Michael Oakeshott, John Dewey, and The Philosophy of Education

Adrian Rutt

Michael Oakeshott and John Dewey take similar points of departure to form their philosophies of

education: the idea that the school, and education in general, should be removed or separated

from any outside influence of the world. Oakeshott believed that “the idea ‘school’ is that of

detachment from the immediate, local world of the learner, its current concerns and directions it

gives to his attention,” and Dewey, in a similar tone, claims “it is the business of the school

environment to eliminate, so far as possible, the unworthy features of the existing environment

from influence upon mental habitudes” (DE, 20). Putting aside for a moment the ambiguity of

Dewey’s phrase “unworthy features,” both thinkers believe that there is something undesirable in

students simply being submersed or indoctrinated into the everyday world around them, and that

the school should first and foremost make distinctions between these two worlds.

But for Dewey it isn’t that the school was something better than society or the

community, but rather he wanted it to be merely one morepart of the community: “school must

represent the present life. As such, parts of the student’s home life (such as moral and ethical

education) should take part in the schooling process… the teacher is a part of this, not as an

authoritative figure, but as a member of the community who is there to assist the student” (ibid.).

It is obvious that Oakeshott and Dewey are separated by more than just an ocean, so to

understand both the subtle and glaring differences in their respective philosophies of education it

is necessary to summarize their larger philosophical projects so that these subtleties are better

illuminated. As Timothy Fuller says of Oakeshott (which holds true for Dewey as well): “the

quest to identify distinctive features of important human activities has always been central to his

philosophical investigations… seeking and distinguishing features of teaching and learning are

inseparable from his work as a whole” (VLL, xvi). Using theirgeneral philosophies as a starting

point, one can put into perspective how both Oakeshott and Dewey thought the school should be

organized—from its character to its essential aims. One can see, then, that their philosophical

visions of the world go hand in hand with their philosophical visions of and for the school. For

both thinkers this latter task—that of trying to define the character of education—is abstract, but

is necessary as a foundation to understand why they then promote certain types of teachers and

curriculums. Both the role of teacher and how the curriculum is to be structured are two of the

most essential aspects of Oakeshott and Dewey’s educational systems, and thus, as will be

shown, the most specific as well.

The Larger Philosophical Project

Oakeshott sees the world as separated into different components, and in a posthumously

published essay titled Work and Play, he distinguishes two such ways of being active in the

world: “work” and “play.” He believes that the former eclipses the latter almost completely in

our lives. “Play” for Oakeshott is forgotten and replaced by “work”—something he believes the

ancients (Greeks, Romans, etc.) had a better appreciation and thus balance of. To be at “play” is

to “to try to understand and to explain the world,” and this “obviously entails an attitude towards

the world that is not one in which it is regarded as material that can be used to satisfy wants”

(emphasis mine) (WP). For Oakeshott the imbalance between work—an “activity that seeks the

satisfaction of wants”—and play is fostered in formal education and thus creates citizens that

only think in term of wants and how to get those wants. In short, Oakeshott thinks there’smore

than this (ibid).

But Oakeshott doesn’t want to banish “work;” he merely wants a distinction between

learning to exploit the world to get something we want and enjoying somethingfor its own sake.

School for him is the place that this distinction could be made explicit, where it “was understood

to be a place where one was introduced to those activities and attitudes towards the world that

were not concerned with satisfying wants, where one was introduced to those activities of

explanation and imagination that were ‘free’ because they were pursued for their own sake and

were emancipated from the limitations and anxieties of ‘work’ … [School] comes from a Greek

word skole , which means ‘leisure’ or ‘free time’” (ibid). The difference for Oakeshott is that

work is designed “to impress some temporary human purpose upon some component of the

world” while play is “to reveal the world as it is and not merely in respect of its potential to

satisfy human wants” (ibid). This is key to Oakeshott’s overall project: he wants humans to

recognize that “the greater part of what we have is not a burden to be carried or an incubus to be

thrown off, but an inheritance to be enjoyed” (VLL, 74). He even extends this thought into the

realm of education when he states that there are “some people who allow themselves to speak

‘As if arrangements were intended, For nothing else but to be mended’” (ibid). This attitude of

dissatisfaction toward the world is detrimental if it becomes all consuming, and “our

determination to improve our conduct does not prevent us from recognizing” that we should

enjoy arrangements as they presently appear to us (ibid).

However, Oakeshott is not so naive to think that practical influences wouldn’t pervade

every aspect of our human lives. He says, “There must, to be sure, be a place for learning how to

use the resources of the world for the satisfaction of human wants. But we are fortunate if we are

not encouraged to confuse the two quite different experiences of the world” (WP). In the end,

Oakeshott does not wish to rid ourselves of our practical pursuits, but only wishes to see that we

understand that there is a distinction between work and play and, ultimately, to retrieve the

importance of play in our everyday lives. In this important essay, Oakeshott connects his the idea

of play with his previous ideas about poetry when he says that inboth play and poetry “images in

contemplation are merely present; they provoke neither speculation nor inquiry about the

occasion or conditions of their appearing but only delight in their having appeared” (ibid). This

“delight” that Oakeshott refers to throughout his work is an attempt to reclaim the “voice” of

poetry that has been silenced by the practical and scientific since the Enlightenment. Poetry, like

the practical and the scientific, is just one more voice among many Oakeshott sees as joined in

the only way they can be: in a conversation.

It is also crucial, then, to understand Oakeshott’s use of the conversational metaphor. The

metaphor of conversation—something he refers to quite often throughout many of his

writings—is one in which he finds justification for many of his philosophical views. In a much

quoted passage he says of conversation:

In a conversation the participants are not engaged in an inquiry or a debate; there is no 'truth' to be discovered, no proposition to be proved, no conclusion sought. They are not concerned to inform, to persuade, or to refute one another, and therefore the cogency of their utterances does not depend upon their all speaking in the same idiom; they may differ without disagreeing… And voices which speak in conversation do not compose a hierarchy. Conversation is not an enterprise designed to yield an extrinsic profit, a contest where a winner gets a prize, not is it an activity of exegesis; it is an unrehearsed intellectual adventure. It is with conversation as with gambling, its significance lies neither in winning nor in losing, but in wagering. Properly speaking, it is impossible in the absence of a diversity of voices: in it different universes of discourse meet, acknowledge

each other and enjoy an oblique relationship which neither requires nor forecasts their being assimilated to one another (RP, 196­198).

And later, connecting it with education, he says “Education, properly speaking, is an initiation

into the skill and partnership of this conversation in which we learn to recognize the voices, to

distinguish the proper occasions of utterance, and in which we acquire the intellectual and moral

habits appropriate to conversation. And it is this conversation which, in the end, gives place and

character to every human activity and utterance” (ibid). Here we see Oakeshott’s philosophy

culminating in what he calls the “conversation of mankind.” Oakeshott envisioned society being

in a constant and never­ending conversation with our cultural inheritance, and that so our

association as citizens is “not of pilgrims traveling to a common destination, but of adventurers

each responding as best he can to the ordeal of consciousness in a world composed of others of

his kind” (OHC, 243). Both his conversation metaphor and pilgrim metaphor point to the same

idea: that there is no specific place our conversations nor society is supposed to go; no

preordained course to follow. Similarly, both metaphors imply that what is most important is

what is passing before us at the present moment, so education for Oakeshott is the “interval” in

which human beings gain a deeper and broader insight so that they may attend to this passing

before them both conversationally and as travellers.

It is also important to note that in his later writings Oakeshott was skeptical about the

joining of theory and practice. This, in short, is the breaking point between Dewey’s larger

philosophy and Oakeshott’s: both thinkers agree—rather unsurprisingly due to their mutual

contact with British Idealism and Hegel—on many issues, but on the role theory, philosophy,

and practice should play they are essentially on opposite sides.

While Oakeshott would agree with Dewey when he says that “men are not isolated

non­social atoms, but are men only when in intrinsic relations,” he would disagree with the

progressive line of thought that Dewey takes naturally from this idea (EW 1, 231). That “inquiry

is problem­solving, is historical and progressive, and is communal. We engage in inquiry as part

of a struggle with an objectively precarious but improvable environment.” Whereas Oakeshott 1

embraces a pluralistic, contingent society, Dewey acts as more of a visionary in his belief that

“there is almost always common ground between diverse groups, and this fact offers continuing

hope that challenges can be confronted as a unified public.” In short, Dewey sees the status quo 2

as a “crust of convention” to be broken through, and even defines morality as simply “growth.”

Democracy, then, was the ultimate goal for Dewey.

Even though Dewey believes in individual rights he thinks the community should and

would ultimately supercede people’s innate drives to selfishness. He therefore believes his

explicit promotion of teamwork and community in schools would naturally lead one to

promoting democracy. Education is absolutely crucial to bring about progress and his vision of

the world. As such, much of Dewey’s educational thought stems from his pragmatism; more

specifically, the “view that rejected the dualistic epistemology and metaphysics of modern

philosophy in favor of a naturalistic approach that viewed knowledge as arising from an active

adaptation of the human organism to its environment.” This empirical and “naturalistic 3

approach” for Dewey is—in modern terms—the scientific approach: much of his work on

education revolves around the use of the laboratory, experimentation, and modern (19th century)

science to bolster his views. His progressivism stems naturally from this pragmatic process:

1http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dewey­political/ 2 Hildebrand, p 140. 3 http://www.iep.utm.edu/dewey/

human beings need to be flexible, open­minded, imaginative, and experimental if they are going

to meet the challenges of a future unknown world.

It is not hard to see where Oakeshott and Dewey diverge in terms of their larger

philosophical projects. Dewey envisages a fully democratic community as the ultimate end to

societal arrangement. He took what he saw as an end which allows the greatest flourishing of

individuals and then proceeded to backtrack and “analyze democracy’s pillars: education, the

economy, the media, and… the social sciences.” Oakeshott on the other hand purposely 4

sketches a limited and somewhat vague vision of ideal societal arrangements when he describes

society as “an association… of adventurers” (OHC, 243). In short, everything for Dewey traces

back to his staunch optimism in human progress; his belief in adaptation and growth being

absolutely crucial if humans are going to keep up with a constantly changing environment. While

Oakeshott wouldn’t disagree with Dewey’s analysis that the environment constantly changes, his

skepticism on the subject of conscious and social progress in light of this change shines through

in most of his work. To sum up, Dewey’s focus is on the progress a society can make, while

Oakeshott would rather focus on enjoying what is in front of us.

So whereas Oakeshott says that subjects like “Philosophy, science, and history are, then,

activities that belong not to ‘work’ but to ‘play,’” Dewey would say almost the exact opposite

(WP). He believes this gathering of philosophic, scientific, and historic knowledge are activities

to be used so that we might make use of them to make the world a better place in which to live

and, specifically, promote democracy. Again, Oakeshott does not deny the use of these subjects

for satisfying contingent wants and goals, but makes the suggestion that “this knowledge should

4 Hildebrand, p 95.

not be confused with scientific knowledge, and that winning this sort of knowledge is not to be

confused with the scientific enterprise of understanding and explaining” (ibid). Understanding

and explaining for Oakeshott are other ways of saying “play,” because they have no inherent

energy to move into the practical world of affairs. For Oakeshott, “play” is largely disinterested.

So Dewey explicitly thinks education is designed to, in Oakeshott’s words, “impress some

temporary human purpose upon some component of the world,” or gathering the necessary

knowledge to change the world for the better (ibid). Dewey complains, “the conception that the

mind consists of what has been taught, and that the importance of what has been taught consists

in its availability for further teaching, reflects the pedagogue’s view of life...It takes, in brief,

everything educational into account save its essence ­ vital energy seeking opportunity for

effective exercise” (DE, 71). In short, Dewey thinks that—per his pragmatism and naturalistic

psychology—there can be no learning for the sake of learning just as there cannot be learning

only to be inculcated into the practical world around us. The two are one in the same for Dewey.

While not completely disagreeing with this, it is this wanting to change the world with the

knowledge acquired in school that Oakeshott thinks is overemphasized in the educational realm.

Both thinkers fear the explicit politicization of information learned in school, but due to

Oakeshott’s belief that the plurality of voices (and and all voices) should be allowed to develop

naturally he stays further away from this possibility than Dewey does. In other words,

Oakeshott’s educational system would have far fewer children learning things to promote

specific ends like democracy or equality, whereas Dewey encourages this type of environment

(albeit subtly). It would be no surprise, then, to see Dewey’s educational philosophy being used

for ends other than what he thought they should be used for—it can easily be geared toward the

promotion of Fascism or Communism. However it is not hard to see how being educated in

Oakeshottian fashion might lead to—using Dewey’s phrase—“aloofness and indifference…so

insensitive in his relations to others as to develop an illusion of being really able to stand act

alone” (DE, 44). Although Oakeshott’s view of education doesn’t lead to directly to “aloofness

and indifference” or individualism, “it is not without its difficulties… the most glaring of these is

its failure to balance its obvious concern with intellectual excellence with any sort of

consideration of equity or of other purposes education might serve in a democratic society” 5

Here we see the gap between Dewey’s collective education and Oakeshott’s individual education

widen.

But the two thinkers differ in degrees when it comes to this balance of work and play; the

impression that Dewey does not promote learning for its own sake or Oakeshott learning for

vocational purposes would be to misread their respective philosophies under a black and white

lens. It should be clear at this point that the reason Oakeshott wants the school separated from

ordinary life is because he believes life has more to offer than satisfying wants, while Dewey

wishes it to be separated so that students imagination and problem­solving skills aren’t stifled by

influences from the status quo world around them. In short, this difference between the two

educational philosophies can be most easily understood in light of their views about the

theory­practice distinction.

The “Character” of the School and the Aims of Education

5 Franco, p 124.

Where Oakeshott and Dewey disagree most is on the topic ofwhat exactly a school environment

should be like, or rather what purpose it serves and what means it employs to serve those ends.

The interest, attention, and the discipline of the student are important for both thinkers but for

opposite reasons: Dewey’s frustration stems from the fact that he believes “The inclination to

learn from life itself and to make the conditions of life such that all will learn in the process of

living is the finest product of schooling” (DE, 51). This creed, Dewey says, should be the

mission of every educational institution and any other aim than this the school all but destroys

the child’s innate tendency to be interested andvoluntarily active in the learning process. In other

words, to make this learning process go on outside of the school’s walls the school must spark

the interest of the child by connecting what is learned to their lives; the school must show the

student the relevancy of what is being taught to them. Otherwise “when material has to be made

interesting, it signifies that as presented, it lacks connection with purposes and present power: or

that if the connection be there, it is not perceived” (DE, 127). In short, Dewey uses his

naturalistic psychology to bolster his views about children’s and human’s natural tendency to

want to learn when they see how it affects their everyday lives. Here Dewey is working off the

assumption that people cannot learn unless they are motivated. The school today, by forcing

discipline and using external reward systems irrelevant to what is learned, destroys the chances

of education fostering “the inclination to learn from life itself.” He states rather forcefully that

“no one has ever explained why children are so full of questions outside of the school, and the

conspicuous absence of display of curiosity about the subject matter of school lessons” (DE,

155). Dewey’s most damning critique of the school system’s was just this: confusion abouthow

to go about teaching and learning; the schools either treated children as “the immature being who

is to be matured; the superficial being who is to be deepened" or they focused too much on the

child which Dewey saw equally detrimental to the learning process (DE, 238). To remedy this

confusion he states that “the child and the curriculum are simply two limits which define a single

process. Just as two points define a straight line, so the present standpoint of the child and the

facts and truths of studies define instruction" (CC, 278). Dewey’s pragmatism makes itself

known in this last statement by acknowledging the balance between wholly subject­centered or

wholly child­centered approached. Both extremes are detrimental to the student.

In stark contrast to Dewey’s focus on naturalistic psychology, Oakeshott states that

education “begins with the appearance of a teacher with something to impart which is not

immediately connected with the current wants or ‘interests’ of the learner” (VLL, 68). Whereas

Dewey explicitly states that the student’s innate and present interest should be fostered,

Oakeshott says that upon entering the school the student should be “ready to embark” on the

“serious and orderly initiation into an intellectual, imaginative, moral, and emotional

intelligence…This is a difficult undertaking; it calls for effort” (VLL, 69). The contrast here, in

modern terms, is between Dewey’s more child­centered approach and Oakeshott’s

teacher/conversation­centered approach, and, as if Oakeshott were speaking to Dewey directly,

he states that “to corrupt ‘School’ by depriving it of its character as a serious engagement to

learn by study, and to abolish it either by assimilating it to the activities, ‘interests’, partialities

and abridgements of a local world” is one of two sides of the “current project to destroy

education” (VLL, 82). In short, the child­centered approach for Oakeshott is one based on the

interests, and thus whims of the student, rendering it unserious and unfocused. On the other

hand, Oakeshott sees himself as promoting a more serious engagement. But Oakeshott’s

characterization of the university and school in general shouldn’t be read broadly: he

acknowledged other types of educations such as vocational, but that the mixing of different types

that had different goals and outcomes was the core problem.

The Teacher

One of Oakeshott’s most remarkable commentaries is on the role of the teacher. “For whom can

a man be more deeply indebted than to the one to whom he owes, not his mere existence, but his

participation in human life? It is the Sage, the teacher, who is the agent of civilization” (VLL,

39). It is the types of education that focus solely on the material and subjects as facts to be

imparted that render the teacher useless in Oakeshott vision. To merely teach information or

subjects is to merely listen to “what a man has to say, but unless we overhear it in a mind at work

and can detect the idiom of thought, we have understood nothing” (VLL, 59). This is what

Oakeshott called “style”...“the choice made, not according to the rules, but within the area of

freedom left by the negative operation of the rules” (ibid.). This style was heard—not

surprisingly—through a conversation between the teacher and student. At this point, we can see

Oakeshott’s larger educational question: “whether the pursuit of university education is to

acquire knowledge of some specialized branch of learning, connected perhaps with a profession,

or whether it is for something else besides this” (VLL, 156). What a man has to say is not

necessarily subordinate for Oakeshott, but the “something else besides this”—his style—is just

as important for him. Furthermore, this latter “style” cannot be viewed from the outside by those

demanding to know what education is for (it can only be transmitted between the teacher and the

student in the immediate environment—it cannot be written down in a curriculum), so “we begin

to talk of ‘integrating courses’ and of ‘culture’” to appease those on the outside (ibid.).

Lastly Oakeshott believes the “business of the teacher is to release his pupils from

servitude to the current dominant feelings, emotions, images, ideas, beliefs and even skills, not

by inventing alternatives to them which seem to him more desirable, but by making available to

him something which approximates more closely to the whole of his inheritance” (VLL, 42).

This, in keeping with the idea that the school must be removed, was “an opportunity to put aside

the hot allegiances of youth without the necessity of acquiring new loyalties to take their place”

(VLL, 127). Here Oakeshott wants to shed wholly the idea that education is for something to

help us satisfy our wants whether that be money or a good job. He believes this narrow and

shallow way of thinking about education misses much of what is to be valued, namely, our

cultural inheritance.

Although Dewey belonged more to the child­centered camp, he no sooner separated

himself from them by acknowledging the extremely tough role of the teacher. Throughout

Democracy and Education, Dewey hints that the role of the teacher to be both flexible, effective,

and subtle—almost an impossibility in light of his pragmatism. “The business of the teacher is to

produce a higher standard of intelligence in the community, (emphasis mine)” Dewey claims

immediately distinguishing his collective education from Oakeshott’s individualistic education

(LW, 159). But the role of the teacher was equally as demanding—possible more so—than

Oakeshott’s: for Dewey, teachers need to be

intelligently aware of the capacities, needs, and past experiences of those under instruction, and secondly, to allow the suggestions made to develop into a plan

and project by means of the further suggestions contributed and organized into a whole by the members of the group (EE, 71).

Furthermore, they only create “a starting point to be developed into a plan through contributions

from the experience of all engaged in the learning process” and this process involves a

“reciprocal give­and­take, the teacher taking but not being afraid also to give” (ibid.). This latter

point coincides with Oakeshott’s idea of a conversation nicely: Dewey was frustrated with the

‘expert imparting knowledge onto a blank slate’ theory of education, that he too saw the role of

the teacher as a conversationalist. But he did not promote a whimsical, unstructured classroom as

some of his progressive contemporaries thought a child­centered approach should be, but rather

the teacher’s job was to keep students on track by imparting their “greater insight to help

organize the conditions of the experience of the immature [students]” (ibid.).However he says of

this imparting that, “frontal attacks are even more wasteful in learning than in war” (DE, 169).

This pragmatic balance between the teacher subtly guiding the direction of the curriculum and

letting the child’s experience and innate interest wander is a hard equilibrium to strike.

Dewey’s teacher, according to many critics, is an impossibility. To have a teacher be

attentive to the constantly changing needs of any given number of students every single day and

still fostering their innate and individual curiosities is a fantasy. The challenge for the teacher in

both Oakeshott’s view and Dewey’s is keeping the interest of the students. An Oakeshottian

teacher that can keep student’s attention about things unconnected to their lives is almost as

unrealistic as Dewey’s doing­it­all teacher. To be fair, Oakeshott doesn’t think aboutattention as

much as Dewey because he doesn’t think much of the caliber of students entering school in the

post­war period in which he is writing. The real problem with the universities wasn’t due to

incompetent teachers or a loosely structured curriculum, but “an influx of students unprepared to

take advantage of the opportunity to ‘stretch one’s sails to the wind’” (VLL, 127). Furthermore,

Oakeshott hopes that students realize there are different types of education all with the goal of

helping us get on in the world. To think that university education is the only option—as it seems

today—is both damaging to the character of the university and to the student. Both Oakeshott

and Dewey would probably admit that the teachers they envision as best exemplifying their

philosophy are rare. One could even argue that their respective attributes describing the teacher

are modeled off themselves, as both were successful and famous educators throughout their

lives.

What Is Learned

Throughout the essays in The Voice of Liberal Learning, Oakeshott constantly berates

“general education” or “an education concerned with the substance of culture” as

something undesirable in the educational environment (VLL, 21). “Substance of culture”

here must be differentiated from “cultural inheritance”: the former is the culture of the

present moment; our everyday surroundings while the latter is the whole of our culture;

its traditions, history, and everything up to this point. He goes on to say that this type of

education is “so anxious that everything shall receive mention that it can afford no more

than a fleeting glimpse of anything in particular. Here learning amounts to little more

than recognition; it never achieves the level of an encounter” (VLL, 21). At this point it is

clear that Oakeshott is in favor of aspecific education, one that has a narrow focus rather

than wide and unspecific—even if it leaves out a good amount of what is considered

general and required. This latter type of education produces nothing more than a “culture

philistine”: a person who only understands culture insofar as it helps them pursue and

satisfy contingent wants (ibid.). The culture philistine is shallow and lacks true

understanding. In response to Walter Moberly’s plea to present students with a “unified

conception of life,” or “a synoptic, integrated view of the moral and intellectual world,”

biographer Paul Franco writes that

Oakeshott finds nothing in all this but nonsense. In the first place, no such integration of the world of knowledge is currently available to us. Second, no such integration is necessary for the university to exercise its function. There is a way in which the various specialisms can come together in a meaningful way in the university without being integrated from above by some sort of Weltanschauung. 6

Here we see Oakeshott’s larger belief—that there are numerous ways to go about

education—tying in with his specific beliefs about what a curriculum should look like. In other

words, there is no overarching or unifying theme that explicitly answers the question ‘what is

education for?’

Without this serious—and specific—engagement to learn by study students miss “the

object of education”: “to enable a man to make his own thought clear and to attend to what

passes before him” (VLL, 156). Dewey would assuredly agree with Oakeshott and even echoes

him when he states that education “is that reconstruction or reorganization of experience which

adds to the meaning of experience, and which increases ability to direct the course of subsequent

experience” (DE, 76). And, in passage that Oakeshott could have written himself, says that

6 Franco, 118

education is meant prepare him for the future life which “means to give him command of

himself; it means so to train him that he will have the full and ready use of all his capacities”

(ibid.). For Oakeshott, his educational writings get as close to pragmatism than any other late

work. But whereas Dewey wants to explicitly state that what we learn should be used in how we

move about the world, Oakeshott only hints at this logical end. What Oakeshott fails to recognize

is that when a student—during this “interval”—spends time looking into the “mirror of [his or

her] cultural inheritance,” they will likely result in a better human being. Better in this sense is

the same as Dewey would describe: imaginative, reflective, moral, and being able to attend what

passes before them in a manner that requires these attributes. In short, Dewey would agree that

this is the ultimate object of education even if his larger philosophy hopes that the students

become Democratic, progressive, and world­changers. Ultimately, Dewey believes that the sort

of education that Oakeshott or he himself would require would produce the same type of student.

Oakeshott, on the other hand, does not believe this to be the case, but rather believes that

Dewey’s students would produce exactly the kind of human who can only view things in terms

of how they can be used.

The tendency to lump Dewey into the “socialization” camp as Oakeshott sees it, is to

misunderstand Dewey’s goal: he wants to teach students “to think,” but unlike his more

progressive contemporaries, he does not wish to see this thinking unconnected with the subjects.

Both Oakeshott and Dewey do not believe thinking can happen in a vacuum, but their difference

lies in the structure of the curriculum. Again, Oakeshott sees the ability to think as a byproduct

of being engaged in a specific subject matter seriously and in a disciplined manner. Dewey, on

the other hand, sees the occasion as serious but the engagement as natural and thus discipline

stemming from the inherent usefulness of the subject matter for the student.

On matters of the specific curriculum Oakeshott was equally as frustrated. He claims that

....instead of teaching the languages and literature of the world it has become a school for training interpreters, that instead of pursuing science it is engaged in training electrical engineers or industrial chemists, that instead of studying history it is studying and teaching history for some ulterior purpose, that instead of educating men and women it is training them exactly to fill some niche in society (VLL,116).

In short, the subjects in school are being taught merely as means to an end and not as

ends in themselves. As mentioned earlier, Oakeshott promotes specific education because what

we have in front of us in terms of our inheritance “has no meaning as a whole; it cannot be

learned or taught in principle, only in detail” (VLL, 49). Oakeshott’s skepticism about being able

to present students with a coherent picture stems from the fact that he believesthere is none that

can be offered.

But to characterize Dewey as someone who promotes a “general” and unspecific

curriculum would be a disservice. Since Dewey makes no distinction between intellectual and

practical studies he has no reason to believe that there is one kind of education and another—as

Oakeshott sees it. He says, “the notion that knowledge is derived from a higher source than is

practical activity, and possesses a higher more spiritual worth, has a long history,” and traces this

back to Plato and Aristotle who he undoubtedly thinks made a misstep in believing there was

some higher knowledge (DE, 262). For Dewey, education leads to one outcome: action. There

can be no knowledge for its own sake because even this knowledge has practical bearing on our

actions and how we move about the world we inhabit. This Jamesian psychological position

amounts to saying that there really is no distinction between knowing for its own sake and

knowing for something else. The difference, then, lies in how knowledge is imparted for both

thinkers: Oakeshott wants to educate for education’s sake even if the outcome has practical

bearing on the student. Dewey merely acknowledges this latter point by saying education is

indeed for something else—a means to ends.

Conclusion

Obviously, Oakeshott reconciled with many of Dewey’s thoughts, but two major strands stand

out: that full­fledged democracy is the end to communal life, and that our thinking about most

matters should begin with the psychological or naturalistic. But to focus on the glaring

differences in their broader philosophies would be to miss the subtle similarities in their

educational philosophies. Both thinkers undoubtedly believe that the school should be its own

environment separated from the outside world, and for not all that dissimilar purposes: ultimately

the outside world represents something undesirable either as an influence on the school

(Oakeshott) or as a representation of the status quo (Dewey). Both thinkers believe the role of the

teacher is immensely challenging. Oakeshott would probably agree with Dewey when he says of

the teacher: "No one can be really successful in performing the duties and meeting these

demands of teaching who does not retain [their] intellectual curiosity intact throughout [their]

entire career" (LW, 343). Oakeshott and Dewey’s view of the teacher differ enormously from the

teachers in strictly subject­centered or child­centered classrooms; the demand, discipline, and

intelligence simply isn’t there like it is in their philosophies.

Oakeshott’s ‘radical’ pluralism also seems to come to a head with Dewey’s idea that

there is no difference between thinking and doing or between intelligence and practical affairs. It

is hard to blame Dewey for wanting to blur this line for two reasons. The first being that he was a

serial optimist in his hope for humans to actively create a better world—using intelligence via

their education—for each subsequent generation. The second reason being his psychological

background: Dewey found that in most cases even the most remote knowledge had an affect on

human being’s actions. Oakeshott doesn’t want to blur this line, and although he realizes both

sides exist, he merely wants a distinction between the two types of knowledge. But applying

Dewey’s reasoning to Oakeshott’s view of education ends up being something very similar to a

practical education. Since there is no difference between purely intellectual affairs and purely

practical ones, Oakeshott’s education still ends upbeing good for something even if it is simply a

better human being. To be fair, Oakeshott seems to begrudgingly acknowledge this when he says

that all education is social, and that education in general presupposed the belief “that we live in

societies which, because they are associations of human beings, depend upon their members

being human, that is, being in some degree educated” (VLL, 79). The irreconcilable difference,

then, is that this almost platitudinous presupposition for Oakeshott—that human beings

inherently social—is Dewey’s starting point. In short, Dewey wants to use this inherent sociality

as the focus and springboard for his whole philosophy whereas Oakeshott shies away from this

so as to allow the intricacies and idiosyncrasies of each individual voice to be heard. In the end,

it might only be that Dewey’s voice is just one more among many for Oakeshott. But the same

should be said from Dewey’s perspective: that Oakeshott’s philosophy is just one more

welcomed voice in Dewey’s democratic Utopia.

Abbreviated References to the Works of Oakeshott & Dewey

(DE) Dewey, John. 1997. Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of

Education. New York: Free.

(EE) Dewey, John. 1938. Experience and Education. New York: Macmillan.

(LW) Dewey John and Jo Ann Boydston. 1981. The Later Works, 1925­1953. Carbondale:

Southern Illinois UP.

(OHC) Oakeshott, Michael. 1991. On Human Conduct. Oxford: Clarendon Pr.

(VLL) Oakeshott, Michael and Timothy Fuller. 2001. The Voice of Liberal Learning.

Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund.

(WP) Oakeshott, Michael. 1995. “Work and Play.” First Things.

1. Franco, Paul. 2004. Michael Oakeshott: An Introduction. New Haven: Yale UP.

2. Hildebrand, David. 2008. Dewey: A Beginner’s Guide. Oxford: Oneworld.

3. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dewey­political/

4. http://www.iep.utm.edu/dewey/