of social and mental life is but one example of the strategies of separation that influence us as human actors and as educators. These strategies are undertaken and maintained because of a fear of uncertainty and a lack of faith. For Dewey education primarily involves interactions that empower the individual to take an active and intelligent part in social life. Pedagogy, on this account, must involve strategies and methods to emphasize power rather than appreciation; the “enlightened and trained capacity to carry forward those values which in other conditions and past times made those experiences worth having” rather than the empathic assimilation of others’ experiences. Schools must provide educative experience which will “give [the student] such possession of [him or herself] that [she or he] may take charge of [him or herself]; may not only adapt [him or herself] to the changes which are going on, but have the power to shape and direct those changes.”² Dewey sees the educative function of schools in their capacities to provide those experiences, some of which are embodied in the occupations of work and play. There is a clear view in Dewey that these occupations serve a connective function; they do not preserve the past, but connect the past to the present and future of the child’s interests and activities.

It is useless to bemoan the departure of the good old days of children’s modesty, reverence, and implicit obedience, if we expect merely by bemoaning and by exhortation to bring them back. It is radical conditions which have changed, and only an equally radical change in education suffices. We must recognize our compensations…yet there is a real problem: how shall we retain these advantages, and yet introduce into the school something representing the other side of life — occupations which exact personal responsibilities and which train the child in relation to the physical realities of life?³

When occupations are made important to school life, Dewey contends that there is a change in the spirit and atmosphere of schools — from passive and inert to buoyant and outgoing. Too, there is a shift from an emphasis on individuality and competition to sociality and community. Perhaps Dewey played up the importance of occupations, as such, too much; there is a sense in which we can come to take him literally at his word about the nature of the occupations themselves. However, it seems to me that if we look at the purpose of occupations in Dewey’s schema, as modes of activity on the part of the child which reproduce, or run parallel to, some form of work carried on in social life, Dewey emphasizes their connective rather than the recapitulative functions. There is a balance maintained between the intellectual and the practical phases of experience, a swing in focus to the purposive and energizing ends of the activity away from external utility.

I find myself in the somewhat awkward position of wanting to defend Dewey. It is awkward not because I am a latent Dewey-basher, but because despite some deep affinities with Dewey on several fronts, I believe his view of progress does to a certain extent, as Palermo says, “reinforce the status quo,” vis-á-vis class and certainly race in many respects. And so I wanted to find something to support my qualms in this fresh engagement with Dewey. Nevertheless, I believe that Palermo’s critique misses the mark, in part because he takes such a thin slice of Dewey and in part because the connection of Dewey’s strategies to the hyper-real remains, at the end of the day, tenuous.

Baudrillard does an interesting take on mass media in which he invokes some of the qualities that I read as important to Palermo’s use of the hyper-real. Baudrillard’s critique of various theories of mass communication rests on his understanding that the ‘communication’ in mass communication is importantly only a simulation. That is, “something is spoken there, but in such a way as to exclude any response anywhere.”⁴ So for Baudrillard, the hyper-reality of Adventureland is encapsulated not only in what is not said about the history and reality of Africa but in the banishment of the consumer from any negotiation about response. Disneyland may be wish-fulfillment or fantasy, but it is empty of communication and thinking participation. The hyper-real not only does not encourage our questions, inquiry and response, it forecloses that possibility while keeping in us a belief that by being wishers and fantasizers, we are part of the experience in some real and meaningful way.

The hyper-reality of Adventureland is that which militates against any resistance to the plastic, the too-greenness, the inviting glances of the animals. The occupations are meant to connect students to their participatory energy and potential although in practice teachers and students may be quite unsuccessful in tapping into the reality of the social world. Wool carding, in 1992 is certainly unreal, but is it hyper-real? The occupations are invoked not out of nostalgia for what was or never could have been but as a prod to consider the present and the future. In the particular examples that Dewey uses, the activities are potentially empty politically, but not necessarily ideologically. The context in which school occupations are carried out is not unimportant; we might want to think about the dangers of romanticizing or making the activities objects of simple and naturalizing consumability.

Perhaps the final section of this response would be best left simply as an assertion that reality is overrated. Instead though, I am going to go back to Palermo’s parting caveat and ask why we would in the first place wish, in contemporary schooling, to implement Dewey’s occupational simulations.

We might wish to look at changes in political economy. This is part of Dewey’s project insofar as he suggests that changes in industrial-technological society are increasing our separation from our own production and products. Clearly things have changed. Wool carding and other activities of domestic economy seem quite removed from our own sphere. But it seems possible that we might want to look at the shifts from domestic to industrial to post-industrial economies in some way that provides a livelier sense of history than reading a text. It seems that if we do want to look at junctions and disjunctions in social and economic history in a more direct and hands-on way, we could take up the challenge of providing those activities with texture.

We might also wish to interrogate these changes and invite inquiry about them. Much more so than at the turn of the century, schoolchildren are objects and subjects of public discourses about economy, about production, and most emphatically about consumption. These activities are not removed from either the experience or interests of children in this culture, and if the occupation strategy remains inviting, it seems a logical place to invite students’ participation in discussions, readings, simulations relating to their own induction into the world of work, exchange, and value.

We, like Dewey, might wish to make live connections between the past, present, and future. It is precisely here that I believe that Dewey may be most correct, even if the occupations idea in practice seems flat. The portrayal of academic history as what has already happened to others in a time and space removed from the possibility of even provisional understanding seemed as dead a pedagogical ploy to Dewey as it does to me today. In addition to any other occupational activity, we might look to other discursive forms: narrative and autobiography come immediately to mind.

My point here is that Dewey, I think, would be more interested in defending active participatory inquiry and experience over any reality check about the ins and out of potting and weaving. He would be appalled at the notion that by recapitulating wool carding he was actively seeking to suck the history and politics out of the activities; that he was giving himself over to regressive wish-fulfillment. Palermo’s critique rests too heavily on a notion of reality that Dewey’s conception of occupations does not take as its central mission, and that notion of reality and its significance seems to me to remain contentious for our own pedagogical purposes — even if we take social change as a central educational goal. If we want to use Baudrillard to examine our practices, we may need to burrow deeper.

If we wished to revive occupational simulation in any form today, it seems to me that it would be less with a notion that we need check our activities against some abstract notion of reality and more with a notion that we would ‘fess up to our weaknesses. We can take up Dewey’s challenge to keep the faith in ourselves as long as we do not lie to ourselves about our fallibilities, our tendencies both to naturalize certain power relations and to naturalize progress as linear inevitability. Palermo is right when he suggests that if we wish to infuse our pedagogy with social critique, we cannot afford nostalgia. But neither can we afford to ignore Baudrillard’s conditions for revolution everywhere: to restore the possibility of true response. Like bricoleurs, we will take our strategies and means where we can get them, and we must continually monitor ourselves as workers in the struggle for meaning, value, and communication.

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¹ James Palermo, “Dewey on the Pedagogy of Occupations: The Social Construction of the Hyper-Real,” Philosophy of Education 1992, ed. H. Alexander (Champaign, Illinois: The Philosophy of Education Society, 1993).

² John Dewey, Moral Principles in Education (Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, 1975), 27.

³ John Dewey, John Dewey On Education, ed. Reginald D. Archambault (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 114.

⁴ John Dewey, “The School and Social Progress,” in The School and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), 12.

⁵ Jean Baudrillard, “Requiem for the Media,” in For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (St. Louis: Telos Press, 1981), 170.