DEWEY ON THE PEDAGOGY OF OCCUPATIONS:
THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF THE HYPER-REAL

James Palermo
Buffalo State College

Democracy and Education describes John Dewey’s idea of the methods the schools must use to overcome the radical social changes effected by the industrial revolution. The overarching solution is what he calls a “New Education” — a student-centered pedagogy of doing. A crucial element of this pedagogy involves a nostalgic return to the past in which children simulate the adult occupations of an agrarian household economy as the living model of democracy.

I shall argue that this simulation of occupations in today’s classroom is a false representation of the world constructed out of jumbled epistemological categories; and, that put into practice, this simulation turns Dewey’s social critique on its head by reenforcing the political status-quo. All of this can be revealed by treating Dewey’s occupation simulation as a cultural sign system which can be decoded.

To make sense of these claims I shall describe (1) Jean Baudrillard’s semiological paradigm, the three orders of simulacra¹ and (2) apply this schema to Dewey’s pedagogy of occupations found in Democracy and Education and his earlier collection of essays entitled The Child and the Curriculum, The School and Society.

But, at the outset, I want to specify my use of the semiotic method. The paradigm is traceable to the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure whose major discovery was that the meaning of a linguistic sign is secreted between the union of two elements: the signifier, or articulated expression, and the signified, or articulated concept. Linguistic meanings, then, must be seen as dialectical structures: any change in a single element simultaneously changes the constellation of elements. On the other hand, the meaning of a sign system derives from continuities that exist among and between signifiers. But, my use of the semiotic paradigm here is extended to social and cultural phenomena. In Levi Strauss’ terms, the culture itself is viewed as a symbolic system: customs, institutions, images, bodies, objects, everything, gains sense when it becomes a sign; that is, when each or any of the above are placed into the sign relationship of signifier and signified.² Meaning, then, is generated out of the sign equivalence. For instance, if a five dollar bill has value, it is because that piece of green and white paper is a signifier made equivalent to a certain amount of labor time, the signified. Again, this represents not a natural value, but one which emerges out of relations of equivalence.³

In sum, the purpose of a semiology of culture “…is to make explicit the implicit knowledge used in the reading of signs. [Furthermore, its task is to uncover the rules which govern the possibility of creating meaning]…the rules which govern our conceptual space.”⁴

Historically, philosophers have treated such rules as a part of the critique of knowledge. This is what Kant called the transcendental sphere, the investigation of the limits and conditions of knowledge. Baudrillard’s semiological investigations are transcendental, but unlike Kant, his aim is social critique. I shall now turn to the constructs previously mentioned, “the three orders of simulacra,” which encapsulate Baudrillard’s critical method.

In its broadest sense, Baudrillard uses the term simulacra to mean cultural sign systems which present an appearance or a likeness as reality; these appearances organize socio-cultural life. Simulacra present a reality principle with categories which determine how society understands itself and its environment. These categories are a representation or self image of the society to itself, informing and unifying each sphere of society, making it into a cohesive whole.⁵ And, simulacra regulate institutional practices in ways which seek to reproduce and perpetuate the status-quo. But, simulacra evolve historically.

Indeed, Baudrillard’s three orders of appearance designate historical epochs with correlative techniques of production and value. The first order of simulacra designates the Renaissance, the second order refers to the Industrial epoch, and the third order corresponds to the Post-Industrial time period.

The Renaissance begins and industrial capitalism ends the first order simulacrum. The sign of the epoch is the counterfeit. Things are handcrafted counterfeits; they emulate the forms of nature. And, following the law of the human metabolism with nature, use-value regulates the economy, that is, objects are made to satisfy immediate needs.⁶ The referential power of the signifier/signified couplet is evidenced in the hand-made object as artifice/nature, product/use-value, and product/living labor.

The modern period of industrial capitalism is the second order simulacrum. Its sign is the machine. The machine introduces technique: the production of a series of 2 or of n identical things.⁷ Nature, use-value, and the human artisan drop out and are replaced by the commodity-form of equivalence. Commodities gain significance not as material objects but as signifiers whose value is measured against exchange with other commodities. And, in the commodity form, human labor itself appears transformed into the equivalence of the dead labor of wages. In Baudrillard’s words, technique means that as “…objects are transformed into simulacra of one another…so are the people who produce them. [This] extinction of original human reference permits the law of equivalence [and] the possibility of production.”⁸

The post-modern period of information technology is the third-order simulacrum. Its sign system is the simulation. And its vehicles, the computer and electronic media, revolutionize the structure of representation. If the first order simulacrum counterfeited reality and second order simulacrum made human beings and products appear as commodities, the third order simulacrum of the hyper-real makes the question of the adequacy of the sign system to any pre-existing referent non-sensical. That is, the hyper-real is a radical new order of things because it produces a simulation without a referent in the real world.⁹ The prior division between sound-image/concept and thing, or signifier and signified, disappears. Further, the replication of the real by another medium, and even the distinction between the real and the medium, is gone. Its replacement is a phantom content in which the real and the medium appear as one.¹⁰ Baudrillard’s argument must not be taken, simplistically to mean that all experience in contemporary society is hyper-real or, loaded with symbols having no referents. Baudrillard instead is looking at imagery in art, electronic media, advertisements and recreational activities that deliver messages that are ideological. Such messages are bound up with, summarize, and reenforce the socio-economic system and its values. These representations are signs without referents if what is simulated presents as historical reality a value, or event that is more apparent than real. An example is the depiction of the ideology of equal opportunity for all regardless of race, sex or gender, or the simulation intermixes simulacra of different historical epochs. I will show this is the case later in the Dewey occupational model.

Put differently, the hyper-real is a simulation beyond truth and monetary exchange value. The hyper-real copies nothing. Its signifiers are not equivalent to money. The value structure of the hyper-real is one of commutation; each signifier’s value is equivalent to that of any other signifier within the simulation. Each Signifier signifies only itself; each signified is its own referent. Baudrillard calls this phenomenon an implosion of meaning in which reality loops around itself. What we accept are the simulated effects of the real world’s absence. To fill this absence, simulations often resurrect imagery and messages from the past. This hyper-reality is a fabrication of image and imaginary. It presents an imagined, fictive real, seemingly more real and more appealing than reality itself.

Consider Disneyland as a paradigm case of the hyper-real. The venue, Adventureland Liberty-Square, is illustrative. The Disneyland brochure describes Adventureland as a jungle cruise where one can “…explore untamed lands and waterways, where elephants, hippos, tigers and snakes threaten at every bend.’’¹¹

Adventureland is an Africa made for American consumption, a place without a history. The 20th Century realities of famine and political revolutions are absent. Certainly this is not a copy of anything real. In place of the real, Adventureland is the tropical rainforest in “living technicolor.”¹² This is a new, improved, primeval Africa, a place of tranquil ferocity where wild beasts scare the customers, yet still seem cute. This is the spectacle of real animals appearing as inflated rubber beasts, lolling on a veld so green it gleams like plastic. Adventureland is the pacified naturescape of Henri Rousseau made into a kitsch never-never land.

On the surface, the introduction of Disneyland as a paradigm case of the hyper-real seems a bad choice. Disneyland seems only to be an instance of larger-than-life entertainment, allowing visitors detachment from pressures of everyday life. Indeed, for the adult, Disneyland appears as a huge diorama — an environment where viewers become participants in a staged event. No political significance is apparent here. But, ironically, this is exactly why Disneyland is a good choice. Disney’s Africa is a place without famine, political turmoil, race hatred and death. Disneyland expresses the hyper-real as part of the taken-for-granted world. This is an uncomplicated world of harmony that we can only wish for. In this sense, Disneyland, like other examples of the hyper-real works like a dream: the hyper-real is experience made more real than the real. Why? Because this is a depoliticized, a-temporal world of wish-fulfillment.

Keeping Baudrillard’s constructs of the three orders of simulacra in mind, I want to shift to a description of Dewey’s views on the schoolroom simulations of occupations, looking first at connections to mind and method. I have chosen Dewey’s occupational simulation because: A) it was the central theme in speech’s he gave to parents in describing the workings of the University of Chicago laboratory; B) all schools in Dewey’s time and our own perform the ideological function of inculcating cultural values and forming the child; and C) Dewey’s simulation of occupations (with some necessary changes) is extremely attractive to educators even today.

Dewey’s notion of mind signals the technique of reconstituting human experience; to act with a mind is to control, enhance and preserve present experience so that more and qualitatively better experience can follow. Mind is not a thing, but a sense-giving operation; mind is the operation of human intelligence in the world. Mind means a consideration of the facts of the situation, including a consideration of what has to be done, a review of the relationship of means and ends, an anticipation of the present and future consequences of a plan of action and the execution of that idea to secure an end-in-view.

Of course, Dewey’s analysis rejects the Cartesian coqito, an immaterial, private entity set against the materiality of an outside world and body. The coqito denies our ordinary experience of the world. It describes mind as “…complete in each person, and isolated from nature and hence from other minds. But [Dewey argues] when men act, they act in a common and public world.¹³ This is not to say that the simple recognition of the public nature of mind is enough. Dewey argues that many educationists fail because they ignore the need to set up the proper environmental context of teaching; they ignore the need to form the socialized mind. Dewey allows that the individual child must “…have opportunity to employ his own powers in activities that have meaning.” [But, he insists] “…mind as a concrete thing is precisely the power to understand things in terms of the use made of them; a socialized mind is the power to understand them in joint or shared situations.”¹⁴

The above description sets down direction for the classroom formation of mind. The prior question, however, concerns the need to develop a method which connects to the child’s real nature. Put differently, any talk about forming the mind, is useless, unless and until, the teacher actually makes use of the child’s native powers or tendencies. Dewey calls these native tendencies instincts or impulses, and he couples the exercise of these instincts to the child’s classroom simulation of adult occupations. Before describing this simulation, it is necessary to consider Dewey’s view of the instinctual nature of the child.

At the outset, Dewey contextualizes the discussion about instincts and their proper excercise with the claim that the school must be changed over into the ideal home. This means first, that the teacher must act like “…the parent who is intelligent enough to recognize what is best for the child, and is able to supply what is needed.”¹⁵ Dewey then lists the child’s instincts under four headings: (l) the social-conversational, (2) the making or constructive, (3) the inquiry, and (4) the expressive or aesthetic instinct.

In exercising the social instinct, classroom recitation and attendance competition are replaced with free and active social intercourse between peers and teacher. The child raises “…points of interest and value to him in the conversation carried on: statements are made, inquiries arise, topics are discussed, and the child continually learns.’’¹⁶

The constructive instinct describes the child’s impulse to use the hands and to manipulate things. Dewey says that the natural outlet of this tendency is “…in shaping materials into tangible forms and permanent embodiment.’’¹⁷ His example is of a child who constructs a box. In the process of making plans, using tools to saw, plane, sandpaper and joint the pieces of wood together, the child embodies problem solving activity.

The inquiry instinct combines both the constructive and conversational instincts, and previews the abstract investigations of chemistry and physics. His example is of children determining the effects that various degrees of water temperature produce on the white of an egg.¹⁸

The aesthetic instinct appeals to the children’s desire to make something and to “…give it a social motive, something to tell…a work of art.”¹⁹ His example is of a classroom of children who build a primitive loom and then weave blankets modelled on a Navajo Indian design.

As I have already indicated, the medium which integrates the instincts with the formation of mind is the child’s simulation of adult occupations. There is a manifold appeal in these simulations: occupations provide intrinsic interest, are joined to the instincts, embody the thinking process and recapitulate the history of the race. Dewey defines occupations as “…a mode of activity on the part of the child which reproduces, or runs parallel to some form of work carried on in social life.”²⁰ But unlike actual adult work, the simulation of occupations is not work for pay. Instead, classroom occupations are “…an end in themselves; [and their purpose is to develop]…the [child’s] mental and moral states [as well] as the growth involved in the process of reaching a result.’’²¹ As I have already noted, Dewey claims that occupations are interesting because they grow out of instincts. His evidence is the spontaneous interest the child demonstrates in play outside the school. That play involves haphazard attempts to reproduce social occupations. That play not only gives an outlet to the instincts, it repeats the never ending effort of the race to master the forces of nature, “…through [the] getting of food to maintain life; securing clothing to protect and ornament it, and thus finally, to provide a permanent home.”²² Quite simply, the juncture of instincts and the simulation of occupations represents the human’s fundamental relations to the world.

A closer look at the Dewey texts reveal why and how all of this is to be done. At bottom, Dewey argues that the classroom simulation of occupations does two things: 1) the experience of children working together on an interesting task which demands practical thinking converts dead subject matter into a living reality, and 2) the roles that the child simulate represent an accurate picture of the adult world and human progress. In Democracy and Education Dewey sets down a list of available occupations and co-mingled processes. The children there “…work with paper, cardboard, wood, leather, cloth, yarns, clay and sand, and the metals with and without tools. [Processes employed] are folding, cutting, pricking, measuring, molding…and the operations characteristic of such tools as the hammer, saw, file. Outdoor excursions, gardening, cooking, sewing…weaving, [all forms what he calls] active pursuits with social aims.”²³ His essay “The School and Social Progress” describes the children’s recapitulation of the processes which convert raw materials into cloth. Using “…raw wool as it comes from the back of the sheep [they] re-invent the first frame for the carding of wool — a couple of boards with sharp pins in them. They redevised the simplest process for spinning the wool…[a] weight through which the wool is passed”²⁴ is then twirled to draw out the fiber.

Unlike the teacher-centered classroom in which children are given prescriptions and dictation — a place in which they reproduce ready-made models, here the children have something to do. In the simulation of occupations “…appliances are brought to bear upon physical things with the intention of effecting useful changes [and this] is the most vital introduction to the scientific method.”²⁵ Put differently, what the children directly experience are not only the practical applications of chemistry, physics, and reading — ideas hidden in textbooks — but the test of those ideas, directly in the real world. Dewey calls this activity, thinking.

While my intent has been to present the salient features of Dewey’s pedagogy of occupations, what remains is the need to re-examine the text to discover the overarching moral purpose of these simulations. Dewey’s moral argument follows these lines:

A) Today (1915) we live in a social world in which every phase of life has been profoundly changed by the effects of the factory system of industrial capitalism.

Books, magazines, papers were multiplied and cheapened. As a result of the locomotive and telegraph, frequent, rapid, and cheap intercommunication by mails and electricity was called into being…freedom of movement with…exchange of ideas, indefinitely facilitated. Learning has been put into circulation…actively moving in all the currents of society itself.²⁶

B) But the change from hand production in the home to machine production in the factory has also produced profound socio-economic changes, and many of these changes are negative. For example, the face-to-face interdependent work of the family in the household system demanded a rational socialized experience. The child saw his/her relationship as one of creative interdependence. All of the processes needed to master nature and sustain life stood revealed. What was produced was something immediately necessary — a product having use-value. And, what was produced in the child was a moral conscience that came from seeing one’s place and purposes in a genuine community life.

“We cannot overlook the factors of discipline and of character guiding in this kind of life…something to be done…a real necessity that each member of the household should do his own part faithfully and in co-operation with others.”²⁷ But, the negative side of industrial capitalism is that the machine has also transformed life into something mean and nasty. The factory worker is subordinated into the rhythms of the machine. The mechanical processes of the machine itself hide the activities of production — the conversion of raw material into a product of use-value made by hand disappears. This absence ushers a dramatic economic and social dislocation. As the things stamped out by the machine become commodities, the worker labors only for money. Appearing to self as identical and replaceable as the things made by the machine, she or he becomes alienated from others. Dewey recognizes in the consciousness of the worker the sense of being only an “appendage to the machine.” He likens this to the condition of slavery: “Plato somewhere speaks of the slave as one who in his actions does not express his own ideas, but those of some other. It is our social problem now, …that method, purpose, understanding, shall exist in the consciousness of the one who does the work, that his activity shall have meaning to himself.”²⁸

C) Dewey’s solution of course, is to have the schools catch up with the “general march of events” by recapturing the familial cooperation of the household system. His moral purpose is to set in place an embryonic community of democratic living.

With this in mind, I shall turn to the critique of Dewey’s simulation. To begin I want to reassert the obvious: Dewey is a philosopher who wants to change the culture. I see him as one who believes that the experiences and values instantiated in the classroom form the possibility of a truly democratic society. But, for Dewey and his times, democracy was a way of living that had not been realized — a review of his articles in the Social Frontier of the 1930’s evidences that.

To the question, “Why does the simulation of occupations fail?” the fundamental answer is: Dewey’s simulation does not recognize the political significance of the shift from the counterfeit or first order to that of the second order industrial capitalist epoch. What are the implications here? A review of Baudrillard’s categories is helpful. This fundamental epistemological misrecognition is built upon the following: (1) Dewey’s simulation does not illustrate the economic change of the industrial revolution — a change in value from that of use-value to exchange-value fundamentally altered socio-political relationships. The counterfeit, or first order simulacrum, emphasized the product that was hand crafted. The value of the product was determined by humans. With the machine culture and commodity production, the value of a thing is determined by other things: the commodity is measured against another thing, gold, and that value fluctuates according to the law of supply and demand. In Marx’s terms, human living labor power is made equivalent to money, and the human is transformed into a commodity.

(2) Dewey’s simulation separates the social form of life from its social content. The household production relationship is one of mutual interdependence for survival. The object produced reflects those who created it. But, the worker in the industrial capitalist simulacrum fails to see an objectification of self in work. The relationship of worker to factory owner is a class, adversarial relationship. The net effect is that the worker ekes out a living wage.

(3) Dewey’s simulation actually psychologizes the political reality of class differences. When the use of occupational simulations is used in the school so that the future industrial worker may see “the social value of his work”, the source of the worker’s alienation is hidden. Again, that source lies in the worker’s actual production relationship in the industrial epoch. The attempt to resurrect the moral characterology of the household economy and to graft it onto the industrial economy, not only is unreal — the attempt serves to legitimate the worker’s lot.

But, if the misrecognition of the industrial capitalist simulacrum turned Dewey’s purposes inside out, the use of the occupation technique in the post-modern context exacerbates that political condition, and it is our fault, not Dewey’s.

Ironically, the occupation technique appears specially tailored for the post-modern epoch. Calculators, computers, and word processors are now the rule in the teaching of the 3 R’s; television also is a co-equal partner in telling children about the world. And this is precisely the trouble, these aids have once again isolated children and made them passive. The tedious work of long division or the parsing of sentences is what the child passes on to the computer; in fact, for some children the work of getting knowledge might be reduced to shuffling bits of information shown on a monitor. It seems to make sense then, to return to Dewey’s “occupation” technique. The simulation appears to deliver the right kind of practical, social and moral experience without any mediation — the lesson is lived by the child directly.

But today, to choose Dewey’s technique of occupations is to choose the hyper-real. A familiar example of the hyper-real, that of Andy Warhol’s pop-art, works well to underscore similarities with Dewey’s technique. The Warhol imagery of “Brillo Boxes,” “Campbell Soup Cans,” or “Marilyn Monroe” is public imagery repeated. This is the stuff of advertisements. We are so saturated by these images, they are so pervasive, so unrelenting, and so trite, that they appear natural, that is, they seem always to have been part of the culture. Consequently, we no longer really see them. Warhol forces us to pay attention, by simulating, exaggerating, and repeating these banalities. His favorite device is to repeat the same images on a grid. “Marilyn Monroe,” for instance, is a work which features the actresses’ image 25 times: the same image of her face is reproduced in 5 rows across and 5 rows down. Warhol was demanding that we break the chain of looking without seeing, by placing the act of repetitive looking into a new medium.²⁹

But, more importantly, Warhol was playing both with the machine technique of industrial capitalism (the production of a series of 2 or of n identical things) and the counterfeit objects. That is, the painting “Marilyn Monroe” combines elements of both the second and first order simulacra. But unlike the second order value structure of industrial capitalism, Warhol’s “painting as a painting” has no real referent. It is not, for example, a piece of advertisement meant to generate a real audience for a Monroe movie. Likewise, the painting is not even a likeness of the real woman Monroe; it is not a counterfeit. “Marilyn Monroe” is a total environment complete within itself. Each of the multiple images are of equal value within the total field. This “Marilyn Monroe” is a monumentalized banal image in which the signifier/signified couplet become one. This “Marilyn Monroe” expresses the hyper-real.

In what sense is the Dewey simulation for today’s children like the Warhol example, the hyper-real? Dewey’s specific example of the children’s re-enactment of the process of changing raw wool into fiber is illustrative. Dewey tells the reader how the children re-invented a simple frame for carding the wool and of another device to spin it. Like Warhol, the teacher who uses “occupations” resuscitates a message located within popular culture. For the teacher, that message is “Dewey’s philosophy is, ‘We learn by doing!’” The reinvention of the frame is an attempt to have children look again, to have them see the hidden processes of production. Like Warhol, the teacher revives an icon from the past (in this instance a machine) and a way of life which has disappeared. But what really is being simulated here? The answer is nothing. The frame is not a copy of something real. The labor relationships acted out do not exist in the real world: the occupations expressed are depoliticized and a-historical; the social relationships describe life as we would dream them; they are examples of wish fulfillment. This is an agrarian utopia, more fun and more humane than our own experience of the world. This simulation wants to represent to children how we would see ourselves — what Baudrillard has called a simulacrum. In fact, it is the simulacrum of our age — the hyper-real. The hyper-real represents the fetishism of a lost object, an absence which is simulated.³⁰ The children’s re-invention of the frame works precisely that way. The democratic style of conjoint living that is simulated is the living image of an imaginary past. Such an experience is absent from, and a denial of, today’s real life. Dewey’s simulation, like Warhol’s painting, is complete onto itself. Without a referent in the world, the occupation technique signifies only itself. In other words, for today’s students Dewey’s pedagogy of occupations is caught within its own simulation loop.

Now, it would be wrong to conclude from all this that I think that Dewey’s work is outdated or wrongheaded. Quite the contrary, my belief is that Dewey was probably the single most important philosopher of education that America has produced. My caveat is simply this: 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.

For a response to this essay, see Alston.

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¹ J. Baudrillard, Simulations (New York: Simiotext (e) Inc., 1983), 83.

² C. Levi-Strauss, “Introduction a L’oeuvre de Marcel Mauss,” in Sociologie et Anthropologie, ed. M. Mauss (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1950), XIX.

³ See, R. D’Amico, Marx and Philosophy of Culture (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1981).

⁴ J. Culler, “The Linguistic Basis of Structuralism,” in Structuralism: An Introduction, ed. D. Robey (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), 28.

⁵ See, B. G. Chang, “Mass Media, Mass Mediation: Jean Baurdrillard’s Implosive Critique of Modern Mass-Mediated Culture,” Current Perspectives in Social Theory 7 (1986): 157-181.

⁶ K. Marx, Capital Vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin Books, 1976), 283-84.

⁷ J. Baudrillard, “Order of Simulacra,” in Structualism: An Introduction, ed. D. Robey (London: Oxford, University Press, 1972), 63.

⁸ Ibid.

⁹ Ibid., 71.

¹⁰ B. G. Chang, “Mass Media, Mass Mediation,” 162.

¹¹ Disneyland (Los Angeles: Walt Disney Corporation, 1972).

¹² Ibid.

¹³ J. Dewey, Democracy and Education (New York: MacMillan, 1916), 297.

¹⁴ Ibid., 33

¹⁵ J. Dewey, The Child and the Curriculum (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1900, 1956), 34.

¹⁶ Ibid., 35.

¹⁷ Ibid.

¹⁸ Ibid., 39.

¹⁹ Ibid., 44.

²⁰ Ibid., 132.

²¹ Ibid., 134.

²² J. Dewey, Democracy and Education, 199.

²³ Ibid., 196.

²⁴ J. Dewey, The Child and the Curriculum, 21.

²⁵ J. Dewey, Democracy and Education, 202.

²⁶ J. Dewey, The Child and the Curriculum, 25.

²⁷ Ibid, 11.

²⁸ Ibid, 23.

²⁹ See, E. B. Feldman, Art as Image and Idea (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall Inc., 1967), 336.

³⁰ K. Linker, “From Imitation to the Copy of Just Effect: On Reading Jean Baudrillard, “ Art Form (April, 1984), 46.