Replies

The connection is sloppy use of language. John Dewey and Martin Heidegger used the same or similar terms and ideas but with different definitions. Researchers in Education, primarily people like Nell Nodding, have used Dewey’s terms with the early Heidegger’s definition. It should be noted that later in life, Heidegger repudiated his own position and replaced it with a more mystic or spiritualist concept akin to listening to your inner voice. So when I write about the influence of Heidegger I am doing doing so based upon the concepts in his early work, Being and Time.

This is problematic because Dewey was many things but he wasn’t a subjectivist. John Dewey believed that if you let children learn in a “naturalistic setting” that they would find an absolute truth. For Dewey, 2+2 always equaled 4. It didn’t matter how you reached 4, it was the answer was the important thing. (His idea of truth being an New England -upper middle class-white-lapsed Protestant-World view) At no point did Dewey claim that truth is a narrative, or a construct. This, as far as it goes is not a bad concept and there is some value in using it to help children see how what they learn applies to real world settings.

Heidegger, on the other hand, was a near complete subjectivist who thought that absolutes were a linguistic creation. In his work, Being and Time, Heidegger writes about the concept of “A thing in the world” or an object that becomes what it is through the process of definition or naming of that thing. This is a useful concept in some ways and can be explained as an extension of Plato’s theory of forms. We call those “Chairs” Chairs because they all have the qualities of “chairness” even though they might have have as many differences as similarities. But, when we, through a process of examination and discovery name something a “chair” in a known language, it is absolutely a chair, not a sofa, nor a stool, not a bench. But, for Heidegger, there was no form or absolute chair, only attributes that we attribute to a thing. Thus, in early Heidegggerian thinking, all truth is a process and truth merely a label.

For Heidegger discovering truth was a process, and it was the process, not the outcome that was important. Thus, 2+2=4 is not as important as how you arrive at 4. The answer is less important than the process. The end result can be anything we choose to name it.

In this way, US educational philosophy has been subverted by Post Modernism from a loosely Christian world view espoused by Dewey, Mann and Montessori into a system lacking absolute value or meaning. The focus has changed, without educators realizing it, from child centered, to process centered. Only the process is important there is little or no value in the end result.

This is why I state from time to time that the public education system is child abuse. It is a system that, at its core, espouses meaninglessness as truth. Which, is another way of saying, there is no truth. If there is no truth, there is possibility of education. If there is no possibility of education there is no purpose in school.

Or at least that is my contention.