Page 1.10, Part 3, Sections 16-20 16. EDUCATION: CONSERVATIVE AND DEWEYAN, 101 In this and the following 2 sections we take Book 1's longest look at Dewey's liberal educational models of excellence. Usually the philosophy of education is treated as a minor philosophic subject, if it’s treated at all. As in so many ways, Plato was an exception to that rule; his most famous book Republic is essentially a book on educational philosophy. For Dewey, however, and many other liberals, education was one of philosophy's most important subjects, if not the most important! Only with better education can people begin seeing more intelligent ways of acting and guiding their lives, and thus build better habits. Luckily Dewey lived at a time when many Americans wanted to keep improving their lives and governments -- the Progressive Era -- and so in many places around the country many of his educational ideas were experimented with, tested, and continued on into the 1950s! At such schools young folks were helped to learn useful job skills as well as important character habits, like helping others and respecting just laws, as well as learn how to intelligently change unjust ones. For example, for a while Gary, Indiana's entire school district began using many of his ideas in the 1910s, as did the Chicago Vocational School system, and of course later in life entire country’s like Turkey, China, and Japan asked him for educational advice about making their own schools more excellent. They all wanted to keep improving their schools so their young folks would learn more intelligent habit-arts and thus lessen many of their social problems, like crime, unemployment, and helping their economies become more industrial and competitive. Even though he went to China decades before the Communists took over, today China produces more engineers than anyone else and their economy is rapidly becoming world-class, second only to the US. In any case, however, these 3 sections are not just for new teachers, but also for parents and students of education; after all, parents are the most important teachers for any child! Our Main Criticisms For we liberal Deweyans, for too long US education has been out of the progressive improvement loop, so to speak. Its basic education philosophy has been too conservative and even medieval. For us, educational excellence is the best and ONLY way for people AND societies to keep growing and evolving more peaceful and intelligent habit arts, but the more traditional schools remain, the more difficult that goal becomes. Such book-obsessed schools make it more difficult to learn all the democratic and experimental habits making life all it can be. To Dewey liberal education was the best key for teaching young folks how best to keep improving all their habit-arts, like healthcare, charity, exercise, lawfulness, and respect for equal rights. Again, without such a liberal educational system, many social problems remain an economic drag, like fighting crime, underemployment, unemployment, crippling social discrimination, drug abuse, health problems, democratic weaknesses, not to mention global warming and war itself. For Dewey all such modern social challenges can most rapidly be improved only with effective and practical educational ideas and practices, ones in which students make an emotional commitment to learning what feels best to them, rather than being regimented and made to learn what they often have no desire or need to learn. The less young folks make that emotional commitment, the sooner they forget what they spent years being made to learn. And so for us Deweyan liberals children should be free to choose a career path as soon as possible, even in elementary school! Such an emotional commitment makes it much easier to then teach students the valuable character habits they’ll need to become successful lawyers, doctors, engineers, police people, carpenters, plumbers, or whatever, and also the writing, reading, and calculating skills schools now try to teach. So, if Dewey's right, if the emotional commitment to learn practical employment skills is the best educational model for any kind of learning, then child psychology becomes one of the most important subjects of all. Without knowing something about the 3 main stages of child development, it’s almost impossible to build such schools, as Plato himself saw thousands of years ago. In general those stages are a playfully sense-based stage until about 7, a constructive stage until about 11 or 12, and then, as the brain matures, a more intellectual stage capable of grasping more abstract ideas. Thus, without accepting such a child psychology, and instead yoking students to book-work for 12 years, it will take much longer for almost anyone to learn any kind of excellence! And the more that doesn’t happen, the more vulnerable millions of young folks will remain to all of society’s unintelligent temptations and vices. On the other hand, the more schools are based on that psychology, the more naturalistic and less stressful school becoming, and the more children will want to be there. After helping found the American Association of University Professors, and becoming its first president, Dewey published his best educational book, Democracy and Education. Also The School and Society is a good little introductory book about elementary education. More About Dewey After he moved to the newly opened University of Chicago in 1894 Dewey opened its famous Lab School; there he began testing his liberal ideas. It’s still operating today, helping students learn valuable computer skills. After his undergraduate studies he taught briefly at the high school level in Pennsylvania, and there he began feeling how artificial conservative educational models were; without emotionally committing themselves to learn all the book facts they were being asked to learn, school for most students became a place merely to go to until the law said they could leave. For how many students is that the reality even today? In fact, even today most students just don’t need to know all those book facts college professors of education said they should learn. Also, they often justified their book-based models on producing so-called well-rounded students who learn a little of many different subjects. Again, at such schools students quickly forgot the ideas they learned merely to pass the next test. Thus, education for most everyone remained shallow, superficial, and worst of all, useless for much of life outside the school room! Greatly undereducated parents didn’t know enough about education to challenge such an educational model. Thus, often students weren’t prepared for the new jobs being created as science and technology continued creating them. In short, Dewey realized the whole feeling-side of education was largely missing in traditional classrooms; it was mostly just telling students to learn academic subjects at merely a mechanically verbal level of learning, rather than a holistic level of feeling AND verbal learning. So, like Alexander’s empire, conservative public education covered a lot of ground but it was only a few inches deep. And the work was easy; teachers just needed to stay a day or 2 ahead of the students’ book assignments. But again, such facts were all but useless in the real world outside of school. Another result was to ignore the far more useful subject of character development. Thus, again, many students remained vulnerable to all the anti-social actions going on in their own neighborhoods. Police brutality thus became intensified as more people broke the law mainly for economic reasons. They didn’t have the skills to work at better paying jobs, and thus racial segregation and discrimination continued making life needlessly stressful. In Chicago Dewey got the chance to test some of his more holistic and naturalistic ideas of learning, based on a sounder model of child psychology. There he saw the results of making learning an active, sense-based, enjoyable, and natural as learning outside of school. He wanted children to learn about history, chemistry, physics, but he also wanted such subjects taught not just from books in the higher grades, but from active and holistic learning experience! That way, a child’s bodily feelings would be just as educational as talking about ideas. In short, Dewey saw how knowledge should be located in one’s muscles as much as one’s brain. For example, having young students at the sense-based stage of development build a garden would also begin teaching them some elementary chemistry, biology, and mathematical facts. Also, it would make those ideas more meaningful because the experience was active, rather than a passive desk-centered model where student muscles are kept out of the educational loop, so to speak. After all, such children learn best with active practice. He also began experimenting with building projects for students at the constructive stage of development. He saw how even his own children learned best when they actively experimented intelligently to build what they wanted, and when teachers helped them feel what intelligent actions felt like. Students were to first make a detailed plan for their projects, and then actually test it themselves to see its results. Such holistic and organic learning experiences made learning important intelligent and experimental ideas easier and more enjoyable, and it also increased their carpentry, electrical, and plumbing skills. What kind of fertilizer, for example, was best for a garden, and how much of it was best? What is fertilizer? Are there different kinds? How is it made? Such questions begin opening up for young children the entire world of experimental research, and not just for a few, but for all students. Then, after moving to Columbia University in New York in 1904, he continued writing about education and convincing more people how our traditional public schools could be even better with the addition of constructive or project kinds of learning. If children wanted to learn more about politics, then they would make a list of questions, plan a trip to city hall, and talk with politicians who could answer their questions. Such learning projects would be much more meaningful to students than merely passively reading about politics. Then, when students’ body-minds are ready to study abstract ideas, the last 2 years of high school could be devoted to those studies, especially for students going on to college. Such a learning model was also useful for promoting democratic feelings of equality; each student played some part in such projects. Some Ancient Education History As with so many other philosophic ideas, liberal and active models of education go back not only to ancient Greek Sophists and Atomists, but they were used by our native ancestors for millions of years! All useful tools and habits were actively built experimentally, since the first stone tool was built over 2 million years ago! Normally, native children are taught to build their own useful skills, tools, and weapons during their constructive stage of childhood. And often it was the only way women were educated until the 1800! In ancient Greece, many Sophists like Protagoras became the college professors of the time, traveling from city to city and giving lectures about what students should practice. Sometimes they sold their books too! In fact, Dewey says how their new liberal questions about learning helped build the classic model of philosophy which lasted thousands of years! What is learning? Can character excellence be taught, or was it just a random gift from the gods? What is the best political, ethical, and educational system? Is there one or many? Such questions helped define philosophy’s 6 main topics, namely nature, learning, ethics, politics, education, and art. As they went from city to city they gave lectures for which they charged a fee; hey, sophists gotta eat too, right? What’s more, the lectures were aimed at teaching young folks practical skills for living more intelligently in the new democratic systems evolving around Greece. For example, learning how to speak well in public and in the law courts, where juries were sometimes 500 people; many people were afraid to speak in front of such large groups. They also lectured about important skills like estate management. Books were expensive and thus almost non-existent, and so lecturing gave young folks a chance to hear about new ideas they could practice for themselves. Thus, the new skills useful in a democratic society were learned. Such skills made it easier to take advantage of opportunities growing at the time. We've already seen one example of it when Thales made a lot of money selling olive oil presses one year. Needless to say, many of those ancient liberal democratic Sophists were secular-minded. To them, learning useful skills made living here and now more secure and worthwhile. Unlike conservative, Plato many liberal Sophists didn’t bother about any other realm except our natural one; Protagoras frankly admitted his not knowing about any other world besides our natural one. After all, with centuries of practical colony building in back of them, and many smashed fingers along the way, many Sophists were confident their own practical experimental learning model would be useful to many people. Aesop's practical little stories written at that time were about what practical skills might be useful, and they’re still popular reading today. With Socrates’ (d. 399) help ethical questions became another part of classical philosophy. So, is it any wonder one of the most prominent 4th century BCE sophists, a man named Antiphon wrote (Fr. 60) “Primary among human concerns is education” And of course one of the founders of Western liberalism, Democritus, himself realized its importance too; he tells us he would rather discover one law of nature than be a king in any entire country! In China too Confucius said with education all class divisions fad. In short, education helps us see all people are related and deserve the same rights as everyone else. The business-oriented democratic world of the 400s BCE was challenging Greek men like they had never been challenged before; women and slaves were pretty much out of the public loop. Sophist teachers helped fill those new educational needs. Men needed to get better at building businesses, talking respectfully with people, and also at guiding their government as well as defending themselves in court. Thus debate and reasoning skills were needed. Even slaves were welcomed to attend, as long as they paid the fee. As a result, old Greek political institutions continued being reconstructed along democratic lines, as is our modern world, and those with more intelligent thinking and acting habits had a big advantage in that world. It became easier to make an honest drachma or two. Socrates, of course, Democritus, Plato, Aristotle, and many others soon began painting their philosophic answers to such challenging questions, and within a few decades Western civilization had liberal, moderate, and conservative educational models of excellence, although Aristotle’s wasn’t very detailed. Just as today, where they differed was in what they thought was excellent to know, and how they could best learn it. Thus, different models of nature and learning began growing. Greeks being Greeks, it wasn't soon before conservatives like Plato began challenging Democritus’s liberal naturalistic models of excellence. His religious habits were very strong; in fact his Republic rested on knowing Spirit-Objects; he felt they were the best objects to know, much like Christians would say for many centuries during the Middle Ages. Naturally, Plato educational model was far from democratic. Instead it focused mainly on how to educate a few elite students rather than everyone; many conservatives cherish such feelings to this day. In the Republic he described his youthful conservative spirit-feelings about life and education, like how only future philosopher-kings should be educated for some 50 years before they were given power. After that time they would continue enforcing a very conservative model of life on everyone, limiting both democratic and religious freedoms for everyone. As mentioned earlier, no agnostics or atheists would be allowed. However, even he saw how some liberal ideas were useful. For example, his future rulers were to spend some 15 years in practical work between the ages of 35 and 50. They would then learn something about the problems and potentials of life. After that, then while ruling their city-state, they would return to more abstract subjects, like contemplating nature's eternal and unchanging spirit-objects -- the Spirit-Objects he thought governed all of nature. Because our natural world was merely a reflection of that spirit-world, only its objects could teach people what the best knowledge was all about, and thus make their actions most excellent. Sadly, however, we’ve seen how Plato eventually realized such objects could not be known entirely, or even with any degree of certainty. So, on a logical level they remained merely an assumption with no real evidence for them. Conservatives like Socrates and Plato, and moderates like Aristotle, thought like many traditional educators still think today: Mere thinking and reasoning is the most excellent learning art. That idea lives today in many of our public schools when they emphasis book-study for 12 years as the best form of education. Some, like Socrates, preferred a conversational style of reasoning. He would talk with whomever he could and ask them to define the eternal nature of some familiar abstract idea -- friendship, beauty, justice, and courage. Conservatives like him and Plato simply assumed such objects existed; again, mathematical facts seemed to imply such eternal knowledge existed. Others, like Democritus, Plato, and Aristotle preferred a written and lecture style of reasoning; Plato and Aristotle both started their own schools in Athens and no doubt lectured in them. Thus, we can begin seeing how important education was to the Greeks; they too sensed it was the key to building a better world. Where they differed from each other was the definition of ‘better.’ For Plato better meant more controlled, less diverse, more closed, and more feudalistic. For Democritus and Protagoras better meant more freedom, equality, democracy, and variety. A Case for Character Training Like them, Dewey too saw how important education was to the health of any political system, especially democracy. After all, for almost all of civilization people had lived in feudal societies where the rights they had depended on the social power they had, whether it was military, monetary, or religious. But he also noticed how modern tax-supported public schools also aimed at keeping a status quo in place. In fact, throughout much of history students were regimented, taught to obey their teachers, and kept that way with physical punishment. In the late ancient period Augustine too was often wacked by his teachers, and even in the 1960s I too saw how Catholic education was based on physical punishment, almost on a daily basis. The school disciplinarian would daily walk around the lunchroom and bang together the heads of students laughing and enjoying themselves. In fact, it’s not too much to say the present state of our nation as largely disconnected from our political and economic systems is a direct result of our educational practices. Those 2 important systems are all but ignored in our public schools, as is the subject of character excellence. To say the least, the more those character habits are ignored, the easier it becomes for those in power to stay in power and keep increasing it too, as we’ve seen in the last few sections. In truth, CHARACTER development and skills were as important to many ancient liberal sophists as they were to modern liberals like Dewey; character habits like good speaking, honesty, helpfulness, lawfulness, and how to make an honest drachma or 2. Such habits can help keep one's freedom and knowledge growing all through life, and thus help make life more satisfying and rewarding. Without them life remains much like we see on our local news shows, full of violence and disrespect. Even some teachers were recently sentenced to prison terms for changing test score grades. For us liberal Deweyans, however, character excellence is a life-long practice and skill beginning in our public schools. It's the same way with medical or legal skills; no doctor or lawyer knows everything about their art, and so they merely KEEP PRACTICING those habit-arts all through life! It's the same way with character excellence; it's an always growing practice rather than a static skill; it challenges people to practice joyful and respectful actions all through life, in thousands of little different ways here and now. In truth, there are an infinite number of ways to practice kindness, sympathy, and helpfulness. Down through time such useful and practical character skills not only helped people keep learning more easily, but also live safer and more intelligent lives in democratic systems. For example, Protagoras said part of character excellence was the habit of respecting the law, no matter what country you were in, and so knowing what the law is became an important part of liberal excellence on a daily basis. Sadly, that skill too has been all but ignored in many, if not most, of our tax-supported public schools! How many young folks today would act more excellently if their schools focused on teaching our laws, rather than just more and more trivial academic facts about history and literature while remain largely useless for all but future teachers? Can't you just imagine Protagoras looking for a parking sign every time he parked his chariot, if parking signs existed at the time? In short practical-minded Protagoras celebrated useful character knowledge and skills; they helped make life less stressful and more enjoyable. After all, if you’re going to learn some habit-art, why not learn not only some useful habit, but how best to use it wisely and intelligently, rather than ignorantly and illegally? More often than not, such important character habits like knowing what the law says about many different actions helps preserve a person's freedom, rather than remaining a slave to their own unintelligent ideas and habits. No doubt, seeing even slaves as deserving of equal rights was another bit of liberal audacity Plato and Aristotle both could not accept. For them a feudal model of life and nature was firmly implanted! Plato once complained about slaves who were too well dressed; it made them more difficult to see. That was part of the world they lived in. It was a common feeling; many imagined everyone's Fate was all arranged at birth by 3 spirit-goddesses. No doubt, Plato and Aristotle didn't believe that, but moderate Aristotle believed some people should even be forced into slavery, even though if they were smart enough, many slaves were often given more freedom; some even became bank managers! Hundreds of years later Julius Caesar too felt justified in killing many thousands of Celts in France. Why? How else could such barbarians become truly civilized? Sounds like he definitely had more gall than kind and sympathetic feelings while in Gaul! So even in ancient Greece practical character habits became the liberal key to excellence in all things, especially in education. The more we practice such habits, and make them part of our will power, the easier it becomes to practice ethical excellence in our own democratic age. If practiced enough it becomes what many conservative and moderate psychologists call instinct! However, what that means in school is allowing students to first learn about the many different skills being practiced in the real world, and then allowing them to choose which one they would like to learn more about. No doubt, such liberal, practical, democratic actions will make it much easier to also teach the democratic character habits too, like tolerance and respect for all law-abiding people. Without such schools, feudalistic habits of intolerance and hate will continue on, as we can see daily in our media and newspapers. To this day in many places conservatives work to keep such democratic habits weak and hobbled in their growth. What’s more, religious ideas are still often used to defend such conservative actions; they might offend some god somewhere, or bring on some catastrophe. In fact, many religions continue practicing those ideas, and the more they do, the more intolerant people feel. Using Useful Ideas Before Plato was born, liberal Protagoras probably discovered a rather interesting educational question. Some practical person may’ve asked him: If whatever we experience is true for us, then why pay high fees to teachers like you to teach us about excellence? In short, if excellence is relative from city to city, nation to nation, and even from person to person, then why do we need Sophists telling us what they think excellence is? His answer, however, shows how really practical and pragmatic he was. In effect he said even though everyone is the measure of their own truth, not everyone’s truth works equally well in different social situations! Excellence in irrigating crop fields in one country, for example, may not be acceptable in another country, perhaps for religious reasons. For example, lying and thievery may be allowed in some places, but in a more civilized place neither one may work equally well. Thus knowing conditions here and now becomes another part of liberal character excellence. What is happening out there? If you visit and start talking about crop irrigation in one place, you can understand why people might think it less than excellent when they have laws against it. So Protagoras suggested an intelligent person will learn to respect the country’s laws they’re in, so life’s stresses would be reduced. It was just another example of practical reasoning. Why risk the chance of being thrown into jail, or worse, just for not respecting a country’s laws? Why try to fricassee a camel when it’s against the law? In short, for the well-traveled Protagoras, because excellence always varies from place to place, and from person to person, why not learn to respect all law-abiding people? It’s another example of how intelligent respect is one liberal democratic character habit useful in many different places! Is it all just ancient history! Even in the US, the world's oldest democracy, many conservative secular and religious folks today still feel some peaceful habits should be outlawed and forbidden, rather than tolerated; gay and lesbian equal marriage rights are merely one current example of that idea; a few decades ago it was equal rights for Africans, and in the 1800s it was equal rights for Irish immigrants. In fact, one liberal democratic character skill Protagoras taught remains excellent today: respect and obey any country's laws, as long as they're just and apply to everyone! And, even if they are unjust, work intelligently to change them if you work at all. That way you keep your freedom to keep making life better for everyone. How can education get more practical than that, and yet in many of our public schools today such ideas are only mentioned in books, if they’re mentioned at all, and rarely practiced if they’re practiced at all. If you're a real social pioneer you can challenge unfair and unjust laws in court, just to test them and maybe get them overturned, but such skills are rarely allowed to be practiced by students themselves! To us Deweyan liberals it’s another great weakness of our public schools. Most all of the learning remains confined to a merely boo-idea level of consciousness, rather than a deeper body-mind level. Protagoras’ liberal practical educational ideas, like teaching yourself useful kinds of respectful habit-arts, and of course testing them in the real world, no doubt inspired Aristotle, Dewey, and many other educators as well. For nature-loving Aristotle, founding a school became an intelligent way to build his own aristocratic models of philosophic excellence, and in it more than mere facts were to be taught. For him excellent ethical habits were those of a moderate aristocratic Greek gentleman, loaded with all its undemocratic feelings about equal rights and opportunities for anyone not a member of his aristocratic class. For the liberal and democratic Dewey, however, teaching useful and practical CHARACTER habits to all students in our public schools was the best way to keep strengthening our democracy and its liberal values of equality. If not, then such skills can even be eliminated merely within 1 generation! After all, everyone learns the habits they’re taught. If no one were taught intolerant habits they wouldn’t be practiced. Hopefully now the reader will see why Dewey based his liberal model of education on 3 pillars: fact, skills, and character development. Part of that character development depends a great deal on knowing what the law is, and the results of not respecting it. Thus, the following question: Why shouldn't young folks learn more about our laws every year they’re in school, as well as practicing such respect both in school and out? Why shouldn’t they also learn how to judge whether a law is fair and just, and helps make everyone’s life safer and more enjoyable? After all, what good is knowing a million facts if you didn't know how to wisely use them to make everyone’s life more enjoyable? Some German Nazis acted like real bastards because they used their scientific facts and skills destructively, rather than constructively and kindly. Dewey’s 3 Pillars of Educational Excellence. At the University of Chicago Dewey became friends with a woman who was helping immigrants learn more about character excellence and how to live best in their new urban and democratic surroundings. At her Hull House school Jane Addams taught poor undereducated immigrants how to use their government wisely, rather than let it merely use them and their tax money. Eventually she invited Dewey to lecture at Hull House; such lectures not only helped the immigrants, but also helped him explain his ideas of excellence with plain language, and thus help make his writing simpler and less technical. While in Chicago he also began seeing some more serious social problems immigrants were facing, and how they might be solved with some new, more useful, educational habits. With Addams’ help Dewey saw how character habits were more useful than even. Eventually they became one of Dewey's 3 liberal pillars of excellent education: factual knowledge, useful skills, and character habits. To this day, however, conservative educators continue ignoring character habits as a worthwhile educational goal! Again, they’re taken themselves out of the social improvement loop, so to speak. The more such habits are ignored in our schools, the more unintelligent actions keep happening outside of school, and the more taxpayer money must be used to keep shielding the public from such actions! In some places it now costs about $50,000 of tax money to keep just one prisoner from society! Multiply that by 2 million prisoners now jailed in the US, and you can get some idea of how taxpayer money continues being wasted unnecessarily! Just imagine how many more psychologists and student mentors could be hired by our public schools if that 100 billion dollars was spent there! Today, many of our state prisons are terribly overcrowded with young, able-bodied people who have been merely undereducated! They never were taught to enjoy working honestly and joyfully to build skills useful in the real world. They were often made to learn in a largely unnatural situation, namely to sit still and merely keep reading. And economically they were often treated as just another body useful for getting more state money! No doubt, to us Deweyan liberals, ignoring character development on a formal teaching level is one of the greatest weaknesses of US public education. It fosters and encourages many of the serious tragic life-wrecking social events we see every day around us. All criminal actions, and all the publicly paid systems to keep arresting, trying, and jailing millions of people would be greatly reduced if our public schools regularly taught the kinds of liberal character habits I’ve been talking about. To us liberals, trivial knowledge facts merely helps build trivial people. It’s another sad result of what happens when monopoly educational power stays in place, as it has in our public schools. To this day it remains controlled by a few educational bureaucrats who want to change nothing in the system. After all, they’re making good tax money for not much strenuous work. Only when enough people say enough, we want more liberal schools built in our own neighborhoods, will such schools begin to be built. As far as I can see, today the public continues being distracted from learning more about liberal education models with such issues like whether teachers should have tenure, or how many charter schools should be allow in our system? For us liberal Deweyans these are all side issues! The educational debate should be about what children are being taught in school, rather than continue to allowing trivial book knowledge to remain the main educational goal. In fact, these are anything but new educational ideas. Going all the back to ancient Greece, personal tutors taught the current character habits to their aristocratic students. Only such wealthy people could afford to hire such one-on-one tutors, and thus easily pass on to young folks the ideas parents wanted them to have. Even some Roman educators like Marcus Quintilianus (35-100 CE) pointed to their usefulness. But again, only a small class of wealthy aristocrats could afford such private tutors to home-school children. Even though the Roman Republic had recently become ruled by an all-powerful emperor, Marcus was liberal enough to realize the benefit of teaching all students such habits, whether rich or poor. In fact, for us Deweyan liberals, for thousands of years that had been education's main challenge! Dewey saw, the more young folks weren't taught such liberal democratic habit-arts in their schools, homes, and churches, the more intolerant students would become with their conservative ideas and habits. Thus, we got such atrocious and vicious actions in the Middle Ages like burning heretics alive in public, as well as helpless women and children condemned as anti-Christian and evil witches. In medieval Germany alone as many as 10,000 people were killed in one year! For him it was obvious: Democratic excellence creating a more peaceful and enjoyable world for everyone would more easily grow if excellent liberal character habits were taught to students every year they’re in school. The US founders simply weren’t very democratic. They built a central government to best help grow a wealthy upper class of businesspeople, rather than a more democratic social life for everyone, so they gave no educational powers to the central powers. Only with the recent growth of a more active federal government has it gained more power to shape public education. After 1954 it began sending troops to integrate the public schools. Dewey moved to Columbia in 1904. We can imagine, for a few moments, what life was like at the time. Dewey continued seeing many educational challenges as Africans continued being lynched in many southern states, and the racist KKK even marched in large numbers down Pennsylvania Ave. in 1920! Poor and uneducated foreigners were flooding into New York by the millions every year, including all of my grandparents; they just passed through on their way to Ohio. But many thousands stayed in New York and helped create the need for more housing, clothing, food, and schools. The entire social network was overloaded. To many of those foreigners, just having a bed to sleep in and a stove to cook on was a luxury, even if five people slept in a bed and only potatoes and vegetables were cooked. What’s more, the rather conservative public schools weren’t much help; mainly they helped immigrants learn some English and enough political facts to become citizens. However, many never learned the skills or creative habits useful in their new industrial democracy, and thus couldn’t teach them to their children. Neighborhood gangs roamed the streets stealing what they could just to stay alive. A wonderful movie showing what life was like around that time is Somebody Up There Likes Me. The schools didn’t teach children how to become honest cops or carpenters or even teach basic lawyer and doctor skills. Mainly, their goal was to just keep the kids busy with a series of passive book assignments for a few hours. By nature, however, kids and most adults are active experimental learners, as any parent soon learns. Naturally, caring liberals like Dewey asked how can the public schools help make their lives more rewarding, enjoyable, and less stressful? Like many Asian workers today, US immigrants made pennies a day while a few factory owners made fortunes. They simply weren’t interested in teaching their workers more intelligent skills like limiting their families to one or two kinds, what foods help build healthy bodies, and what laws should be respected. Many immigrant families thus turned to organize their criminal actions. Liberals like Dewey, for example, asked why merely keep giving children more book assignments if it didn't help build more useful skills and intelligent character habits. How could mere book assignments ever teach immigrants how to use the new government to make life safer for everyone, keep making life better? Why demand children keep memorizing trivial facts about American presidents, English novelists, and chemical formulas they didn’t want to learn and would probably never use in the real world? If such facts were to be learned, why not at least make them game-oriented and fun , like writing and performing their own presidential scenes, acting out the truths novelists were describing, learning their math, chemistry, and scientific facts while actually helping beautify and improve their own neighborhoods, and helping others learn more intelligent habit-arts? In short, how to stay intelligently connected with their surroundings in positive and constructive ways? Wouldn't such important skills help young folks not only find better kinds of work, and perhaps also start their own business and also use some of the profits to keep helping others? Aren’t those kinds of habits really what true civilization is all about? In short, what was educationally more important: teaching young folks trivial skills like how to work fractions and decimals year after year, or help them learn excellent character skills like honesty, creativity, helpfulness, and of course feeling what democratic tolerance feels like? No doubt, many conservative educators at first simply ignored such liberal ideas like vocational education courses; to them teaching excellent character habits was the parents' job, not theirs. But by 'passing that educational buck' to others they, in effect, helped keep their own neighborhoods degraded, encourage criminal activities for economic reasons, drug-habits of social withdrawal, and make life more stressful for taxpayers who paid for all those services to better control such actions. Again, everyone's taxes are used to keep funding schools, courts, prisons, and other remedial social services. For Dewey is just wasn’t’ very intelligent to keep our public school out of the life-improving loop, so to speak. It only kept hobbling the growth of a more democratic world. The more excellent character habits like health, lawfulness, and helpful business skills are ignored, the easier it is for young folks to fulfill the American fantasy of getting rich quickly with less than excellent actions! To this day, far too many young folks are quickly pressured to join a neighborhood gang, start demanding 'protection' money from neighborhood businesses, start abusing alcohol, drugs, vulnerable young women, and even thievery to solve boredom and money problems. Why not? It's all part of life in the big city, isn't it? Life’s a rat-race and a jungle isn’t it? And even if they do get caught committing such actions many quickly learn how to pay off the police, or go to jail and learn more criminal actions from those already there! Police corruption in the early 1900s was probably rampant in all major US cities. The movie Serpico showed how rampant the problem was in New York in the 1970s! Given the state of public awareness about education, creating more liberal schools, even in New York, was about as easy as walking on water. Many professional-minded parents naturally wanted their sons and daughters to become lawyers and doctors, and so any kind of industrial education was a step backward for them, not forward. In fact, when voters got a chance to start making their schools more liberal, like many other cities had done already, they rejected the idea during the first World War. Thus, except for creating more vocational options in some schools, the obsession with learning more and more academic trivia stayed pretty much the same. As a result, character habits continued being ignored. Poorly educated people continued living in poor neighborhoods and allowing their kids to practice more criminal kinds of habits. It seemed to be tribal warfare between conservatives and liberals with kids caught in between! Remember, both radio and television hadn't yet been invented, and even when they were they were used mainly for advertising and entertainment purposes, thus making people more eager to keep buying the goods corporations were making, like washing machines and expensive cars, jewelry, and don’t forget stocks and bonds. And because respectful character excellence wasn't taught, such cars often gave young men a place to force vulnerable women to give in sexually or get out and walk! When women weren’t taught about respectful and caring sex, or men about running an honest, lawful, and helpful repair shop, clothing factory, restaurant, or appliance store, then life remains the ‘rat-race’ it’s pretty much been for thousands of years, full of superstitions and myths. Even when a Prohibition amendment passed in the early 1900s outlawing the sale of alcohol, criminal gangs themselves became organized like corporations to keep selling it, and again paying off the police to look the other way. Even today, an traditional educational model based on trivia knowledge maintains its monopoly in public education. Most parents even today are still too undereducated about liberal models of education to even think better schools can be built, much less focus on actually building them in their own neighborhoods! They often still believe their schools should continue teaching only reading, writing, and arithmetic. Today, that monopoly is still maintained with the help of state laws, and they keep hobbling the growth of more liberal democratic schools. Even in supposedly more liberal charter schools the same kind of subjects are still forced on the most vulnerable among us, children! Teacher unions often went to state capitols and convinced politicians to pass such laws, making education improvement more difficult and practically impossible. In effect such state laws removed school improvement from local control and gave it to state officials. In fact, to this day conservative Republicans often called themselves educational reforms, and yet the reforms they suggest often change the flow of public tax money from non-profit public schools to for-profit private hands! It’s like the US Constitution merely changed the flow of public money from the British government to local aristocratic pockets. And union pay rates don’t apply to Charter schools, so the profits are even greater! Thus, teachers are left with the choice to teach more academic trivia or find some other work. Even in most Charter schools children are made to learn more and more facts-facts-facts, so the private owners and investors can collect more public tax money from the government! Such events have made liberal educational improvement difficult, if not practically impossible. Still, liberal progress hasn’t been stopped. Thanks to the growth of more liberal families, democratic progress continues growing. They care about empowering their children with more intelligently kinds of character habits! And I might add, that includes respectful sexual character habits too! What young woman today in much of the Western world doesn’t know what respectful sexual behavior is, and how they too should have a part in saying what should happen and when? But on the public school and Charter school levels, it seems the goal is still to teach academic facts, facts, and more facts. The program was firmly established in the late 1950s when the so-called Space Race began. Undemocratic conservatives convinced President Eisenhower himself to speak out against Dewye’s education ideas, and he did! Ike said Dewey’s ideas were the main reason why Russia’s space program was more advanced than the US’s! In reality, however, it seems the Russians merely captured more German rocket scientists after World War 2 than the US did! As a result, today almost everyone still believes forcing children to learn what they have little desire or use for remains the definition of good education, even though many children keep telling their parents they don’t like school? These days I hear some conservative politicians still talk about how their new educational programs will teach children to reason critically, and thus become more intelligent adults. As we’ll see, however, early in the 1900s liberal educators at Columbia like Edward Thorndike proved experimentally children learn to reason just as well in a project-oriented school, and in many cases better, than students in book-oriented schools. In any case, today probably most people still don’t know what better schools can look like, and even if they did they would often be legally kept from creating them without state permission! In short, our own education laws keep hobbling social improvements themselves! In fact, most people today have only experienced a passive book-oriented education model, and so continue naively believing making children sit at desks day after day, year after year, and remain tied to their books is educational excellence. To us Deweyan liberals it certainly is not! What’s more, educational history in the first half of the 1950s tells us Dewey’s ideas are more useful for building a more equal and democratic life for everyone! A more project and professions-oriented educational model is much more naturalistic and effective. It’s holistic, rather than merely verbal. Such a liberal educational model is more like the way children actually learn anything, namely with active kinds of practice! In them learning becomes more enjoyable, constructive, and productive because it’s based firmly on children development itself! However, education debate is practically non-existent. It’s all dictated from the top down, so to speak, just like feudalistic morals were dictated from the pope down, or laws were dictated from the king! Be honest now, when is the last time you heard any kind of meaningful debate about different educational models? Without such debate how can anyone have any real choice about what kinds of schools their tax money should be used for? Why shouldn’t parents and students have the right to start learning about a profession or career while they’re in school, so life can become less stressful once they graduate? Why should young folks enter their adult years knowing almost nothing about how to make a honest buck and help others in the process? In fact today, more than 200 years after the US was founded, most of our states in the world's oldest democracy still have unjust and unfair laws against same-sex marriage. True, they might soon all be negated by Supreme Court rulings, but when schools ignore liberal character habits, the underlying feelings of bigotry remain in place, rather than joy and feelings of wishing people well. Aren’t those the feelings all civilized people should learn? At least we liberals say they are. More than 100 years after the Civil War millions of people were still taught to hate and hobble African equal rights as much as possible! Just like philosophy itself, there are conservative, moderate, and liberal models of education, but when they fail to teach our democratic ideals of character excellence, like sharing rights equally, and how to respect others and our just laws, then how excellent are they for making everyone's life better? Should democratic habit-arts of equality, respect, or lawfulness be ignored by our schools just because people don’t realize how important they are? One Personal Recollection One similarity between liberal and conservative educational models is they both agree the ultimate goal of education is teaching students how to intelligently solve their own problems. Where they often differ is how young folks should learn to solve their own problems. Years ago, after I had taken some philosophy courses and how to ask some meaningful questions, rather than just sit around like a dope, I called into a radio talk show one day and asked 2 education professors what the best goal of public education was. At first they sounded a little surprised at such a basic question, but after a few moments they both agreed the goal was teaching students how to solve their own problems. No doubt, to both liberals like Dewey and traditional educators that goal is important; who wants to have adults stay dependent on others for solving their own problems? No doubt, many disabled people need help from others, but most people can learn to intelligently solve their own problems; after all, most problems aren’t very serious at all. So, the goal is teaching young folks how to intelligently answer life's challenges is a worthwhile one. Such skills help make life more satisfying, and thus keep growing as people. However, the big question is how should we go about teaching those important skills, like how to make a plan of action, and then experimentally test the plan to see its results? Conservative kinds of educators in general say knowing more book-facts is the best way to learn how to solve our own problems. It’s an old and traditional system. In the Middle Ages, for example, people learned to say certain prayers to help solve their problems, like disease, having a safe journey, not offending god, and asking for forgiveness. In short, merely reading examples of character excellence should be enough to teach students how to best solve their problems. For liberals like Dewey, however, what's needed is a much more active and organic kind of experimental testing and learning how such actions actually feel, so those ideas don’t become quickly forgotten, like happens regularly with mere book-facts. How many of the book-facts do typical 25 and 30 year olds remember from their 12 years of public school? So, to make ideas and skills something other than Alexander’s empire, that is narrow and shallow, it’s better to use active kinds of learning projects, rather than merely reading about them. If children want to learn, say, more about Behavioral psychology, then they might actually perform scenes from The Taming of the Shrew, or any other play where such examples exist. To liberals like Dewey that active kind of education model will always produce better results than merely reading about such examples in, say, a psychology book. In fact, only actions can best build any new habit-art. Merely reading without performing some idea leaves learning on merely a narrow and shallow verbal level of awareness, rather than a body-mind level of feeling AND idea, or as we say a body-mind level of awareness. It's the difference between merely talking about ideas and actually practicing them. The common proverb is: Actions speak louder than words! In short, modern Behavioral psychology says young folks need active practice to best learn any new habit; it is a psychology Dewey helped build! Mere reading neglects the entire feeling side of a person's body-mind, and so is much less than excellent learning, as we've seen with Plato's and Aristotle's contemplative reasoning art. It's one thing to merely think spirit-objects or eternal Forms exist, but to actually know they actually exist are 2 very different things. As we’ve seen, Plato’s Parmenides bravely demonstrated with mathematical precision why such objects were not be known and might never be known! I didn't ask it at the time I called in, but I should have: If knowing how to solve our own problems is education's main goal, then why do students made to go through 12 years of public schooling without getting any active training about solving either their own or hateful social problems? Wouldn't knowing how improving a diet habit, for example, be much easier if students knew how to actively experiment with their eating habits? And if not, then isn't our present healthcare crisis one result of neglecting such experimental learning, and relying instead on the government's help to solve healthcare problems our own bad eating habits often create?! After all, some 50% of all health problems are now said to be diet related, and the heavier people become, the more health problems they'll probably have, once again paid for with everyone's socialized tax money. And of course the more money is needed for that, the less money is available for continuing to improve and enjoy life itself. So, this question too seems more than a little reasonable: Are our own conservative book-oriented public schools really helping create many of the government programs conservatives say we shouldn’t have? Almost certainly, such programs will continue being needed as long as our public schools remain obsessed with teaching only more and more book-facts, and remain outside the loop of working to make life better for everyone! Yet another little lame limerick is offered to make the point. At memorizing definitions Jones was a whiz. Reading more as he felt some dental fizz. As teeth came from his head, He sheepishly said, My schools never taught what dental health is. 17. EDUCATIONAL MODELS, 102 Traditional Educational Weaknesses For we liberal Deweyan perhaps the greatest weakness of traditional schools is their ignore of our strongest learning art, active experimental learning. It’s a much more effective and natural learning tool than merely answering someone else’s book-questions year after year, For Dewey mere book-learning is unnatural. Why? It separates and isolates thinking from actively testing ideas, thus keeping knowledge on a purely verbal and mental level. For example, lucky students may read about useful character habits like helping others less well of, but that idea takes on another deeper meaning when such ideas are experimentally tested! In that situation the entire body is involved with the learning process, rather than just the verbal awareness. To his great credit even conservative Plato realized how important active kinds of learning are, and recommended his future leaders spend 15 years actively learning about life before they became leaders. And, a standing joke for Mark Twain was his saying he never let school get in the way of his education; he too realized the best knowledge is learned in active experimentation. It’s what gave his writings so much human depth and warmth. But, it seems even Mark missed something very important, namely the character art of using his fortune to help those less well off. He kept using his money merely to make more money, and the more his investments went broke, the more he had to work to make more money. If he’d have gone to a more liberal school where such character habits are a normal part of the day he almost certainly would have made his life less stressful and more enjoyable. Surely, the ‘Robin Hoods’ around him had fun taking it away from him with money-draining investments! As Dewey saw, for 12 years in traditional schools students are tied mainly to their books, ‘spoon-fed’ merely academic facts, like George Washington crossed the Delaware River during the Revolutionary War. However, how many students are allowed to more feel that fact in some kind of experimental body-mind way? How many students are allowed to write a short scene and actually feel how cold it was at the time, and why he was crossing the river in the first place? Washington crossed the Delaware because the plan he made to attack the British in Trenton, New Jersey needed to be tested and verified in life; it was part of the process of experimentally testing a plan there and then. What's more, if a rather rotund and overweight General Knox would have rocked the boat a little more, Washington might never have made it into New Jersey! How much more fun would learning be if children were allowed and encouraged to create such active learning situations. In short, the more young folks don't feel how important intelligent experimental learning and testing is, the more they remain immature and childlike. Again, the art is not difficult to teach. It simply means writing a plan of action, assigning different tasks to different students, and then actively test the plan; some adjustments to the original plan may be necessary, but then again, what plan is always accurate the first time? The earlier children learn that art, the easier it becomes to start solving their own problems intelligently! Again, in traditional schools teachers are almost forced to cover so much material in so much time, so students can score well on the end-of-year standardized test, and teachers can keep their jobs. However, what standardized test ever asked students what’s the best way to solve any problem intelligently? The obsession with making such tests so academically focused not only leads students to believe that’s what education should be about, but it artificially pressures teachers to keep education that way. Recently some teachers who changed students test scores were even sentenced to a year in jail; that’s how obsessed the conservative educational bureaucracy is with keeping education merely on a verbal level, and all but ignoring not only deeper, more natural, and more enjoyable kinds of learning, but useful character training too. As a result, students get almost no feeling or idea either about WHAT character excellence means or how to experimentally build it. Many leave school psychically crippled in a sense; they have few useful skills for living life well in the real world. The more such habits are ignored, the more difficult it becomes to earn an honest living after schools days are over, if, that is, they can even find a job they're interested in and pays enough to live on. More About a Liberal Educational Model Today we see some wasteful results of such educational weaknesses. Because most schools remain book-centered and fact-based, rather than individually student-centered and experimental, many students simply drop out of school as soon as the law allows. In fact, their educational needs are not being met! Why stay in school and keep learning useless academic facts. When is the last time the reader needed to prove a geometric theorem in the real world? And yet all students are made to study that art for a year! Algebra is the same way. In fact, that criticism might be leveled against most school subjects! Most students simply don't have a need to keep learning such facts; what do they have to do with life in the real world, where the American dream awaits? Almost always it seems such high schools would rather teach students to know things like why Othello caused Desdemona to commit suicide, and how to solve quadratic equations. But for Dewey, without character habits like community work and improvement, school merely keeps diverting student attention away from perhaps THE most important subject of all, namely PHYSICAL AND MENTAL HUMAN HEALTH and its 2 important habit-arts -- intelligent diet and exercise! Wealthy folks can afford to send their children to psychologists to help them learn more useful habits, but why should our tax-paid public schools keep ignoring such important skills while we keep spending some $600 billion a years building more guns and bombs? In what sense are those events worth celebrating in other countries? One result of such schools makes it more difficult to start making some positive contributions to our society; drug-dealing and criminal actions are much more profitable. In fact, as we'll see in Book 5's Models of Educational Excellence, the sooner learning the arts of experimental testing and character helpfulness, the easier it becomes for most everyone to keep educating themselves, rather than depending on others. When students discover how important excellent diet and exercise habits are in whatever career they choose, then they'll want to learn how to build those habits, and thus be better prepared for life itself, instead of just for the next test! Not learning to talk confidently, intelligently, and constructively is often another weakness of traditional schools. How many young folks are deathly afraid to say anything in front of a group? It’s certainly not because young folks aren’t capable of learning such skills; it’s mainly because they’re not allowed to practice them on a regular basis in conservative book-obsessed schools. For how many teachers is a completely silent classroom the best? What is our conservative educational bureaucracy afraid of by teaching students to speak up forcefully and rationally about events in the real world? Is it because military units function best when no one questions or talks about what’s going on? And how much more tragic is the situation when most of the information people learn about the world comes from talking, not reading or writing? How else can young folks learn to feel the art of kind and sympathetic talking when students are conditioned from grade 1 to mostly sit quietly and work from books, and when sports remain the art of merely defeating someone else, rather than learning how to intelligently keep improving our own skills of helpfulness? I hasten to add: such educational systems exist not just at the public school level. How many college students and athletes leave school with absolutely no feeling for using some of their money to help those in need, rather than merely build a bank account? And equally regrettable, how can students want to keep educating themselves when their question-asking habit is largely neglected by book assignments? In them the questions are already given, so again, without the habit of asking intelligent questions, students leave school crippled in that way? It often leads to psychic doldrums, so to speak, in which boredom becomes a strong feeling. Again, bored people are boring people. As a result, many students finish school not only afraid to say anything in front of an audience, but of not knowing anything worthwhile to say either! Evidently, since the 1950s that’s the way conservatives want young folks to be. It make life in the corporate and military worlds that much easier! They don’t want students knowing about over-population and independent kinds of thinking; they want young folks to start having a family so they have to work for whatever the corporation pays them. Thus, the more students are discouraged from talking in class about what they're learning, either in school or outside it, the more abstract skills like solving quadratic equations become meaningful; such equations, by the way, are useful for, say, finding how big a garden area might be, or even designing a piece of furniture. They have a use, but when they’re separated from constructive kinds of projects, they remain merely another mental diversion. Also, intelligent kinds of talking in class on a regular basis can not only help build all-important feelings of self-confidence, but also organizational skills. The better organized their weekly talk become, the more interesting they can be made. Conservative educators often focus mainly on teaching facts, facts, and more facts from books, books, and more books, but that’s often not all. Business skills too are often included, like typing and learning how to use our ever-growing number of electronic toys and tools. But Dewey was bold enough to ask what the results of such an education are. A passive kind of obedience was one result. The more students obey their teachers and don’t have any different learning goals themselves, then the more vulnerable they remain to people who test them for their character excellence once they leave school or home. All during his public school and university years Albert Einstein was interested only in math and science; one of his teachers even told him he would never amount to anything. Imagine what physics would be like today if Albert hadn’t remained interested in his own questions, like what is light and what would life look like if we could travel that fast? Again, is a passive and non-questioning habit really the one most cherished by our corporate and military leaders? Are they really the ones behind the creation of our book-obsessed educational systems? Well, to cite merely one piece of evidence. Admiral Hyman Rickover who helped build America’s nuclear submarine fleet in the 1950s, said as much. To him schools should teach only facts, facts, and more facts, and then let the connecting of their facts be someone else's responsibility higher up in the bureaucratic system, whether it's either military or corporate. Only they know best about the 'big picture', and what’s going on in the world. We can well imagine Socrates and Plato talking about the same kinds of ideas. To them running a government should be left to the older men who have more knowledge and experience; only their judgments can be best. Young and inexperienced people shouldn’t be given any political power, or as little as possible! It’s understandable; experience often makes people wiser, and obviously military knowledge too is seasoned and ripened with experience. However, don't even foot soldiers need character excellence, to know what's best to do with the facts they have around them? Should they just keep killing innocent people simply because they’re ordered to? For us liberal democrats, that like saying people can’t even ask why we should use our tax money to pay for 20 or 30 nuclear submarines when merely 1 of their missiles can literally level any city on earth? Should we really keep allowing people to have such power? Wouldn’t we all be better off if all such weapons were dismantled? In truth, the more people are conditioned merely to obey orders, rather than evaluate the facts for themselves, the greater the chances for massive amounts of brutality, as we saw during the Vietnam War. Babies are still being deformed by the poisons we dropped on that country! Who needs to be a rocket scientist to feel such situations call for intelligently evaluating facts rather than merely obeying others no matter what the results are? Many ancient Greeks like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle felt the un-criticized life is not worth living, but if we don’t teach young folks how to evaluate facts by their possible results, the more dangerous life becomes for everyone. Of what educational use is merely collecting more and more book-facts, and not thinking about their possible results in the real world. In such schools where critical thinking habits are taught, they become a much more important part of the community, rather than remained isolated from it. As we've already seen, I learned many isolated biological facts in school, but because I never learned to put them to use for building a more intelligent diet, I continued wrecking my own health. And here's another example of allowing only a few to tell us what the facts mean. In 2001 US intelligence services had gathered many, many facts about the 9-11 airplane hijackers; they were already here in the US taking flying lessons in different parts of the country! But such facts were never shared with different organizations, so they could be put together into a coordinated picture, and for also questioning them on why anyone would want to learn merely to fly a passenger airplane, rather than also learn to take-off and land it! The art of coordinating and using facts intelligently is definitely a more important skill than merely learning more and more facts; what do the facts mean and how can they be used to keep making life safe and productive? The more people know how to practice that creative and intelligent art, the safer we all become! Aristotle collected tons of biological facts from around his world and even organized many of them into some useful categories, but he missed evolution’s big picture; had he lived 10 years longer he may have been able to better see such a picture. In short, his un-criticized assumption about their being some eternal constant forms creating eternally constant groups of animals and plants made an evolutionary model of nature almost impossible for him. Evidently even Plato's Academy some ideas were beyond criticism! In short, we Deweyan liberals celebrate knowing facts; accurate information is needed. But to merely demand all students obey their teachers and learn the same facts, whether they want to or not, is not democratic education. At best it’s a conservative model of education aimed at maintaining a feudalistic class-based status quo! In more liberal schools children are taught how to use their facts and skills intelligently, constructively, helpfully, and if possible kindly! In truth, as test-scores and drop-out rates teach us, many students simply don't need to know more and more book-facts. Also, some 70% of high school students don’t go on the keep learning more and more book facts in college. And what’s more, much less than 30% don’t get a degree in 4 years. Today many urban schools have a drop-out rate as high as 50%! In other words, in some neighborhoods over half the students are leaving the one place they could be using as an excellent preparation into the world outside of school. So, because what's important about facts is how they’re used, shouldn't that educational fact help concerned parents keep pressuring their local schools to start including more naturalistic kinds of learning projects all through the 12 years of public schooling? The less that happens, then more and more students will continue entering their adult years psychically immature and crippled for excellently answering many of life's challenges, like obeying just laws and making only honest money. We continue seeing those kinds of results daily in our media. As John Galbraith saw, too many people, both educators and corporate supervisors, have become content to keep the class-based economic status quo in place, and so rarely even think about the social results of a 50% drop-out rate for some schools. Who cares? Let someone else deal with it! Parents aren’t the only ones in such an improvement loop. Students are too. Students too can accept the challenge to improve that 50% drop-out rate, so as to better meet different student learning desires. For example, why shouldn’t students wanting to be business people be able to make some ‘school money’ with a student business, and then use it to help those less fortunate? In short, why not turn student creativity and experimentation loose in a safe and constructive manner, to help more students stay in school and keep improving themselves as well as their neighborhoods? Such learning not only gets students more feelingly involved with local challenges, but also with helping others to help themselves. In short, the more students are encouraged to ACTIVELY AND EXPERIMENTALLY solve their own problems, the more their own educational and character excellence grows stronger, the more mature students will become, and the more their own schools will continue being improved. Believe it or not folks, nature has no desire to leave manmade projects alone, and that’s been a challenge for only about 4 billion years, give or take a New York minute of 2! As many are seeing today, education dollars are becoming less available as income and taxes remain stagnant. Especially during recessions tax revenues become even less, and so intelligence tells us more community volunteers are needed, especially in the lower grades, to help students start learning about intelligent experimentation. That shouldn’t be a problem now that millions of ‘baby-boomer’ retirees are now available. Then, as children enter their constructive stage of development they will need more help building the many workshops students can use to start learning about the skills they will use as adults, everything from computer, doctor, and legal shops to carpentry and plumbing. No doubt, money will also be saved from not needing all the books used in traditional schools. And teacher roles will be changed from finding and grading book assignments to one of mainly guidance, encouragement, and problem solving. In any case, however, the traditional separation of intelligent work habits from helpful character habits will end. And the more young folks learn to enjoy such habits and respect just laws, the less vulnerable they’ll become to criminal behavior and drug abuse, to name just 2, as well as merely making war-weapons endangering innocent people. Life is sacred. That’s not to say sometimes violence is needed against those who aim at harming and killing anyone, but thankfully such people are still a small minority. What's more, the more students keep intelligently criticizing and improving their own schools, the easier it will be get needed public funding to build and equip all the practical workshops at liberal schools. No one can say for sure how many shops will be needed at every school; each school and district has its own needs and so should be built to serve community needs. Still, food, clothing, and health shops will probably be useful in all schools. Even if students learn nothing else besides what mental and physical health is, and how to practice it, it’ll be a great improvement over many of our traditional schools. And, it’ll also be easier for students to volunteer when they’re adults, and feel gratitude to the school that they will feel cared for and nurtured them so well. They’ll also learn what habits they need to keep strengthening our democracy, like staying in contact with their representatives, voting, and protesting all the attempts of those trying to weaken it, so they can keep using the system for their own personal gain. In that way they’ll start building a social consciousness, rather than just caring about themselves. We still have many serious problems, like dangerous atomic weapons, global warming, environment pollution, and equality issues. To keep children isolated from those issues merely helps keep them in place. Why shouldn’t students be included in those improvement loops, and be trained to constructively criticize and improve not only their own schools, but their nation and world as well? Such critical thinking and constructive actions are another important place to practice intelligent experimentation, and perhaps even produce some real improvements. In any case, they’ll learn more about our strongest learning art – intelligent experimentation. After all, isn’t it more intelligent to keep experimenting with constructively engaging an enemy instead of merely keeping them isolated or kill them? No doubt, new obstacles will be felt in all learning projects, but that’s where skill like creative thinking and intelligent negotiation become useful, right? Experimenting With A New Educational Model Such traditional educational weaknesses as were mentioned earlier, like not actively teaching excellent character habit-arts on an active level of learning, have helped keep far too many young folks grossly undereducated and often frustrated. Also, school boredom is often a serious problem, and a sign of educational needs not being met. Thus parents are also challenged more than ever to also help their children learn more about all the useful and rewarding work available in the real world, and help them start learning about their own strengths and weaknesses, so they might feel where they can best use their talents. How many young folks leave school with knowing little about themselves, and so have little feeling for what kind of work they want to do? Thomas Edison’s mother was a fine example of such a caring parent. America’s greatest inventor went to public school for only a few years, and then his smart and creative mother home-schooled him! She encouraged him to build habits of constructive curiosity and imaginative question-asking, 2 useful habits for intelligent experimentation. While still in his teens he invented a better telegraph system. His mother knew how important it was to teach creativity's habit-art and how it depended on a question-asking habit. Asking about how things work and also how they might be improved helped focus and strengthen his art of intuitively creative thinking and testing. Those kinds of habits were used all through his life at his New Jersey lab too; sometimes he’d even lock the doors so his workers couldn’t get out until they helped find solutions to creating another invention. It also took those workers over a year to invent a useful working light bulb. Too bad the element neon wasn’t discovered until 1898 or else the problem would have been solved much easier and our world would have become much more colorful. We Deweyans ask why shouldn’t any student learn to practice such creative skills in whatever class they take? Any subject can be adapted to any student’s talents and needs, and so that kind of experimental learning can be encouraged in any workshop with the help of intelligent questions. After all, aren’t all the products we have today the result of such thinking? For example, how might we begin making our traditional schools more student centered instead of book centered? No doubt one useful idea is a small step-by-step approach to improvement, as we’ve seen Part 1 with building better habit-arts. If true, then to try to convert all schools in a district to an experimental workshop system, or even all the grades in one school all at once, might be too much of an adjustment for both students and teachers to make. It might cause more frustration than satisfaction. And so to avoid such possible results, a ‘baby-step’ approach to improvement might be best, say, making a plan for the first 3 grades where students are mainly using the senses to learn more about themselves and their world. So, projects using that fact can be more intelligently designed. With such thinking the reader can begin feeling some of the new challenges faced when trying to convert a traditional book-centered school into a more liberal child-centered school. They aim to take advantage of childhood’s 3 main stages of development; they are sense-based until about 7 or 8, a constructive phase between 8 and 14, and then as their brains become more developed they enter an abstract thinking phase. Many book-centered schools tend to ignore those first 2 stages of development, and keep children working on book assignments, which for many children soon become boring. In most students there’s little natural ability and desire to learning such abstract facts. And for another thing, conservative book-and-teacher-centered schools keep students basically inactive and confined to passive class work almost all the time, writing the answers to their book questions, and then having teachers grade their work. No doubt it’s easy work for teachers, but what important and useful character habits are students not learning in such schools, and how deeply are they feeling their importance to making life less stressful and more enjoyable? As a result, many students learn the habits often practiced all through the Middle Ages, namely passive obedient to those in authority, and to do whatever they’re told, rather than learn to think and act constructively for themselves. Such schools explain why that era lasted for over a thousand years, and why democratic habits even in the world’s oldest democracy is still weak and neglected! Also, students don't get much practice focusing on either personal or community improvements, like demanding living wages, more of a voice in political decision-making, and equality for all law-abiding citizens. Teaching such passive and obedient habits were useful to the social ruling class; they helped keep a feudal social structure solidly in place with various forms of slavery. Even as late as the early 1800s George Hegel, Germany's archconservative philosopher, echoed such ideas when he said: "Thought, as much as will, must commence with obedience." And the more such habits were encouraged the German, Japanese, and Italian schools, the easier it was for people like Hitler, shoguns, and Mussolini to make people soldiers. In today’s much more democratic and industrial world such habits are simply counterproductive in many situations. Liberal kinds of creative and experimental habits are much more useful in today’s world, and they help build a person’s individuality, creativity, independence, and reliable knowledge. They are, in fact, the kind of habits that helped a few people build Western civilization's life-changing Industrial Revolution shortly after Hegel died in 1831. What’s more, such experimental habits encourage more reliable and organic kinds of ideas, rather than believing their own ideas are absolute Truth for all time. Besides such creative habits are the normal way people learn, as can be seen from watching a group of even young children. Who ever saw a child learn to ride a bike, cook a meal, fix a broken toy, build a new invention, and learn how dangerous alcohol can be just from reading about them in books? And it's why caring and thoughtful parents often encourage their kids to keep experimenting, but intelligently rather than merely routinely! Such parents will also teach them to help others with their skills, rather than merely think only about their own comfort. As a result, liberal schools will begin looking differently from traditional ones; liberal schools will have more shops, like metal, auto, wood, garden, health, and clothing shops for students to actively their creative and experimental habit-arts. For liberal Dewey, because we’re all individuals, with our own powers of independent thinking, the child should be encouraged to keep actively practicing such intelligent habits. What intelligent mechanic doesn't know how to read a repair manual, use mathematics to figure out another outrageous repair bill, or how to tell someone they need a new muffler bearing? When the emphasis is on learning character excellence, then young folks can begin feeling how such habits only increases the chances for making their own life better. Why keep practicing habits that keep making life less than what it might be? Shouldn’t we be honest with ourselves about such education? If capitalism and democracy both work best when people know what excellent habits feel like, and practice them, then not to teach them merely weakens both our economy and our political system. Even today we see the results of mean and unkind discrimination of law-abiding and helpful people. How intelligent is that? After all, how vibrant and healthy for everyone’s health can any political system be when peoples’ main habit-art is obedience to merely old traditional ideas that started growing long before our modern democracies began growing? In more liberal schools children will learn ideas should be practiced just because they’ve been practiced for centuries! How much more stressful and dangerous did life remain just because many people continued believing slavery had been practiced for centuries and was, therefore, natural and normal? Communist Russia and China, Nazi Germany, and many other countries including the US all have seen, at times, examples of how dangerous life can become when people refuse to see their habits and ideas as merely the result of their practice, rather than believing they’re nature’s eternal and unchanging truth? Even today, in the US, the reluctance to experiment with liberalizing drug and sex worker laws may be doing more harm than good to many young folks. Blind and unintelligent obedience to the social status quo in effect keeps encouraging people to practice their routine habits, keep things as they are, don’t rock any boats, and keep allowing power-hungry and greedy people to keep increasing their power, rather than using it to help others. If nothing else, much of our own history is mainly a record of such people and the sometimes painful results of their actions. In short, only as people become more educated about how all habits are learned experimentally, and how to enjoy experimenting with building better ones, can intelligent change and progress grow at a more progressive pace. If not, tribal and gang warfare will continue on. How many students never realize they have the option of helping improve their local libraries, health clinics, and homeless services? In short, the more parents, teachers, and students realize they have the freedom to build more intelligent character habits, like better diet and exercise habits, and more community-improvement projects, then the more students will become anchored to life outside of school, the world they will eventually inherit. Such schools have a much better chance of improving many of our own social problems, like intolerance and hateful bigotry, and in the process put our socialized taxes to better use than building more wasteful prisons and deadly weapons. We Deweyan liberals like to ask, why shouldn’t students be included with such an improvement loop? Not to include them is merely to keep them sheltered, immature, and naïve. In other words, life has become something each of us helps make, rather than merely accepting what others say it should be. Why shouldn’t that fact be applied to our schools as well as our government? Just because kids drop-out doesn’t mean they want to quit learning; it often means they just want to learn different things than what’s being taught, and whatever that is there are intelligent and unintelligent ways of using such knowledge. Crooks exist in every profession. How many kids are lured into drug-dealing just for the money, or because everyone else is doing it, and how much do our own schools and drug laws keep encouraging kids to keep endangering their own lives? How Hot Are You for More Sex Education???? What other examples illustrate Dewey’s educational models of excellence? Sex education is definitely another good example. One fact many people choose not to think about is the variety of sexual habits and actions, and so many people feel they don’t want their children learning about them wither. But, how intelligent is that? Not to know such facts only keeps one’s psyche narrow, shallow, and worst of all intolerant! What good is being ignorant about human habits when those habits are practiced in today’s world? Doesn’t such ignorance just help increase anxiety about others, rather than a more intelligent well-wishing? In fact, sex is a perfectly normal human need, and so why not teach high schoolers what some intelligent and acceptable expressions are? Here, of course, I’m certainly not recommending experimentation in the public schools, even though it no doubt exists in many of them today. But shouldn’t just that fact be reason enough to help students begin feeling what sexual respect looks like, and how it can even be treated with some humor and laughter? In many schools even reading about different sexual expressions would go a long way to making young adults feel more comfortable in the adult world. In the native world children are often married when they’re sexually mature. Wouldn’t better facts about sex be justified if it helped prevent even one unwanted pregnancy, or even one expression of sexual immaturity, like satisfying one’s self as quickly as possible? Shouldn’t high schools begin seeing sex too can be a creatively joyous and happy event each time it’s practiced, rather than the same ol’ same ol’? Why shouldn’t more schools be allowed to experiment with such classes on a mental level? After all, we’re all just human and there are many ways of expressing one’s sexual feelings intelligently, joyfully, and respectfully. No doubt, such excellent sex habits of demanding respect from a partner would help reduce much sexual trauma, and unnecessary worry and anxiety. They could even practice such respectful behavior in class, and thus reduce many irrational sexual fantasies about men acting dominantly and women acting passively. As liberal Protagoras liked to remind people, mankind is the measure of all things, of things that are bad and good. Sex education to one may, thus, be moral corruption to another. However, if such classes were merely another educational option to choose, rather than a required course for everyone, then students and parents would be free to make an intelligent choice about what they want their child to learn. That way such ideas can be learned only by those who choose to learn them. In any case it should be obvious, the freedom to keep intelligently experimenting with what children can learn is a very important part of liberal educational excellence. The more legislators keep restricting how our schools might be improved, the less free students become to see what excellence means to different kinds of situations. To us Deweyan liberals that result is certain less than excellent. We live in a world where people are conditioned to build many different kinds of habits, and not to realize that only keeps isolating and separating people from that world. What’s more, as more than 20 sexually-transmitted diseases teach us, the less students can learn about them in sex class, the more vulnerable they stay to getting them, and the more tax money is needed to pay for their health bills! So, why shouldn’t students be free to make such intelligent class choices in high school, just as they should be free to start learning about excellent diet and exercise habits all through grade school? Who knows? It may even help create some more intelligent ways of managing prostitution practices. After all, it’s been legal in much of Nevada for decades and believe it or not some women haven’t been corrupted, but liberated! What Is Psychological Health? Psychological health is another very important subject for we Deweyan liberals. What do we mean by it? What is it? How do we go about achieving it? Such questions were talked about in Part 1, but they can also be talked about to students, as well as actively practiced all through grade school. After all, such habits are useful throughout life, and so the sooner they’re learned, the better life becomes! For us some of the basic ideas of Behavioral psychology can be taught to students even at the sense-based stage of development. As we’ve been seeing, accurate and reliable psychological information is another new modern educational challenge. As late as the 1800s very intelligent modern sophists like Robert Ingersoll complained about not having some real dependable psychological knowledge about ourselves taught in our public schools, like what excellent speaking and working habits feel like, and the best way for young folks to experimentally learn such useful habits. Since then, however, psychologists like Dewey have learned a lot about how best to build new habits and skills, so why not empower young folks with such knowledge? Joyful and encouraging speaking habits can be learned a little more each day. After all, all people must live with themselves all through life, and yet much about such healthy psychological actions can keep weakening any destructive habits they may be learning. What are habits, and why is it so difficult to stop abusing tobacco or alcohol; eating less than excellent foods now offered on just about every block in every city; what is an excellent diet for my body; what is humor and why is it so important to psychological health; what’s the best way to learn such habits and thus make life more satisfying; and why should anyone pay honestly-earned money to merely keep harming themselves with less than excellent food? If those results aren’t promoted with healthful psychological actions, then what would be? How can we expect our own nation to keep using limited money for diet-related health problems and yet not teach young folks what physical health means, and how to actively learn more about it? If not, then we continue living in a naïve psychic world where merely by passing a constitutional amendment will stop people from abusing alcohol. We've already seen how important psychologically excellent habits can be, like how to enjoy improving our own weak, excessive, and unhealthy habits one ‘baby-step’ at a time. But if more people are to learn them, then shouldn’t they too be offered as subjects even to primary-age students? They can at least begin feeling what they’re like. And if so, then why aren’t more useful psychological classes a real option to students who often want to know more about their own body-minds, and what health means? Where is the intelligence in restricting such knowledge about body-mind health itself in our public schools? What can it feel like to build a better diet or exercise habit; how can they be strengthened; and how important is enjoyable practice for learning such habits? What does it feel like to build an intelligent plan for improving an unhealthful and dangerous habit, and then how can we best test the plan to see its results? And of course there's physical health as well. What exercises and foods best help us stay in ship-shape shape, and when’s the best time to practice them? Not only are such habit-arts useful all through life, but they also help students solve another important educational challenge -- building the inner enjoyable and fun feelings of a healthy body-mind, as well as intelligently knowing how to best control our own growth. It’s certainly no absolute guarantee of a long and productive life, but then again what is? Education’s Important Social Results Are such liberal educational ideas really too radical, bazaar, idealistic, or communistic? Not at all. They just reflect some of the useful knowledge science has recently discovered. As our newspapers and media remind us daily, unintelligent habits help make everyone’s life more stressful and dangerous; who doesn’t remember the chaos caused by 19 9-11 hijackers? Thus, weak and unintelligent educational habits help produce less-than-excellent social results. As is widely known, even in democratic countries like the US young folks often finish 12 years of public schooling and have almost no feeling for what character excellence is or job skills! That’s a social result every liberal person should be outraged about; we all pay for the social results of such schools. Even good students are at a big disadvantage compared to those who already know how to respect the law, keep only honest money, practice equal rights, and help others help themselves. In short, book knowledge is far from an excellent education! Without learning something about character excellence young folks often become vulnerable to acting like morons, with no respect for any law or person. And worse, they have no questions about how they can become more intelligent character artists, build better habits, and keep contributing to our nation’s well-being. In fact, learning just one character excellence, like obeying just laws, makes our country that much more excellent and allows more tax money to be spent on building more liberal schools. Normally students learn almost nothing about how their book-knowledge can be best used to improve their schools or neighborhoods. That’s yet another weak social result of our public schools. Probably in every city in the world even primary students can learn more about creatively using their book-facts for thousands of different beautification and improvement projects. Merely growing flowers for a local park can help young students begin feeling how important chemical and conservation facts are. Such projects would also begin strengthening creative thinking’s habit-art. What better place and time is there to start learning such habits than in the primary grades? Why shouldn't even 1st graders learn to feel such excellent ideas and their constructive social results, like where to find useful book-facts about growing flowers, how easy it is to keep building their sense of humor, positive speaking habits, how celebrate democratic equal rights, and begin learning more about body-mind health? Shouldn’t more parents and students be asking themselves what social results are our book-centered public schools helping produce? Such educational weaknesses of traditional schools keep weakening both people and our nation! Our millions in prisons are all evidence of how our traditional book-obsessed public schools are still out of the improvement character loop. And again, to house, feed, and clothe all those people are paid by taxpayers. Why shouldn’t our schools be places where young folks can start learning how to respect someone’s else property, how to help those less well off, how to speak honestly, how to earn honest money, and how to report those who pose a serious threat to others? The more such character excellence is ignored, the more our San Quentin’s and Sing-Sings get a multiple-occupancy room ready, all at taxpayer expense of course! According to one report California taxpayers now pay about $50,000 a year per inmate! And how many millions more remain undereducated but haven't yet turned to major criminal actions, like welfare and insurance fraud? Because people reproduce faster than they reconstruct and improve their schools, it’s still easy for dangerous and unhealthful habits to be pasted from one generation to the next. Obviously most parents are much more caring about what their children learn, and so help them become of more conscious of dangerous habits. But how many poor folks don’t have such caring and helpful parents? We see the results of unwanted children in homeless numbers in all our cities. Why shouldn’t they have better schools to teach them more excellent habits? Even in upper middleclass neighborhoods how many young folks begin using illegal drugs even before they leave school, to relieve their stressful muscular tensions, and even turn to gangs to help support their drug habits? Isn’t that alone a good reason to at least begin experimenting with decriminalizing drug use? And if it works to reduce crime rates, then wouldn’t that free up even more tax monies for more constructive educational work, like teaching students how to live joyfully and constructively, rather than depressively and destructively? How many people out there still have such habits, and feel even murdering innocent people is justified, or other gang members? The more such habits are neglected, the more it seems war has remained almost inevitable, from ancient Greece, to the 1800s when the US government almost killed our entire Native American population, to 2 World Wars, Korea, and Vietnam! Are those the social results of any truly civilized nation? Of course not. But unless more caring people begin to speak up, and want to help those disadvantaged young folks, those social results will almost certainly continue happening. Won’t war become extinct when people feel everyone else is sacred, and when it ceases to be at all profitable? Am I being too romantic, utopian, idealistic, and even unscientific? After all, how can you possibly reason with someone like a Hitler or a Stalin? British PM Chamberlain tried reasoning with Hitler and failed miserably, but doesn’t that teach us such excellent character habits need to be taught to everyone as soon as possible, in Germany as well as Britain? It may sound too optimistic but we liberal say even if Hitler had had a kinder and more intelligent education, one that helped him fulfill his dream of being an architect, the world would be a different place today? He wanted to help build useful building, and yet people kept telling him he didn’t have the talent for it, or encouraged him to practice the excellent skills, knowledge, and character habits he needn’t to become an architect! Eventually after Germany’s defeat in World War 1 he found a ‘scapegoat’ for his hatful feelings -- the Jews. Today US jails are already terribly over-crowded with inmates needing more civilized and respectful training and education, and when they don’t get it they often remain socially dangerous. Doesn’t it make much more sense to teach such habits BEFORE they learn unintelligent habits, rather than after they’ve learned them? Afterwards just makes learning more intelligent habits that much more difficult. What’s more, prison guards keep demanding ever more money from tax payers, and when taxes shrink during recessions then political leaders have little choice but to release some still-undereducated prisoners to help balance budgets! In a healthy democracy people would have demanded such educational improvement decades ago! Isn’t it time we faced this fact? Even the US is still far from a healthy functioning democracy, and from building schools where dreams are fulfilled rather than frustrated. No doubt there are a great many positive learning events going on in our public schools every day. I certainly don’t mean to suggest doomsday is our democracy is on the verge of becoming another military dictatorship. However, the more we ignore teaching such excellent character habits in favor of teaching habits of obedience and acceptance, the closer we move to such a government. Obviously many more students could be taught more about building excellent character habits IF more parents and children were free to experimentally work at improving their own neighborhoods and schools. We Deweyan liberals aren’t asking all public schools become more liberal all at once. We are asking for more freedom at the local level for caring and concerned parents and students to create such schools in their own neighborhoods! Without that freedom at a local level educational experimentation will continue within the same book-obsessed system we now have. Today it’s called the Common Core system, but it’s essentially the same book-centered system already in place. It’s like experimenting with, say, only different kinds of tea. What we liberals need is the freedom to experiment with milk, coffee, sodas, and waters! In any case, however, people still have the ultimate power in a democracy, even though our own feudalistic political system makes an improvement process more difficult. Just as the aristocracy make improvement for the serfs almost impossible in the Middle Ages, so too state and national laws keep making improvements at the local level more difficult. Not impossible, just more difficult. School improvement is just one example among many, drugs and prostitution laws are 2 other examples. With such a political system the feudal Middle Ages lives on. The improvement door is open somewhat. But for real experimentation to begin happening, more parents, teachers, and students need to start demanding the freedom to start a process of public school improvement! How many parents and students today still don’t even realize they can help build better student-centered schools if they have a plan and demand the freedom to experiment? How many of tomorrow’s criminals would start building more helpful and sympathetic character habits if they were allowed to read to the elderly and disabled even one day a week? Much of the time undereducated parents simply don’t know such character-building options are available, or why they’re so important. Most people come home from work dog-tired and ready for dinner, a few beers, and little else. Most people don’t even ask themselves how many young frustrated drop-outs could be helped to make their dreams become reality in more liberal schools, where students are given more of a choice besides learning more book-facts or leaving school. These aren’t just abstract ideas; they’re a felt reality playing out throughout the US, and no doubt much of the world too. Like any good experimentalist Dewey’s constructive public school criticisms in the early 1900s began focusing on specifics, like job training. Vocational schools, for example, were one of his suggestions, and they’ve grown tremendously since then. Many of Los Angles’ schools too now teach useful job skills for a specific service, like health care, performing arts, and business skills, so they help children learn some practical habits. All well and good. But, how many such students still don't learn what excellent community-service habits feel like? How many never learn how to help others with some of their money? And the more such character habits are formally neglected, the more government monies will certainly be needed to keep the dangerous social results of such neglect controlled by more police, courts, and prisons. How many ‘inner’ cities around the country have already become social ‘sewers’ where homeless people live? No doubt, it's useful to learn practical job skills like carpentry, welding, auto and computer repair, and experimental lab skills, but why should equally useful charity and philanthropy training stay conveniently ignored? When they are is it the result of conservative teachers who want to maintain a feudalistic class or tribal structure as much as possible? The good news is we’re not facing an immediate doomsday implosion, at least not until too much atmospheric carbon makes life impossible in many places. The world may well end in a carbon whimper, rather than in atomic blasts! Students today are getting many more educational options for character development than ever before. They can volunteer, for example, for many trash-collecting programs on the weekends, and with helping people overcome local disasters, like earthquakes and floods. But, again, aren't there more intelligent and helpful activities to learn other than sweeping streets? What about using all their scientific facts about plants and animals to build community gardens with senior citizens? Wouldn’t they be more fun and educational than sitting in some classroom day after day, memorizing soon-forgotten book facts? Wouldn’t such active learning projects help make their book-work even more meaningful? Wouldn’t it be great exercise for seniors too? During this relatively peaceful time, isn’t it time people started experimenting more with getting students out into our neighborhoods in a safe and healthy way? How many poor communities could use a community fish tank, and how many high schools students would love to build one with the intelligent constructive skills they learned in their public schools? No doubt there would be new safety challenges to overcome first, but students could even help solve them too. People are facing new economic challenges on a daily basis too, as obscenely wealthy people keep creating and maintaining a system where only they keep becoming wealthy. But if economists are right, and capitalism really runs on consumer choices, then why can’t our schools begin weaning students away from their books and begin feeling what it’s like to start demanding huge concentrations of wealth be better circulated for everyone’s benefit, and not just a few? And if adults are free to make the purchases they want, then why shouldn’t students be free to choose the classes they want to attend? Why not let the student market decide what their classes should be, and how they should be taught, just like consumers stock purchases help decide what businesses to grow? Who knows? Some teachers might even like such work more than merely grading papers and making tests. Again, all such reconstructive changes needn’t be abrupt, total, and thus too disruptive! They can be slow, gradual, and always improving; slow and steady wins the educational race too, doesn’t it? That way it’s easy to correct and improve weaknesses. Some of the wasteful social results already mentioned tell us more people should be free to experiment with our public schools. Each year tens of billions of dollars are already being spent by our police, courts, and prisons to merely correct or confine unhealthful character weaknesses. Wouldn’t it have been better for tax payers to teach more intelligent habits in grade-school? What judge or cop wouldn’t like to play more golf or tennis, or have more time to visit our schools and speak more about what respectful habit-arts students are learning? Wouldn’t the same also apply to doctors, psychologists, and lawyers? The longer we ignore such character excellence, the more obnoxious and wasteful social results are produced. By the time they get to prison it’s almost impossible to teach young folks more intelligent habit-arts. For years many will remain just as reasonable as Herr Hitler, and some even suffer the same suicidal fate. Timothy McVey was so angry he built a car bomb and killed over 200 people with it; how many young McVey’s are now in our public schools? Shouldn’t our schools have more psychologists working to find out who has such feelings, and then help them build more constructive ones? Aren’t our public schools the nature work place for our psychologists? Bottom line: Educational change is not impossible. Difficult yes, impossible no! Drug abuse is one example. Our legal system is realizing drug abuse is more of an educational problem than anything else; many people simply never were encouraged to teach themselves to enjoy life without drugs. Many of their public schools were places where serious, silent work was practiced most of all. No doubt, illegal drug abuse is still not widespread, but legal drug abuse seems to be much more widespread than it once was. In any case, learning to work and play enjoyably while in school would help reduce the need for such abuse, wouldn’t it? After all, what else do drugs do but relax a person and promote confident feelings? Once again, experimentation with more liberal schools is the only way to find out for sure! In any case such problems continue sapping billions to stop, say, Columbian coca planters, and still haven’t solved the problem of cocaine abuse here in the US. People continue paying for the drug, when they could just as easily get a legal prescription and also start talking to a drug counselor about building more healthful habits. At any rate, isn’t it worth experimenting with teaching more enjoyable habits in our public schools? Who knows for sure what useful social results will be produced? Like so many other personally weak, excessive, and unhealthful habits, drug abuse too is an educational problem, not a criminal problem! Again, the more young folks teach themselves the excellent character art of enjoying and celebrating life without drugs, the less need they'll have for them later on, and what better place is there to start learning such character habits than in our homes, churches, and schools? One day our churches may stop controlling others by teaching religious spirit-myths and instead focus only on helping people become more independent and learn how to intelligently help themselves. Why shouldn’t parents start demanding our public schools teach more than the so-called 3 R’s -- reading, writing, and arithmetic? Why shouldn’t they teach students how to become more independent and how to use book facts to keep making life more satisfying? What might such schools and churches look like? They would be places where everyone could learn more intelligent habit-arts, like how to make an intelligent practice plan, and then carefully test it. When building a more healthful diet, for example, student teams can first read and get some facts about different foods -- learn more about some healthful diet options and what results they might produce in their own bodies. Who knows, some may even discover ways to even improve on the book-facts! Then they can make a plan to test their ideas. As we’ve already seen, such active experimental learning has become our strongest learning art, and such planning and testing would begin building their feelings for that most important habit-art. What's more, if their testing also helped feed some of those less fortunate, like with a garden or fish farm, it would also begin building the useful character art of helping others. In that way learning would be much more active, experimental, and natural, just as it is outside of school! Instead of getting in education’s way such schools can make it more excellent, helping more students become more confident they can intelligently become what they want to become. Here's a great example of how neglected excellent character habits still are, even for gifted students at one of our best universities. Merely learning more and more mathematical facts helped a ‘genius’ earn a doctorate degree at Harvard, but he eventually became a murdering Unabomber who the public now supports with their taxes? Well at least his bombs were all mathematically correct, weren’t they? It’s yet another reason why we Deweyan liberals say character excellence -- KNOWING HOW TO USE FACTS INTELLIGENTLY TO HELP OTHERS AND OUR SELF -- might be THE most important educational goal! And to get that point across with a little more humor, and impress the idea on all peoples’ minds forever and ever, or as least on one person’s mind, here's yet another laboriously lame limerick! To a thief who was caught with the brass He was asked why act like an ass? Why not look twice, To find a nice Little computer rip-off class? No doubt, even criminal actions too need new skills just to stay in business. 18. MORE ABOUT LIBERAL EDUCATION, 102 Esthetic Experience in Our Schools That sounds like a very sophisticated kind of experience, but once again, odd-sounding words are often used to describe very simple ordinary experiences. Case in point: for us Deweyan liberals esthetic experience merely calls our conscious attention to our feeling here and now. Feeling, say, sunlight is an esthetic experience. What could be simpler? When children build their first finger painting, for example, they have some new esthetic experience -- they feel what the paint looks and feels like, and thus keep expanding their old set of esthetic feelings. And when they use such feeling to help others become a little smarter, their socially esthetic feelings grow as well. However, the more our public schools allow such experience to remain on a non-verbal subconscious level of awareness, the more disconnected from esthetic experience students become. Luckily philosophic history often talks about such feelings when it talks about learning and art. Ancient Greeks, for example, called such feelings qualities, like hot and cold, wet and dry. Thus, for Dewey, new esthetic feelings are important; they're the natural result of any new body-mind learning experience. As anyone knows, one’s first sexual experience is full of new esthetic feelings! It’s why such constructive building projects became important in his educational model. They further educate the entire body-mind of feelings AND ideas. Such experiences not only produce new ideas but new feelings as well. For him, another great weakness of our public schools is to quickly downplay feelings’ importance in learning by confining student work to merely book ideas! Such a conservative learning model soon makes school something to be endured, rather than enjoyed; the feeling of enjoyment is so important to learning any kind of new habit. Why keep practicing something that’s not enjoyable and fun? How many parents today not only ask their children what they learned in school today, but also about how they felt about such ideas -- what their esthetic learning felt like? How many parents today ignore their child’s bored feelings, and tell them that’s the way school is, rather than demanding the schools start producing more enjoyable esthetic learning experiences. Centuries ago Ben Franklin realized how important esthetic feelings were in education, and so suggest students get out of the classroom and go on field trips to feel how other people are working. Today students still go to museums, but when it’s only once or twice a year it doesn’t overcome most boring feelings about school. What’s more, how many parents never teach their children how to CONSCIOUSLY make their lives more enjoyable with playful esthetic experience by simply talking about that art? How many parents in fact keep allowing their public schools to continue wasting so much of students’ time and efforts learning mere mental ideas, rather than demand a more holistic body-mind approach to learn with more active learning projects? Such active learning projects also makes learning character habits like respect and honesty that much easier when they’re felt and not just redd about! How many people today are still esthetic children, and don’t realize how important enjoyable feelings are in any new learning experience? Such esthetic feelings help make life and learning less stressful, more enjoyable, and more satisfying! More liberal models of educational excellence like Dewey’s encourage all the above-mentioned kinds of esthetic excellence; they promote democratic and individual development. They nurture individual development, rather than keep isolating students from each other as well as bodily feelings from mental ideas. Mere book work emphasizes just the thinking and reasoning half of the body-mind. More liberal educational models like Dewey’s ask how can we better guide and encourage more enjoyable, respectful, and helpful feelings to keep growing in students, and thus weaken disrespectful and selfish feelings? Active and practical workshops and projects for students was the best answer to that question. Within them learning all the traditional skills like reading, writing, and arithmetic are learned naturally, rather than boringly and repetitively! Such work job-based workshops can best promote the practice of enjoyable esthetic feelings, and thus make learning itself more fun. Just the act of building something, whether it’s a table or a relationship, is itself capable of generating a very large number of new esthetic meanings and feelings. In fact, enjoyable esthetic feelings can turn any unsatisfying routine habit into a more creative habit-art. How many people have felt golf was too frustrating while they were learning it, and yet continued improving those feelings with more enjoyable practice? In fact, such enjoyable esthetic feelings have often been used to build a person’s sexual habits as well, so it’s intelligent to first ask a person you’re interested in what their sexual training has been. It just might save a lot of wasted time and frustration later on. New and unfelt esthetic feelings always grow during new experiences, but like anything else it takes some practice to first consciously notice them, and then to make them as enjoyable and fun as possible! Otherwise, all constructive work is merely unintelligent routine. Here is where teachers can be so useful; good liberal teachers help students verbalize their feelings, and thus make it easier to make a conscious plan to make them more enjoyable and fun. If you feel tired and tense, for example, then why not take a little break and relax those un-enjoyable feelings and start feeling more enjoyable ones? In fact, the word ‘enjoyable’ means able to produce joyful and happy feelings! What Place Has Physical Punishment? In such loving, caring, and enjoyable schools and homes, what need would there be for physical punishment? In fact, over 90% of criminals supported with excessive amounts of public tax money have been excessively abused as children! No doubt as a learning tool punishment has a very long history and practice. For centuries many Western scholars claimed Aristotle was one of the most educated men of all time, and yet he too said students should sometimes be whacked merely for not paying attention! Such esthetic experiences promote feelings of fear and obedience, the 2 cardinal excellences of a feudalistic political and social system. They in fact help define the educational challenge for we liberal Deweyan democrats! To his day both religious and public school educators still use paddling and other painful feelings as educational tools, sometimes even on students who merely show their joy and happiness; I’ve seen it myself. Our prisons too tell us how dangerous excessive punishment is. The more defenseless children are physically punished, the more it tends to create excessively dreadful feelings of resentment, anxiety, hostility, and of course hatred -- all those feelings often getting in the way of civilized living. True civilization for us Deweyan liberals is all about peace and helpfulness to those in our human tribe, rather than merely our own religious, political, or sexual tribe. To me, if any action is truly obscene, then excessively punishing defenseless children is certainly one of them. Perhaps the best response is to quickly let local child welfare people know about it and ask them to help. When conservative public schools continue focusing on book facts, and ignore more enjoyably active experimental kinds of learning, then it’s normal to student attention to wander and sometimes even lead to disruptive actions; they become discipline problems and either must be punished or removed from class altogether. The other alternative is to remain passive and obedience, like in fact many young girls are conditioned to do. There’s also an equally harmful form of punishment many teachers might practice, and that parents should know about, namely, punishing students with school work itself! How many times have frustrated and disruptive students been punished with repetitive writing assignments, like writing ‘I will be good’ a 100 times? Is it any wonder why far too many of our young folks learn not to like school, and leave as soon as they legally can; up to 50% of the student population in some inner city schools? Who wants to keep practicing the skills they’re punished with? Why make it more difficult to enjoy, love, and nurture the important skills of intelligent learning by linking them to punishment and painful feelings? The mission of our public schools is, or should be, to nurture esthetically enjoyable feelings of intelligent learning, rather than frustrate them. Hopefully the educational use of physical punishment is lessening, but excessive physical punishment seems still a social tragedy in far too many homes, as the 90% statistic tells us! The more excessive it is, the more it can twist and pervert children’s constructive and helpful feeling into destructive and hateful ones, like resentment and anger, unless of course you’re raising children who’ll make their living being spanked! Believe it or not some do and will. No law against it, right? As we’ve seen, there are more intelligent alternatives to punishment as an educational tool. Many people were lucky enough to have a warm, loving, and nurturing home life, where esthetically enjoyable feelings were encouraged. Their parents were their friends rather than their jail keeper. For such parents merely withdrawing their love and affection, until a child promises not to act selfishly or disrespectfully, is punishment enough. The late Senator Ted Kennedy described how his mother Rose sometimes withdrew her warm and enjoyable affection to encourage good habits in her children; that way they learned what actions were unacceptable and which weren’t. The problem was her husband Joseph practiced some disrespectful actions, especially against women, and so her son John Kennedy, for example, continued disrespectful actions, even to the point of becoming morally unfit to remain president. And of course guilt feelings have often been a part of Jewish education for centuries, often produced with both physical and psychic punishment. Humorist Woody Allen gives a classic example of it when he says he doesn’t believe in god, but still feels guilty about it! Is it possible to raise a child without any physical punishment? Why not? As a learned early in my teaching career, the more young folks are rewarded and praised for their constructive work, for respecting people, just laws, and helping others, then the less need there'll be for any negative kinds of punishment; they’ll feel good about doing what’s excellent, rather than what’s mean and unkind. Besides, merely hitting or isolating a child for misbehaving is not educational excellence; it still leaves a child ignorant about what actions ARE excellent. Punishment often teaches a child what not to do, rather than what to do later on, like how to help those with their problems. Thus rewarding children for their intelligent, kind, and sympathetic actions, and telling them why they're being rewarded, best helps them strengthen such habit-arts! It may even help increase memory power too. Is there an easier way to remember to bring home that octopus sushi and frog’s-leg ice cream? Obviously most parents already do great work raising their children; if not our world would certainly be much worse than it is now. But that certainly doesn’t mean millions of more people can become more active and assertive both politically and socially. Of course some conservatives may want to play around with our people-in-prison numbers to make it sound like it’s not really so outrageously wasteful. Someone might say two million is only about .6 % of our entire population, so forget about making our schools more enjoyable places of learning; they’re not that much of a problem! It’s just more ‘bleeding heart’ liberal scare tactics! But, aside from such statistical playing, the ever-increasing cost to taxpayers remains a very serious growing problem! The more precious tax money must be used to house, clothe, and feel people for their criminal actions, the less money will be available for learning to enjoy more intelligent kinds of actions in our public schools! If nothing else it’s still an example of unnecessary waste! Mere prison housing, feeding, and medical care runs into the tens of billions EACH YEAR! That result to me is certainly wasteful, as it no doubt is to many others, especially when our public schools could be using that money to build much more civilized habits before criminal feelings start growing. Imagine, just for a few moments, how many more psychologists, workshops, and useful community projects could become a part of public education if those billions were available to them. Imagine, just for a few moments, all the potentially great human resources and talents that could be liberated in our schools, instead of being spent on prisons year after year after year with little or no real benefit to society. How many folks get out of prison with the very same feelings and skills they went into prison with? In fact, many come of prison knowing even more about criminal activity! In truth, no one really knows how much stronger, more vibrant, more democratic, and more intolerant our nation would be of any form of feudalism, especially economic feudalism, if those 2 million had been better educated in their homes and public schools. Adult Education? Since when do legally adult person's not need any more education? Here’s yet another important liberal education question you might want to think about: Wouldn't it be a good idea to require parents spend a year learning about intelligent child care skills when they enroll their first child in school? No doubt, parents should have the freedom to raise their children as they see fit, as long as they’re lawful and not abusive, but shouldn't they also KNOW what excellent character habits are and how best to teach them? What better place is there to teach such important habit-arts than in our schools? Why keep naively assuming all young folks already know how to intelligently raise children, when in fact they don’t. Because we all pay taxes to house and feed in jail those with weak character habits and excessive criminal habits, don't we all have a right to demand everyone know something about one of our most important skills, namely intelligently raising a child? As it is now, we demand young folks know some important facts about driving a car before getting a license, so why should it be any different with raising a child to live intelligently in a democratic republic? No doubt, conservatives would argue against it. Since Plato conservatives have worked against teaching young folks any kind of democratic skills or intelligent scientific habits; for thousands of years experimental learning and democracy have been conservatives’ sworn enemies! They both weaken the power to control people, and keep them obedient. With such questions and facts it should be clear why controlling liberal education philosophy was so important to conservatives like Plato and even moderates like Aristotle. Real democrats work to end all aristocratic feudalistic social forms and give everyone the same equal rights and opportunity as everyone else! Such reforms are sign of democratic health and power, and public schools are where such habits should be taught. We Deweyan liberals aren't calling for an educational revolution all at once, overnight; that idea belongs to magical fantasies about how life works. But to completely ignore intelligent experimentation, or restrict it legally, is just as dangerous to democratic health. So we say it's best to merely take one baby-step at a time, to the next evolutionary step or plateau, and then keep building from there! Thus, our own neighborhood schools become the battle ground for we Deweyan liberals. If one can be improved with the ideas talked about here, then that’s what’s most important for us. One can lead to 2, and 3, and so on. Furthermore, for such progress we can all play a part, teachers, students, and parents. Even African religious leaders joined the loop to help build intelligent civil disobedient protest habits, rather than their own public schools. That to me is a classic example of how really important and useful our churches can be if they so choose, and how mean and vicious social habits can be improved with their help. History again shows even ol’ Tom Jefferson himself would probably have benefited from better lessons in democratic character excellence. Even though African Sally Hemmings bore him children he continued feeling Africans were generally incapable to reasoning intelligently. In that way he too needed more education. He also never seemed to learn how to intelligently control his own money! He died deeply in debt. Those conservatives who want to keep the educational status quo just like it is, and keep children ignorant about any ideas of excellence, can criticize these liberal educational ideas in a thousand different ways: it'll cost too much; it'll raise taxes; it'll weaken our society in other ways; it won't work; it's communistic and socialistic. For most of US history Native Americans, Africans and Asians were society's most hated people, followed closely behind by Jews, Irish, Catholics, and women. For such conservatives the status quo must be maintained at all costs, even if it means denying people their democratic rights to even vote, and our schools must be places where such habits are passed on! In other words, our schools must continue ignoring democratic ideals, even after more than 200 years of democratic evolution! That’s how important are public schools are to we Deweyan liberals. Selfish and unkind people may not realize an important fact of life; such habits often merely hurt themselves more than anyone else. Without good character training they may never realize ‘what goes around often comes around’; if they deny equal rights to others, then they too deserve to have their civil rights denied! As a result they end up hurting themselves by not treating all people with respect, honor, and equally! My own childhood definitely had many weaknesses, but such bigotry it didn’t have; my lawyer-father even helped integrate Chicago neighborhoods in the 1950s one house at a time. As a result, it’s easy for me to talk and act more liberally about equal rights for everyone! Along with Dewey I just honor and celebrate the democratic principles upon which our liberal tradition and country was founded; we’re all humans and so all deserve the same rights as anyone else. Obviously, democracy is a growth process, like any other habit-art, but the more our public schools are kept out of that growth loop, the more difficult improvement becomes. What liberal didn’t laugh when conservative President Bush 2 told us we could quickly build a cooperative democracy in Iraq when over 200 years we haven’t built one at home yet! And what hypocrisy it is to criticize China and Russia for human rights violations when many people in our own country still have hateful unintelligent feelings and ideas! Another Sign of Democratic Health: Educational Choice? Dewey criticized how book-obsessed public schools teach their prized factual textbook knowledge -- slave-like to an entire group, rather than as a free choice. As most adults already know, for 12 years students read about what someone else tells them is important to know. However, isn't that like going into an aerobics studio and allowing the instructor to tell us what kind of a body we should have? And on top of it, then college professors sometimes complain about students not having strong independent critical thinking skills! How on earth can children learn independent, creative, and critical question-asking skills when, for 12 years, they're made to merely find the book's 'right answers'? So naturally liberal educators like Dewey said such traditional schools really teach mostly habits of intellectual passivity and academic laziness! How can students become curious and want to keep learning when their own question-asking skills have been largely neglected for 12 years? As a result, how many students are happy to be done with school after high school, or even drop-out earlier? In short, when many students finish 12 years of traditional schooling not only are their own character habits not the best, but their all-important curiosity and question-asking skills are weak and greatly undeveloped! In that kind of educational situation is it any wonder many young folks turn to drugs and crime in response to a world they often feel psychically isolated from? Not encouraging all students to intelligently practice excellent learning habits like question-asking, and start learning what they themselves want to learn more about, in effect KEEPS children emotionally and intellectually immature! Is it any wonder young folks often are glad to go to war to relieve their frustrations; killing is easy, just pull the trigger? I’m innocent; I was just following orders. As a result, they often remain vulnerable to those promising quick money and happy times! Thus, Dewey criticized WHAT our schools teach -- their subjects. Traditional school subjects often ignore the practical side of education's coin, namely, how to use such knowledge and facts to keep improving life and building more helpful character habits. That, to him, was certainly less than educational excellence. In fact, such subjects are often used to find the most verbally advanced students; after all, brains are important for improving the species. So when some schools have a drop-out rates of nearly 50% how much objective evidence should people need? Their own school’s educational habits are plainly not satisfying important student needs. The answer is not to simply keep building more conservative book-obsessed schools, but to build schools where student have more educational choices to make. One promising educational option today is called Community Service work, or at least was an option before yet another serious economic recession once again began reducing tax funds for public schools. If one didn’t know better, one might believe our obscenely wealthy upper class would like nothing better than to end all non-profit public schools, so for-profit schools could more easily grow. In any case, a great challenge today is to keep such community service classes growing for students at all levels, from primary to the college level! Such learning is more vibrant, holistic, naturalistic, and more enjoyable than mere book-learning. Such classes give students a greater chance for some real practical community-improving work experience, and so we ask parents to support such programs as much as possible. No doubt, to us such classes are best if they are offered at the primary level, but any level is better than no level! After all, the last I heard seven year old kids were definitely people too! Another challenge is to make them something more than just street sweeping or trash collection. The challenge is to encourage students to see what improvements are possible in an area, make a plan to achieve them, and then test their plan. Such a plan might even include talking to people who could help fund such projects as a neighborhood park or a recycling center for all old electronic gadgets , or even how students could raise the needed money itself. Another liberal educational challenge is to help build a practical psychology workshop, where students could actually practice the healthful ideas they’re learning about, like working humorously and joyfully. Ideally, such classes would start at the primary level, help young sense-based learners learn what respectful and helpful ideas feel like. Almost certainly, only a few lucky students really know what habits are psychologically healthful, and which are dangerous. Once again, such Behavioral studies are easiest to teach at the primary level, and remain useful all through life, so why not start teaching them to children? Why should anyone naively expect anyone to practice psychological health when they’ve never been taught what it feels like? No doubt, many people who know little about Behavioral psychology might feel it’s somehow undermining all their values, but what is so dangerous about teaching students the useful, life-long art of intelligent SELF-TEACHING, or how to use rewards and a 'baby-step' method to slowly teach themselves what they want to learn? Aren't truly educated people those who know HOW to intelligently solve their own problems? If so, then wouldn't such classes easier to see peoples' own ACTIONS AND RESULTS are what're most important, not how they look and who they talk to? Wouldn't just that one idea make it much easier to feel more tolerant to those people who look differently than others, and who are labeled gays and lesbians? And more importantly, wouldn’t we ALL benefit if people learned intelligent habits are simply respectful to all law-abiding people? If you’re really another one of those ‘radical’ democratic educators, then it might be something even worth experimenting with. How many times in history have today’s 'radical' ideas, like equal rights, become tomorrow's democratic status quo? That certainly seems to be the trend, doesn’t it? Educational Results Beyond the Classroom Perhaps more than any other philosopher of the 1900s, Dewey also saw the possibilities such educational ideas create beyond the classroom for building a healthier democracy, where wealth-power is easily controlled with democratic power. Is it just coincidence our obscenely wealthy class has become even wealthier since our schools have become more book-obsessed since the late 1950s, and our universities have become less affordable to all but the wealthiest families. Only they can easily afford the huge costs of college, and so keep being lectured by conservative professors, many of whom want nothing more than to maintain our feudalistic status quo. In more liberal democratic schools children would have a choice about learning not only useful job skills, but also about useful character habits as well! He saw clearly how our public schools can be used not to build a healthier democracy, where equal rights are demanded for all, but rather merely maintain the political and economic status quo. If our public schools don’t teach such intelligent experimental habits on a formal basis, even to primary age students, then their entire character growth will remain stunted, immature, and even medieval. The recent explosion of business arts and skills need young folks who know how to experiment intelligently and creatively, how to learn new skills quickly, and how to use extra monies to help those less well off. No doubt, sometimes it takes some trial-and-error experimentation for students to discover what job skills they like best, and also learn how to enjoy experimentally learning more about them. It even took very intelligent Ben Franklin years to learn how important science was, and also begin experimentally learning how to build useful objects, like a lightning rod so as to better protect buildings and people from becoming cinders. Until then people continued using religious skills like prayer and worship to avoid lightning’s dangers. And even after the lightning rod was invented some religious conservatives condemned him for taking away some of god’s power to punish sinners! Such is the power of conservative habits to maintain the social status quo, even though the outside world around them is continually changing and evolving! More liberal democratic schools will make it easier for more people to start learning how to intelligently control constructive kinds of growth, rather than merely reject all such ideas. What better skill can there be in an always changing world? Without the help of our tax-supported public schools, real progress educating young folks about practicing or democratic ideals has been difficult. Good liberal schools are still relatively rare, even in the US, and population growth rates make the challenge even more difficult. Teachers must be trained themselves, new curriculums designed for more liberal schools, and then even allowed to grow in places where un-democratic habits are firmly in place. In those places conservatives and many moderates choose to block any such useful educational reforms; they want students to remain educated only about the habits they feel are best. Recently I even heard a high government Democratic education official flatly say character habits will never be formally taught in public schools, as if there was some eternal and unchanging natural law against it! Such un-democratic statements continue telling us true liberals should first focus on improving their own neighborhood schools, and thus increase the educational freedom for everyone! Conservatives know full well, the more young folks are liberated from their old routine educational habits of obedience to their teachers and books, and encouraged to more clearly see how political propaganda is used to maintain an economic, political, and educational status quo, the more vulnerable that feudalistic status quo becomes! That’s exactly what most conservatives and moderates have not wanted, do not now want, and almost certainly will never want! They want to keep making it easier for them to keep taking more of the public’s money, even if it’s used to build more useless and unneeded weapons, or give it to wealthy corporations and farmers who don’t need it. With more liberal public schools, more people will find it easier to elect more liberal politicians who aren’t afraid to tax the already obscenely wealthy at a much fairer rate than they now pay, and also work to restrict their putting millions of dollars into off-shore bank accounts, and thus avoid paying taxes at all! If there’s any kind of natural human law, it might be this: those with power will keep working to maintain, conserve, and increase it as much as possible! Western history is literally brimming with examples of that idea, and it’s still brimming to this day! This also seems rather safe to say. Without more liberal democratic-oriented public schools, our so-called cultural wars between conservatives and liberals will continue being won by a small class of very wealthy people. Thus, stress and frustration will continue being felt by most everyone; stressful economic recessions seem to be happening even more frequently these days. People should thus know: true conservatives want children to continue learning habits of obedience and meek acceptance of the ideas and feelings they're given to learn. Such habits grow stronger every time a child works on another academically trivial book assignment, and is made to feel they are the most important things to know. As we’ve seen in these pages, from Plato on, what’s been most important for conservatives is maintaining their feudalistic status quo, whether its based on secular or religious assumptions! The more such conservative and moderate aristocratic assumptions were challenged, the more room became available to build more liberal democratic habits and skills. Also worth thinking about is this idea too. Our conservative book-oriented public schools make it easier for students to join some kind of military service where obedience to those with authority is not just expected, but demanded. From the 1890s on US military outfits have often been forcing people in other countries to accept US goods and services, and thus, with the help of obedient soldiers, enslaving them with perpetual debt to US banks and the wealthy upper class! Such obedient soldiers have been making it easy to enforce those goals by even cold-bloodedly killing and murdering anyone who might rebel against them; Vietnam was merely one brutal and vicious example among hundreds occurring throughout the 1900s while building a US economic and military empire. As we've seen, after he retired Marine General Smedley Butler said flatly he acted as just a high class muscleman obeying orders from Wall Street and wealthy financiers! No doubt, these days that empire is maintained more with economic power than military force, with orgs. like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, but they continue working to maintain a feudalistic economic status quo. To his credit, Aristotle said to use money merely to make more money should not be allowed, and he also saw how it was often used to buy more political and economic power. But without also suggesting democratic ways to better control that power for everyone’s benefit, they remain merely 2 ideas. While some corporations were making millions of dollars during World War 1selling guns and weapons, the US government passed a law forbidding people to even speak against the war; the First Amendment be damned, there was money to be made. It's yet another example of how money will distort any democratic freedom in its path. For us Deweyan liberals such military and economic reality both rest on young folks obeying for most of 12 years what they’re told to do by their teachers, without any practical freedom or encouragement to even question the usefulness of any such assignments. Again, in the corporate world such unquestioning habits of obedience are useful; corporate leaders don’t want anyone questioning the pay they get, the working conditions they have, or the work they do. All such freedoms would merely endanger their own profits and salaries. As a result, many corporations have been fighting for decades against union worker power! To this day women are often paid less than men for the same work, mostly because they haven’t learned to organize themselves and thus increase their economic power. They haven’t yet learned healthy democratic habits! In fact, union membership is at an all-time low these days while corporate profits are at an all-time high! We Deweyan liberals say this situation is a direct result of conservative educational practices in our own public schools, and until they change it’s naïve to believe life will change in any meaningful way! The addiction to money can be just as dangerous as the addiction to any dangerous drug. Many religious conservatives too still believe, with Plato, it’s absolutely necessary to keep others and our nation as free as possible from sin and irreligious habits; the current fight against same-sex marriage is merely one example. In short, for all such reasons the battle to build more liberal democratic public schools continues to this day! For us liberals the main reason is fairly easy to see: the more people are conditioned to feel some of their ideas reflect absolute truth, the more likely they are to resist any challenges to them. The more people feel as Aristotle did, that some people are natural slaves, and should be treated that way, the easier it was for mean, violent, and vicious racial and sexual hatreds to continue on, and thus making our democracy much less healthy than it might be. Liberals like Dewey, on the other hand, not only recognized such a reality, but also began challenging it by helping build more liberal democratic schools where child development stages were more respected. Even many ancient conservatives have said children should be allowed to play and learn with games until they’re almost teenagers. For Dewey such liberal ideas would make it easier to keep educating youngsters about actually building a more peaceful and productive world for everyone, and not just a small class of obscenely wealthy folks. Teaching creatively experimental habits and skills while learning useful employment skills is basically how liberal schools differ from conservative ones. Too many young folks still haven’t been allowed or encouraged to learn such important skills, and thus make life less difficult for themselves and our nation more democratic with equal rights and opportunities for all. Naturally, such liberal democratic schools would rest on all of the ideas mentioned so far, like the experimental learning of practical and useful knowledge and skills, the freedom to choose and learn more about a career path while still in school, and how to use our creative ideas as helpful tools, rather than merely building a bank account. No doubt, today we face many of the same social challenges mankind has faced for thousands of years, and have been frustrated by conservatives for thousands of years too! Without such a practical and useful democratic educational model, we continue facing serious social and personal problems, like economic slavery, drug addiction, gang violence, social disrespect, forced prostitution, and juvenile and adult crime to name just 6 obnoxious results. They continue telling us our traditional book-centered educational models need improving. Those results are not the result of corrupt liberal ideas and feelings, much less an evil human nature, as conservatives even today tell us. They’re the result of conservative educational models of education kept in practice for thousands of years first with religious ideas, and today also with secular ideas about conservative values being the best values of all. It’s an old sophist debate trick; when something is your fault blame the other person as much and as often as you can! In truth, however, much of our modern world today is the direct result of conservative institutions. For example, today conservative ideas about the value of a small minority having vast amounts of economic wealth and power are useful for a few conservative politicians to stay in power and keep working to maintain such a feudal economic system. Those few thousand people have more wealth and political power than 50% of the population combined!? Is that in fact the best kind of social model to make life better for everyone? Real life conditions emphatically tell us it is not! No doubt, much has been accomplished and improved for many people in our modern world in merely the past 200 years. Millions of people are now being fed, clothed, housed, and better educated than ever before, thanks to experimental science and more liberal political improvements. However, as many also know, life has also remained very brutal for many as well. For far too many young folks today, not having useful job skills when they leave high school continues making them vulnerable to some of the most dehumanizing habits ever practiced, like addicting young women to drugs and forcing them into prostitution merely to feed their pimp’s drug habit! The more people are educated to look the other way, the easier it becomes to continue such actions. So, isn’t it natural to ask if our own public schools are partly to blame for such results? Why shouldn’t students be educated to not only quickly report such events, but also to learn useful job skill so it would be easier to resist such actions? Don’t young women have the right to learn such skills? Thanks in part to our book-obsessed schools, hundreds of thousands of young women runaways will begin leading such a life, and living with the psychic scars for the rest of their lives unless they get some expert professional help. Such events can be reduced with the help of fully staffed caring public schools helping learn how to demand respect from others while they enjoyable learn useful job skills. Often such young women attended schools where building more helpful and practical skills was thought to be beyond education’s scope, and thus be unprofessional! Conservatives have been arguing like that for centuries. If we’re to build more useful skills for our modern democratic world, then a willingness to experiment with new ideas is another useful habit-art. Not feeling some ideas shouldn’t be experimented with even for a short time, like with equal marriage rights, prevents people from seeing the actual results from such actions, and thus have some objective evidence one way or another! Have such results made life any different, and if so in what way? Such an intelligent experimental habit-art is the natural result of seeing ideas as merely mental tools, not absolute truth. When students are better educated about our experimental Behavioral psychology, it becomes easier to feel some ideas should be experimented with, just to see their results. How would my life change if I allowed gay and lesbian couples to marry? What would be the social results if more students were allowed to learn the job skills they want to learn, and had more democratic freedom to choose school rules and student representatives? As it is now, many young folks leave school with weak feelings for those important skills, and thus keep allowing others to build the kind of world we now have. In fact, as many as 500,000 young folks become vulnerable runaways every year who often get forced into prostitution by brutal males already addicted to drugs. Thus, it becomes practically impossible to even think about how their own neighborhood schools could be helping improve that situation by enjoyably teaching more useful job skills to young folks. Also, what‘s wrong with experimentally testing for a short time the idea of legalizing prostitution and drug use, just to see what results might be produced? Sex is a human need, and so learning to express it in socially healthy ways is an important habit-art. How can life possibly keep becoming better and more satisfying for everyone unless more people treat their ideas experimentally, and see what results are actually produced? Without such feelings for experimental learning we simply remain in the same old routine ruts of paying to feed and house drug users and sellers in prison at about $50,000 each a year! Then, when they get out they’re back on the streets within days luring more young teenage women into the same actions. How useful for social health is it to keep ignoring how young folks want to start learning some useful job skills even while they’re in elementary school? Why shouldn’t our schools help students build practical clothing, law enforcement, medical and legal skills so they can begin serving community needs even while in school? Dewey’s new liberal models of educational excellence are saying this is OUR world to experiment with intelligently, and the more we do, the easier it becomes to find better ways of living and judging any idea or action. In fact, with freedom from believing any routine idea or ritual reflects nature’s absolute truth has come the freedom to keep experimenting with all intelligent kinds of growth, rather than keep obeying a status quo producing such obnoxious results. If some students want to learn how be bus drivers, then why not also teach them how to be creative and intelligent drivers who know how to enjoy their needed public service work? No institution stays the same forever. Perhaps the best example of that is some of our religious organizations; many are working to make their followers more humane and humanistic, and focused on helping those who still have many old conservative ideas about life and nature. What better goal could any organization possibly have? Many liberals today say such liberal humanistic goals are religion’s oldest and most worthwhile. For example, many fundamental Christian sects now regularly use Behavioral psychology methods to help those addicted to old conservative ideas, and thus teach the art of intelligently growing better habits one step at a time and one day at a time. The more they do, the more they improve life in this world -- the only people-friendly world for many billions of miles around! Is there any better way for religious folks to express their love than encouraging people to intelligently enjoy the art of guiding their own excellent growth? Isn't that the best goal of a truly liberated religion, as it is with a truly liberal education? To us Deweyan liberals, the more people feel all of life should be a self-directed educational growth, and stay focused on improving life for everyone, the more sensitive they’ll become to controlling those who want to keep enslaving as many as possible for their own comfort! Teaching others to enjoy guiding their growth intelligently and experimentally embodies the new modern liberal model of ideas as mental tools and democratic equal rights as the best political system. To us Deweyan liberals, all those social organizations treating only their ideas as absolute Truth are more psychically enslaving than liberating, and more controlling than loving and respectful. After all, nature never has had only one model of truth, and almost certainly never will have. Many liberal people today have dedicated their lives to teaching their new models of ideas as experimental mental tools. Indeed, with such humanistic ideas there are as many different 'roads to heaven', feelings about being born again, and becoming saved as there are people on earth! The popular saying is there are more ways than 1 to skin a cat. Such tolerant feelings are yet another new naturalistic result of seeing all ideas as experimental. With its help we can also more deeply celebrate some new modern heroes who actively worked for democracy's ideal of equal rights, like Susan Anthony, Ben Franklin, Jane Addams, Martin Luther King Jr., and John Dewey, as well as millions of other liberals who're working for the same result each and every day. For example, the more Susan Anthony sensed women were mainly taught how to be obedient second-class citizens, the more deeply she felt the idea of inequality as merely another social weakness, and thus as something to keep experimentally improving. Voting rights for women became his mission! Why should anyone tolerate half the population not having an equal right to vote, or not having reproductive freedom? Isn’t expanding such equal rights what all humane organizations do? Such a modern democratic world continues unfolding. In fact, just a few hundred years ago, in the 1700s, many Christians routinely believed this idea was absolute truth: some women and children become possessed by devils and evil spirits, and so should be burned as witches to save their souls. One more example may be useful. About 30,000 years ago Neandertals failed to improve their routine habits of living while the newly evolved sapien peoples continued spreading out around the globe. Thus, within a few thousand years they became extinct. The more Neandertals practiced their old routine hunting habits, the more difficult it was to experiment with new ones, and thus continue feeling life’s enjoyments. It’s not just prehistoric history either; such a reality continues on even today. Recently secular totalitarian leaders have shown how dangerous routine habits of obedience can be. Stalin, Hitler, and Pol Pot all demanded obedience to their models of truth, while killing millions of people who allowed them the power to do so. To us Deweyan liberals, even these examples from human history are enlightening. They help teach us we the people have the power to build a more satisfying world for everyone, and unless we focus that democratic power we will be responsible for whatever else happens; unless the people act together and more democratically, our world will remain feudalistic. If liberals like Dewey are right, if all our ideas depend on HUMAN habit-arts, then more liberal democratic schools will build such a world more quickly, a kinder, more respectful, and helpful world where children’s helpful dreams are fulfilled rather than frustrated. Who knows, maybe even one day peace may break out all over the world! Imagine that, aye?? Stranger things have happened, haven't they? However, almost certainly it'll never happen unless we ourselves start looking at more intelligent and humane models of education, economics, nature, and politics. The more that happens, the easier it’ll become for such a world to keep evolving. Little feisty Jonathan went to school in May, Mother had roused him from bed where he lay. While studying an octagonal cask, He raised his hand and asked, Hey, am I gonna learn anything useful today? 19. IS NOTHING SACRED? At this point, for some conservative and moderates, it might feel as if nothing is truly sacred to us Deweyan liberals. After all, we celebrate many of the most popular ideas and habits of the past 20,000, like spirit-objects and a feudalistic model of nature and life. As a result, they may also feel as ancient conservatives like Plato felt: such liberals are really a danger to society and should not be tolerated; they don’t practice the stabilizing habits we conservatives do. Such conservatives may look at our liberal models of life and nature and feel they don’t really satisfy our deepest desires to know, love, and serve god in this life, and be happy with him in the next. Such liberals are just too shallow and limited in their thinking, and wrongfully ignore any other realm but the natural one. For many conservatives even today those reactions are often common. After all, how can anything really feel sacred unless they’re based on spirit-ideas and objects? Thus, liberal models may feel not only artfully cold, but even socially dangerous; they seem to ignore all sacred feelings, and so they're simply out of touch with nature's deepest realities and mankind’s deepest needs. Many conservatives today feel any nation which rejects religious habits is doomed to failure by god itself. At best Dewey’s liberal models of life and nature feel frigidly arctic and coldly polar. They should be used for chilling martinis, not helping improve peoples' characters or building a better world. There’s more too. How many of those small baby-steps are there from Dewey’s liberalism to a dangerous social anarchism , where everyone does what they want as long as they don't harm or disrespect anyone else’s freedom to say what should happen to their body? Within months our cities almost certainly would be full of drug users staggering around, if they can stand up at all. Even though such behavior is restricted in liberal Amsterdam today, it's just a hint of what life could become. What is really sacred about those results? In truth only spirit-objects and religious habits can be felt as truly sacred, and thus only they are the best insurance against all forms of egotistical, self-centered, indulgent social anarchy, ethical chaos, and philosophic nihilism. Only god’s divine grace and sacred power can really save anyone from such a life. No doubt, those kinds of highly negative feelings about our new liberal models of life and nature may feel right to many, especially about Dewey’s democratic and educational models. Equal political rights for everyone could mean the end of the family itself as we know it – namely one man and one woman. Similar feelings would probably come from people like Friedrich Nietzsche. While he and Dewey felt self-mastery, intelligent habits, and individual artistic excellence were on the same level as sacred spirit-objects, Nietzsche loudly rejected political democracy and equal rights. To Nietzsche, Plato, Aristotle, and modern conservatives like Ayn Rand, political excellence is best defined aristocratically, rather than democratically. They echo many of Plato's ideas about human nature. Most people are by nature meant to serve an elite aristocratic class of rulers and governors. The masses can’t really be educated to wisely govern themselves, much less a nation; they’re too welded to their own petty pleasures to use any political power wisely. Thus, ideas about aristocratic individualism are best, rather than democratic individualism. Only such aristocratic individuals can know best how to govern and use power to keep society in a stable feudalistic structure, supported by a strong and military. In short, for Plato, Aristotle, Nietzsche, and Rand democracy was anything but sacred. It's never been widely popular, and what's more shouldn't be, as if it was a law of nature and hasn’t been systematically ignored and keep weak by conservatives for thousands of years! For such people any liberal talk of democratic equality and socialism is fantasy talk; the lower classes are happy with almost nothing, so trying to make their lives better would be like trying to swim the ocean. For Nietzsche political kindness and helpfulness to all classes -- political socialism -- has never made the world go round; military power is what should be sacred. Even if we don't like it, military might still makes right, just like it did in Plato's day, and the tradition has been unbroken since then; only those kinds of ideas are politically sacred. So feeling Dewey’s ethical, political, and educational models should be sacred is just more liberal utopian fantasy! And for Plato, people must be made to practice religious habits; instinctively human nature is equipped to accept such ideas. Not only shouldn't Dewey’s democratic ideas of equal rights become sacred, but they shouldn't even be discussed, much less experimentally tested, even to help those who need help. For Nietzsche people should help people, not governments, and nature should be allowed to keep selecting those for both life and death. Given such aristocratic assumptions, such conclusions become obvious. But, once again, how do we know liberal models aren’t excellent unless we test them? In fact, as history shows us, where conservative ideas have been tested, as they were all through the Middle Ages, they continued leaving people just a vulnerable to natural dangers as they’ve always been. However, since a more democratic experimental learning art has been practiced, life has become much less dangerous and more enjoyable. What’s more, the continuing peasant revolts all through history also tell us hereditary class difference and privileges are inherently unjust, mean, and inhumane! They violate the feelings of equality many people feel should be a natural part of life. In any case, however, to condemn Dewey's new liberal ideas of humanistic sacredness before they’re tested is to merely another form of dogmatism, rather than intelligent experimentation. Almost certainly, they’re the result of strong habits, and little else. The more people allow such feelings to control their actions, the less chance there will be for any kind of progress, and hence increased freedom. As we’ve seen many times already, when any idea about sacredness isn’t physically tested for its results, then it can only be an assumption, rather than reliable truth. And as for feeling only spirit-ideas can be sacred, why just imagine all those animals who, for hundreds of millions of years, had no such feelings about life and nature, and yet often treated many objects as sacred and important. For how many millions of dinosaur mothers were their offspring treated as sacred? In short, for us Deweyan liberals nature is a place where many different ideas and habits can become just as sacred as other ideas and habit. The challenge is to encourage those sacred feelings for peaceful and respectful habits, rather than warlike and disrespectful ones! Such actions help make life safer, more rewarding, and more worthwhile! Growing New Feelings of Sacredness What might be some more ideas about natural sacredness? Well, first of all, our own daily actions! People can teach themselves to feel their ordinary, daily actions are as sacred as anything else! Our own helpful and intelligent daily actions are ultimately worthwhile and important. As we've seen, intelligent practice is the key; the more we take the time to feel such sacredness, the stronger those feelings become. In fact, as we’ve been seeing throughout this book, 'sacred' feelings have been re-born and reconstructed all through history! For example, as Christian missionaries helped violent and destructive Vikings feel more civilized ideas of peace and non-violence were sacred, their feelings for violence were re-constructed, and in fact were re-born! It certainly didn’t change all their war-like habits, but it was another baby-step in the right direction, as were feeling excessive and unhealthful sex and feasting pleasures could become improved with different sacred ideas faithfulness and moderation. Even in its infancy, sacred Christian sexual ideas helped people re-construct their own feelings, as Paul’s letters tell us. And more recently, even those feelings of sacredness are being re-constructed with newer liberal models of sexual sacredness. No doubt such Christian ideas weren’t always treated as sacred; all through its history some priests, monks, friars, and even nuns sometimes rejected such sacredness; some popes sometimes kept concubines and fathered children. The point is, however, new and different feelings can become ‘sacred’ with intelligent practice. Thus, for us Deweyan liberals every generation represents the chance for new kinds of sacredness to grow, with new feelings about what should be sacred and what shouldn’t be. If that weren’t the case, then the Church would still be burning heretics and witches in sacred fires. Another example of naturalistic sacred growth can be seen during the 1700s' Enlightenment. Romanticism's ‘godfather’ Jean Rousseau (d. 1778) helped deepen the sacred feelings for native peoples, as well as democratic decision-making. With his help ‘savage’ natives became noble savages, and models of what life could be without many civilized institutions corrupting their natural goodness. He said "Man is born free, but is everywhere in chains”. For many Romantics those ideas became more sacred, even if they reflected mere feelings rather than facts. Like a true Romantic he felt it was a form of sacredness to let peoples’ natural goodness bloom on its own, without interference from teachers, priests, or rulers. Today schools like Summerhill continue practicing such Romantic educational sacredness; students are free to learn or not learn whatever they want. And even though some of his democratic ideas too weren’t entirely logical, they still helped many to feel they could become much more sacred than they had been. Such examples are helping teaching people all ideas of sacredness are human based, and depend on human practice. No doubt, completely reconstructing old sacred ideas is a slow process, especially when schools and homes don't teach how new ideas can become sacred with intelligent experimentation. Russian writer Leo Tolstoy (d. 1910) too saw how difficult it was to re-educate peasants to feel different kinds of sacredness. Many of them preferred to live routinely in rundown ancestral homes rather than move away to better government-built ones. Even when young educated social workers told them church officials were helping stop many social improvements, peasants often rejected them and their ideas too! Their religious habits had become routinely sacred and they didn’t know how to experimentally build better ones. It's yet more evidence for important early childhood education; unless children don't begin feeling how sacred experimental testing is, other routine habits may keep them from building others kinds of sacredness. Only as Russian schools began teaching new 'sacred' kinds of experimental habits after 1917, like science and democracy begin becoming more sacred. And when they didn’t, other habits did. No doubt, many people who first heard Paul of Tarsus talk about his new sacred ideas about a messiah and his new ethical values felt them as less than sacred. To all those who hadn't practiced such ideas it sounded just too unbelievable; how could merely believing a convicted criminal was truly the Son of God? At the time such new ideas just had too many other sacred ideas to compete with. But the more Paul experimented with such ideas, and the more people practiced them, the more he saw people could learn new sacred ideas; people were willing to experiment and feel the results of living a more hopeful life. Until only a few centuries ago science’s useful tools and inventions were still too unknown for many to feel their sacredness, but the more they were used, the easier it became. Eventually, Dewey's Behavioral psychology celebrated all feelings, even 'sacred' ones, are the result of simple practice on a daily basis. Imagine no newlyweds feeling their own shared actions couldn’t make their relationship more sacred with each passing day. As a matter of fact, feeling any kind of sacredness, about any habit-art, happens on a daily basis all over the world. The more they’re feelingly practiced, the more sacred they become. Computers and word processors have become much more sacred to me since I’ve been writing these books. Those are just facts of life. The more ancient Greeks practiced the ideas at the Delphic Oracle, ‘Nothing in Excess’and 'Know Yourself", the more sacred they became, for Socrates included. The challenge, both then and now, was how to keep them sacred. Without a good public school system it was fairly easy for destructive politicians to convince Athenians was with Sparta was necessary. They were made to feel protecting their empire at any cost wasn’t excessive, but rational! They eventually learned that was one of the most excessive ideas of all. The Peloponnesian War ripped the Greek world apart, and it seems to have never recovered its intellectual and creative sacredness. There once was a soldier named Billem Who talked to his buddy named Willem. They said with glee Let's wait and see, If their sacredness is different let's kill 'em! The same kinds of events apply to Dewey’s new liberal ideas of sacredness, or excellence. Without some daily practice here and now, the new sacred feelings of peace and a common humanity among all people will remain merely ideas, rather than real and growing tools helping build a better world. And the more that happens, the easier it may be to feel what some call existential fear -- nothings’ really worthwhile and sacred; life is really meaningless and it's not really worth living! One can easily feel such ideas reading Jean Sartre’s (d. 1980) Nausea. Such people may even feel they don’t know who they are anymore; they’ve lost all their sacred feelings and are dreadfully facing a life of having to create an entirely new set of sacred feelings! Existential angst is another phrase describing such psychically nauseous feelings. Young folks typically have such feelings as they enter adulthood and feel their childhood habits are useless. Psychologists often describe it as an identity crisis. Young folks are especially vulnerable at that time and will often grab on to the first philosophic model they see, including Nazi and Communist models. Sartre himself felt life’s absurdity while fighting the Nazis in World War 2, and afterward began experimenting with communism throughout his life. Building such new sacred models of life and nature is another challenge of being human. With our bigger brains and more choices we've become much more sensitive and vulnerable to such psychically nauseous feelings. Thankfully we now have much more reliable knowledge about growing such new feelings. In fact, creating new sacred feelings has been a natural part of life for hundreds of millions of years, give or take a Thanksgiving weekend or 2! Also, for us more intelligent humans an infinite number of ideas can now become sacred meanings and feelings! All it takes is a little daily effort on our part. How else did mammoth-kabobs become sacred food? That's some more of our liberal good news. Even though I had been a practicing Christian for years, Dewey’s ideas helped me begin feeling other more liberal and humane kinds of sacredness, like experimental learning, and intelligently helping others to help themselves. They helped reduce my feeling of existential angst, become more relaxed, and better able to enjoy life more. Why Not Make Liberal Ideas More Sacred? We've already seen many ideas Dewey might call 'sacred', that is, intelligent and supremely important. No doubt, at the top of any list would be liberal education. Nature has given us humans the power to become learners and creators all through life; our brains and hands are 2 of nature’s most marvelous biological tools. With them and our creative talking habits we can keep learning and making life better as long as we live. In short, all of life can be a learning experience. Thus, intelligent kinds of learning have become at least as sacred today, and often more so, than at any time in the past, and they in turn depend on one's education. And so the question of excellent learning has become more sacred. As we’ve seen ancient Greeks felt that question too. What is excellent learning? Should it focus on knowing eternally unchanging objects, or rather the ever-changing world we all live in? Thus, quite naturally, the more this world is valued, the more sacred becomes intelligent experimental testing and also the fair treatment of everyone. Why keep wasting our energies denying people their equal rights just because they have different peaceful habits? Around the world today that liberal habit-art is growing much more scared than at any time in the past. So, the more students feel such ideas as sacred, the more it can help make life more peaceful, cooperative, and joyful. Thus, intelligent tolerance has become much stronger. Other liberal ideas too have become more sacred. At this point the list should be familiar: experimental learning; intelligently helping others to help themselves; joyfulness; happiness; tolerance; equal rights; intelligent kindness and sympathy; democratic excellence; science and art; holding all our public officials responsible for their actions, especially the police; building a kinder and more caring community; testing those who test us; playful fun and recreation on a daily basis; and slowly becoming what we want to become! Because none of those habit-feelings are inborn or sacred at birth, only each person's daily practice can energize them into sacred feelings. Welcome to modern life and its naturalistic challenges: what will you do WITH your freedom, and what will you do FOR your freedom can become sacred questions? In any case, worrying about learning other sacred ideas and habits just makes the learning process more difficult. If you don't feel you have any sacred ideas and habits, then why not treat that as a good feeling? After all, how can anyone keep growing unless they first feel their weaknesses? The important point is to keep experimenting and learning more about what you want to learn about; who isn’t on their own sacred mission? The challenge, as always, is to make your mission produce as many of life’s positive, peaceful, and respectful results as you can. Such sacred liberal ideas help us see all people as relatives and part of our human species, rather than members of this or that particular tribe. For us Deweyan liberals HUMAN KINSHIP is a sacred feeling. We’re not saying love everyone; everyone has their own different loving needs. But to feel such a kinship helps reduce any hateful feelings one may have. The good news is most people already feel some things are sacred; some call them our 'instinctive' impulses? The liberal challenge, however, is to know what those instinctive feeling are, and to begin making the more dangerous ones less impulsive and more controllable. For example, what kind of unhealthful diet instincts have you? Why not help improve them with a little humor? Would anyone like to help make a non-fat New York Cherry Cheesecake frozen yogurt flambé? If you just laughed a little, then you felt a good way to help relax the dangerous diet instincts you might have, and make it easier to build more sacred healthful instincts with better diet choices. Hey, who knows? You might even discover creating a chain of frozen yogurt shops is your life's sacred mission. You certainly could do worse; you could try to sell frozen pig's-feet yogurt topped with a tangy fried liver sauce. Did I miss my calling by not going to cooking school? As I’ve tried to show in these pages, human history itself shows we are the animals who like to keep making new ideas and habits sacred. Both religious and philosophic history has many examples of that idea. If so, then sacredness itself is an always growing and evolving habit-art. The more life changes, the more we need new sacred ideas. They make it easier to keep living in a changing world; they help us define what excellence is for us, for what we can become, and how to make life as satisfying as possible. For millions of years already our ancestors' tools made it easier to create new sacred ideas and take advantage of new opportunities. In fact, some define we humans as a tool-making animal. However, what's becoming more obvious these days is learning how even sacred religious habits have kept evolving even at the simpler native level of culture. It’s one reason I’ve included some information about them. For example, thousands of years ago some Jewish folks too began acted as if every 7th day was sacred; they called it Sabbath day. Such a tradition had been sacred to many peoples for thousands of years before that? Also, groups of seven days were set aside for feasting, relaxing of social rules, gift giving, and just relaxing. Romans normally celebrated many Saturnalia days in late December as the winter solstice approached. People felt the seven planets were seven spirit-gods and so were sacred objects. Just like some people today have artfully energized sacred feelings for yogurt, many ancient peoples acted as if every 7th day should be sacred. And of course between then and now almost certainly every human culture and society has made certain days sacred; today, however, they're usually called holidays rather than holidays. Most of the old ideas of sacred days have changed much. So, one question you might ask yourself is how many days are sacred to you? Is there any reason for not making every day feel sacred? Such questions help us see we gave the power to make anything feel just as sacred as any other. It’s all a question of actively treating something as sacred. The practical question is what do we want to make sacred? Have you ever felt life-giving fruits and beans are sacred foods? We Deweyan liberals suggest the same kinds of questions about sacredness should also apply to our all-important economic and political institutions too. Why not learn to treat them as sacred tools for making everyone’s life more enjoyable and rewarding? If not, then it’s easier for a small class of wealthy conservatives to keep making life better just for them! Dewey definitely felt that way about traditional book-oriented schools as well! In fact, for us Deweyans working to keep them producing more democratic results is sacred work! The United Nations organization, for example, also helps encourage such growth. The more one experiments with that work, the more sacred it will feel. Religious Sacredness Evolves Too No doubt, to many pious conservatives around the world it may seem arrogant and even satanic to say even sacred religious ideas keep evolving. However, even the few examples of religious history cited in these pages shows some of that evolution. That history itself shows how different religious habits become sacred as new social and personal practices evolve. Perhaps no finer example of that fact in Western civilization is Christianity itself. Its founder Paul of Tarsus simply substituted many of his sacred new Christian feelings for his old Jewish ones. Much like today’s traditional schools, Paul’s early Jewish education focused mainly on feeling only Jewish religious ideas were sacred. Eventually, however, as he learned more about the new Jesus movement growing with Judaism, he began building different sacred ideas about life and nature! What’s more, like any good scientist today he tested how they worked on his missionary journeys. It’s yet another example of how peoples' sacred ideas keep growing and evolving to better express new feelings. So, if practice is the way any idea becomes sacred, then why shouldn’t practice itself become a sacred habit-art? After all, it’s the key to making any idea more sacred; with practice any idea too can become more sacred as they're used in daily life to make life more rewarding, satisfying, and productive! How else can, say, new sacred feelings for intelligent experimental testing grow, or nature be felt as both dangerous and supportive, unless they’re practiced? The more we use liberal ideas to help guide our actions here and now, and try to avoid nature’s dangerous results, the more we begin feeling how sacred his idea of nature can feel. Like any other habit-art, sacredness too is an organic and growing art. Thus, becoming our own more intelligent and helpful person is sacred work to us liberal Deweyans. With a little luck and some intelligent daily practice we liberal artists-in-sacredness can continue reconstructing life to better harmonize with new modern opportunities and knowledge, making the art of improvement itself more and more sacred, meaningful, and interesting as we grow older. Who knows? Maybe there’s a sacred Cucamonga Cheesecake Yogurt franchise waiting for you! And while you're working at it maybe you’d like to start feeling even creative philosophic thinking can become more sacred. For example, I think Rousseau was wrong with both the ideas I mentioned earlier. In fact, everyone isn’t born free, they’re born helpless; and everyone’s ‘habit-chains’ are organic; they can grow and decay just like all living things! The ever-present challenge is to keep making intelligent habits more sacred, and unintelligent less so. The more that happens, the easier it become to see there never has been only one set of sacred feelings; there have always been a tremendous variety of them; they all depend on human actions! For only about 100 million years carnivorous dinosaurs felt a mouth full of fresh Brontosaurus kabobs was sacred, while plant-eating animals kept avoiding that fate. For some spiders web-building is sacred work, while for insects avoiding them was just as sacred. The more we keep seeing our amazingly new liberal models of life and nature, and human history in particular, the easier it becomes to see all its great variety of sacred feelings rests on active work and practice. No doubt some spiders keep feeling their webs are sacred work, but they still need to build those feelings with their own work. In our always-changing world such sacredness always reflects different kinds of habits, not different kinds or levels of reality. Each Brontosaurus taught itself to feel which plant-foods were sacred, just as each Tyrannosaurus taught itself to feel Brontosaurus kabobs were sacred; they were both learned habits. During World War 2 soldiers built their sacred habits the same way, as Allied armies worked to protect themselves from tyranno-Nazis! Really, doesn’t what is threatened have a sacred right to defend itself? New Models of Obscenity Once again, such examples help teach us what's equally important about any sacred habit-arts are their results! Producing kind and helpful liberal results thus becomes sacred work! For Dewey useful social and personal results are what make any practice sacred. Such artistic work also gives us a way to judge any art as fine or obscene. Dewey talks about such ideas in his Art as Experience. Is a work of art obscene if it merely mirrors hateful community actions with images that community holds sacred? Is some piece of art obscene if it merely shows how some people really act? If a work of art offends some people, might it be because they themselves have offended some people? Can’t 'obscene' art merely reflect peoples' own actions; can’t it be another example of what goes around, comes around? If so, then why shouldn’t artists too hold sacred their freedom to show how revolting some actions are? Isn’t that too using art in an educational way? Who hasn’t been political cartoons in which obscenely wealthy and pictured as obscenely overweight people? Aren’t such people even more obscene than a picture of 2 people loving each other? Aren’t the greedy results they produce even more offensive than those produced by supposedly obscene films? If so, then why not start feelings how the actual results actions produce should be used to judge how obscene any habit-art is? Some TV sit-coms in the 1970s began doing just that – using the results of peoples actions to show how irrational and stupid they sometimes act. Even though many people were outraged by shows like All In The Family, they began showing how bigoted and hateful some people can actually act, and how reconstructing such habits can be helped with laughter and humor. As Aristotle might say, TV became more cathartic -- it helped people lose their old feelings of fear and pity. For too long we've thought so many of our feelings and ideas were forever and always obscene or sacred, just because someone else they should be. But with the growth of Behavioral science, a person’s selfish and greedy actions became obscene, rather than pictures of naked humans. Such 'obscene' new comedy shows kept encouraging people to look again at their own 'sacred' actions and ideas, and see how the results of them were no longer acceptable. As a result, more people became more liberated from their old ideas of sacredness, and more sensitive to new sacred ideas like democratic equal rights? Slowly, the results of destructive and brutal actions have helped make warfare not only less sacred, but more obscene too. Even without excellent character training in schools, more people began seeing on TV and in films warfare’s terribly wasteful and destructive results! Is there anything more obscene than seeing innocent people killed and mutilated? As a result, peaceful and constructive actions have continued becoming much more sacred to people around the world. Thus, another new liberal challenge is to keep such new liberal ideas of obscenity growing. More New Sacred Habit-Arts Perhaps our greatest new liberal challenge is teaching people such democratic and experimental kinds of sacredness, so peace and tolerance can become more sacred to all. In short, romantic and religious warfare is out, and peace is in. No doubt, in many places even today such ideas are far from sacred. For example, both Israelis and Palestinians say peace is sacred, but how intelligent are such ideas when they exclude each other? Thus, inclusive models of peace become sacred, simply because of the results they produce for everyone! Otherwise old sacred models of segregation will continue dividing people into separate tribes, and teaching each only their ideas are sacred. No doubt, some of the problem is one result of Israel defining itself as both a Jewish and democratic state; the 2 ideas are fundamentally opposed to each other. How can religious ideas apply equally to those outside the religion? No one knows what new sacred ideas will evolve in that situation, but the more their young folks learn how to produce more peaceful and cooperative results, the more sacred those ideas will become. That much seems obvious. What’s much less obvious is how we get from here to there? How can schools and homes produce such habits when most people don’t want such schools built? I suspect progressive Jewish and Palestinian women will eventually play a great part in raising more intelligent children to feel each other’s sacredness as well as their own. With the growth of our modern fast-food corporations, new habit-arts of health have become much more sacred. More such corporations aimed mainly at making more and more money are becoming felt as more obscene than sacred. They often care more about pleasing a person’s food tastes than helping produce more social health. Such new sacred feelings of physical health are still weak in many people. As we saw earlier, until just a few hundred years ago healing any disease was often linked to sacred religious feelings and actions, often to the forgiving of one's sins. Today, the ideas of germs and viruses have become much more sacred for medical science and the public. For thousands of years repentance and worship were part of a sacred healing art. Germs? What’re germs? Where are germs? I don't see them. Simply because new medical ideas are producing better results, new medical feelings of sacredness are evolving. Vitamins, for example, have become much more important to millions of people, rather than praying and worshipping. Because such old sacred ideas were felt to be the Eternal Truth, people continued believing their sins, or bad karma, really caused diseases. New Testament stories too picture Jesus very much wanting to help all his poor fellow Jews heal their illnesses by simply forgiving their sins and driving away evil disease-causing spirits! Today, however, scientific ideas of healing have become much more sacred; they simply produce much better results than old healing actions. Thus, new personal habit-arts of diet, exercise, and cleanliness have become more sacred in the past few decades than in the past few thousand years! Other New Models of Sacredness Economics too has become a much more sacred idea not only for the corporate wealthy class, but for average citizens too. These days physical and psychic kinds of slavery have evolved into economic slavery. In today’s wealthy-based world even democratically elected politicians have become enslaved to the wealthy upper class, as a result of merely 5 conservative Supreme Court justices! A bizarre ruling in 2010 said corporations are really people, and so using their billions to support any politician they want is really a form of free speech! Is it any wonder people are challenged more than ever these days to make their liberal political actions much more sacred, despite what people like Plato and Nietzsche have suggested! A government more ready and able to help people live better lives has become necessary as a counter-balance to the harmful and stressful economic results big corporations often produce, like its on-going series of recessions and depressions. In fact, new ideas about governments humanizing and socializing their economies have become more sacred, despite conservative work to the contrary. The growth of liberal political democracy has made changing such conservative ideas sacred work. After all, government actions often helped build our large corporations in the first place, like they did with land grants along railroad routes. Conservatives also used government to create protective tariffs, or fees, on goods coming into the country. In effect they helped restrict competition from other countries and thus help build our giant modern corporations. So, when those corporations act mainly to keep maximizing profits at their workers' expense, then why shouldn't the people have the right to use government for their benefit, rather than just a few obscenely wealthy people? In his very interesting book In a Few Hands: Monopoly Power in America, Senator Estes Kefauver has shown how the modern economic idea of corporate-socialism has helped build our giant corporations, now controlling well over half of our economy, not to mention all the trillions in debt people now have! In short, Adam Smith's sacred rosy economic models of a competitive market-based economy have become almost useless for most people. They no longer fit reality, and so new sacred economic and political models need to be tested and used. A growing sense of corporate monopoly power is asking for such testing, especially when profits are used to keep building personal fortunes rather than the public good – that is, better schools, highways, roads, utilities, and hospitals. Some corporations are so powerfully independent these days they can even raise prices during recessions, when people are losing their jobs. Before he left office in 2008, much to the relief of millions, President Bush 2 signed yet another such corporate-socialist bill to give bad-loan-making banks $700 Billion of socialized tax payer money! The people who run those Wall Street banks know they can now make tens of millions of dollars more even when they make bad investments! There’s no principle of ‘moral hazard’ for them anymore; if they don’t stay in business much of the world’s economy will collapse! For them economic power is sacred. Such corporate socialism has been a sacred practice for much of the past 200 years in the US, while helping increase stressful social results for millions of other people! Thus, the war between conservative and liberal models of economic sacredness continues on. Because such corporate actions have helped create stressful social results for many people, they are now more challenged than ever to make their own political actions and voting power as sacred as possible for everyone's well-being. Slowly our old sacred capitalistic models of rugged individualism and free market economics have become much less sacred. Their results continue producing a feudalistic social system in which a few live like kings and the rest struggle just to pay their monthly bills. Thus a new democratic model of political sacredness continues growing. Since the late 1800s the US government has been experimenting to keep economic competition a sacred reality. For example, the Sherman Anti-Trust Act was passed in 1890. It aimed at not allowing powerful monopolistic corporations to keep dominating peoples' lives too much, thus empowering the government to keep regulating them for everyone's benefit. However, if people whose job it is to enforce the law choose not to, then it’s the same as having no law at all! And so once again, we see why new political models of sacredness were needed. Why should people merely keep accepting the social, political, and economic conditions they were born into, and not try improving them at all? Today, for example, 2-income families are often needed just to keep pace with corporate and labor-caused higher prices. But, until people feel it's another sacred challenge to get more organized, and become a more effective counterbalance to corporate power, much of life will continue being controlled not by them, but by giant banks corporations and their congressional helpers. To help create such new feelings it might help to know, for many thousands of years taxing workers and peasants has been more sacred than taxing the upper classes. The result often caused more people to keep living in filth and squalor, like animals, while a few lived in luxury. Religious ideas too were used to justify such actions and thus keep people accepting the social status quo. People were told god governs the world so whatever happens must be god's will; give to Caesar what is Caesar's. Even early in our modern period conservative philosophers like Gottfried Leibnitz too said about the same thing -- we live in the best of all possible worlds. Today, however, more and more people are feeling different models of religious, and social sacredness. Today, unfounded religious assumptions about spirit-objects can be more easily questioned by children, as can economic assumptions about feudalism being a social law of nature, rather than meekly continuing to accept that status quo. But such liberal freedom is not an end in itself; it’s merely the first step for building better sacred models. As a result, today more people are feeling how sacred it is to help everyone live a better life. As we'll see in Book 4’s Modern Models of Excellence, Dewey too worked at reconstructing such old aristocratic and economic-political ideas into those helping improve everyone's life; it’s another sacred idea for we liberal democrats. We’re all human and have the same human needs. As a result more liberal questions like the following have become more sacred: How are our corporations and governments helping make life easier, more productive, more intelligent, more rewarding, more enjoyable, and more educational for everyone? No doubt, such questions have been helping make democracy itself a more sacred political system, in spite of conservative work to keep restricting voting power, political choice, and public financing of elections. As our history of continuing economic recessions grows, old economic and political ideas need to be not just forgotten, but replaced! Today democracy keeps challenging people to learn more about what the hell's going on out there, and then to keep experimenting with new ideas. What’s more, that task is made even more difficult by our popular corporate-controlled media itself! To keep democratic power weak and unfocused so-called news shows almost always continue ignoring important economic and political events going on out there, and keep telling us about trivial natural and man-made disasters, regularly interrupted by ads to see more trivial products people don’t really need. People are thus challenged to use their new communication tools like computers to learn more about much more important events going on out there, how to better control the more dangerous ones, and promote the more useful ones. How else can our democracy keep growing stronger. To be fair, some labor unions too haven’t always acted in the public interest. Many times their main goal was to make life better for only their own members. That’s merely like English barons organizing against King John to make only their own lives better, rather than the lives of all English people, serfs included. Thus, merely demanding better wages only for themselves, allowed their corporate managers to merely pass on the wage increases to the public, and thus take more of their money. It seems to me a truly liberal labor union would not only work to share corporate profits with all needy folks, but also demand more decision-making power on their boards of directors! That model of corporate democracy has yet to be felt as sacred by many people. Slowly but surely more people are realizing old sacred feudalistic political and economic models need to be improved for everyone’s benefit. Why accept an economic feudalism perpetuated by laws whereby children can inherit huge family fortunes and thus have freedoms most everyone else doesn’t have? Apparently ‘survival of the fittest’ natural laws should only work for the poor and disabled, and not the wealthiest families. Also, in their quest to celebrate the sacred benefits of individual work and personal wealth, conservatives seem to conveniently forget another little fact of social power: Any government is a form of socialism! To exist at all it must socialize peoples' tax money to build an army for protecting people and for empire building, pay politicians, help others when disaster strikes, and also bail out giant corporations so greater economic disasters don’t occur! The more people feel such facts as sacred, the easier it becomes to humanize and democratize our world. On a more individual level new ideas of the family are become more sacred. For example, how intelligent is it to keep growing large families when sooner or later our resources like water and fossil energy will reach their natural limits? And, how intelligent is it to restrict marriage freedom to only men and women when millions of people best relate to another person of their own gender? As those new questions become more sacred, they help build new sacred models of the family and marriage. As many already over-populated countries today are learning, it's much more intelligent to better control their own populations and natural resources rather than neglect both for merely personal gain. Neither unlimited family size nor family gender are eternally sacred ideas, and so to keep acting intelligently they too need to be constantly redefined so as to keep producing better living conditions. Needless to say, for feeling such new habits as sacred, our schools, homes, and churches have very important new sacred educational roles to play! Sacredness Doesn't Die, It Just Keeps Evolving! As anyone can plainly see, for us Deweyan liberals sacred feelings and habit-arts are far from dead. In fact, like any idea new sacred ones are constantly growing and evolving. A few decades ago how many felt intelligent exercise and eating habits were sacred? Such evolution is all a part of life in our constantly changing world. In such a world even the most sacred religious ideas are not immune, as the ancient liberal Greek Sophists and Atomists began teaching. Also, just think for a minute about all the times the sacred idea of god has been reconstructed with different meanings -- at least hundreds of times! In fact, with our more liberal educational tools, the art of growing new sacred habits may be stronger and more alive than it’s ever been! Also, helping others has become more sacred for both religious and non-religious people. Every day doctors and psychologists around the world are helping millions of people learn how to start taking a more intelligent control of their medical health and psychological growth! One very worthy organization is called Doctors Without Borders. Many people, far too many people, often need medical attention, often to help improve diseases caused by the person’s habits themselves! Thus, learning more about diet and exercise has become more sacred knowledge. And psychologically, who at times hasn’t felt depressed, like they’re merely a lonely and solitary leaf adrift in an immense uncaring universe, with no helping-direction or creative path in life? Nature may not care for us like our ancestors once thought, but that doesn't mean we can't keep making our own creative and helpful actions more sacred than ever before! So, once again, new sacred habit-arts continue growing and evolving, with the help of all the new educational tools science is helping create! They’ve given us more power to educate ourselves than ever before, and thus to more easily answer life’s new challenges. In short, self-education has become much more sacred than ever, helping ourselves become more independent and intelligent learners, rather than meekly accepting what other people tell us is the truth and obeying their orders. In fact, as is easily seen today, new intelligent habit-arts can continue helping people build an infinite number of new sacred ideas and feelings! The sacred universe is now open for business as old sacred ideas like worship and prayer have become less useful and less practiced. No doubt, it's important to feel grateful for our blessings, and perhaps humbly feel nature's grandeur, but these days, with science's help, continuing to intelligently grow such blessings has become much more sacred to many liberals. For example, more and more people around the world are beginning to feel humanity's sacredness, rather than merely narrow ideas like tribal sacredness, or personal wealth. The sacredness of women's equal rights, for example, has been growing for about a century now, as has African and non-heterosexual rights too. No doubt, in parts of the world today many still see such people as naturally inferior, and thus as merely something to be controlled and dominated, even to the point of cutting off a woman’s clitoris so they won't be too sexually active, and even killing them if they don't obey traditional religious laws. For thousands of years schools and conservative religions have helped make such habit-arts sacred. Thus, in many parts of the world they’re often treated like property rather than people, and little better than cattle or slaves, and even as something to be merely bartered and traded for with other men. Even in culturally advanced ancient Greece women were generally kept at home, weaving cloth, uneducated, raising children to fight the next war, and allowed to say little if anything. Roman women were a little freer, but not much. Even in the more religious Middle Ages such habits continued being felt as sacred and god’s law. Thankfully even the Church didn’t have much luck with keeping nuns from enjoying fancier dresses, dancing, and keeping pet animals, especially dogs. It's another example of how secular ideas of sacredness can keep evolving with just a little personal audaciousness and independence. To millions today such ideas like women's equality, as well as equal HUMAN rights, may still feel not only not sacred, but the devil's own work; such is life. Much of mankind is still emerging from a very long primitive period where only one's tribal habits were felt as sacred. Today, however, it’s become much easier to keep challenging those old sacred ideas while learning new liberal sacred ideas democracy and equality. And again, the more our schools, homes, and churches help teach them, the faster they’ll grow. Kind and sympathetic feelings and habits for practicing democratically equal human rights have become, for many modern liberals, a new sacred mantra. Rather than merely dominating others against their will, such ideas encourage everyone to develop and grow their own talents. Certainly if any political idea was sacred to Dewey equal-rights was it. He certainly didn't invent it, but he celebrated it and kept it alive and growing. Like so many other ideas it went back to the democratic ancient liberal Greeks. No doubt since then it’s remained weak and ineffective; about all liberal Greek democrats like Democritus and Protagoras could do was plant their sacred equal-rights seeds. Such is no longer the case; these days all of mankind can feel freedom's sacredness with the help of our powerful educational tools. The same tools allowing businesses to become globalized are also allowing liberal ideas to be globalized as well. No doubt in many ways we are still just democratic children. Only recently has even physical slavery lost its natural sacredness. Plato's and Aristotle's ideas justifying it as natural are now much too out of step with new liberal sacred democratic ideas. Dewey too felt equal rights' new sacredness for all people, and today it’s being slowly extended around the world, with baby-steps as usual. It’s become another sacred liberal idea to KEEP IT GROWING! Like every other sacred idea ever created by mankind, equal rights depends on people-power to keep it alive and strong. Conservation and environmental protection have become much more sacred ideas too. With the growth of polluting for-profit corporations sometimes came the growth of dangerous environmental poisons. These days it seems more of our state governments are making the control of such events sacred work, with the help of pollution and recycling laws. After all, healthy air affects everyone's health. Why should profits be more important than anyone’s health? Some Personal Sacred Ideas Today, thanks to the growth of our best learning art -- experimental testing -- more people can easily feel a sacredness for our new ideas about intelligence – that is, for consciously treating all their ideas as something TO BE tested each and every time they’re used! Such feelings help create a new sacred idea about nature too, namely something that’s always changing and evolving, and that’s always capable of being improved and made more satisfying. Experimental testing itself has become more sacred. As a result, however, each day's actions can be felt as more sacred! Almost certainly, they are the only actions we will even know the most about, and so creatively work to keep improving them also becomes a more sacred habit-art. Only with them can we begin feeling more of nature’s possibilities are, and how they too help us keep growing as people. How many helpful ideas can our inner instinctive impulses create NOW to keep making our life grow as we want it to grow? How many meaningful and creative ideas and results can we feel and test now? To many millions around the world, those kinds of questions and possibilities are becoming more sacred every day! Such secular kinds of sacredness can also help grow the sacred art of looking forward to what can become better, and also how it can become better. As we’ve already seen, the second step in experimental learning is imaginatively seeing what might help us intelligently answer our challenges to improve any of our weak, excessive, and unhealthful habits. Such intelligent self-controlled growth has become more sacred, largely because we liberals have become liberated from old religious ideas like god’s will, preordained fate, and Karma. Such liberation has thus helped make sacred our own character habits. As we’ve seen throughout these pages, for most of history our ancestors thought what was sacred knowledge already existed, like spirit-knowledge, and eternal kinds of natural law, often expressed in the formal language of size and motion called mathematics! However, with the growth of human science like Behavioral psychology, and liberal philosophy in general, people became more liberated to see their own actions as sacred. They and their future results are what build all our ideas and feelings, and thus largely control our own destinies! Such a new future-looking psychological model is now becoming more sacred, and helping expand the conscious awareness of future results with our actions here and now. Unless looking forward becomes a more sacred idea, how can we imagine life getting any better here and now? In such ways are personal kinds of sacredness growing today. In short, life is an experimental playing field when our actions play a part in seeing how life is played. As mentioned earlier, at the beginning of our modern era ‘Shakespeare’ too celebrated such forward-thinking. England’s 17th Earl of Oxford, Edward De Vere -- to me the best candidate for writing ‘Shakespeare’s plays -- used the same kind of idea so wonderfully in his energetic and vibrant Taming of the Shrew. No doubt Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor magnificently elevated that forward-looking idea to sacredness in their superb film version of the play. For Dewey we can’t completely control the future or the present, but intelligent experimental actions -- lawful and respectful -- keep increasing our chances for a better life as we keep invading the future. What's more, the more we feel and intelligently react to the future's excellent possibilities, as well as its potential dangers, the safer and more enriching life can become. In short, looking forward INTELLIGENTLY, and playfully testing our ideas, has become a much more sacred habit-art. Dewey also mentions the usefulness of an old ethical habit-art, gratitude! For what? For so many things, like, for example, those working to make life more peaceful and less violent for everyone! It sounds obvious, but to many people such gratitude still isn’t a strong feeling. For Dewey they should be. Such feelings gratitude for all those helping others are the basis for a humanist ethical model. To many people gratitude may sound like such a simple and unimportant idea, but it isn’t, especially for those who’re focused on promoting more ethically liberal habits of excellence; many religions are also working to build such a world. For all such people acting gratefully makes it easier to support them and their work. In fact, gratitude -- simply feeling and expressing our thankfulness -- has been a part of all liberal ethical system for many thousands of years; the ancient liberal Atomist Epicurus felt thankful for all his students and friends. So, feeling thankful for even another day of life and all its blessings of food and health, makes life itself that much more sacred. And the more sacred one’s life feels, the easier it becomes to feel everyone’s life as sacred! So, why not begin looking FORWARD to showing gratitude even for those who test us as well as help us? After all, how can anyone get stronger unless they’re tested? The more thankful we are for such events, the easier it is to keep practicing it. No doubt, each of us has many more ideas about what’s sacred to them. Moreover, sacred feelings can keep growing, just like any feeling. As we’ve seen earlier, for many today intelligent and safe sex itself has become a sacred habit-art; for many it’s been elevated to a religion level of importance, and thus is something to express our gratitude for. It’s yet another habit helping us become artists in sacredness. Again, such sacred possibilities are infinite in number; lovingly sharing an enjoyable and safe friendship, relationship, and perhaps even marriage, whether to someone or our work; raising an intelligent family; working with similar people; enjoying life, and even happily frustrating our disrespectful enemies can all become sacred work, as sacred as any High Mass was ever felt. To all such feelings of sacred we Deweyan liberals say forward! FORWARD to slowly and surely becoming our own more independent master, rather than remaining just another dummy slave to our own unhealthful habits others have conditioned us to grow. To us if any habit-art is sacred it's learning how to better control and master our own dangerous and disrespectful actions! Why shouldn't that art too become just as sacred as any religious ritual? After all, such intelligent actions are often a much more useful habit-art than many routine rituals; a forward-thinking intelligence is our best weapon against any of life’s new and challenging situations. Even though we may sometimes feel depressed and sad about life's shortness, or our own loneliness, or about not accomplishing very much, or even feel afraid of death itself, the more we keep practicing our sacred habit-arts during whatever little time we have, the easier it becomes to pass over the rough times. Indeed, our own intelligent actions give us the power to keep growing and maybe even becoming a little wiser. Who knows? One day I may even get to be a good limerick writer! Hope springs eternal, right? How sacred would life in fact become if people took the time to keep feeling grateful for their freedom and untroubled times, like carefree kids often feel? FORWARD! And speaking of nature….who dares not feel its sacredness these days, like many ancient Greeks felt about it, especially those liberal Atomists and Sophists before Plato? Helping combat global warming, over-population, pollution, weak political and educational systems can all become sacred work these days. More people are realizing we’ve really got no other planet to live on, and so are feeling this one is one of our most sacred objects. Nature remains dangerous, not to mention disrespectful people and corporations, but it’s our only home for light-years around and so making it less dangerous and more satisfying remains just as sacred to us Deweyan liberals as it did to ancient liberals like Protagoras and Democritus. Genetic science too has recently been encouraging us to feel all of us are nature's children for whom teaching the arts of experimental intelligence, peace, and tolerance can become more sacred every day! Forward! Sacred feelings about our earth can help motivate us to build better recycling habits, but to also keep frustrating those whose actions abuse and disrespect it. The less we take good care of nature and its people the less they might take good care of us. Looking FORWARD helps us see how more dangerous our earth can become if we allow anyone to merely ignore all their dangerous results, and instead focus mainly on corporate and personal profits. Is continuing to spread dangerous pollution and toxins really worth making a few people wealthy and life more dangerous for many others? Is merely producing as many children as possible good for them and our earth, or is raising 1 or 2 intelligent kids best? Look at all the serious population problems both India and China now have, and how they were caused by governments who didn’t build schools helping young folks intelligently look forward to such results. They were mainly interested in preserving their feudalistic social systems. Shouldn’t such results help everyone feel more deeply not only how sacred our earth is, but how important liberal schools are for keeping life on it more sacred? Perhaps one day our global-warming, carbon-spewing captains of industry, and our population-ignoring religions, may soon feel more sacred about our ideas when their own fortunes are affected. I know it's difficult for some people to feel such new kinds of sacredness, but it's not impossible, especially when people are educated to feel that way. Intelligent communication too has become another sacred habit-art for us Deweyan liberals. In many ways it’s the educational key to building a better world. The more people learn about different models of life and nature, communicate them to others, and intelligently keep experimenting to test them, the sooner more sacred communication habits will become. Today, with global communication becoming more commonplace, it's become easier than ever before for more people to keep working intelligently, rather than routinely, even on an international level. Over-population is just one such problem; many people here in the US are already acting to prevent such problems from happening here. Millions of women are becoming more educated too. In fact, many Japanese and Russian women may be over-reacting; new low birth rates in those 2 countries may soon create economic problems of their own. Still, it's a healthy sign of how much easier it’s become to learn more with better communication systems. The more such challenges are communicated, the healthier we can make life itself! With better communication skills more and more people these days are realizing our earth has only limited, not unlimited, resources; that idea is indeed an important first baby-step for gaining a more sacred feelings for population control, as well as learning to re-cycle what we have. For decades in the US sacred feelings of re-cycling were ignored while about 4% of the earth consumed about 25% of its resources. Without feeling such resources are sacred and should be more intelligently managed, we merely keep disrespectful our own earth. As a result, to many zero-population-growth has become another sacred goal. If any status quo should be maintained, it’s healthy population numbers. In fact, John Dewey was one of the first philosophers to elevate conservation to a ‘sacred’ philosophic topic; Progressive Republican president Teddy Roosevelt also helped make it a more sacred idea; even liberal Dewey voted for him in 1904, although he disagreed strongly with his imperialistic foreign policy. In short, what's become much more sacred these days is learning to intelligently manage our own personal and social actions, rather than merely keep doing what others tell us to do. Intelligent independent actions have become much more sacred than meekly doing whatever we’re told to do. Such obedience can more easily make us more vulnerable to natural dangers themselves. Perhaps more of us can learn to feel our earth’s sacredness from our Native American peoples; they’ve practiced that feeling for centuries. FORWARD! Needless to say, all those examples show once again new liberal kinds of sacred possibilities. The more people are taught these new forms of sacredness, and how focused people-power is the most intelligent way to improve any weak, excessive, and unhealthful situation, the easier it becomes to keep reconstructing our schools for teaching those habit-arts of intelligent work, respect for just laws, and of course for helping those who could use a little help. Like always, all feelings of sacredness are educational challenges. The more our schools, homes, and churches ignore, say, teaching excellent democratic character habits, then the more social problems we keep creating for ourselves! If Dewey’s right, then more liberal and progressive kinds of education will keep the new feelings of sacredness growing and becoming stronger. Such liberal kinds of education are now growing more sacred than ever, at least on a family level, but to become more powerful they need to become a much larger part of our public school system. Daily it’s becoming more obvious to more people: the more such schools keep teaching students how to best solve their own personal and social problems, the less help they’ll need from the government, and the more socialized tax-monies can be spent to keep helping those who really need it. If conservatives want smaller government, then young folks simply need to feel how sacred it is to have schools where more useful knowledge and skills are taught. It certainly seems to me to be yet some ‘common ground’ both liberals and moderate conservatives can work to develop. As we’ll see in Book 5 however, presently even many of them remain firmly anchored to a medieval school system based on learning more and more academic trivial than anything else. How much less would there have been to pass a Prohibition law, or any of our drug laws, if schools were places where children’s needs for enjoyable work were made much more sacred than spending the public’s money to buy tons of books written by those aiming to promote patriotic feelings rather than more intelligent and useful habit-arts? What better way is there to keep government from growing too much, other than better educating young folks about practicing sacred character habits? If so, then founding a progressive school, a progressive teacher's college, or a progressive church is in fact sacred liberal work. Such institutions do more intelligent things than merely pass out writing assignments, or food and clothing; they also help teach young folks to feel how sacred their own enjoyable work actions are. Such work has become more sacred than ever. No doubt, such liberal forms of educational sacredness may be growing slowly; after all, most every nation is still just emerging from a feudalistic social period where obedience to a religious status quo was demanded. However, the more young folks feel the goal of learning itself is frustration-free, the easier it becomes to feel its sacredness. As we’ve seen earlier, if LEARNING happens all through life, each and every day, then it can become one of the most sacred goals of all! In other words, if we teach students how to enjoy learn intelligently, it would lessen the need for government help later on, and also reduce individual frustration. Whether we learn what works or what doesn’t, in either case we’ll learn something! So the old cliché -- we can't always get what we want -- is in fact false. If we want ONLY to keep learning -- not accomplishing, but LEARNING to accomplish -- then that desire will never be frustrated and always be satisfied! With that thought we Deweyan liberals also differ from Buddhists who say desire is the root of all suffering and bad karma. On the contrary! As Dewey points out, such a goal is anti-scientific; the more we learn to intelligently satisfy our desires with experimental testing, the better life gets. So, a more healthful liberal psychology can make teaching to intelligently learn its sacred goal. Even Siddhartha himself desired to build schools where students would learn not to desire; desiring not to desire was sacred to him, even though it wasn’t very logical! Desiring not to desire is itself a desire! If so, the goal itself is unattainable. However, if we desire to keep learning intelligently, then that desire will always be fulfilled! Thus, we liberal Deweyans say learning to intelligently desires to keep learning is the best goal to both a growing inner enlightenment and a healthier outer world. Why? Simply because one way or another the desire to learn is always achieved! These days even the new idea of a person’s right to die is becoming more sacred. Many today want to legalize their right to end their life when they choose, rather than when some insurance-collecting doctor says it should end. Such doctors merely help raise everyone’s health insurance rates, so the right to die idea is a natural extension of feeling we all have sacred human rights. Religious conservatives may disagree for 2 reasons. For them it’s god’s choice when people should die; to take that spiritual right and turn it into a human natural right is just another example of human pride, arrogance, and sinfulness. And for another thing, how competent are people to judge when their life should end? After all, they may feel differently tomorrow, or science may discover a cure for their sickness. No doubt life may be improved at any time; no argument there. But if people have a right, a sacred right, to control their own bodies as long as it doesn't harm anyone else, then why should there be any law against it? Even conservative Socrates practiced the art; he simply felt it was his time to die. Yes he could've lived longer, perhaps 20 years longer, but he chose to end it at that time. Why feel bad about such a freedom when in fact every life form has its biological limit anyway? In fact many people may become so physically ill they may feel life is not worth living, and so to demand they continue living may be seen as disrespectful to their humanity, dignity, and freedom. And until god’s caring for people is objectively verified, then we Deweyan liberals see no reason for believing such a creature exists. Also, the tremendous amount of pain in the world is another reason. How caring can an all-powerful and merciful god possibly be when such pain and suffering continues on a daily basis? No doubt, some may feel sad when someone calmly and rationally decides when to end their suffering, but shouldn’t they feel even sadder about the 2-day life spans of house flies. After all they spend much of their short lives feeding on dung's bacteria! To them life is truly a short flight with a menu only another fly can appreciate. Smilingly I ask, imagine what it would be like being a fly psychologist; how could you possibly keep your couch clean? So just remember, the next time you step on a gaggle of flies swarming around another pile of dog droppings, why not tell yourself it's not just feeding time; it's mercy killing! The point I’m really trying lamely to make is this: How sacred is your humor habit, even about death? The new habit about those who’ve died is to celebrate their work and their life, rather than sit around for days crying and feeling sorry about death. Everything alive has its natural limit. Again, living intelligently and healthfully is becoming more sacred. Why bother worrying about eternity? It gets here soon enough, so in the meantime why not make life itself more of an intelligent sacred celebration? While not teach yourself to feel grateful and thankful for each day we have here and now? Besides, what's the good of dreading eternity, unless it's part of a comic routine? Then it might help others to laugh and lose their dreadful feelings too. Obviously many people keep sighing about feeling life’s shortness, but how intelligent and healthful is that? Almost certainly we haven’t existed for the eternity BEFORE we were born, and what does that eternity feel like? I don't know about you but it certainly feels like nothing to me. So why not use some plain old common sense? Why not teach yourself, one sacred feeling at a time, to joyfully feeling more of life’s blessings here and now, and keep working to leave it a little better place than we found it? What more sacred work can one possibly have? Besides, institutions are what live on, not people; raising more intelligently caring people to work in them is certainly sacred social work to us. Or would you’d rather be a fly? In fact, why not teach yourself to feel any healthful and constructed habit-art as sacred work, even sex itself? Experimentally we can teach our self to feel any art is sacred, so why not be intelligent about it? Why not learn to treat yourself as a sacred piece of life? Wouldn’t that feeling make it easier to keep building more healthful habits, like joyfully exercising a little each day? I’ve discovered there’s a difference between joyful exercise and joyless exercise. The first leaves me more refreshed and energized than the second. Why not try discovering that difference for yourself? Such enjoyable habits can make all our actions feel more sacred, self-controlled, imaginative, respectful, and artistic. Is there only one right way to grow such habit-arts, and only one right path for everyone to travel? Dewey might chuckle at such a question. Everyone's unique and so everyone learns in their own way and at their own pace, even us dummy duffers who get lucky every once in a while with a hole-in-one! In any case, however, our own sacred daily practices here and now are the key to feeling any kind of life’s infinitely sacred meanings. The more we use them to keep producing more healthful results, the sacred life itself becomes. How sacred can our intelligent feelings become here and now; that’s one of life’s challenges. Like any other habit can be, it’s both a challenging science AND art. Science tells us what normally can happen, like golf can be a relaxing game, and sex can make one feel loved and reduce one’s tensions. Artistic experimental testing, however, teaches us what does in fact happen: I only hit a few really good shots today, and sex always feels good. The more we use our actions intelligently, and feel their sacredness, the easier it becomes to feel even golf is fun and self-love is important. FORWARD! Believe it or not another libidinously lame limerick impulse has surfaced again; thank goodness it’s a great way to clear up all confusing ideas, maybe. A pious young man who did certainly care, At city-life looked and fixed his stare. But after a time, Beyond reason and rhyme, Asked how come people aren't all sacred out there? 20. WHO WANTS TO TEST THEMSELVES? Finally, in our last section some confident readers and students may feel like testing what they’ve redd, so I've included some questions. Others, however, who may feel it’s all been a waste of time, can just skip this section altogether, take a little walk around the neighborhood, relax, and then get on with their lives. So, for all those Type-A folks out there who think they already know about they’ve redd, we can start with some deeply meaningful philosophic questions, like what kinds of flies are attracted to liberal philosophy; how often do they need therapy after reading it; and what do fly therapists actually charge for a session? If you can answer those questions in 10 words or less, and without smiling, then you’re definitely ready to look at the following question. A few words of warning first, however. Before reading these questions, and to better preserve your sanity, it may be best to focus on trying to answer just one question, rather than all of them at once. Just pick the one you’re most interested in and try to answer it. If you try to answer all of them at once you too may wind up on a real therapist's couch! As a famous actor once said: Perfection’s overrated; I know, I’ve been there! Questions About Native Excellence We’ve seen a few examples of excellent native habit-arts, like constructive tool-making, helpful talking, and spirit-arts, and we’ve also seen how results help make them excellent or weak habit-arts. In Book 2's Native Models of Excellence we’ll see more of them in more detail, but how many healthful and unhealthful results can you list for them? It’s obvious tool-making is still an excellent art, but what results actually do make it excellent or dangerous? Why did the very useful tool making art grow so slowly, and what made it grow faster and more diverse during Middle Paleolithic times (100,000 BCE – 35,000 BCE)? What’s more, does a habit’s excellence depend only on its outer results? What might have been some excellent inner results for native peoples? And of course the same questions can apply to talking and spirit-arts. What were their results for our ancestors' inner character development? Why do you think over 2 million years, give or take an hour or 2, separate the birth of stone tool-making from talking and spirit-arts? Were native spirit-ideas helped lay the mental foundation for all religions today? Compare and contrast native spirit-ideas with one modern religious system. How many philosophic similarities and differences can you list between native, ancient, and modern peoples? (Hint: answers like ‘a lot’ will not be accepted!) What do you think about Dewey’s modern models of spirit-ideas? Why do you think Dewey rejected all spirit-ideas? As we've seen, models about native life use facts from modern native cultures. What other kinds of objective evidence are used to build modern models of prehistoric native excellence? Do any of them produce absolute truth or just probable kinds of truth? On a scale of 1 – 100%, how probable do you think the model of native excellence described earlier is? Do objective Neandertal grave-sites, for example, prove absolutely they believed in soul-spirits? Many native grave sites as old as 60,000 years suggest as much, but is it important to know when spirit-ideas began evolving, and if so why? How much of the prehistoric native world do you think is still buried and yet to be discovered? (Answers like ‘a lot’ still don’t count!) Many native people practiced Dewey’s idea of excellence. What is it? Do you agree with it, and if not, why not? List as many reasons as you can think of. Questions About Ancient Kinds of Excellence As we’ve seen, conservative Plato said spirit-objects were the only things capable of producing absolute Truth; they are the best objects of knowledge. Explain why you think he felt that way. What are Dewey’s most excellent objects of knowledge, and how reliable are they? Describe the 3 main assumptions about nature helping build Western civilization’s 3 main different philosophic models, liberal, moderate, and conservative. Even though it was fairly small, the competitive Greek culture elevated many habit-arts to new liberal models of excellence. List as many as you can. In what ways do their 3 kinds of philosophic models still apply to human cultures today? Who were the 3 most important philosophers in each Greek tradition, and what were their 5 main philosophic subjects? How did ancient Greek conservative learning about spirit-objects differ from native learning methods, and how excellent are those conservative method today? Why did nearly all Greek thinkers feel so confident about their new logical reasoning habits? Who was Protagoras and why did Plato feel so threatened by his humanism? In what ways did Greek competitive habits affect Plato? What else helped them invent Olympic Games almost 800 years BEFORE Jesus lived, give or take a month or 2? Why did so many conservative and moderate Greeks like Plato and Aristotle want some objects in nature produce absolutely certain truth? What were some other important social factors making the Greeks so confident, practical, independent, and curious about nature? Who invented Western science and how was it different from religious models of nature? What was Plato’s ideas about women and slavery, and how were they justified? Same question about Aristotle. Hundreds of years before Plato lived in the 300s BCE, ancient Greece's active, confident, and independent peoples built a culture only itself could destroy, and only itself did destroy. What habit-arts helped destroy much of its excellence? In the early 400s BCE the Greeks banded together and defeated the more powerful empire on earth, the Persians, much like little Vietnam defeated the superpower US in the 1960s and '70s. But what else do you think helped create great philosophers like Democritus, Plato, and Aristotle? The Greeks often practiced homosexual relations. Do you think that helped their decline, and if so why? What may have helped the Greeks take almost every art except peace to new plateaus of excellence? Was it all just natural instincts, or were supernatural powers involved? What role do you think the Greek gods played in Greek greatness? In the late 500s BCE, in Italy, Pythagoreans helped build a number of monastery-like schools where Pythagoras’s religious and scientific ideas could keep growing. For Pythagoreans numbers were felt as sacred objects; to them the multiplication table was an example of Absolutely Certain and Perfect Knowledge. Do you agree or disagree? What other Pythagorean ideas did Plato like? What is it about math ideas that has led conservative philosophers and scientists to believe nature does in fact have some eternally unchanging objects within it? What is mathematics and why do you think that’s the best answer? Why do you think Socrates started looking for ethical absolutes rather than scientific absolutes? What led so many Greek thinkers to say logical reasoning is our best learning method? Who disagreed with them, and why? Plato’s mythical dialogue Timaeus is named for a Pythagorean and describes many of their ideas about how the world was created by something called a demiurge. What were some reasons it was his most popular book all through Europe's Middle Ages, at least with those few monks who had taught themselves to read? Was it really only Platonic propaganda arguing Socrates being killed by Athens' democratic government, or did he willing choose to end his life? (Hint Plato’s Apology may be enlightening, although what he had to apologize for I’ll never know.) In Book 3’s Ancient Models of Excellence we’ll see a more detailed picture not only of philosophy’s most famous trio -- Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle -- but also of those marvelous liberal Greek thinkers most people never learned about, namely Democritus, Protagoras, Epicurus, and Carnaedes. Why is that? What may’ve motivated those liberals to ignore all spirit-models of nature? What role, if any, did evil spirits play in their thinking? Plato often criticized Sophists for charging money for their lectures. Do you think Plato too often charged his students for room and board? If so, do you think philosophy is really just a rich person’s hobby? List some reasons why. Based on what you’re redd in Book 1, and what you’ve seen of life, briefly describe your model of nature. Does it have any unchanging objects in it, and if so what are they? Were conservative and moderate Greek thinkers really right? Is the goal of science to discover eternally certain facts about nature, or merely to describe different amounts of probability about nature events? All 3 ancient Greek traditions had educational models of excellence. Briefly describe your own model and why you think it’s best. Today some people define a star as merely a hot ball of gas, but what did many ancient conservative and moderate Greeks believe about stars and planets? What natural event may have caused many of them to believe their movements were the result of eternal objects, like spirit-objects or god? Why do you think Plato and Aristotle both pictured nature like a pyramid, with earth at the bottom and a supreme Goodness or God at the top? For Plato how involved were the gods in daily affairs? Democritus, Plato and Aristotle dedicated almost their entire lives to philosophy? No doubt one of the Greeks' most charming and adorable people helped bring it home to peoples’ everyday lives. What was it about Socrates that helped make him philosophy’s most important patron saint? Like his gregarious mid-wife mother, Socrates liked to get out and visit amongst the people and talk about their ideas, so he never built a sitting-and-writing habit, but Plato and others have left some endearing descriptions of him. What do you think was Socrates’ special philosophic talent? Why was he called the gadfly of Athens? And why is his questioning art still valuable today, especially in law schools and many kinds of personal relations? What were Socrates’s criticisms of democracy? Do you think many people today still look for his kind of ethical and political absolute Truths? Briefly describe your reactions after reading any Platonic dialogue. With Socrates' help ethics became a much more important philosophic topic, but what were Plato's and Aristotle's ethical ideas, and how do they compare with Dewey's? Which ethical model do you think is most excellent? Name some important assumptions helping build Aristotle’s ethical models. Aristotle’s model of nature too is called a teleological one, but what does it mean and how accurate a model do you think it is? Was he right? Is nature guided eternally by constant and unchanging Forms within nature itself? Do you think most everything in nature has a Final Form within it, helping make it whatever it is? What do you think Aristotle and Plato would say about DNA? What would they have thought about TV, movies, or airplanes? Give some reasons for your answers. The Greeks created Western civilization’s first Age of Reason, so why do so many scientists today believe we really can’t learn about nature and life just by reasoning? Who was Protagoras, and what were some of his ideas? Which ideas seem too radical to you? Why did people like Socrates and Plato feel so threatened by his humanistic Sophist ideas? How did Plato feel about most of them? No doubt Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle believed asking and answering reasonable questions in the right order was the best way to learn about nature’s constant and eternal causes. Is that philosophic goal still excellent for Dewey? If not, then to whom is it still excellent? In Plato’s dialogue Meno Socrates seems to prove some math ideas are in fact innate and inborn in all of us, even from birth. If we just ask our self the right questions we can begin remembering what they are, and thus begin learning about nature’s eternal spirit-objects. The dialogue tells how one day Socrates merely asked a slave boy questions about a complex math problem and how even the poor and uneducated slave could discover the correct answer. What do you think that proves? Does it prove everyone, even uneducated people, already subconsciously knows some kinds of constant and already existing eternal 'truth', or does it merely prove even uneducated people can answer logical questions with obvious answers? And if it proves the first idea, then how logical was Plato being when he said only a few wise philosophers should have political power, and not everyone? Do you believe in reincarnation like Pythagoras and Plato did; list some reasons why you feel that way? If yes, then do you also believe mere contemplative reasoning can teach anyone nature’s eternal and absolute Truth and thus enlighten and free anyone from being born again? Do you think Plato was more of an ancient conservative priest trying to start a new religion, a philosopher, or a poet? For all the physics majors out there, was Plato's mathematical atomism the true ancestor of quantum physics, or was Democritus' atomism? What is an equation, and are mathematical equations, like E = mc2, always and forever True? Are Galileo’s and Newton’s mathematical equations models of absolute scientific Truth? Are they all examples of eternal and constant Natural Laws? Is mathematics a way of discovering eternal Truth, or is it merely a specialized language of size and motion? Do you think Plato’s artful dialogues actually point the way to discovering Ultimate Truth, or do they merely portray Ultimate Fantasies? If his pictures actually reflect Ultimate Truth, then how can they possibly produce such awful logical absurdities, like described in his own dialogues Parmenides and Sophist ? What were those 6 awful absurdities, and how might they be resolved? Do you think Plato’s entire spirit-matter dualistic model really has no logical reasons for believing it? Is it all based merely on his personal assumptions? Why do those 2 dialogues help prove Dewey’s point, that philosophy is and can be only criticism, and if so, then was Socrates right – the un-criticized life is not worth living? What do you think about Plato's educational theories in the Republic? And what were the results when he tried to test such ideas? Why do you think Dewey recommended reading Plato more than any other philosopher? Plato called his most famous student The Reader, but what else helped make Aristotle such a great philosopher? Why can Aristotle’s model of nature be called moderate? Why did Aristotle openly start criticizing Plato’s dualistic models of life and nature soon after he died? In what way was Aristotle’s model of nature more naturalistic? What did Plato think about Democritus’s models of nature and psychology? Was his model of nature ‘opened’ or ‘closed’? I mean did it allow for fish to some day evolve into people, (and if not, then why do so many people like to swim)? What do you think caused the Greek culture's decline, and why has it remained rather mediocre even since? What might the words Kingdom of Heaven have meant to Jesus, and did he really believe it was close at hand’? Did Paul of Tarsus accept that idea? How popular did Plato, Aristotle, and Democritus become with Islamic scholars? Many say Islam's world-class cultural achievements in the 9th and 10th centuries were based on Greek philosophic models; do you agree or disagree, and why? Some Questions About Dewey’s Models of Excellence Some say England really best inherited ancient Greece's philosophic spirit as early as the 1200s. Do you agree or disagree, and why? We'll see in Book 4's Modern Models of Excellence more about how recent liberal scientific and democratic political arts grew and blossomed. Briefly, what was Dewey's general reaction to them? Why did he reject both Plato’s and Aristotle’s models of nature? He often used the word 'organic'? What do you think it meant to him? What was one of his basic assumptions about nature, and briefly describe some examples of it? Do some think his philosophic model is too radical, and if so, why? Was he just another modern humanist Sophist? For all those education majors out there, what does Dewey's model of excellent education look like? Do you think it’s unrealistic, and if so why? Why did Dewey put so much emphasis on education? Was he mistaken, and if so why? How do his educational ideas differ from Plato’s and Aristotle’s models? Why haven't our schools been able to keep themselves more liberal than conservative book-oriented? What political, social, and educational values did Dewey celebrate most of all? Some Final Thoughts A lot of information has been given in this book. Hopefully, however, it’ll make reading any of the other books in the series much easier, but also make life more interesting and more easily mastered if the 4 other books aren’t redd. I do hope Book 5’s Educational Models of Excellence will be redd carefully; for us Deweyan liberals it is really important for building the kind of schools any healthy democracy should have. In any case the reader now has a little better feel not only for Dewey's models of excellence, called Naturalistic Humanism, but also for some conservative and moderate models of excellence too. Such philosophic models are not dead and mere history, but in many ways continue evolving to solve new modern problems and challenges. Can’t Plato’s and Aristotle’s economic ideas be useful even today? Incidentally, Alfred North Whitehead’s (d. 1947) Process and Reality is a modern version of Plato. As we sail FORWARD into those other books we'll continue coloring in those 3 traditions of excellence. They can help make life a more exciting adventure, or a more painful experience, depending on how they’re used. Do you think Dewey's liberal kind and constructively peaceful habits will always produce outer and inner excellence? And perhaps even more importantly, is experimental learning really our only learning art? Does it really confine our knowledge only to our natural world? Is it our most excellent way to intelligently keep expanding our old routine habit-ruts and make our weak feelings of joy, confidence, justice, love, respect, and happiness stronger and more deeply felt? Ethically, is intelligently playful practice really the best way to become a more intelligent and independent master of our self, or are our own routine habit-arts all really too powerful to improve without god’s grace? After reading what's been said earlier in Part 1 about Behavioral psychology, do you think Dewey was just too optimistic about its possibilities? I mean, do you really think you’ll ever become the master of all your unhealthful and dangerous habit-arts, or are you destined to remain a slave to some of them? Really, aren't some habits just too strong to master, no matter how hard we try? Isn’t most everyone just too conditioned and habitual about some things to even start feeling life can become what we want it to become, with the help of intelligently enjoyable daily experiments? And if they are, then what kind of optimism should we have for progress itself, either personal or social? Was Siddhartha right; is progress really just another illusion? Was that really why the Greeks became just another average, mediocre culture? Did they finally realize their own destructive habits had become just too powerful to control and transform? Did they too lose the confidence to keep working intelligently to themselves and life better? Did the Christians models of excellence as humility and depending on god’s grace help hobble liberals forms of Greek excellence? Was Nietzsche right? Did Christian moral models merely reflect the values, hopes, and frustrations of the ancient world’s slave and poor classes? These might be some questions philosophy majors might be interested in talking about. But in any case one truth remains the same; there’s only one way to find out how excellent you can make yourself, and that’s to experimentally test the few liberal ideas talked about throughout Book 1! So, if there’s any idea of Dewey’s you take away from this book, that might be the most important one; any kind of personal improvement is the result of experimental testing and enjoying better results. After all, hasn’t the weakness of personal habits been as the root of all national collapses, like Rome and Czarist Russia, and might that not too be happening now in the US? Will America's own weak and unhealthful diet, exercise, and educational habits eventually cause the US to become just another mediocre nation, while nations like China will soon become the world's leader because of their more healthful personal and educational habits now honed over thousands of years? If we Deweyan Behaviorists are right, then what's the most excellent way of turning any of this book's mere 2 dimensional ideas about excellence into dynamic, living, and growing 4 dimensional habit-arts? Isn’t it always the result of early educational practices? Do cultures keep collapsing merely because their educational institutions keep ignoring teaching everyone more excellent habit-arts? If every culture needs excellent schools to keep staying excellent, then is that really human nature's Achilles Heel? Can any culture become excellent without excellent personal and social habits? Aren't they the best way to teach people only a little candy a day is best, rather than over-indulging in unhealthful food, and under-indulging in healthful exercise? Without excellent public schools how can any nation really keep intelligently improving both personal and social forms of excellence? Isn't that the great lesson of Greece's Golden Age? And how many more interesting questions can you add to this list? (Hint: ‘an infinite number’ is still not acceptable.) And speaking of philosophy, what do you think is philosophy's real power for attracting so many intelligent people to build their own models of philosophic art? At last our first little general model of philosophic art has been outlined; the following parts will continue being colored in more detail. To see more of those models we must move FORWARD into the FUTURE. Hopefully, if time is used wisely, it'll help us keep reconstructing our old and worn out PAST models and thus keep expanding and growing better PRESENT ideas and feelings here and now! The other books in this series will continue describing more of Dewey's Native, Ancient, Modern, and Educational models of excellence. Hopefully they’ll help us become more confident in our own actions, more intelligent about the new liberal models of life and nature recently constructed, and perhaps even see deeper into our own selves as well. No doubt, we'll see how old and already widespread some of Dewey's ideas are, and why we say, with a robust confidence, they’re worthy of being celebrated in our schools, homes, and churches today. Dare I say it? They can even make life much more enjoyable and helpful. To see them we keep moving FORWARD! |
16.
EDUCATION: CONSERVATIVE AND
DEWEYAN, 101
In this and the following 2 sections we take Book 1's longest look at Dewey's liberal educational models of excellence. Usually the philosophy of education is treated as a minor philosophic subject, if it’s treated at all. As in so many ways, Plato was an exception to that rule; his most famous book Republic is essentially a book on educational philosophy. For Dewey, however, and many other liberals, education was one of philosophy's most important subjects, if not the most important! Only with better education can people begin seeing more intelligent ways of acting and guiding their lives, and thus build better habits. Luckily Dewey lived at a time when many Americans wanted to keep improving their lives and governments -- the Progressive Era -- and so in many places around the country many of his educational ideas were experimented with, tested, and continued on into the 1950s! At such schools young folks were helped to learn useful job skills as well as important character habits, like helping others and respecting just laws, as well as learn how to intelligently change unjust ones. For example, for a while Gary, Indiana's entire school district began using many of his ideas in the 1910s, as did the Chicago Vocational School system, and of course later in life entire country’s like Turkey, China, and Japan asked him for educational advice about making their own schools more excellent. They all wanted to keep improving their schools so their young folks would learn more intelligent habit-arts and thus lessen many of their social problems, like crime, unemployment, and helping their economies become more industrial and competitive. Even though he went to China decades before the Communists took over, today China produces more engineers than anyone else and their economy is rapidly becoming world-class, second only to the US. In any case, however, these 3 sections are not just for new teachers, but also for parents and students of education; after all, parents are the most important teachers for any child! Our Main Criticisms For we liberal Deweyans, for too long US education has been out of the progressive improvement loop, so to speak. Its basic education philosophy has been too conservative and even medieval. For us, educational excellence is the best and ONLY way for people AND societies to keep growing and evolving more peaceful and intelligent habit arts, but the more traditional schools remain, the more difficult that goal becomes. Such book-obsessed schools make it more difficult to learn all the democratic and experimental habits making life all it can be. To Dewey liberal education was the best key for teaching young folks how best to keep improving all their habit-arts, like healthcare, charity, exercise, lawfulness, and respect for equal rights. Again, without such a liberal educational system, many social problems remain an economic drag, like fighting crime, underemployment, unemployment, crippling social discrimination, drug abuse, health problems, democratic weaknesses, not to mention global warming and war itself. For Dewey all such modern social challenges can most rapidly be improved only with effective and practical educational ideas and practices, ones in which students make an emotional commitment to learning what feels best to them, rather than being regimented and made to learn what they often have no desire or need to learn. The less young folks make that emotional commitment, the sooner they forget what they spent years being made to learn. And so for us Deweyan liberals children should be free to choose a career path as soon as possible, even in elementary school! Such an emotional commitment makes it much easier to then teach students the valuable character habits they’ll need to become successful lawyers, doctors, engineers, police people, carpenters, plumbers, or whatever, and also the writing, reading, and calculating skills schools now try to teach. So, if Dewey's right, if the emotional commitment to learn practical employment skills is the best educational model for any kind of learning, then child psychology becomes one of the most important subjects of all. Without knowing something about the 3 main stages of child development, it’s almost impossible to build such schools, as Plato himself saw thousands of years ago. In general those stages are a playfully sense-based stage until about 7, a constructive stage until about 11 or 12, and then, as the brain matures, a more intellectual stage capable of grasping more abstract ideas. Thus, without accepting such a child psychology, and instead yoking students to book-work for 12 years, it will take much longer for almost anyone to learn any kind of excellence! And the more that doesn’t happen, the more vulnerable millions of young folks will remain to all of society’s unintelligent temptations and vices. On the other hand, the more schools are based on that psychology, the more naturalistic and less stressful school becoming, and the more children will want to be there. After helping found the American Association of University Professors, and becoming its first president, Dewey published his best educational book, Democracy and Education. Also The School and Society is a good little introductory book about elementary education. More About Dewey After he moved to the newly opened University of Chicago in 1894 Dewey opened its famous Lab School; there he began testing his liberal ideas. It’s still operating today, helping students learn valuable computer skills. After his undergraduate studies he taught briefly at the high school level in Pennsylvania, and there he began feeling how artificial conservative educational models were; without emotionally committing themselves to learn all the book facts they were being asked to learn, school for most students became a place merely to go to until the law said they could leave. For how many students is that the reality even today? In fact, even today most students just don’t need to know all those book facts college professors of education said they should learn. Also, they often justified their book-based models on producing so-called well-rounded students who learn a little of many different subjects. Again, at such schools students quickly forgot the ideas they learned merely to pass the next test. Thus, education for most everyone remained shallow, superficial, and worst of all, useless for much of life outside the school room! Greatly undereducated parents didn’t know enough about education to challenge such an educational model. Thus, often students weren’t prepared for the new jobs being created as science and technology continued creating them. In short, Dewey realized the whole feeling-side of education was largely missing in traditional classrooms; it was mostly just telling students to learn academic subjects at merely a mechanically verbal level of learning, rather than a holistic level of feeling AND verbal learning. So, like Alexander’s empire, conservative public education covered a lot of ground but it was only a few inches deep. And the work was easy; teachers just needed to stay a day or 2 ahead of the students’ book assignments. But again, such facts were all but useless in the real world outside of school. Another result was to ignore the far more useful subject of character development. Thus, again, many students remained vulnerable to all the anti-social actions going on in their own neighborhoods. Police brutality thus became intensified as more people broke the law mainly for economic reasons. They didn’t have the skills to work at better paying jobs, and thus racial segregation and discrimination continued making life needlessly stressful. In Chicago Dewey got the chance to test some of his more holistic and naturalistic ideas of learning, based on a sounder model of child psychology. There he saw the results of making learning an active, sense-based, enjoyable, and natural as learning outside of school. He wanted children to learn about history, chemistry, physics, but he also wanted such subjects taught not just from books in the higher grades, but from active and holistic learning experience! That way, a child’s bodily feelings would be just as educational as talking about ideas. In short, Dewey saw how knowledge should be located in one’s muscles as much as one’s brain. For example, having young students at the sense-based stage of development build a garden would also begin teaching them some elementary chemistry, biology, and mathematical facts. Also, it would make those ideas more meaningful because the experience was active, rather than a passive desk-centered model where student muscles are kept out of the educational loop, so to speak. After all, such children learn best with active practice. He also began experimenting with building projects for students at the constructive stage of development. He saw how even his own children learned best when they actively experimented intelligently to build what they wanted, and when teachers helped them feel what intelligent actions felt like. Students were to first make a detailed plan for their projects, and then actually test it themselves to see its results. Such holistic and organic learning experiences made learning important intelligent and experimental ideas easier and more enjoyable, and it also increased their carpentry, electrical, and plumbing skills. What kind of fertilizer, for example, was best for a garden, and how much of it was best? What is fertilizer? Are there different kinds? How is it made? Such questions begin opening up for young children the entire world of experimental research, and not just for a few, but for all students. Then, after moving to Columbia University in New York in 1904, he continued writing about education and convincing more people how our traditional public schools could be even better with the addition of constructive or project kinds of learning. If children wanted to learn more about politics, then they would make a list of questions, plan a trip to city hall, and talk with politicians who could answer their questions. Such learning projects would be much more meaningful to students than merely passively reading about politics. Then, when students’ body-minds are ready to study abstract ideas, the last 2 years of high school could be devoted to those studies, especially for students going on to college. Such a learning model was also useful for promoting democratic feelings of equality; each student played some part in such projects. Some Ancient Education History As with so many other philosophic ideas, liberal and active models of education go back not only to ancient Greek Sophists and Atomists, but they were used by our native ancestors for millions of years! All useful tools and habits were actively built experimentally, since the first stone tool was built over 2 million years ago! Normally, native children are taught to build their own useful skills, tools, and weapons during their constructive stage of childhood. And often it was the only way women were educated until the 1800! In ancient Greece, many Sophists like Protagoras became the college professors of the time, traveling from city to city and giving lectures about what students should practice. Sometimes they sold their books too! In fact, Dewey says how their new liberal questions about learning helped build the classic model of philosophy which lasted thousands of years! What is learning? Can character excellence be taught, or was it just a random gift from the gods? What is the best political, ethical, and educational system? Is there one or many? Such questions helped define philosophy’s 6 main topics, namely nature, learning, ethics, politics, education, and art. As they went from city to city they gave lectures for which they charged a fee; hey, sophists gotta eat too, right? What’s more, the lectures were aimed at teaching young folks practical skills for living more intelligently in the new democratic systems evolving around Greece. For example, learning how to speak well in public and in the law courts, where juries were sometimes 500 people; many people were afraid to speak in front of such large groups. They also lectured about important skills like estate management. Books were expensive and thus almost non-existent, and so lecturing gave young folks a chance to hear about new ideas they could practice for themselves. Thus, the new skills useful in a democratic society were learned. Such skills made it easier to take advantage of opportunities growing at the time. We've already seen one example of it when Thales made a lot of money selling olive oil presses one year. Needless to say, many of those ancient liberal democratic Sophists were secular-minded. To them, learning useful skills made living here and now more secure and worthwhile. Unlike conservative, Plato many liberal Sophists didn’t bother about any other realm except our natural one; Protagoras frankly admitted his not knowing about any other world besides our natural one. After all, with centuries of practical colony building in back of them, and many smashed fingers along the way, many Sophists were confident their own practical experimental learning model would be useful to many people. Aesop's practical little stories written at that time were about what practical skills might be useful, and they’re still popular reading today. With Socrates’ (d. 399) help ethical questions became another part of classical philosophy. So, is it any wonder one of the most prominent 4th century BCE sophists, a man named Antiphon wrote (Fr. 60) “Primary among human concerns is education” And of course one of the founders of Western liberalism, Democritus, himself realized its importance too; he tells us he would rather discover one law of nature than be a king in any entire country! In China too Confucius said with education all class divisions fad. In short, education helps us see all people are related and deserve the same rights as everyone else. The business-oriented democratic world of the 400s BCE was challenging Greek men like they had never been challenged before; women and slaves were pretty much out of the public loop. Sophist teachers helped fill those new educational needs. Men needed to get better at building businesses, talking respectfully with people, and also at guiding their government as well as defending themselves in court. Thus debate and reasoning skills were needed. Even slaves were welcomed to attend, as long as they paid the fee. As a result, old Greek political institutions continued being reconstructed along democratic lines, as is our modern world, and those with more intelligent thinking and acting habits had a big advantage in that world. It became easier to make an honest drachma or two. Socrates, of course, Democritus, Plato, Aristotle, and many others soon began painting their philosophic answers to such challenging questions, and within a few decades Western civilization had liberal, moderate, and conservative educational models of excellence, although Aristotle’s wasn’t very detailed. Just as today, where they differed was in what they thought was excellent to know, and how they could best learn it. Thus, different models of nature and learning began growing. Greeks being Greeks, it wasn't soon before conservatives like Plato began challenging Democritus’s liberal naturalistic models of excellence. His religious habits were very strong; in fact his Republic rested on knowing Spirit-Objects; he felt they were the best objects to know, much like Christians would say for many centuries during the Middle Ages. Naturally, Plato educational model was far from democratic. Instead it focused mainly on how to educate a few elite students rather than everyone; many conservatives cherish such feelings to this day. In the Republic he described his youthful conservative spirit-feelings about life and education, like how only future philosopher-kings should be educated for some 50 years before they were given power. After that time they would continue enforcing a very conservative model of life on everyone, limiting both democratic and religious freedoms for everyone. As mentioned earlier, no agnostics or atheists would be allowed. However, even he saw how some liberal ideas were useful. For example, his future rulers were to spend some 15 years in practical work between the ages of 35 and 50. They would then learn something about the problems and potentials of life. After that, then while ruling their city-state, they would return to more abstract subjects, like contemplating nature's eternal and unchanging spirit-objects -- the Spirit-Objects he thought governed all of nature. Because our natural world was merely a reflection of that spirit-world, only its objects could teach people what the best knowledge was all about, and thus make their actions most excellent. Sadly, however, we’ve seen how Plato eventually realized such objects could not be known entirely, or even with any degree of certainty. So, on a logical level they remained merely an assumption with no real evidence for them. Conservatives like Socrates and Plato, and moderates like Aristotle, thought like many traditional educators still think today: Mere thinking and reasoning is the most excellent learning art. That idea lives today in many of our public schools when they emphasis book-study for 12 years as the best form of education. Some, like Socrates, preferred a conversational style of reasoning. He would talk with whomever he could and ask them to define the eternal nature of some familiar abstract idea -- friendship, beauty, justice, and courage. Conservatives like him and Plato simply assumed such objects existed; again, mathematical facts seemed to imply such eternal knowledge existed. Others, like Democritus, Plato, and Aristotle preferred a written and lecture style of reasoning; Plato and Aristotle both started their own schools in Athens and no doubt lectured in them. Thus, we can begin seeing how important education was to the Greeks; they too sensed it was the key to building a better world. Where they differed from each other was the definition of ‘better.’ For Plato better meant more controlled, less diverse, more closed, and more feudalistic. For Democritus and Protagoras better meant more freedom, equality, democracy, and variety. A Case for Character Training Like them, Dewey too saw how important education was to the health of any political system, especially democracy. After all, for almost all of civilization people had lived in feudal societies where the rights they had depended on the social power they had, whether it was military, monetary, or religious. But he also noticed how modern tax-supported public schools also aimed at keeping a status quo in place. In fact, throughout much of history students were regimented, taught to obey their teachers, and kept that way with physical punishment. In the late ancient period Augustine too was often wacked by his teachers, and even in the 1960s I too saw how Catholic education was based on physical punishment, almost on a daily basis. The school disciplinarian would daily walk around the lunchroom and bang together the heads of students laughing and enjoying themselves. In fact, it’s not too much to say the present state of our nation as largely disconnected from our political and economic systems is a direct result of our educational practices. Those 2 important systems are all but ignored in our public schools, as is the subject of character excellence. To say the least, the more those character habits are ignored, the easier it becomes for those in power to stay in power and keep increasing it too, as we’ve seen in the last few sections. In truth, CHARACTER development and skills were as important to many ancient liberal sophists as they were to modern liberals like Dewey; character habits like good speaking, honesty, helpfulness, lawfulness, and how to make an honest drachma or 2. Such habits can help keep one's freedom and knowledge growing all through life, and thus help make life more satisfying and rewarding. Without them life remains much like we see on our local news shows, full of violence and disrespect. Even some teachers were recently sentenced to prison terms for changing test score grades. For us liberal Deweyans, however, character excellence is a life-long practice and skill beginning in our public schools. It's the same way with medical or legal skills; no doctor or lawyer knows everything about their art, and so they merely KEEP PRACTICING those habit-arts all through life! It's the same way with character excellence; it's an always growing practice rather than a static skill; it challenges people to practice joyful and respectful actions all through life, in thousands of little different ways here and now. In truth, there are an infinite number of ways to practice kindness, sympathy, and helpfulness. Down through time such useful and practical character skills not only helped people keep learning more easily, but also live safer and more intelligent lives in democratic systems. For example, Protagoras said part of character excellence was the habit of respecting the law, no matter what country you were in, and so knowing what the law is became an important part of liberal excellence on a daily basis. Sadly, that skill too has been all but ignored in many, if not most, of our tax-supported public schools! How many young folks today would act more excellently if their schools focused on teaching our laws, rather than just more and more trivial academic facts about history and literature while remain largely useless for all but future teachers? Can't you just imagine Protagoras looking for a parking sign every time he parked his chariot, if parking signs existed at the time? In short practical-minded Protagoras celebrated useful character knowledge and skills; they helped make life less stressful and more enjoyable. After all, if you’re going to learn some habit-art, why not learn not only some useful habit, but how best to use it wisely and intelligently, rather than ignorantly and illegally? More often than not, such important character habits like knowing what the law says about many different actions helps preserve a person's freedom, rather than remaining a slave to their own unintelligent ideas and habits. No doubt, seeing even slaves as deserving of equal rights was another bit of liberal audacity Plato and Aristotle both could not accept. For them a feudal model of life and nature was firmly implanted! Plato once complained about slaves who were too well dressed; it made them more difficult to see. That was part of the world they lived in. It was a common feeling; many imagined everyone's Fate was all arranged at birth by 3 spirit-goddesses. No doubt, Plato and Aristotle didn't believe that, but moderate Aristotle believed some people should even be forced into slavery, even though if they were smart enough, many slaves were often given more freedom; some even became bank managers! Hundreds of years later Julius Caesar too felt justified in killing many thousands of Celts in France. Why? How else could such barbarians become truly civilized? Sounds like he definitely had more gall than kind and sympathetic feelings while in Gaul! So even in ancient Greece practical character habits became the liberal key to excellence in all things, especially in education. The more we practice such habits, and make them part of our will power, the easier it becomes to practice ethical excellence in our own democratic age. If practiced enough it becomes what many conservative and moderate psychologists call instinct! However, what that means in school is allowing students to first learn about the many different skills being practiced in the real world, and then allowing them to choose which one they would like to learn more about. No doubt, such liberal, practical, democratic actions will make it much easier to also teach the democratic character habits too, like tolerance and respect for all law-abiding people. Without such schools, feudalistic habits of intolerance and hate will continue on, as we can see daily in our media and newspapers. To this day in many places conservatives work to keep such democratic habits weak and hobbled in their growth. What’s more, religious ideas are still often used to defend such conservative actions; they might offend some god somewhere, or bring on some catastrophe. In fact, many religions continue practicing those ideas, and the more they do, the more intolerant people feel. Using Useful Ideas Before Plato was born, liberal Protagoras probably discovered a rather interesting educational question. Some practical person may’ve asked him: If whatever we experience is true for us, then why pay high fees to teachers like you to teach us about excellence? In short, if excellence is relative from city to city, nation to nation, and even from person to person, then why do we need Sophists telling us what they think excellence is? His answer, however, shows how really practical and pragmatic he was. In effect he said even though everyone is the measure of their own truth, not everyone’s truth works equally well in different social situations! Excellence in irrigating crop fields in one country, for example, may not be acceptable in another country, perhaps for religious reasons. For example, lying and thievery may be allowed in some places, but in a more civilized place neither one may work equally well. Thus knowing conditions here and now becomes another part of liberal character excellence. What is happening out there? If you visit and start talking about crop irrigation in one place, you can understand why people might think it less than excellent when they have laws against it. So Protagoras suggested an intelligent person will learn to respect the country’s laws they’re in, so life’s stresses would be reduced. It was just another example of practical reasoning. Why risk the chance of being thrown into jail, or worse, just for not respecting a country’s laws? Why try to fricassee a camel when it’s against the law? In short, for the well-traveled Protagoras, because excellence always varies from place to place, and from person to person, why not learn to respect all law-abiding people? It’s another example of how intelligent respect is one liberal democratic character habit useful in many different places! Is it all just ancient history! Even in the US, the world's oldest democracy, many conservative secular and religious folks today still feel some peaceful habits should be outlawed and forbidden, rather than tolerated; gay and lesbian equal marriage rights are merely one current example of that idea; a few decades ago it was equal rights for Africans, and in the 1800s it was equal rights for Irish immigrants. In fact, one liberal democratic character skill Protagoras taught remains excellent today: respect and obey any country's laws, as long as they're just and apply to everyone! And, even if they are unjust, work intelligently to change them if you work at all. That way you keep your freedom to keep making life better for everyone. How can education get more practical than that, and yet in many of our public schools today such ideas are only mentioned in books, if they’re mentioned at all, and rarely practiced if they’re practiced at all. If you're a real social pioneer you can challenge unfair and unjust laws in court, just to test them and maybe get them overturned, but such skills are rarely allowed to be practiced by students themselves! To us Deweyan liberals it’s another great weakness of our public schools. Most all of the learning remains confined to a merely boo-idea level of consciousness, rather than a deeper body-mind level. Protagoras’ liberal practical educational ideas, like teaching yourself useful kinds of respectful habit-arts, and of course testing them in the real world, no doubt inspired Aristotle, Dewey, and many other educators as well. For nature-loving Aristotle, founding a school became an intelligent way to build his own aristocratic models of philosophic excellence, and in it more than mere facts were to be taught. For him excellent ethical habits were those of a moderate aristocratic Greek gentleman, loaded with all its undemocratic feelings about equal rights and opportunities for anyone not a member of his aristocratic class. For the liberal and democratic Dewey, however, teaching useful and practical CHARACTER habits to all students in our public schools was the best way to keep strengthening our democracy and its liberal values of equality. If not, then such skills can even be eliminated merely within 1 generation! After all, everyone learns the habits they’re taught. If no one were taught intolerant habits they wouldn’t be practiced. Hopefully now the reader will see why Dewey based his liberal model of education on 3 pillars: fact, skills, and character development. Part of that character development depends a great deal on knowing what the law is, and the results of not respecting it. Thus, the following question: Why shouldn't young folks learn more about our laws every year they’re in school, as well as practicing such respect both in school and out? Why shouldn’t they also learn how to judge whether a law is fair and just, and helps make everyone’s life safer and more enjoyable? After all, what good is knowing a million facts if you didn't know how to wisely use them to make everyone’s life more enjoyable? Some German Nazis acted like real bastards because they used their scientific facts and skills destructively, rather than constructively and kindly. Dewey’s 3 Pillars of Educational Excellence. At the University of Chicago Dewey became friends with a woman who was helping immigrants learn more about character excellence and how to live best in their new urban and democratic surroundings. At her Hull House school Jane Addams taught poor undereducated immigrants how to use their government wisely, rather than let it merely use them and their tax money. Eventually she invited Dewey to lecture at Hull House; such lectures not only helped the immigrants, but also helped him explain his ideas of excellence with plain language, and thus help make his writing simpler and less technical. While in Chicago he also began seeing some more serious social problems immigrants were facing, and how they might be solved with some new, more useful, educational habits. With Addams’ help Dewey saw how character habits were more useful than even. Eventually they became one of Dewey's 3 liberal pillars of excellent education: factual knowledge, useful skills, and character habits. To this day, however, conservative educators continue ignoring character habits as a worthwhile educational goal! Again, they’re taken themselves out of the social improvement loop, so to speak. The more such habits are ignored in our schools, the more unintelligent actions keep happening outside of school, and the more taxpayer money must be used to keep shielding the public from such actions! In some places it now costs about $50,000 of tax money to keep just one prisoner from society! Multiply that by 2 million prisoners now jailed in the US, and you can get some idea of how taxpayer money continues being wasted unnecessarily! Just imagine how many more psychologists and student mentors could be hired by our public schools if that 100 billion dollars was spent there! Today, many of our state prisons are terribly overcrowded with young, able-bodied people who have been merely undereducated! They never were taught to enjoy working honestly and joyfully to build skills useful in the real world. They were often made to learn in a largely unnatural situation, namely to sit still and merely keep reading. And economically they were often treated as just another body useful for getting more state money! No doubt, to us Deweyan liberals, ignoring character development on a formal teaching level is one of the greatest weaknesses of US public education. It fosters and encourages many of the serious tragic life-wrecking social events we see every day around us. All criminal actions, and all the publicly paid systems to keep arresting, trying, and jailing millions of people would be greatly reduced if our public schools regularly taught the kinds of liberal character habits I’ve been talking about. To us liberals, trivial knowledge facts merely helps build trivial people. It’s another sad result of what happens when monopoly educational power stays in place, as it has in our public schools. To this day it remains controlled by a few educational bureaucrats who want to change nothing in the system. After all, they’re making good tax money for not much strenuous work. Only when enough people say enough, we want more liberal schools built in our own neighborhoods, will such schools begin to be built. As far as I can see, today the public continues being distracted from learning more about liberal education models with such issues like whether teachers should have tenure, or how many charter schools should be allow in our system? For us liberal Deweyans these are all side issues! The educational debate should be about what children are being taught in school, rather than continue to allowing trivial book knowledge to remain the main educational goal. In fact, these are anything but new educational ideas. Going all the back to ancient Greece, personal tutors taught the current character habits to their aristocratic students. Only such wealthy people could afford to hire such one-on-one tutors, and thus easily pass on to young folks the ideas parents wanted them to have. Even some Roman educators like Marcus Quintilianus (35-100 CE) pointed to their usefulness. But again, only a small class of wealthy aristocrats could afford such private tutors to home-school children. Even though the Roman Republic had recently become ruled by an all-powerful emperor, Marcus was liberal enough to realize the benefit of teaching all students such habits, whether rich or poor. In fact, for us Deweyan liberals, for thousands of years that had been education's main challenge! Dewey saw, the more young folks weren't taught such liberal democratic habit-arts in their schools, homes, and churches, the more intolerant students would become with their conservative ideas and habits. Thus, we got such atrocious and vicious actions in the Middle Ages like burning heretics alive in public, as well as helpless women and children condemned as anti-Christian and evil witches. In medieval Germany alone as many as 10,000 people were killed in one year! For him it was obvious: Democratic excellence creating a more peaceful and enjoyable world for everyone would more easily grow if excellent liberal character habits were taught to students every year they’re in school. The US founders simply weren’t very democratic. They built a central government to best help grow a wealthy upper class of businesspeople, rather than a more democratic social life for everyone, so they gave no educational powers to the central powers. Only with the recent growth of a more active federal government has it gained more power to shape public education. After 1954 it began sending troops to integrate the public schools. Dewey moved to Columbia in 1904. We can imagine, for a few moments, what life was like at the time. Dewey continued seeing many educational challenges as Africans continued being lynched in many southern states, and the racist KKK even marched in large numbers down Pennsylvania Ave. in 1920! Poor and uneducated foreigners were flooding into New York by the millions every year, including all of my grandparents; they just passed through on their way to Ohio. But many thousands stayed in New York and helped create the need for more housing, clothing, food, and schools. The entire social network was overloaded. To many of those foreigners, just having a bed to sleep in and a stove to cook on was a luxury, even if five people slept in a bed and only potatoes and vegetables were cooked. What’s more, the rather conservative public schools weren’t much help; mainly they helped immigrants learn some English and enough political facts to become citizens. However, many never learned the skills or creative habits useful in their new industrial democracy, and thus couldn’t teach them to their children. Neighborhood gangs roamed the streets stealing what they could just to stay alive. A wonderful movie showing what life was like around that time is Somebody Up There Likes Me. The schools didn’t teach children how to become honest cops or carpenters or even teach basic lawyer and doctor skills. Mainly, their goal was to just keep the kids busy with a series of passive book assignments for a few hours. By nature, however, kids and most adults are active experimental learners, as any parent soon learns. Naturally, caring liberals like Dewey asked how can the public schools help make their lives more rewarding, enjoyable, and less stressful? Like many Asian workers today, US immigrants made pennies a day while a few factory owners made fortunes. They simply weren’t interested in teaching their workers more intelligent skills like limiting their families to one or two kinds, what foods help build healthy bodies, and what laws should be respected. Many immigrant families thus turned to organize their criminal actions. Liberals like Dewey, for example, asked why merely keep giving children more book assignments if it didn't help build more useful skills and intelligent character habits. How could mere book assignments ever teach immigrants how to use the new government to make life safer for everyone, keep making life better? Why demand children keep memorizing trivial facts about American presidents, English novelists, and chemical formulas they didn’t want to learn and would probably never use in the real world? If such facts were to be learned, why not at least make them game-oriented and fun , like writing and performing their own presidential scenes, acting out the truths novelists were describing, learning their math, chemistry, and scientific facts while actually helping beautify and improve their own neighborhoods, and helping others learn more intelligent habit-arts? In short, how to stay intelligently connected with their surroundings in positive and constructive ways? Wouldn't such important skills help young folks not only find better kinds of work, and perhaps also start their own business and also use some of the profits to keep helping others? Aren’t those kinds of habits really what true civilization is all about? In short, what was educationally more important: teaching young folks trivial skills like how to work fractions and decimals year after year, or help them learn excellent character skills like honesty, creativity, helpfulness, and of course feeling what democratic tolerance feels like? No doubt, many conservative educators at first simply ignored such liberal ideas like vocational education courses; to them teaching excellent character habits was the parents' job, not theirs. But by 'passing that educational buck' to others they, in effect, helped keep their own neighborhoods degraded, encourage criminal activities for economic reasons, drug-habits of social withdrawal, and make life more stressful for taxpayers who paid for all those services to better control such actions. Again, everyone's taxes are used to keep funding schools, courts, prisons, and other remedial social services. For Dewey is just wasn’t’ very intelligent to keep our public school out of the life-improving loop, so to speak. It only kept hobbling the growth of a more democratic world. The more excellent character habits like health, lawfulness, and helpful business skills are ignored, the easier it is for young folks to fulfill the American fantasy of getting rich quickly with less than excellent actions! To this day, far too many young folks are quickly pressured to join a neighborhood gang, start demanding 'protection' money from neighborhood businesses, start abusing alcohol, drugs, vulnerable young women, and even thievery to solve boredom and money problems. Why not? It's all part of life in the big city, isn't it? Life’s a rat-race and a jungle isn’t it? And even if they do get caught committing such actions many quickly learn how to pay off the police, or go to jail and learn more criminal actions from those already there! Police corruption in the early 1900s was probably rampant in all major US cities. The movie Serpico showed how rampant the problem was in New York in the 1970s! Given the state of public awareness about education, creating more liberal schools, even in New York, was about as easy as walking on water. Many professional-minded parents naturally wanted their sons and daughters to become lawyers and doctors, and so any kind of industrial education was a step backward for them, not forward. In fact, when voters got a chance to start making their schools more liberal, like many other cities had done already, they rejected the idea during the first World War. Thus, except for creating more vocational options in some schools, the obsession with learning more and more academic trivia stayed pretty much the same. As a result, character habits continued being ignored. Poorly educated people continued living in poor neighborhoods and allowing their kids to practice more criminal kinds of habits. It seemed to be tribal warfare between conservatives and liberals with kids caught in between! Remember, both radio and television hadn't yet been invented, and even when they were they were used mainly for advertising and entertainment purposes, thus making people more eager to keep buying the goods corporations were making, like washing machines and expensive cars, jewelry, and don’t forget stocks and bonds. And because respectful character excellence wasn't taught, such cars often gave young men a place to force vulnerable women to give in sexually or get out and walk! When women weren’t taught about respectful and caring sex, or men about running an honest, lawful, and helpful repair shop, clothing factory, restaurant, or appliance store, then life remains the ‘rat-race’ it’s pretty much been for thousands of years, full of superstitions and myths. Even when a Prohibition amendment passed in the early 1900s outlawing the sale of alcohol, criminal gangs themselves became organized like corporations to keep selling it, and again paying off the police to look the other way. Even today, an traditional educational model based on trivia knowledge maintains its monopoly in public education. Most parents even today are still too undereducated about liberal models of education to even think better schools can be built, much less focus on actually building them in their own neighborhoods! They often still believe their schools should continue teaching only reading, writing, and arithmetic. Today, that monopoly is still maintained with the help of state laws, and they keep hobbling the growth of more liberal democratic schools. Even in supposedly more liberal charter schools the same kind of subjects are still forced on the most vulnerable among us, children! Teacher unions often went to state capitols and convinced politicians to pass such laws, making education improvement more difficult and practically impossible. In effect such state laws removed school improvement from local control and gave it to state officials. In fact, to this day conservative Republicans often called themselves educational reforms, and yet the reforms they suggest often change the flow of public tax money from non-profit public schools to for-profit private hands! It’s like the US Constitution merely changed the flow of public money from the British government to local aristocratic pockets. And union pay rates don’t apply to Charter schools, so the profits are even greater! Thus, teachers are left with the choice to teach more academic trivia or find some other work. Even in most Charter schools children are made to learn more and more facts-facts-facts, so the private owners and investors can collect more public tax money from the government! Such events have made liberal educational improvement difficult, if not practically impossible. Still, liberal progress hasn’t been stopped. Thanks to the growth of more liberal families, democratic progress continues growing. They care about empowering their children with more intelligently kinds of character habits! And I might add, that includes respectful sexual character habits too! What young woman today in much of the Western world doesn’t know what respectful sexual behavior is, and how they too should have a part in saying what should happen and when? But on the public school and Charter school levels, it seems the goal is still to teach academic facts, facts, and more facts. The program was firmly established in the late 1950s when the so-called Space Race began. Undemocratic conservatives convinced President Eisenhower himself to speak out against Dewye’s education ideas, and he did! Ike said Dewey’s ideas were the main reason why Russia’s space program was more advanced than the US’s! In reality, however, it seems the Russians merely captured more German rocket scientists after World War 2 than the US did! As a result, today almost everyone still believes forcing children to learn what they have little desire or use for remains the definition of good education, even though many children keep telling their parents they don’t like school? These days I hear some conservative politicians still talk about how their new educational programs will teach children to reason critically, and thus become more intelligent adults. As we’ll see, however, early in the 1900s liberal educators at Columbia like Edward Thorndike proved experimentally children learn to reason just as well in a project-oriented school, and in many cases better, than students in book-oriented schools. In any case, today probably most people still don’t know what better schools can look like, and even if they did they would often be legally kept from creating them without state permission! In short, our own education laws keep hobbling social improvements themselves! In fact, most people today have only experienced a passive book-oriented education model, and so continue naively believing making children sit at desks day after day, year after year, and remain tied to their books is educational excellence. To us Deweyan liberals it certainly is not! What’s more, educational history in the first half of the 1950s tells us Dewey’s ideas are more useful for building a more equal and democratic life for everyone! A more project and professions-oriented educational model is much more naturalistic and effective. It’s holistic, rather than merely verbal. Such a liberal educational model is more like the way children actually learn anything, namely with active kinds of practice! In them learning becomes more enjoyable, constructive, and productive because it’s based firmly on children development itself! However, education debate is practically non-existent. It’s all dictated from the top down, so to speak, just like feudalistic morals were dictated from the pope down, or laws were dictated from the king! Be honest now, when is the last time you heard any kind of meaningful debate about different educational models? Without such debate how can anyone have any real choice about what kinds of schools their tax money should be used for? Why shouldn’t parents and students have the right to start learning about a profession or career while they’re in school, so life can become less stressful once they graduate? Why should young folks enter their adult years knowing almost nothing about how to make a honest buck and help others in the process? In fact today, more than 200 years after the US was founded, most of our states in the world's oldest democracy still have unjust and unfair laws against same-sex marriage. True, they might soon all be negated by Supreme Court rulings, but when schools ignore liberal character habits, the underlying feelings of bigotry remain in place, rather than joy and feelings of wishing people well. Aren’t those the feelings all civilized people should learn? At least we liberals say they are. More than 100 years after the Civil War millions of people were still taught to hate and hobble African equal rights as much as possible! Just like philosophy itself, there are conservative, moderate, and liberal models of education, but when they fail to teach our democratic ideals of character excellence, like sharing rights equally, and how to respect others and our just laws, then how excellent are they for making everyone's life better? Should democratic habit-arts of equality, respect, or lawfulness be ignored by our schools just because people don’t realize how important they are? One Personal Recollection One similarity between liberal and conservative educational models is they both agree the ultimate goal of education is teaching students how to intelligently solve their own problems. Where they often differ is how young folks should learn to solve their own problems. Years ago, after I had taken some philosophy courses and how to ask some meaningful questions, rather than just sit around like a dope, I called into a radio talk show one day and asked 2 education professors what the best goal of public education was. At first they sounded a little surprised at such a basic question, but after a few moments they both agreed the goal was teaching students how to solve their own problems. No doubt, to both liberals like Dewey and traditional educators that goal is important; who wants to have adults stay dependent on others for solving their own problems? No doubt, many disabled people need help from others, but most people can learn to intelligently solve their own problems; after all, most problems aren’t very serious at all. So, the goal is teaching young folks how to intelligently answer life's challenges is a worthwhile one. Such skills help make life more satisfying, and thus keep growing as people. However, the big question is how should we go about teaching those important skills, like how to make a plan of action, and then experimentally test the plan to see its results? Conservative kinds of educators in general say knowing more book-facts is the best way to learn how to solve our own problems. It’s an old and traditional system. In the Middle Ages, for example, people learned to say certain prayers to help solve their problems, like disease, having a safe journey, not offending god, and asking for forgiveness. In short, merely reading examples of character excellence should be enough to teach students how to best solve their problems. For liberals like Dewey, however, what's needed is a much more active and organic kind of experimental testing and learning how such actions actually feel, so those ideas don’t become quickly forgotten, like happens regularly with mere book-facts. How many of the book-facts do typical 25 and 30 year olds remember from their 12 years of public school? So, to make ideas and skills something other than Alexander’s empire, that is narrow and shallow, it’s better to use active kinds of learning projects, rather than merely reading about them. If children want to learn, say, more about Behavioral psychology, then they might actually perform scenes from The Taming of the Shrew, or any other play where such examples exist. To liberals like Dewey that active kind of education model will always produce better results than merely reading about such examples in, say, a psychology book. In fact, only actions can best build any new habit-art. Merely reading without performing some idea leaves learning on merely a narrow and shallow verbal level of awareness, rather than a body-mind level of feeling AND idea, or as we say a body-mind level of awareness. It's the difference between merely talking about ideas and actually practicing them. The common proverb is: Actions speak louder than words! In short, modern Behavioral psychology says young folks need active practice to best learn any new habit; it is a psychology Dewey helped build! Mere reading neglects the entire feeling side of a person's body-mind, and so is much less than excellent learning, as we've seen with Plato's and Aristotle's contemplative reasoning art. It's one thing to merely think spirit-objects or eternal Forms exist, but to actually know they actually exist are 2 very different things. As we’ve seen, Plato’s Parmenides bravely demonstrated with mathematical precision why such objects were not be known and might never be known! I didn't ask it at the time I called in, but I should have: If knowing how to solve our own problems is education's main goal, then why do students made to go through 12 years of public schooling without getting any active training about solving either their own or hateful social problems? Wouldn't knowing how improving a diet habit, for example, be much easier if students knew how to actively experiment with their eating habits? And if not, then isn't our present healthcare crisis one result of neglecting such experimental learning, and relying instead on the government's help to solve healthcare problems our own bad eating habits often create?! After all, some 50% of all health problems are now said to be diet related, and the heavier people become, the more health problems they'll probably have, once again paid for with everyone's socialized tax money. And of course the more money is needed for that, the less money is available for continuing to improve and enjoy life itself. So, this question too seems more than a little reasonable: Are our own conservative book-oriented public schools really helping create many of the government programs conservatives say we shouldn’t have? Almost certainly, such programs will continue being needed as long as our public schools remain obsessed with teaching only more and more book-facts, and remain outside the loop of working to make life better for everyone! Yet another little lame limerick is offered to make the point. At memorizing definitions Jones was a whiz. Reading more as he felt some dental fizz. As teeth came from his head, He sheepishly said, My schools never taught what dental health is. 17. EDUCATIONAL MODELS, 102 Traditional Educational Weaknesses For we liberal Deweyan perhaps the greatest weakness of traditional schools is their ignore of our strongest learning art, active experimental learning. It’s a much more effective and natural learning tool than merely answering someone else’s book-questions year after year, For Dewey mere book-learning is unnatural. Why? It separates and isolates thinking from actively testing ideas, thus keeping knowledge on a purely verbal and mental level. For example, lucky students may read about useful character habits like helping others less well of, but that idea takes on another deeper meaning when such ideas are experimentally tested! In that situation the entire body is involved with the learning process, rather than just the verbal awareness. To his great credit even conservative Plato realized how important active kinds of learning are, and recommended his future leaders spend 15 years actively learning about life before they became leaders. And, a standing joke for Mark Twain was his saying he never let school get in the way of his education; he too realized the best knowledge is learned in active experimentation. It’s what gave his writings so much human depth and warmth. But, it seems even Mark missed something very important, namely the character art of using his fortune to help those less well off. He kept using his money merely to make more money, and the more his investments went broke, the more he had to work to make more money. If he’d have gone to a more liberal school where such character habits are a normal part of the day he almost certainly would have made his life less stressful and more enjoyable. Surely, the ‘Robin Hoods’ around him had fun taking it away from him with money-draining investments! As Dewey saw, for 12 years in traditional schools students are tied mainly to their books, ‘spoon-fed’ merely academic facts, like George Washington crossed the Delaware River during the Revolutionary War. However, how many students are allowed to more feel that fact in some kind of experimental body-mind way? How many students are allowed to write a short scene and actually feel how cold it was at the time, and why he was crossing the river in the first place? Washington crossed the Delaware because the plan he made to attack the British in Trenton, New Jersey needed to be tested and verified in life; it was part of the process of experimentally testing a plan there and then. What's more, if a rather rotund and overweight General Knox would have rocked the boat a little more, Washington might never have made it into New Jersey! How much more fun would learning be if children were allowed and encouraged to create such active learning situations. In short, the more young folks don't feel how important intelligent experimental learning and testing is, the more they remain immature and childlike. Again, the art is not difficult to teach. It simply means writing a plan of action, assigning different tasks to different students, and then actively test the plan; some adjustments to the original plan may be necessary, but then again, what plan is always accurate the first time? The earlier children learn that art, the easier it becomes to start solving their own problems intelligently! Again, in traditional schools teachers are almost forced to cover so much material in so much time, so students can score well on the end-of-year standardized test, and teachers can keep their jobs. However, what standardized test ever asked students what’s the best way to solve any problem intelligently? The obsession with making such tests so academically focused not only leads students to believe that’s what education should be about, but it artificially pressures teachers to keep education that way. Recently some teachers who changed students test scores were even sentenced to a year in jail; that’s how obsessed the conservative educational bureaucracy is with keeping education merely on a verbal level, and all but ignoring not only deeper, more natural, and more enjoyable kinds of learning, but useful character training too. As a result, students get almost no feeling or idea either about WHAT character excellence means or how to experimentally build it. Many leave school psychically crippled in a sense; they have few useful skills for living life well in the real world. The more such habits are ignored, the more difficult it becomes to earn an honest living after schools days are over, if, that is, they can even find a job they're interested in and pays enough to live on. More About a Liberal Educational Model Today we see some wasteful results of such educational weaknesses. Because most schools remain book-centered and fact-based, rather than individually student-centered and experimental, many students simply drop out of school as soon as the law allows. In fact, their educational needs are not being met! Why stay in school and keep learning useless academic facts. When is the last time the reader needed to prove a geometric theorem in the real world? And yet all students are made to study that art for a year! Algebra is the same way. In fact, that criticism might be leveled against most school subjects! Most students simply don't have a need to keep learning such facts; what do they have to do with life in the real world, where the American dream awaits? Almost always it seems such high schools would rather teach students to know things like why Othello caused Desdemona to commit suicide, and how to solve quadratic equations. But for Dewey, without character habits like community work and improvement, school merely keeps diverting student attention away from perhaps THE most important subject of all, namely PHYSICAL AND MENTAL HUMAN HEALTH and its 2 important habit-arts -- intelligent diet and exercise! Wealthy folks can afford to send their children to psychologists to help them learn more useful habits, but why should our tax-paid public schools keep ignoring such important skills while we keep spending some $600 billion a years building more guns and bombs? In what sense are those events worth celebrating in other countries? One result of such schools makes it more difficult to start making some positive contributions to our society; drug-dealing and criminal actions are much more profitable. In fact, as we'll see in Book 5's Models of Educational Excellence, the sooner learning the arts of experimental testing and character helpfulness, the easier it becomes for most everyone to keep educating themselves, rather than depending on others. When students discover how important excellent diet and exercise habits are in whatever career they choose, then they'll want to learn how to build those habits, and thus be better prepared for life itself, instead of just for the next test! Not learning to talk confidently, intelligently, and constructively is often another weakness of traditional schools. How many young folks are deathly afraid to say anything in front of a group? It’s certainly not because young folks aren’t capable of learning such skills; it’s mainly because they’re not allowed to practice them on a regular basis in conservative book-obsessed schools. For how many teachers is a completely silent classroom the best? What is our conservative educational bureaucracy afraid of by teaching students to speak up forcefully and rationally about events in the real world? Is it because military units function best when no one questions or talks about what’s going on? And how much more tragic is the situation when most of the information people learn about the world comes from talking, not reading or writing? How else can young folks learn to feel the art of kind and sympathetic talking when students are conditioned from grade 1 to mostly sit quietly and work from books, and when sports remain the art of merely defeating someone else, rather than learning how to intelligently keep improving our own skills of helpfulness? I hasten to add: such educational systems exist not just at the public school level. How many college students and athletes leave school with absolutely no feeling for using some of their money to help those in need, rather than merely build a bank account? And equally regrettable, how can students want to keep educating themselves when their question-asking habit is largely neglected by book assignments? In them the questions are already given, so again, without the habit of asking intelligent questions, students leave school crippled in that way? It often leads to psychic doldrums, so to speak, in which boredom becomes a strong feeling. Again, bored people are boring people. As a result, many students finish school not only afraid to say anything in front of an audience, but of not knowing anything worthwhile to say either! Evidently, since the 1950s that’s the way conservatives want young folks to be. It make life in the corporate and military worlds that much easier! They don’t want students knowing about over-population and independent kinds of thinking; they want young folks to start having a family so they have to work for whatever the corporation pays them. Thus, the more students are discouraged from talking in class about what they're learning, either in school or outside it, the more abstract skills like solving quadratic equations become meaningful; such equations, by the way, are useful for, say, finding how big a garden area might be, or even designing a piece of furniture. They have a use, but when they’re separated from constructive kinds of projects, they remain merely another mental diversion. Also, intelligent kinds of talking in class on a regular basis can not only help build all-important feelings of self-confidence, but also organizational skills. The better organized their weekly talk become, the more interesting they can be made. Conservative educators often focus mainly on teaching facts, facts, and more facts from books, books, and more books, but that’s often not all. Business skills too are often included, like typing and learning how to use our ever-growing number of electronic toys and tools. But Dewey was bold enough to ask what the results of such an education are. A passive kind of obedience was one result. The more students obey their teachers and don’t have any different learning goals themselves, then the more vulnerable they remain to people who test them for their character excellence once they leave school or home. All during his public school and university years Albert Einstein was interested only in math and science; one of his teachers even told him he would never amount to anything. Imagine what physics would be like today if Albert hadn’t remained interested in his own questions, like what is light and what would life look like if we could travel that fast? Again, is a passive and non-questioning habit really the one most cherished by our corporate and military leaders? Are they really the ones behind the creation of our book-obsessed educational systems? Well, to cite merely one piece of evidence. Admiral Hyman Rickover who helped build America’s nuclear submarine fleet in the 1950s, said as much. To him schools should teach only facts, facts, and more facts, and then let the connecting of their facts be someone else's responsibility higher up in the bureaucratic system, whether it's either military or corporate. Only they know best about the 'big picture', and what’s going on in the world. We can well imagine Socrates and Plato talking about the same kinds of ideas. To them running a government should be left to the older men who have more knowledge and experience; only their judgments can be best. Young and inexperienced people shouldn’t be given any political power, or as little as possible! It’s understandable; experience often makes people wiser, and obviously military knowledge too is seasoned and ripened with experience. However, don't even foot soldiers need character excellence, to know what's best to do with the facts they have around them? Should they just keep killing innocent people simply because they’re ordered to? For us liberal democrats, that like saying people can’t even ask why we should use our tax money to pay for 20 or 30 nuclear submarines when merely 1 of their missiles can literally level any city on earth? Should we really keep allowing people to have such power? Wouldn’t we all be better off if all such weapons were dismantled? In truth, the more people are conditioned merely to obey orders, rather than evaluate the facts for themselves, the greater the chances for massive amounts of brutality, as we saw during the Vietnam War. Babies are still being deformed by the poisons we dropped on that country! Who needs to be a rocket scientist to feel such situations call for intelligently evaluating facts rather than merely obeying others no matter what the results are? Many ancient Greeks like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle felt the un-criticized life is not worth living, but if we don’t teach young folks how to evaluate facts by their possible results, the more dangerous life becomes for everyone. Of what educational use is merely collecting more and more book-facts, and not thinking about their possible results in the real world. In such schools where critical thinking habits are taught, they become a much more important part of the community, rather than remained isolated from it. As we've already seen, I learned many isolated biological facts in school, but because I never learned to put them to use for building a more intelligent diet, I continued wrecking my own health. And here's another example of allowing only a few to tell us what the facts mean. In 2001 US intelligence services had gathered many, many facts about the 9-11 airplane hijackers; they were already here in the US taking flying lessons in different parts of the country! But such facts were never shared with different organizations, so they could be put together into a coordinated picture, and for also questioning them on why anyone would want to learn merely to fly a passenger airplane, rather than also learn to take-off and land it! The art of coordinating and using facts intelligently is definitely a more important skill than merely learning more and more facts; what do the facts mean and how can they be used to keep making life safe and productive? The more people know how to practice that creative and intelligent art, the safer we all become! Aristotle collected tons of biological facts from around his world and even organized many of them into some useful categories, but he missed evolution’s big picture; had he lived 10 years longer he may have been able to better see such a picture. In short, his un-criticized assumption about their being some eternal constant forms creating eternally constant groups of animals and plants made an evolutionary model of nature almost impossible for him. Evidently even Plato's Academy some ideas were beyond criticism! In short, we Deweyan liberals celebrate knowing facts; accurate information is needed. But to merely demand all students obey their teachers and learn the same facts, whether they want to or not, is not democratic education. At best it’s a conservative model of education aimed at maintaining a feudalistic class-based status quo! In more liberal schools children are taught how to use their facts and skills intelligently, constructively, helpfully, and if possible kindly! In truth, as test-scores and drop-out rates teach us, many students simply don't need to know more and more book-facts. Also, some 70% of high school students don’t go on the keep learning more and more book facts in college. And what’s more, much less than 30% don’t get a degree in 4 years. Today many urban schools have a drop-out rate as high as 50%! In other words, in some neighborhoods over half the students are leaving the one place they could be using as an excellent preparation into the world outside of school. So, because what's important about facts is how they’re used, shouldn't that educational fact help concerned parents keep pressuring their local schools to start including more naturalistic kinds of learning projects all through the 12 years of public schooling? The less that happens, then more and more students will continue entering their adult years psychically immature and crippled for excellently answering many of life's challenges, like obeying just laws and making only honest money. We continue seeing those kinds of results daily in our media. As John Galbraith saw, too many people, both educators and corporate supervisors, have become content to keep the class-based economic status quo in place, and so rarely even think about the social results of a 50% drop-out rate for some schools. Who cares? Let someone else deal with it! Parents aren’t the only ones in such an improvement loop. Students are too. Students too can accept the challenge to improve that 50% drop-out rate, so as to better meet different student learning desires. For example, why shouldn’t students wanting to be business people be able to make some ‘school money’ with a student business, and then use it to help those less fortunate? In short, why not turn student creativity and experimentation loose in a safe and constructive manner, to help more students stay in school and keep improving themselves as well as their neighborhoods? Such learning not only gets students more feelingly involved with local challenges, but also with helping others to help themselves. In short, the more students are encouraged to ACTIVELY AND EXPERIMENTALLY solve their own problems, the more their own educational and character excellence grows stronger, the more mature students will become, and the more their own schools will continue being improved. Believe it or not folks, nature has no desire to leave manmade projects alone, and that’s been a challenge for only about 4 billion years, give or take a New York minute of 2! As many are seeing today, education dollars are becoming less available as income and taxes remain stagnant. Especially during recessions tax revenues become even less, and so intelligence tells us more community volunteers are needed, especially in the lower grades, to help students start learning about intelligent experimentation. That shouldn’t be a problem now that millions of ‘baby-boomer’ retirees are now available. Then, as children enter their constructive stage of development they will need more help building the many workshops students can use to start learning about the skills they will use as adults, everything from computer, doctor, and legal shops to carpentry and plumbing. No doubt, money will also be saved from not needing all the books used in traditional schools. And teacher roles will be changed from finding and grading book assignments to one of mainly guidance, encouragement, and problem solving. In any case, however, the traditional separation of intelligent work habits from helpful character habits will end. And the more young folks learn to enjoy such habits and respect just laws, the less vulnerable they’ll become to criminal behavior and drug abuse, to name just 2, as well as merely making war-weapons endangering innocent people. Life is sacred. That’s not to say sometimes violence is needed against those who aim at harming and killing anyone, but thankfully such people are still a small minority. What's more, the more students keep intelligently criticizing and improving their own schools, the easier it will be get needed public funding to build and equip all the practical workshops at liberal schools. No one can say for sure how many shops will be needed at every school; each school and district has its own needs and so should be built to serve community needs. Still, food, clothing, and health shops will probably be useful in all schools. Even if students learn nothing else besides what mental and physical health is, and how to practice it, it’ll be a great improvement over many of our traditional schools. And, it’ll also be easier for students to volunteer when they’re adults, and feel gratitude to the school that they will feel cared for and nurtured them so well. They’ll also learn what habits they need to keep strengthening our democracy, like staying in contact with their representatives, voting, and protesting all the attempts of those trying to weaken it, so they can keep using the system for their own personal gain. In that way they’ll start building a social consciousness, rather than just caring about themselves. We still have many serious problems, like dangerous atomic weapons, global warming, environment pollution, and equality issues. To keep children isolated from those issues merely helps keep them in place. Why shouldn’t students be included in those improvement loops, and be trained to constructively criticize and improve not only their own schools, but their nation and world as well? Such critical thinking and constructive actions are another important place to practice intelligent experimentation, and perhaps even produce some real improvements. In any case, they’ll learn more about our strongest learning art – intelligent experimentation. After all, isn’t it more intelligent to keep experimenting with constructively engaging an enemy instead of merely keeping them isolated or kill them? No doubt, new obstacles will be felt in all learning projects, but that’s where skill like creative thinking and intelligent negotiation become useful, right? Experimenting With A New Educational Model Such traditional educational weaknesses as were mentioned earlier, like not actively teaching excellent character habit-arts on an active level of learning, have helped keep far too many young folks grossly undereducated and often frustrated. Also, school boredom is often a serious problem, and a sign of educational needs not being met. Thus parents are also challenged more than ever to also help their children learn more about all the useful and rewarding work available in the real world, and help them start learning about their own strengths and weaknesses, so they might feel where they can best use their talents. How many young folks leave school with knowing little about themselves, and so have little feeling for what kind of work they want to do? Thomas Edison’s mother was a fine example of such a caring parent. America’s greatest inventor went to public school for only a few years, and then his smart and creative mother home-schooled him! She encouraged him to build habits of constructive curiosity and imaginative question-asking, 2 useful habits for intelligent experimentation. While still in his teens he invented a better telegraph system. His mother knew how important it was to teach creativity's habit-art and how it depended on a question-asking habit. Asking about how things work and also how they might be improved helped focus and strengthen his art of intuitively creative thinking and testing. Those kinds of habits were used all through his life at his New Jersey lab too; sometimes he’d even lock the doors so his workers couldn’t get out until they helped find solutions to creating another invention. It also took those workers over a year to invent a useful working light bulb. Too bad the element neon wasn’t discovered until 1898 or else the problem would have been solved much easier and our world would have become much more colorful. We Deweyans ask why shouldn’t any student learn to practice such creative skills in whatever class they take? Any subject can be adapted to any student’s talents and needs, and so that kind of experimental learning can be encouraged in any workshop with the help of intelligent questions. After all, aren’t all the products we have today the result of such thinking? For example, how might we begin making our traditional schools more student centered instead of book centered? No doubt one useful idea is a small step-by-step approach to improvement, as we’ve seen Part 1 with building better habit-arts. If true, then to try to convert all schools in a district to an experimental workshop system, or even all the grades in one school all at once, might be too much of an adjustment for both students and teachers to make. It might cause more frustration than satisfaction. And so to avoid such possible results, a ‘baby-step’ approach to improvement might be best, say, making a plan for the first 3 grades where students are mainly using the senses to learn more about themselves and their world. So, projects using that fact can be more intelligently designed. With such thinking the reader can begin feeling some of the new challenges faced when trying to convert a traditional book-centered school into a more liberal child-centered school. They aim to take advantage of childhood’s 3 main stages of development; they are sense-based until about 7 or 8, a constructive phase between 8 and 14, and then as their brains become more developed they enter an abstract thinking phase. Many book-centered schools tend to ignore those first 2 stages of development, and keep children working on book assignments, which for many children soon become boring. In most students there’s little natural ability and desire to learning such abstract facts. And for another thing, conservative book-and-teacher-centered schools keep students basically inactive and confined to passive class work almost all the time, writing the answers to their book questions, and then having teachers grade their work. No doubt it’s easy work for teachers, but what important and useful character habits are students not learning in such schools, and how deeply are they feeling their importance to making life less stressful and more enjoyable? As a result, many students learn the habits often practiced all through the Middle Ages, namely passive obedient to those in authority, and to do whatever they’re told, rather than learn to think and act constructively for themselves. Such schools explain why that era lasted for over a thousand years, and why democratic habits even in the world’s oldest democracy is still weak and neglected! Also, students don't get much practice focusing on either personal or community improvements, like demanding living wages, more of a voice in political decision-making, and equality for all law-abiding citizens. Teaching such passive and obedient habits were useful to the social ruling class; they helped keep a feudal social structure solidly in place with various forms of slavery. Even as late as the early 1800s George Hegel, Germany's archconservative philosopher, echoed such ideas when he said: "Thought, as much as will, must commence with obedience." And the more such habits were encouraged the German, Japanese, and Italian schools, the easier it was for people like Hitler, shoguns, and Mussolini to make people soldiers. In today’s much more democratic and industrial world such habits are simply counterproductive in many situations. Liberal kinds of creative and experimental habits are much more useful in today’s world, and they help build a person’s individuality, creativity, independence, and reliable knowledge. They are, in fact, the kind of habits that helped a few people build Western civilization's life-changing Industrial Revolution shortly after Hegel died in 1831. What’s more, such experimental habits encourage more reliable and organic kinds of ideas, rather than believing their own ideas are absolute Truth for all time. Besides such creative habits are the normal way people learn, as can be seen from watching a group of even young children. Who ever saw a child learn to ride a bike, cook a meal, fix a broken toy, build a new invention, and learn how dangerous alcohol can be just from reading about them in books? And it's why caring and thoughtful parents often encourage their kids to keep experimenting, but intelligently rather than merely routinely! Such parents will also teach them to help others with their skills, rather than merely think only about their own comfort. As a result, liberal schools will begin looking differently from traditional ones; liberal schools will have more shops, like metal, auto, wood, garden, health, and clothing shops for students to actively their creative and experimental habit-arts. For liberal Dewey, because we’re all individuals, with our own powers of independent thinking, the child should be encouraged to keep actively practicing such intelligent habits. What intelligent mechanic doesn't know how to read a repair manual, use mathematics to figure out another outrageous repair bill, or how to tell someone they need a new muffler bearing? When the emphasis is on learning character excellence, then young folks can begin feeling how such habits only increases the chances for making their own life better. Why keep practicing habits that keep making life less than what it might be? Shouldn’t we be honest with ourselves about such education? If capitalism and democracy both work best when people know what excellent habits feel like, and practice them, then not to teach them merely weakens both our economy and our political system. Even today we see the results of mean and unkind discrimination of law-abiding and helpful people. How intelligent is that? After all, how vibrant and healthy for everyone’s health can any political system be when peoples’ main habit-art is obedience to merely old traditional ideas that started growing long before our modern democracies began growing? In more liberal schools children will learn ideas should be practiced just because they’ve been practiced for centuries! How much more stressful and dangerous did life remain just because many people continued believing slavery had been practiced for centuries and was, therefore, natural and normal? Communist Russia and China, Nazi Germany, and many other countries including the US all have seen, at times, examples of how dangerous life can become when people refuse to see their habits and ideas as merely the result of their practice, rather than believing they’re nature’s eternal and unchanging truth? Even today, in the US, the reluctance to experiment with liberalizing drug and sex worker laws may be doing more harm than good to many young folks. Blind and unintelligent obedience to the social status quo in effect keeps encouraging people to practice their routine habits, keep things as they are, don’t rock any boats, and keep allowing power-hungry and greedy people to keep increasing their power, rather than using it to help others. If nothing else, much of our own history is mainly a record of such people and the sometimes painful results of their actions. In short, only as people become more educated about how all habits are learned experimentally, and how to enjoy experimenting with building better ones, can intelligent change and progress grow at a more progressive pace. If not, tribal and gang warfare will continue on. How many students never realize they have the option of helping improve their local libraries, health clinics, and homeless services? In short, the more parents, teachers, and students realize they have the freedom to build more intelligent character habits, like better diet and exercise habits, and more community-improvement projects, then the more students will become anchored to life outside of school, the world they will eventually inherit. Such schools have a much better chance of improving many of our own social problems, like intolerance and hateful bigotry, and in the process put our socialized taxes to better use than building more wasteful prisons and deadly weapons. We Deweyan liberals like to ask, why shouldn’t students be included with such an improvement loop? Not to include them is merely to keep them sheltered, immature, and naïve. In other words, life has become something each of us helps make, rather than merely accepting what others say it should be. Why shouldn’t that fact be applied to our schools as well as our government? Just because kids drop-out doesn’t mean they want to quit learning; it often means they just want to learn different things than what’s being taught, and whatever that is there are intelligent and unintelligent ways of using such knowledge. Crooks exist in every profession. How many kids are lured into drug-dealing just for the money, or because everyone else is doing it, and how much do our own schools and drug laws keep encouraging kids to keep endangering their own lives? Sex Education???? What other examples illustrate Dewey’s educational models of excellence? Sex education is definitely another good example. One fact many people choose not to think about is the variety of sexual habits and actions, and so many people feel they don’t want their children learning about them wither. But, how intelligent is that? Not to know such facts only keeps one’s psyche narrow, shallow, and worst of all intolerant! What good is being ignorant about human habits when those habits are practiced in today’s world? Doesn’t such ignorance just help increase anxiety about others, rather than a more intelligent well-wishing? In fact, sex is a perfectly normal human need, and so why not teach high schoolers what some intelligent and acceptable expressions are? Here, of course, I’m certainly not recommending experimentation in the public schools, even though it no doubt exists in many of them today. But shouldn’t just that fact be reason enough to help students begin feeling what sexual respect looks like, and how it can even be treated with some humor and laughter? In many schools even reading about different sexual expressions would go a long way to making young adults feel more comfortable in the adult world. In the native world children are often married when they’re sexually mature. Wouldn’t better facts about sex be justified if it helped prevent even one unwanted pregnancy, or even one expression of sexual immaturity, like satisfying one’s self as quickly as possible? Shouldn’t high schools begin seeing sex too can be a creatively joyous and happy event each time it’s practiced, rather than the same ol’ same ol’? Why shouldn’t more schools be allowed to experiment with such classes on a mental level? After all, we’re all just human and there are many ways of expressing one’s sexual feelings intelligently, joyfully, and respectfully. No doubt, such excellent sex habits of demanding respect from a partner would help reduce much sexual trauma, and unnecessary worry and anxiety. They could even practice such respectful behavior in class, and thus reduce many irrational sexual fantasies about men acting dominantly and women acting passively. As liberal Protagoras liked to remind people, mankind is the measure of all things, of things that are bad and good. Sex education to one may, thus, be moral corruption to another. However, if such classes were merely another educational option to choose, rather than a required course for everyone, then students and parents would be free to make an intelligent choice about what they want their child to learn. That way such ideas can be learned only by those who choose to learn them. In any case it should be obvious, the freedom to keep intelligently experimenting with what children can learn is a very important part of liberal educational excellence. The more legislators keep restricting how our schools might be improved, the less free students become to see what excellence means to different kinds of situations. To us Deweyan liberals that result is certain less than excellent. We live in a world where people are conditioned to build many different kinds of habits, and not to realize that only keeps isolating and separating people from that world. What’s more, as more than 20 sexually-transmitted diseases teach us, the less students can learn about them in sex class, the more vulnerable they stay to getting them, and the more tax money is needed to pay for their health bills! So, why shouldn’t students be free to make such intelligent class choices in high school, just as they should be free to start learning about excellent diet and exercise habits all through grade school? Who knows? It may even help create some more intelligent ways of managing prostitution practices. After all, it’s been legal in much of Nevada for decades and believe it or not some women haven’t been corrupted, but liberated! What Is Psychological Health? Psychological health is another very important subject for we Deweyan liberals. What do we mean by it? What is it? How do we go about achieving it? Such questions were talked about in Part 1, but they can also be talked about to students, as well as actively practiced all through grade school. After all, such habits are useful throughout life, and so the sooner they’re learned, the better life becomes! For us some of the basic ideas of Behavioral psychology can be taught to students even at the sense-based stage of development. As we’ve been seeing, accurate and reliable psychological information is another new modern educational challenge. As late as the 1800s very intelligent modern sophists like Robert Ingersoll complained about not having some real dependable psychological knowledge about ourselves taught in our public schools, like what excellent speaking and working habits feel like, and the best way for young folks to experimentally learn such useful habits. Since then, however, psychologists like Dewey have learned a lot about how best to build new habits and skills, so why not empower young folks with such knowledge? Joyful and encouraging speaking habits can be learned a little more each day. After all, all people must live with themselves all through life, and yet much about such healthy psychological actions can keep weakening any destructive habits they may be learning. What are habits, and why is it so difficult to stop abusing tobacco or alcohol; eating less than excellent foods now offered on just about every block in every city; what is an excellent diet for my body; what is humor and why is it so important to psychological health; what’s the best way to learn such habits and thus make life more satisfying; and why should anyone pay honestly-earned money to merely keep harming themselves with less than excellent food? If those results aren’t promoted with healthful psychological actions, then what would be? How can we expect our own nation to keep using limited money for diet-related health problems and yet not teach young folks what physical health means, and how to actively learn more about it? If not, then we continue living in a naïve psychic world where merely by passing a constitutional amendment will stop people from abusing alcohol. We've already seen how important psychologically excellent habits can be, like how to enjoy improving our own weak, excessive, and unhealthy habits one ‘baby-step’ at a time. But if more people are to learn them, then shouldn’t they too be offered as subjects even to primary-age students? They can at least begin feeling what they’re like. And if so, then why aren’t more useful psychological classes a real option to students who often want to know more about their own body-minds, and what health means? Where is the intelligence in restricting such knowledge about body-mind health itself in our public schools? What can it feel like to build a better diet or exercise habit; how can they be strengthened; and how important is enjoyable practice for learning such habits? What does it feel like to build an intelligent plan for improving an unhealthful and dangerous habit, and then how can we best test the plan to see its results? And of course there's physical health as well. What exercises and foods best help us stay in ship-shape shape, and when’s the best time to practice them? Not only are such habit-arts useful all through life, but they also help students solve another important educational challenge -- building the inner enjoyable and fun feelings of a healthy body-mind, as well as intelligently knowing how to best control our own growth. It’s certainly no absolute guarantee of a long and productive life, but then again what is? Education’s Important Social Results Are such liberal educational ideas really too radical, bazaar, idealistic, or communistic? Not at all. They just reflect some of the useful knowledge science has recently discovered. As our newspapers and media remind us daily, unintelligent habits help make everyone’s life more stressful and dangerous; who doesn’t remember the chaos caused by 19 9-11 hijackers? Thus, weak and unintelligent educational habits help produce less-than-excellent social results. As is widely known, even in democratic countries like the US young folks often finish 12 years of public schooling and have almost no feeling for what character excellence is or job skills! That’s a social result every liberal person should be outraged about; we all pay for the social results of such schools. Even good students are at a big disadvantage compared to those who already know how to respect the law, keep only honest money, practice equal rights, and help others help themselves. In short, book knowledge is far from an excellent education! Without learning something about character excellence young folks often become vulnerable to acting like morons, with no respect for any law or person. And worse, they have no questions about how they can become more intelligent character artists, build better habits, and keep contributing to our nation’s well-being. In fact, learning just one character excellence, like obeying just laws, makes our country that much more excellent and allows more tax money to be spent on building more liberal schools. Normally students learn almost nothing about how their book-knowledge can be best used to improve their schools or neighborhoods. That’s yet another weak social result of our public schools. Probably in every city in the world even primary students can learn more about creatively using their book-facts for thousands of different beautification and improvement projects. Merely growing flowers for a local park can help young students begin feeling how important chemical and conservation facts are. Such projects would also begin strengthening creative thinking’s habit-art. What better place and time is there to start learning such habits than in the primary grades? Why shouldn't even 1st graders learn to feel such excellent ideas and their constructive social results, like where to find useful book-facts about growing flowers, how easy it is to keep building their sense of humor, positive speaking habits, how celebrate democratic equal rights, and begin learning more about body-mind health? Shouldn’t more parents and students be asking themselves what social results are our book-centered public schools helping produce? Such educational weaknesses of traditional schools keep weakening both people and our nation! Our millions in prisons are all evidence of how our traditional book-obsessed public schools are still out of the improvement character loop. And again, to house, feed, and clothe all those people are paid by taxpayers. Why shouldn’t our schools be places where young folks can start learning how to respect someone’s else property, how to help those less well off, how to speak honestly, how to earn honest money, and how to report those who pose a serious threat to others? The more such character excellence is ignored, the more our San Quentin’s and Sing-Sings get a multiple-occupancy room ready, all at taxpayer expense of course! According to one report California taxpayers now pay about $50,000 a year per inmate! And how many millions more remain undereducated but haven't yet turned to major criminal actions, like welfare and insurance fraud? Because people reproduce faster than they reconstruct and improve their schools, it’s still easy for dangerous and unhealthful habits to be pasted from one generation to the next. Obviously most parents are much more caring about what their children learn, and so help them become of more conscious of dangerous habits. But how many poor folks don’t have such caring and helpful parents? We see the results of unwanted children in homeless numbers in all our cities. Why shouldn’t they have better schools to teach them more excellent habits? Even in upper middleclass neighborhoods how many young folks begin using illegal drugs even before they leave school, to relieve their stressful muscular tensions, and even turn to gangs to help support their drug habits? Isn’t that alone a good reason to at least begin experimenting with decriminalizing drug use? And if it works to reduce crime rates, then wouldn’t that free up even more tax monies for more constructive educational work, like teaching students how to live joyfully and constructively, rather than depressively and destructively? How many people out there still have such habits, and feel even murdering innocent people is justified, or other gang members? The more such habits are neglected, the more it seems war has remained almost inevitable, from ancient Greece, to the 1800s when the US government almost killed our entire Native American population, to 2 World Wars, Korea, and Vietnam! Are those the social results of any truly civilized nation? Of course not. But unless more caring people begin to speak up, and want to help those disadvantaged young folks, those social results will almost certainly continue happening. Won’t war become extinct when people feel everyone else is sacred, and when it ceases to be at all profitable? Am I being too romantic, utopian, idealistic, and even unscientific? After all, how can you possibly reason with someone like a Hitler or a Stalin? British PM Chamberlain tried reasoning with Hitler and failed miserably, but doesn’t that teach us such excellent character habits need to be taught to everyone as soon as possible, in Germany as well as Britain? It may sound too optimistic but we liberal say even if Hitler had had a kinder and more intelligent education, one that helped him fulfill his dream of being an architect, the world would be a different place today? He wanted to help build useful building, and yet people kept telling him he didn’t have the talent for it, or encouraged him to practice the excellent skills, knowledge, and character habits he needn’t to become an architect! Eventually after Germany’s defeat in World War 1 he found a ‘scapegoat’ for his hatful feelings -- the Jews. Today US jails are already terribly over-crowded with inmates needing more civilized and respectful training and education, and when they don’t get it they often remain socially dangerous. Doesn’t it make much more sense to teach such habits BEFORE they learn unintelligent habits, rather than after they’ve learned them? Afterwards just makes learning more intelligent habits that much more difficult. What’s more, prison guards keep demanding ever more money from tax payers, and when taxes shrink during recessions then political leaders have little choice but to release some still-undereducated prisoners to help balance budgets! In a healthy democracy people would have demanded such educational improvement decades ago! Isn’t it time we faced this fact? Even the US is still far from a healthy functioning democracy, and from building schools where dreams are fulfilled rather than frustrated. No doubt there are a great many positive learning events going on in our public schools every day. I certainly don’t mean to suggest doomsday is our democracy is on the verge of becoming another military dictatorship. However, the more we ignore teaching such excellent character habits in favor of teaching habits of obedience and acceptance, the closer we move to such a government. Obviously many more students could be taught more about building excellent character habits IF more parents and children were free to experimentally work at improving their own neighborhoods and schools. We Deweyan liberals aren’t asking all public schools become more liberal all at once. We are asking for more freedom at the local level for caring and concerned parents and students to create such schools in their own neighborhoods! Without that freedom at a local level educational experimentation will continue within the same book-obsessed system we now have. Today it’s called the Common Core system, but it’s essentially the same book-centered system already in place. It’s like experimenting with, say, only different kinds of tea. What we liberals need is the freedom to experiment with milk, coffee, sodas, and waters! In any case, however, people still have the ultimate power in a democracy, even though our own feudalistic political system makes an improvement process more difficult. Just as the aristocracy make improvement for the serfs almost impossible in the Middle Ages, so too state and national laws keep making improvements at the local level more difficult. Not impossible, just more difficult. School improvement is just one example among many, drugs and prostitution laws are 2 other examples. With such a political system the feudal Middle Ages lives on. The improvement door is open somewhat. But for real experimentation to begin happening, more parents, teachers, and students need to start demanding the freedom to start a process of public school improvement! How many parents and students today still don’t even realize they can help build better student-centered schools if they have a plan and demand the freedom to experiment? How many of tomorrow’s criminals would start building more helpful and sympathetic character habits if they were allowed to read to the elderly and disabled even one day a week? Much of the time undereducated parents simply don’t know such character-building options are available, or why they’re so important. Most people come home from work dog-tired and ready for dinner, a few beers, and little else. Most people don’t even ask themselves how many young frustrated drop-outs could be helped to make their dreams become reality in more liberal schools, where students are given more of a choice besides learning more book-facts or leaving school. These aren’t just abstract ideas; they’re a felt reality playing out throughout the US, and no doubt much of the world too. Like any good experimentalist Dewey’s constructive public school criticisms in the early 1900s began focusing on specifics, like job training. Vocational schools, for example, were one of his suggestions, and they’ve grown tremendously since then. Many of Los Angles’ schools too now teach useful job skills for a specific service, like health care, performing arts, and business skills, so they help children learn some practical habits. All well and good. But, how many such students still don't learn what excellent community-service habits feel like? How many never learn how to help others with some of their money? And the more such character habits are formally neglected, the more government monies will certainly be needed to keep the dangerous social results of such neglect controlled by more police, courts, and prisons. How many ‘inner’ cities around the country have already become social ‘sewers’ where homeless people live? No doubt, it's useful to learn practical job skills like carpentry, welding, auto and computer repair, and experimental lab skills, but why should equally useful charity and philanthropy training stay conveniently ignored? When they are is it the result of conservative teachers who want to maintain a feudalistic class or tribal structure as much as possible? The good news is we’re not facing an immediate doomsday implosion, at least not until too much atmospheric carbon makes life impossible in many places. The world may well end in a carbon whimper, rather than in atomic blasts! Students today are getting many more educational options for character development than ever before. They can volunteer, for example, for many trash-collecting programs on the weekends, and with helping people overcome local disasters, like earthquakes and floods. But, again, aren't there more intelligent and helpful activities to learn other than sweeping streets? What about using all their scientific facts about plants and animals to build community gardens with senior citizens? Wouldn’t they be more fun and educational than sitting in some classroom day after day, memorizing soon-forgotten book facts? Wouldn’t such active learning projects help make their book-work even more meaningful? Wouldn’t it be great exercise for seniors too? During this relatively peaceful time, isn’t it time people started experimenting more with getting students out into our neighborhoods in a safe and healthy way? How many poor communities could use a community fish tank, and how many high schools students would love to build one with the intelligent constructive skills they learned in their public schools? No doubt there would be new safety challenges to overcome first, but students could even help solve them too. People are facing new economic challenges on a daily basis too, as obscenely wealthy people keep creating and maintaining a system where only they keep becoming wealthy. But if economists are right, and capitalism really runs on consumer choices, then why can’t our schools begin weaning students away from their books and begin feeling what it’s like to start demanding huge concentrations of wealth be better circulated for everyone’s benefit, and not just a few? And if adults are free to make the purchases they want, then why shouldn’t students be free to choose the classes they want to attend? Why not let the student market decide what their classes should be, and how they should be taught, just like consumers stock purchases help decide what businesses to grow? Who knows? Some teachers might even like such work more than merely grading papers and making tests. Again, all such reconstructive changes needn’t be abrupt, total, and thus too disruptive! They can be slow, gradual, and always improving; slow and steady wins the educational race too, doesn’t it? That way it’s easy to correct and improve weaknesses. Some of the wasteful social results already mentioned tell us more people should be free to experiment with our public schools. Each year tens of billions of dollars are already being spent by our police, courts, and prisons to merely correct or confine unhealthful character weaknesses. Wouldn’t it have been better for tax payers to teach more intelligent habits in grade-school? What judge or cop wouldn’t like to play more golf or tennis, or have more time to visit our schools and speak more about what respectful habit-arts students are learning? Wouldn’t the same also apply to doctors, psychologists, and lawyers? The longer we ignore such character excellence, the more obnoxious and wasteful social results are produced. By the time they get to prison it’s almost impossible to teach young folks more intelligent habit-arts. For years many will remain just as reasonable as Herr Hitler, and some even suffer the same suicidal fate. Timothy McVey was so angry he built a car bomb and killed over 200 people with it; how many young McVey’s are now in our public schools? Shouldn’t our schools have more psychologists working to find out who has such feelings, and then help them build more constructive ones? Aren’t our public schools the nature work place for our psychologists? Bottom line: Educational change is not impossible. Difficult yes, impossible no! Drug abuse is one example. Our legal system is realizing drug abuse is more of an educational problem than anything else; many people simply never were encouraged to teach themselves to enjoy life without drugs. Many of their public schools were places where serious, silent work was practiced most of all. No doubt, illegal drug abuse is still not widespread, but legal drug abuse seems to be much more widespread than it once was. In any case, learning to work and play enjoyably while in school would help reduce the need for such abuse, wouldn’t it? After all, what else do drugs do but relax a person and promote confident feelings? Once again, experimentation with more liberal schools is the only way to find out for sure! In any case such problems continue sapping billions to stop, say, Columbian coca planters, and still haven’t solved the problem of cocaine abuse here in the US. People continue paying for the drug, when they could just as easily get a legal prescription and also start talking to a drug counselor about building more healthful habits. At any rate, isn’t it worth experimenting with teaching more enjoyable habits in our public schools? Who knows for sure what useful social results will be produced? Like so many other personally weak, excessive, and unhealthful habits, drug abuse too is an educational problem, not a criminal problem! Again, the more young folks teach themselves the excellent character art of enjoying and celebrating life without drugs, the less need they'll have for them later on, and what better place is there to start learning such character habits than in our homes, churches, and schools? One day our churches may stop controlling others by teaching religious spirit-myths and instead focus only on helping people become more independent and learn how to intelligently help themselves. Why shouldn’t parents start demanding our public schools teach more than the so-called 3 R’s -- reading, writing, and arithmetic? Why shouldn’t they teach students how to become more independent and how to use book facts to keep making life more satisfying? What might such schools and churches look like? They would be places where everyone could learn more intelligent habit-arts, like how to make an intelligent practice plan, and then carefully test it. When building a more healthful diet, for example, student teams can first read and get some facts about different foods -- learn more about some healthful diet options and what results they might produce in their own bodies. Who knows, some may even discover ways to even improve on the book-facts! Then they can make a plan to test their ideas. As we’ve already seen, such active experimental learning has become our strongest learning art, and such planning and testing would begin building their feelings for that most important habit-art. What's more, if their testing also helped feed some of those less fortunate, like with a garden or fish farm, it would also begin building the useful character art of helping others. In that way learning would be much more active, experimental, and natural, just as it is outside of school! Instead of getting in education’s way such schools can make it more excellent, helping more students become more confident they can intelligently become what they want to become. Here's a great example of how neglected excellent character habits still are, even for gifted students at one of our best universities. Merely learning more and more mathematical facts helped a ‘genius’ earn a doctorate degree at Harvard, but he eventually became a murdering Unabomber who the public now supports with their taxes? Well at least his bombs were all mathematically correct, weren’t they? It’s yet another reason why we Deweyan liberals say character excellence -- KNOWING HOW TO USE FACTS INTELLIGENTLY TO HELP OTHERS AND OUR SELF -- might be THE most important educational goal! And to get that point across with a little more humor, and impress the idea on all peoples’ minds forever and ever, or as least on one person’s mind, here's yet another laboriously lame limerick! To a thief who was caught with the brass He was asked why act like an ass? Why not look twice, To find a nice Little computer rip-off class? No doubt, even criminal actions too need new skills just to stay in business. 18. MORE ABOUT LIBERAL EDUCATION, 102 Esthetic Experience in Our Schools That sounds like a very sophisticated kind of experience, but once again, odd-sounding words are often used to describe very simple ordinary experiences. Case in point: for us Deweyan liberals esthetic experience merely calls our conscious attention to our feeling here and now. Feeling, say, sunlight is an esthetic experience. What could be simpler? When children build their first finger painting, for example, they have some new esthetic experience -- they feel what the paint looks and feels like, and thus keep expanding their old set of esthetic feelings. And when they use such feeling to help others become a little smarter, their socially esthetic feelings grow as well. However, the more our public schools allow such experience to remain on a non-verbal subconscious level of awareness, the more disconnected from esthetic experience students become. Luckily philosophic history often talks about such feelings when it talks about learning and art. Ancient Greeks, for example, called such feelings qualities, like hot and cold, wet and dry. Thus, for Dewey, new esthetic feelings are important; they're the natural result of any new body-mind learning experience. As anyone knows, one’s first sexual experience is full of new esthetic feelings! It’s why such constructive building projects became important in his educational model. They further educate the entire body-mind of feelings AND ideas. Such experiences not only produce new ideas but new feelings as well. For him, another great weakness of our public schools is to quickly downplay feelings’ importance in learning by confining student work to merely book ideas! Such a conservative learning model soon makes school something to be endured, rather than enjoyed; the feeling of enjoyment is so important to learning any kind of new habit. Why keep practicing something that’s not enjoyable and fun? How many parents today not only ask their children what they learned in school today, but also about how they felt about such ideas -- what their esthetic learning felt like? How many parents today ignore their child’s bored feelings, and tell them that’s the way school is, rather than demanding the schools start producing more enjoyable esthetic learning experiences. Centuries ago Ben Franklin realized how important esthetic feelings were in education, and so suggest students get out of the classroom and go on field trips to feel how other people are working. Today students still go to museums, but when it’s only once or twice a year it doesn’t overcome most boring feelings about school. What’s more, how many parents never teach their children how to CONSCIOUSLY make their lives more enjoyable with playful esthetic experience by simply talking about that art? How many parents in fact keep allowing their public schools to continue wasting so much of students’ time and efforts learning mere mental ideas, rather than demand a more holistic body-mind approach to learn with more active learning projects? Such active learning projects also makes learning character habits like respect and honesty that much easier when they’re felt and not just redd about! How many people today are still esthetic children, and don’t realize how important enjoyable feelings are in any new learning experience? Such esthetic feelings help make life and learning less stressful, more enjoyable, and more satisfying! More liberal models of educational excellence like Dewey’s encourage all the above-mentioned kinds of esthetic excellence; they promote democratic and individual development. They nurture individual development, rather than keep isolating students from each other as well as bodily feelings from mental ideas. Mere book work emphasizes just the thinking and reasoning half of the body-mind. More liberal educational models like Dewey’s ask how can we better guide and encourage more enjoyable, respectful, and helpful feelings to keep growing in students, and thus weaken disrespectful and selfish feelings? Active and practical workshops and projects for students was the best answer to that question. Within them learning all the traditional skills like reading, writing, and arithmetic are learned naturally, rather than boringly and repetitively! Such work job-based workshops can best promote the practice of enjoyable esthetic feelings, and thus make learning itself more fun. Just the act of building something, whether it’s a table or a relationship, is itself capable of generating a very large number of new esthetic meanings and feelings. In fact, enjoyable esthetic feelings can turn any unsatisfying routine habit into a more creative habit-art. How many people have felt golf was too frustrating while they were learning it, and yet continued improving those feelings with more enjoyable practice? In fact, such enjoyable esthetic feelings have often been used to build a person’s sexual habits as well, so it’s intelligent to first ask a person you’re interested in what their sexual training has been. It just might save a lot of wasted time and frustration later on. New and unfelt esthetic feelings always grow during new experiences, but like anything else it takes some practice to first consciously notice them, and then to make them as enjoyable and fun as possible! Otherwise, all constructive work is merely unintelligent routine. Here is where teachers can be so useful; good liberal teachers help students verbalize their feelings, and thus make it easier to make a conscious plan to make them more enjoyable and fun. If you feel tired and tense, for example, then why not take a little break and relax those un-enjoyable feelings and start feeling more enjoyable ones? In fact, the word ‘enjoyable’ means able to produce joyful and happy feelings! What Place Has Physical Punishment? In such loving, caring, and enjoyable schools and homes, what need would there be for physical punishment? In fact, over 90% of criminals supported with excessive amounts of public tax money have been excessively abused as children! No doubt as a learning tool punishment has a very long history and practice. For centuries many Western scholars claimed Aristotle was one of the most educated men of all time, and yet he too said students should sometimes be whacked merely for not paying attention! Such esthetic experiences promote feelings of fear and obedience, the 2 cardinal excellences of a feudalistic political and social system. They in fact help define the educational challenge for we liberal Deweyan democrats! To his day both religious and public school educators still use paddling and other painful feelings as educational tools, sometimes even on students who merely show their joy and happiness; I’ve seen it myself. Our prisons too tell us how dangerous excessive punishment is. The more defenseless children are physically punished, the more it tends to create excessively dreadful feelings of resentment, anxiety, hostility, and of course hatred -- all those feelings often getting in the way of civilized living. True civilization for us Deweyan liberals is all about peace and helpfulness to those in our human tribe, rather than merely our own religious, political, or sexual tribe. To me, if any action is truly obscene, then excessively punishing defenseless children is certainly one of them. Perhaps the best response is to quickly let local child welfare people know about it and ask them to help. When conservative public schools continue focusing on book facts, and ignore more enjoyably active experimental kinds of learning, then it’s normal to student attention to wander and sometimes even lead to disruptive actions; they become discipline problems and either must be punished or removed from class altogether. The other alternative is to remain passive and obedience, like in fact many young girls are conditioned to do. There’s also an equally harmful form of punishment many teachers might practice, and that parents should know about, namely, punishing students with school work itself! How many times have frustrated and disruptive students been punished with repetitive writing assignments, like writing ‘I will be good’ a 100 times? Is it any wonder why far too many of our young folks learn not to like school, and leave as soon as they legally can; up to 50% of the student population in some inner city schools? Who wants to keep practicing the skills they’re punished with? Why make it more difficult to enjoy, love, and nurture the important skills of intelligent learning by linking them to punishment and painful feelings? The mission of our public schools is, or should be, to nurture esthetically enjoyable feelings of intelligent learning, rather than frustrate them. Hopefully the educational use of physical punishment is lessening, but excessive physical punishment seems still a social tragedy in far too many homes, as the 90% statistic tells us! The more excessive it is, the more it can twist and pervert children’s constructive and helpful feeling into destructive and hateful ones, like resentment and anger, unless of course you’re raising children who’ll make their living being spanked! Believe it or not some do and will. No law against it, right? As we’ve seen, there are more intelligent alternatives to punishment as an educational tool. Many people were lucky enough to have a warm, loving, and nurturing home life, where esthetically enjoyable feelings were encouraged. Their parents were their friends rather than their jail keeper. For such parents merely withdrawing their love and affection, until a child promises not to act selfishly or disrespectfully, is punishment enough. The late Senator Ted Kennedy described how his mother Rose sometimes withdrew her warm and enjoyable affection to encourage good habits in her children; that way they learned what actions were unacceptable and which weren’t. The problem was her husband Joseph practiced some disrespectful actions, especially against women, and so her son John Kennedy, for example, continued disrespectful actions, even to the point of becoming morally unfit to remain president. And of course guilt feelings have often been a part of Jewish education for centuries, often produced with both physical and psychic punishment. Humorist Woody Allen gives a classic example of it when he says he doesn’t believe in god, but still feels guilty about it! Is it possible to raise a child without any physical punishment? Why not? As a learned early in my teaching career, the more young folks are rewarded and praised for their constructive work, for respecting people, just laws, and helping others, then the less need there'll be for any negative kinds of punishment; they’ll feel good about doing what’s excellent, rather than what’s mean and unkind. Besides, merely hitting or isolating a child for misbehaving is not educational excellence; it still leaves a child ignorant about what actions ARE excellent. Punishment often teaches a child what not to do, rather than what to do later on, like how to help those with their problems. Thus rewarding children for their intelligent, kind, and sympathetic actions, and telling them why they're being rewarded, best helps them strengthen such habit-arts! It may even help increase memory power too. Is there an easier way to remember to bring home that octopus sushi and frog’s-leg ice cream? Obviously most parents already do great work raising their children; if not our world would certainly be much worse than it is now. But that certainly doesn’t mean millions of more people can become more active and assertive both politically and socially. Of course some conservatives may want to play around with our people-in-prison numbers to make it sound like it’s not really so outrageously wasteful. Someone might say two million is only about .6 % of our entire population, so forget about making our schools more enjoyable places of learning; they’re not that much of a problem! It’s just more ‘bleeding heart’ liberal scare tactics! But, aside from such statistical playing, the ever-increasing cost to taxpayers remains a very serious growing problem! The more precious tax money must be used to house, clothe, and feel people for their criminal actions, the less money will be available for learning to enjoy more intelligent kinds of actions in our public schools! If nothing else it’s still an example of unnecessary waste! Mere prison housing, feeding, and medical care runs into the tens of billions EACH YEAR! That result to me is certainly wasteful, as it no doubt is to many others, especially when our public schools could be using that money to build much more civilized habits before criminal feelings start growing. Imagine, just for a few moments, how many more psychologists, workshops, and useful community projects could become a part of public education if those billions were available to them. Imagine, just for a few moments, all the potentially great human resources and talents that could be liberated in our schools, instead of being spent on prisons year after year after year with little or no real benefit to society. How many folks get out of prison with the very same feelings and skills they went into prison with? In fact, many come of prison knowing even more about criminal activity! In truth, no one really knows how much stronger, more vibrant, more democratic, and more intolerant our nation would be of any form of feudalism, especially economic feudalism, if those 2 million had been better educated in their homes and public schools. Adult Education? Here’s yet another important liberal education question you might want to think about: Wouldn't it be a good idea to require parents spend a year learning about intelligent child care skills when they enroll their first child in school? No doubt, parents should have the freedom to raise their children as they see fit, as long as they’re lawful and not abusive, but shouldn't they also KNOW what excellent character habits are and how best to teach them? What better place is there to teach such important habit-arts than in our schools? Why keep naively assuming all young folks already know how to intelligently raise children, when in fact they don’t. Because we all pay taxes to house and feed in jail those with weak character habits and excessive criminal habits, don't we all have a right to demand everyone know something about one of our most important skills, namely intelligently raising a child? As it is now, we demand young folks know some important facts about driving a car before getting a license, so why should it be any different with raising a child to live intelligently in a democratic republic? No doubt, conservatives would argue against it. Since Plato conservatives have worked against teaching young folks any kind of democratic skills or intelligent scientific habits; for thousands of years experimental learning and democracy have been conservatives’ sworn enemies! They both weaken the power to control people, and keep them obedient. With such questions and facts it should be clear why controlling liberal education philosophy was so important to conservatives like Plato and even moderates like Aristotle. Real democrats work to end all aristocratic feudalistic social forms and give everyone the same equal rights and opportunity as everyone else! Such reforms are sign of democratic health and power, and public schools are where such habits should be taught. We Deweyan liberals aren't calling for an educational revolution all at once, overnight; that idea belongs to magical fantasies about how life works. But to completely ignore intelligent experimentation, or restrict it legally, is just as dangerous to democratic health. So we say it's best to merely take one baby-step at a time, to the next evolutionary step or plateau, and then keep building from there! Thus, our own neighborhood schools become the battle ground for we Deweyan liberals. If one can be improved with the ideas talked about here, then that’s what’s most important for us. One can lead to 2, and 3, and so on. Furthermore, for such progress we can all play a part, teachers, students, and parents. Even African religious leaders joined the loop to help build intelligent civil disobedient protest habits, rather than their own public schools. That to me is a classic example of how really important and useful our churches can be if they so choose, and how mean and vicious social habits can be improved with their help. History again shows even ol’ Tom Jefferson himself would probably have benefited from better lessons in democratic character excellence. Even though African Sally Hemmings bore him children he continued feeling Africans were generally incapable to reasoning intelligently. In that way he too needed more education. He also never seemed to learn how to intelligently control his own money! He died deeply in debt. Those conservatives who want to keep the educational status quo just like it is, and keep children ignorant about any ideas of excellence, can criticize these liberal educational ideas in a thousand different ways: it'll cost too much; it'll raise taxes; it'll weaken our society in other ways; it won't work; it's communistic and socialistic. For most of US history Native Americans, Africans and Asians were society's most hated people, followed closely behind by Jews, Irish, Catholics, and women. For such conservatives the status quo must be maintained at all costs, even if it means denying people their democratic rights to even vote, and our schools must be places where such habits are passed on! In other words, our schools must continue ignoring democratic ideals, even after more than 200 years of democratic evolution! That’s how important are public schools are to we Deweyan liberals. Selfish and unkind people may not realize an important fact of life; such habits often merely hurt themselves more than anyone else. Without good character training they may never realize ‘what goes around often comes around’; if they deny equal rights to others, then they too deserve to have their civil rights denied! As a result they end up hurting themselves by not treating all people with respect, honor, and equally! My own childhood definitely had many weaknesses, but such bigotry it didn’t have; my lawyer-father even helped integrate Chicago neighborhoods in the 1950s one house at a time. As a result, it’s easy for me to talk and act more liberally about equal rights for everyone! Along with Dewey I just honor and celebrate the democratic principles upon which our liberal tradition and country was founded; we’re all humans and so all deserve the same rights as anyone else. Obviously, democracy is a growth process, like any other habit-art, but the more our public schools are kept out of that growth loop, the more difficult improvement becomes. What liberal didn’t laugh when conservative President Bush 2 told us we could quickly build a cooperative democracy in Iraq when over 200 years we haven’t built one at home yet! And what hypocrisy it is to criticize China and Russia for human rights violations when many people in our own country still have hateful unintelligent feelings and ideas! Another Sign of Democratic Health: Educational Choice? Dewey criticized how book-obsessed public schools teach their prized factual textbook knowledge -- slave-like to an entire group, rather than as a free choice. As most adults already know, for 12 years students read about what someone else tells them is important to know. However, isn't that like going into an aerobics studio and allowing the instructor to tell us what kind of a body we should have? And on top of it, then college professors sometimes complain about students not having strong independent critical thinking skills! How on earth can children learn independent, creative, and critical question-asking skills when, for 12 years, they're made to merely find the book's 'right answers'? So naturally liberal educators like Dewey said such traditional schools really teach mostly habits of intellectual passivity and academic laziness! How can students become curious and want to keep learning when their own question-asking skills have been largely neglected for 12 years? As a result, how many students are happy to be done with school after high school, or even drop-out earlier? In short, when many students finish 12 years of traditional schooling not only are their own character habits not the best, but their all-important curiosity and question-asking skills are weak and greatly undeveloped! In that kind of educational situation is it any wonder many young folks turn to drugs and crime in response to a world they often feel psychically isolated from? Not encouraging all students to intelligently practice excellent learning habits like question-asking, and start learning what they themselves want to learn more about, in effect KEEPS children emotionally and intellectually immature! Is it any wonder young folks often are glad to go to war to relieve their frustrations; killing is easy, just pull the trigger? I’m innocent; I was just following orders. As a result, they often remain vulnerable to those promising quick money and happy times! Thus, Dewey criticized WHAT our schools teach -- their subjects. Traditional school subjects often ignore the practical side of education's coin, namely, how to use such knowledge and facts to keep improving life and building more helpful character habits. That, to him, was certainly less than educational excellence. In fact, such subjects are often used to find the most verbally advanced students; after all, brains are important for improving the species. So when some schools have a drop-out rates of nearly 50% how much objective evidence should people need? Their own school’s educational habits are plainly not satisfying important student needs. The answer is not to simply keep building more conservative book-obsessed schools, but to build schools where student have more educational choices to make. One promising educational option today is called Community Service work, or at least was an option before yet another serious economic recession once again began reducing tax funds for public schools. If one didn’t know better, one might believe our obscenely wealthy upper class would like nothing better than to end all non-profit public schools, so for-profit schools could more easily grow. In any case, a great challenge today is to keep such community service classes growing for students at all levels, from primary to the college level! Such learning is more vibrant, holistic, naturalistic, and more enjoyable than mere book-learning. Such classes give students a greater chance for some real practical community-improving work experience, and so we ask parents to support such programs as much as possible. No doubt, to us such classes are best if they are offered at the primary level, but any level is better than no level! After all, the last I heard seven year old kids were definitely people too! Another challenge is to make them something more than just street sweeping or trash collection. The challenge is to encourage students to see what improvements are possible in an area, make a plan to achieve them, and then test their plan. Such a plan might even include talking to people who could help fund such projects as a neighborhood park or a recycling center for all old electronic gadgets , or even how students could raise the needed money itself. Another liberal educational challenge is to help build a practical psychology workshop, where students could actually practice the healthful ideas they’re learning about, like working humorously and joyfully. Ideally, such classes would start at the primary level, help young sense-based learners learn what respectful and helpful ideas feel like. Almost certainly, only a few lucky students really know what habits are psychologically healthful, and which are dangerous. Once again, such Behavioral studies are easiest to teach at the primary level, and remain useful all through life, so why not start teaching them to children? Why should anyone naively expect anyone to practice psychological health when they’ve never been taught what it feels like? No doubt, many people who know little about Behavioral psychology might feel it’s somehow undermining all their values, but what is so dangerous about teaching students the useful, life-long art of intelligent SELF-TEACHING, or how to use rewards and a 'baby-step' method to slowly teach themselves what they want to learn? Aren't truly educated people those who know HOW to intelligently solve their own problems? If so, then wouldn't such classes easier to see peoples' own ACTIONS AND RESULTS are what're most important, not how they look and who they talk to? Wouldn't just that one idea make it much easier to feel more tolerant to those people who look differently than others, and who are labeled gays and lesbians? And more importantly, wouldn’t we ALL benefit if people learned intelligent habits are simply respectful to all law-abiding people? If you’re really another one of those ‘radical’ democratic educators, then it might be something even worth experimenting with. How many times in history have today’s 'radical' ideas, like equal rights, become tomorrow's democratic status quo? That certainly seems to be the trend, doesn’t it? Educational Results Beyond the Classroom Perhaps more than any other philosopher of the 1900s, Dewey also saw the possibilities such educational ideas create beyond the classroom for building a healthier democracy, where wealth-power is easily controlled with democratic power. Is it just coincidence our obscenely wealthy class has become even wealthier since our schools have become more book-obsessed since the late 1950s, and our universities have become less affordable to all but the wealthiest families. Only they can easily afford the huge costs of college, and so keep being lectured by conservative professors, many of whom want nothing more than to maintain our feudalistic status quo. In more liberal democratic schools children would have a choice about learning not only useful job skills, but also about useful character habits as well! He saw clearly how our public schools can be used not to build a healthier democracy, where equal rights are demanded for all, but rather merely maintain the political and economic status quo. If our public schools don’t teach such intelligent experimental habits on a formal basis, even to primary age students, then their entire character growth will remain stunted, immature, and even medieval. The recent explosion of business arts and skills need young folks who know how to experiment intelligently and creatively, how to learn new skills quickly, and how to use extra monies to help those less well off. No doubt, sometimes it takes some trial-and-error experimentation for students to discover what job skills they like best, and also learn how to enjoy experimentally learning more about them. It even took very intelligent Ben Franklin years to learn how important science was, and also begin experimentally learning how to build useful objects, like a lightning rod so as to better protect buildings and people from becoming cinders. Until then people continued using religious skills like prayer and worship to avoid lightning’s dangers. And even after the lightning rod was invented some religious conservatives condemned him for taking away some of god’s power to punish sinners! Such is the power of conservative habits to maintain the social status quo, even though the outside world around them is continually changing and evolving! More liberal democratic schools will make it easier for more people to start learning how to intelligently control constructive kinds of growth, rather than merely reject all such ideas. What better skill can there be in an always changing world? Without the help of our tax-supported public schools, real progress educating young folks about practicing or democratic ideals has been difficult. Good liberal schools are still relatively rare, even in the US, and population growth rates make the challenge even more difficult. Teachers must be trained themselves, new curriculums designed for more liberal schools, and then even allowed to grow in places where un-democratic habits are firmly in place. In those places conservatives and many moderates choose to block any such useful educational reforms; they want students to remain educated only about the habits they feel are best. Recently I even heard a high government Democratic education official flatly say character habits will never be formally taught in public schools, as if there was some eternal and unchanging natural law against it! Such un-democratic statements continue telling us true liberals should first focus on improving their own neighborhood schools, and thus increase the educational freedom for everyone! Conservatives know full well, the more young folks are liberated from their old routine educational habits of obedience to their teachers and books, and encouraged to more clearly see how political propaganda is used to maintain an economic, political, and educational status quo, the more vulnerable that feudalistic status quo becomes! That’s exactly what most conservatives and moderates have not wanted, do not now want, and almost certainly will never want! They want to keep making it easier for them to keep taking more of the public’s money, even if it’s used to build more useless and unneeded weapons, or give it to wealthy corporations and farmers who don’t need it. With more liberal public schools, more people will find it easier to elect more liberal politicians who aren’t afraid to tax the already obscenely wealthy at a much fairer rate than they now pay, and also work to restrict their putting millions of dollars into off-shore bank accounts, and thus avoid paying taxes at all! If there’s any kind of natural human law, it might be this: those with power will keep working to maintain, conserve, and increase it as much as possible! Western history is literally brimming with examples of that idea, and it’s still brimming to this day! This also seems rather safe to say. Without more liberal democratic-oriented public schools, our so-called cultural wars between conservatives and liberals will continue being won by a small class of very wealthy people. Thus, stress and frustration will continue being felt by most everyone; stressful economic recessions seem to be happening even more frequently these days. People should thus know: true conservatives want children to continue learning habits of obedience and meek acceptance of the ideas and feelings they're given to learn. Such habits grow stronger every time a child works on another academically trivial book assignment, and is made to feel they are the most important things to know. As we’ve seen in these pages, from Plato on, what’s been most important for conservatives is maintaining their feudalistic status quo, whether its based on secular or religious assumptions! The more such conservative and moderate aristocratic assumptions were challenged, the more room became available to build more liberal democratic habits and skills. Also worth thinking about is this idea too. Our conservative book-oriented public schools make it easier for students to join some kind of military service where obedience to those with authority is not just expected, but demanded. From the 1890s on US military outfits have often been forcing people in other countries to accept US goods and services, and thus, with the help of obedient soldiers, enslaving them with perpetual debt to US banks and the wealthy upper class! Such obedient soldiers have been making it easy to enforce those goals by even cold-bloodedly killing and murdering anyone who might rebel against them; Vietnam was merely one brutal and vicious example among hundreds occurring throughout the 1900s while building a US economic and military empire. As we've seen, after he retired Marine General Smedley Butler said flatly he acted as just a high class muscleman obeying orders from Wall Street and wealthy financiers! No doubt, these days that empire is maintained more with economic power than military force, with orgs. like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, but they continue working to maintain a feudalistic economic status quo. To his credit, Aristotle said to use money merely to make more money should not be allowed, and he also saw how it was often used to buy more political and economic power. But without also suggesting democratic ways to better control that power for everyone’s benefit, they remain merely 2 ideas. While some corporations were making millions of dollars during World War 1selling guns and weapons, the US government passed a law forbidding people to even speak against the war; the First Amendment be damned, there was money to be made. It's yet another example of how money will distort any democratic freedom in its path. For us Deweyan liberals such military and economic reality both rest on young folks obeying for most of 12 years what they’re told to do by their teachers, without any practical freedom or encouragement to even question the usefulness of any such assignments. Again, in the corporate world such unquestioning habits of obedience are useful; corporate leaders don’t want anyone questioning the pay they get, the working conditions they have, or the work they do. All such freedoms would merely endanger their own profits and salaries. As a result, many corporations have been fighting for decades against union worker power! To this day women are often paid less than men for the same work, mostly because they haven’t learned to organize themselves and thus increase their economic power. They haven’t yet learned healthy democratic habits! In fact, union membership is at an all-time low these days while corporate profits are at an all-time high! We Deweyan liberals say this situation is a direct result of conservative educational practices in our own public schools, and until they change it’s naïve to believe life will change in any meaningful way! The addiction to money can be just as dangerous as the addiction to any dangerous drug. Many religious conservatives too still believe, with Plato, it’s absolutely necessary to keep others and our nation as free as possible from sin and irreligious habits; the current fight against same-sex marriage is merely one example. In short, for all such reasons the battle to build more liberal democratic public schools continues to this day! For us liberals the main reason is fairly easy to see: the more people are conditioned to feel some of their ideas reflect absolute truth, the more likely they are to resist any challenges to them. The more people feel as Aristotle did, that some people are natural slaves, and should be treated that way, the easier it was for mean, violent, and vicious racial and sexual hatreds to continue on, and thus making our democracy much less healthy than it might be. Liberals like Dewey, on the other hand, not only recognized such a reality, but also began challenging it by helping build more liberal democratic schools where child development stages were more respected. Even many ancient conservatives have said children should be allowed to play and learn with games until they’re almost teenagers. For Dewey such liberal ideas would make it easier to keep educating youngsters about actually building a more peaceful and productive world for everyone, and not just a small class of obscenely wealthy folks. Teaching creatively experimental habits and skills while learning useful employment skills is basically how liberal schools differ from conservative ones. Too many young folks still haven’t been allowed or encouraged to learn such important skills, and thus make life less difficult for themselves and our nation more democratic with equal rights and opportunities for all. Naturally, such liberal democratic schools would rest on all of the ideas mentioned so far, like the experimental learning of practical and useful knowledge and skills, the freedom to choose and learn more about a career path while still in school, and how to use our creative ideas as helpful tools, rather than merely building a bank account. No doubt, today we face many of the same social challenges mankind has faced for thousands of years, and have been frustrated by conservatives for thousands of years too! Without such a practical and useful democratic educational model, we continue facing serious social and personal problems, like economic slavery, drug addiction, gang violence, social disrespect, forced prostitution, and juvenile and adult crime to name just 6 obnoxious results. They continue telling us our traditional book-centered educational models need improving. Those results are not the result of corrupt liberal ideas and feelings, much less an evil human nature, as conservatives even today tell us. They’re the result of conservative educational models of education kept in practice for thousands of years first with religious ideas, and today also with secular ideas about conservative values being the best values of all. It’s an old sophist debate trick; when something is your fault blame the other person as much and as often as you can! In truth, however, much of our modern world today is the direct result of conservative institutions. For example, today conservative ideas about the value of a small minority having vast amounts of economic wealth and power are useful for a few conservative politicians to stay in power and keep working to maintain such a feudal economic system. Those few thousand people have more wealth and political power than 50% of the population combined!? Is that in fact the best kind of social model to make life better for everyone? Real life conditions emphatically tell us it is not! No doubt, much has been accomplished and improved for many people in our modern world in merely the past 200 years. Millions of people are now being fed, clothed, housed, and better educated than ever before, thanks to experimental science and more liberal political improvements. However, as many also know, life has also remained very brutal for many as well. For far too many young folks today, not having useful job skills when they leave high school continues making them vulnerable to some of the most dehumanizing habits ever practiced, like addicting young women to drugs and forcing them into prostitution merely to feed their pimp’s drug habit! The more people are educated to look the other way, the easier it becomes to continue such actions. So, isn’t it natural to ask if our own public schools are partly to blame for such results? Why shouldn’t students be educated to not only quickly report such events, but also to learn useful job skill so it would be easier to resist such actions? Don’t young women have the right to learn such skills? Thanks in part to our book-obsessed schools, hundreds of thousands of young women runaways will begin leading such a life, and living with the psychic scars for the rest of their lives unless they get some expert professional help. Such events can be reduced with the help of fully staffed caring public schools helping learn how to demand respect from others while they enjoyable learn useful job skills. Often such young women attended schools where building more helpful and practical skills was thought to be beyond education’s scope, and thus be unprofessional! Conservatives have been arguing like that for centuries. If we’re to build more useful skills for our modern democratic world, then a willingness to experiment with new ideas is another useful habit-art. Not feeling some ideas shouldn’t be experimented with even for a short time, like with equal marriage rights, prevents people from seeing the actual results from such actions, and thus have some objective evidence one way or another! Have such results made life any different, and if so in what way? Such an intelligent experimental habit-art is the natural result of seeing ideas as merely mental tools, not absolute truth. When students are better educated about our experimental Behavioral psychology, it becomes easier to feel some ideas should be experimented with, just to see their results. How would my life change if I allowed gay and lesbian couples to marry? What would be the social results if more students were allowed to learn the job skills they want to learn, and had more democratic freedom to choose school rules and student representatives? As it is now, many young folks leave school with weak feelings for those important skills, and thus keep allowing others to build the kind of world we now have. In fact, as many as 500,000 young folks become vulnerable runaways every year who often get forced into prostitution by brutal males already addicted to drugs. Thus, it becomes practically impossible to even think about how their own neighborhood schools could be helping improve that situation by enjoyably teaching more useful job skills to young folks. Also, what‘s wrong with experimentally testing for a short time the idea of legalizing prostitution and drug use, just to see what results might be produced? Sex is a human need, and so learning to express it in socially healthy ways is an important habit-art. How can life possibly keep becoming better and more satisfying for everyone unless more people treat their ideas experimentally, and see what results are actually produced? Without such feelings for experimental learning we simply remain in the same old routine ruts of paying to feed and house drug users and sellers in prison at about $50,000 each a year! Then, when they get out they’re back on the streets within days luring more young teenage women into the same actions. How useful for social health is it to keep ignoring how young folks want to start learning some useful job skills even while they’re in elementary school? Why shouldn’t our schools help students build practical clothing, law enforcement, medical and legal skills so they can begin serving community needs even while in school? Dewey’s new liberal models of educational excellence are saying this is OUR world to experiment with intelligently, and the more we do, the easier it becomes to find better ways of living and judging any idea or action. In fact, with freedom from believing any routine idea or ritual reflects nature’s absolute truth has come the freedom to keep experimenting with all intelligent kinds of growth, rather than keep obeying a status quo producing such obnoxious results. If some students want to learn how be bus drivers, then why not also teach them how to be creative and intelligent drivers who know how to enjoy their needed public service work? No institution stays the same forever. Perhaps the best example of that is some of our religious organizations; many are working to make their followers more humane and humanistic, and focused on helping those who still have many old conservative ideas about life and nature. What better goal could any organization possibly have? Many liberals today say such liberal humanistic goals are religion’s oldest and most worthwhile. For example, many fundamental Christian sects now regularly use Behavioral psychology methods to help those addicted to old conservative ideas, and thus teach the art of intelligently growing better habits one step at a time and one day at a time. The more they do, the more they improve life in this world -- the only people-friendly world for many billions of miles around! Is there any better way for religious folks to express their love than encouraging people to intelligently enjoy the art of guiding their own excellent growth? Isn't that the best goal of a truly liberated religion, as it is with a truly liberal education? To us Deweyan liberals, the more people feel all of life should be a self-directed educational growth, and stay focused on improving life for everyone, the more sensitive they’ll become to controlling those who want to keep enslaving as many as possible for their own comfort! Teaching others to enjoy guiding their growth intelligently and experimentally embodies the new modern liberal model of ideas as mental tools and democratic equal rights as the best political system. To us Deweyan liberals, all those social organizations treating only their ideas as absolute Truth are more psychically enslaving than liberating, and more controlling than loving and respectful. After all, nature never has had only one model of truth, and almost certainly never will have. Many liberal people today have dedicated their lives to teaching their new models of ideas as experimental mental tools. Indeed, with such humanistic ideas there are as many different 'roads to heaven', feelings about being born again, and becoming saved as there are people on earth! The popular saying is there are more ways than 1 to skin a cat. Such tolerant feelings are yet another new naturalistic result of seeing all ideas as experimental. With its help we can also more deeply celebrate some new modern heroes who actively worked for democracy's ideal of equal rights, like Susan Anthony, Ben Franklin, Jane Addams, Martin Luther King Jr., and John Dewey, as well as millions of other liberals who're working for the same result each and every day. For example, the more Susan Anthony sensed women were mainly taught how to be obedient second-class citizens, the more deeply she felt the idea of inequality as merely another social weakness, and thus as something to keep experimentally improving. Voting rights for women became his mission! Why should anyone tolerate half the population not having an equal right to vote, or not having reproductive freedom? Isn’t expanding such equal rights what all humane organizations do? Such a modern democratic world continues unfolding. In fact, just a few hundred years ago, in the 1700s, many Christians routinely believed this idea was absolute truth: some women and children become possessed by devils and evil spirits, and so should be burned as witches to save their souls. One more example may be useful. About 30,000 years ago Neandertals failed to improve their routine habits of living while the newly evolved sapien peoples continued spreading out around the globe. Thus, within a few thousand years they became extinct. The more Neandertals practiced their old routine hunting habits, the more difficult it was to experiment with new ones, and thus continue feeling life’s enjoyments. It’s not just prehistoric history either; such a reality continues on even today. Recently secular totalitarian leaders have shown how dangerous routine habits of obedience can be. Stalin, Hitler, and Pol Pot all demanded obedience to their models of truth, while killing millions of people who allowed them the power to do so. To us Deweyan liberals, even these examples from human history are enlightening. They help teach us we the people have the power to build a more satisfying world for everyone, and unless we focus that democratic power we will be responsible for whatever else happens; unless the people act together and more democratically, our world will remain feudalistic. If liberals like Dewey are right, if all our ideas depend on HUMAN habit-arts, then more liberal democratic schools will build such a world more quickly, a kinder, more respectful, and helpful world where children’s helpful dreams are fulfilled rather than frustrated. Who knows, maybe even one day peace may break out all over the world! Imagine that, aye?? Stranger things have happened, haven't they? However, almost certainly it'll never happen unless we ourselves start looking at more intelligent and humane models of education, economics, nature, and politics. The more that happens, the easier it’ll become for such a world to keep evolving. Little feisty Jonathan went to school in May, Mother had roused him from bed where he lay. While studying an octagonal cask, He raised his hand and asked, Hey, am I gonna learn anything useful today? 16. EDUCATION: CONSERVATIVE AND DEWEYAN, 101 In this and the following 2 sections we take Book 1's longest look at Dewey's liberal educational models of excellence. Usually the philosophy of education is treated as a minor philosophic subject, if it’s treated at all. As in so many ways, Plato was an exception to that rule; his most famous book Republic is essentially a book on educational philosophy. For Dewey, however, and many other liberals, education was one of philosophy's most important subjects, if not the most important! Only with better education can people begin seeing more intelligent ways of acting and guiding their lives, and thus build better habits. Luckily Dewey lived at a time when many Americans wanted to keep improving their lives and governments -- the Progressive Era -- and so in many places around the country many of his educational ideas were experimented with, tested, and continued on into the 1950s! At such schools young folks were helped to learn useful job skills as well as important character habits, like helping others and respecting just laws, as well as learn how to intelligently change unjust ones. For example, for a while Gary, Indiana's entire school district began using many of his ideas in the 1910s, as did the Chicago Vocational School system, and of course later in life entire country’s like Turkey, China, and Japan asked him for educational advice about making their own schools more excellent. They all wanted to keep improving their schools so their young folks would learn more intelligent habit-arts and thus lessen many of their social problems, like crime, unemployment, and helping their economies become more industrial and competitive. Even though he went to China decades before the Communists took over, today China produces more engineers than anyone else and their economy is rapidly becoming world-class, second only to the US. In any case, however, these 3 sections are not just for new teachers, but also for parents and students of education; after all, parents are the most important teachers for any child! Our Main Criticisms For we liberal Deweyans, for too long US education has been out of the progressive improvement loop, so to speak. Its basic education philosophy has been too conservative and even medieval. For us, educational excellence is the best and ONLY way for people AND societies to keep growing and evolving more peaceful and intelligent habit arts, but the more traditional schools remain, the more difficult that goal becomes. Such book-obsessed schools make it more difficult to learn all the democratic and experimental habits making life all it can be. To Dewey liberal education was the best key for teaching young folks how best to keep improving all their habit-arts, like healthcare, charity, exercise, lawfulness, and respect for equal rights. Again, without such a liberal educational system, many social problems remain an economic drag, like fighting crime, underemployment, unemployment, crippling social discrimination, drug abuse, health problems, democratic weaknesses, not to mention global warming and war itself. For Dewey all such modern social challenges can most rapidly be improved only with effective and practical educational ideas and practices, ones in which students make an emotional commitment to learning what feels best to them, rather than being regimented and made to learn what they often have no desire or need to learn. The less young folks make that emotional commitment, the sooner they forget what they spent years being made to learn. And so for us Deweyan liberals children should be free to choose a career path as soon as possible, even in elementary school! Such an emotional commitment makes it much easier to then teach students the valuable character habits they’ll need to become successful lawyers, doctors, engineers, police people, carpenters, plumbers, or whatever, and also the writing, reading, and calculating skills schools now try to teach. So, if Dewey's right, if the emotional commitment to learn practical employment skills is the best educational model for any kind of learning, then child psychology becomes one of the most important subjects of all. Without knowing something about the 3 main stages of child development, it’s almost impossible to build such schools, as Plato himself saw thousands of years ago. In general those stages are a playfully sense-based stage until about 7, a constructive stage until about 11 or 12, and then, as the brain matures, a more intellectual stage capable of grasping more abstract ideas. Thus, without accepting such a child psychology, and instead yoking students to book-work for 12 years, it will take much longer for almost anyone to learn any kind of excellence! And the more that doesn’t happen, the more vulnerable millions of young folks will remain to all of society’s unintelligent temptations and vices. On the other hand, the more schools are based on that psychology, the more naturalistic and less stressful school becoming, and the more children will want to be there. After helping found the American Association of University Professors, and becoming its first president, Dewey published his best educational book, Democracy and Education. Also The School and Society is a good little introductory book about elementary education. More About Dewey After he moved to the newly opened University of Chicago in 1894 Dewey opened its famous Lab School; there he began testing his liberal ideas. It’s still operating today, helping students learn valuable computer skills. After his undergraduate studies he taught briefly at the high school level in Pennsylvania, and there he began feeling how artificial conservative educational models were; without emotionally committing themselves to learn all the book facts they were being asked to learn, school for most students became a place merely to go to until the law said they could leave. For how many students is that the reality even today? In fact, even today most students just don’t need to know all those book facts college professors of education said they should learn. Also, they often justified their book-based models on producing so-called well-rounded students who learn a little of many different subjects. Again, at such schools students quickly forgot the ideas they learned merely to pass the next test. Thus, education for most everyone remained shallow, superficial, and worst of all, useless for much of life outside the school room! Greatly undereducated parents didn’t know enough about education to challenge such an educational model. Thus, often students weren’t prepared for the new jobs being created as science and technology continued creating them. In short, Dewey realized the whole feeling-side of education was largely missing in traditional classrooms; it was mostly just telling students to learn academic subjects at merely a mechanically verbal level of learning, rather than a holistic level of feeling AND verbal learning. So, like Alexander’s empire, conservative public education covered a lot of ground but it was only a few inches deep. And the work was easy; teachers just needed to stay a day or 2 ahead of the students’ book assignments. But again, such facts were all but useless in the real world outside of school. Another result was to ignore the far more useful subject of character development. Thus, again, many students remained vulnerable to all the anti-social actions going on in their own neighborhoods. Police brutality thus became intensified as more people broke the law mainly for economic reasons. They didn’t have the skills to work at better paying jobs, and thus racial segregation and discrimination continued making life needlessly stressful. In Chicago Dewey got the chance to test some of his more holistic and naturalistic ideas of learning, based on a sounder model of child psychology. There he saw the results of making learning an active, sense-based, enjoyable, and natural as learning outside of school. He wanted children to learn about history, chemistry, physics, but he also wanted such subjects taught not just from books in the higher grades, but from active and holistic learning experience! That way, a child’s bodily feelings would be just as educational as talking about ideas. In short, Dewey saw how knowledge should be located in one’s muscles as much as one’s brain. For example, having young students at the sense-based stage of development build a garden would also begin teaching them some elementary chemistry, biology, and mathematical facts. Also, it would make those ideas more meaningful because the experience was active, rather than a passive desk-centered model where student muscles are kept out of the educational loop, so to speak. After all, such children learn best with active practice. He also began experimenting with building projects for students at the constructive stage of development. He saw how even his own children learned best when they actively experimented intelligently to build what they wanted, and when teachers helped them feel what intelligent actions felt like. Students were to first make a detailed plan for their projects, and then actually test it themselves to see its results. Such holistic and organic learning experiences made learning important intelligent and experimental ideas easier and more enjoyable, and it also increased their carpentry, electrical, and plumbing skills. What kind of fertilizer, for example, was best for a garden, and how much of it was best? What is fertilizer? Are there different kinds? How is it made? Such questions begin opening up for young children the entire world of experimental research, and not just for a few, but for all students. Then, after moving to Columbia University in New York in 1904, he continued writing about education and convincing more people how our traditional public schools could be even better with the addition of constructive or project kinds of learning. If children wanted to learn more about politics, then they would make a list of questions, plan a trip to city hall, and talk with politicians who could answer their questions. Such learning projects would be much more meaningful to students than merely passively reading about politics. Then, when students’ body-minds are ready to study abstract ideas, the last 2 years of high school could be devoted to those studies, especially for students going on to college. Such a learning model was also useful for promoting democratic feelings of equality; each student played some part in such projects. Some Ancient Education History As with so many other philosophic ideas, liberal and active models of education go back not only to ancient Greek Sophists and Atomists, but they were used by our native ancestors for millions of years! All useful tools and habits were actively built experimentally, since the first stone tool was built over 2 million years ago! Normally, native children are taught to build their own useful skills, tools, and weapons during their constructive stage of childhood. And often it was the only way women were educated until the 1800! In ancient Greece, many Sophists like Protagoras became the college professors of the time, traveling from city to city and giving lectures about what students should practice. Sometimes they sold their books too! In fact, Dewey says how their new liberal questions about learning helped build the classic model of philosophy which lasted thousands of years! What is learning? Can character excellence be taught, or was it just a random gift from the gods? What is the best political, ethical, and educational system? Is there one or many? Such questions helped define philosophy’s 6 main topics, namely nature, learning, ethics, politics, education, and art. As they went from city to city they gave lectures for which they charged a fee; hey, sophists gotta eat too, right? What’s more, the lectures were aimed at teaching young folks practical skills for living more intelligently in the new democratic systems evolving around Greece. For example, learning how to speak well in public and in the law courts, where juries were sometimes 500 people; many people were afraid to speak in front of such large groups. They also lectured about important skills like estate management. Books were expensive and thus almost non-existent, and so lecturing gave young folks a chance to hear about new ideas they could practice for themselves. Thus, the new skills useful in a democratic society were learned. Such skills made it easier to take advantage of opportunities growing at the time. We've already seen one example of it when Thales made a lot of money selling olive oil presses one year. Needless to say, many of those ancient liberal democratic Sophists were secular-minded. To them, learning useful skills made living here and now more secure and worthwhile. Unlike conservative, Plato many liberal Sophists didn’t bother about any other realm except our natural one; Protagoras frankly admitted his not knowing about any other world besides our natural one. After all, with centuries of practical colony building in back of them, and many smashed fingers along the way, many Sophists were confident their own practical experimental learning model would be useful to many people. Aesop's practical little stories written at that time were about what practical skills might be useful, and they’re still popular reading today. With Socrates’ (d. 399) help ethical questions became another part of classical philosophy. So, is it any wonder one of the most prominent 4th century BCE sophists, a man named Antiphon wrote (Fr. 60) “Primary among human concerns is education” And of course one of the founders of Western liberalism, Democritus, himself realized its importance too; he tells us he would rather discover one law of nature than be a king in any entire country! In China too Confucius said with education all class divisions fad. In short, education helps us see all people are related and deserve the same rights as everyone else. The business-oriented democratic world of the 400s BCE was challenging Greek men like they had never been challenged before; women and slaves were pretty much out of the public loop. Sophist teachers helped fill those new educational needs. Men needed to get better at building businesses, talking respectfully with people, and also at guiding their government as well as defending themselves in court. Thus debate and reasoning skills were needed. Even slaves were welcomed to attend, as long as they paid the fee. As a result, old Greek political institutions continued being reconstructed along democratic lines, as is our modern world, and those with more intelligent thinking and acting habits had a big advantage in that world. It became easier to make an honest drachma or two. Socrates, of course, Democritus, Plato, Aristotle, and many others soon began painting their philosophic answers to such challenging questions, and within a few decades Western civilization had liberal, moderate, and conservative educational models of excellence, although Aristotle’s wasn’t very detailed. Just as today, where they differed was in what they thought was excellent to know, and how they could best learn it. Thus, different models of nature and learning began growing. Greeks being Greeks, it wasn't soon before conservatives like Plato began challenging Democritus’s liberal naturalistic models of excellence. His religious habits were very strong; in fact his Republic rested on knowing Spirit-Objects; he felt they were the best objects to know, much like Christians would say for many centuries during the Middle Ages. Naturally, Plato educational model was far from democratic. Instead it focused mainly on how to educate a few elite students rather than everyone; many conservatives cherish such feelings to this day. In the Republic he described his youthful conservative spirit-feelings about life and education, like how only future philosopher-kings should be educated for some 50 years before they were given power. After that time they would continue enforcing a very conservative model of life on everyone, limiting both democratic and religious freedoms for everyone. As mentioned earlier, no agnostics or atheists would be allowed. However, even he saw how some liberal ideas were useful. For example, his future rulers were to spend some 15 years in practical work between the ages of 35 and 50. They would then learn something about the problems and potentials of life. After that, then while ruling their city-state, they would return to more abstract subjects, like contemplating nature's eternal and unchanging spirit-objects -- the Spirit-Objects he thought governed all of nature. Because our natural world was merely a reflection of that spirit-world, only its objects could teach people what the best knowledge was all about, and thus make their actions most excellent. Sadly, however, we’ve seen how Plato eventually realized such objects could not be known entirely, or even with any degree of certainty. So, on a logical level they remained merely an assumption with no real evidence for them. Conservatives like Socrates and Plato, and moderates like Aristotle, thought like many traditional educators still think today: Mere thinking and reasoning is the most excellent learning art. That idea lives today in many of our public schools when they emphasis book-study for 12 years as the best form of education. Some, like Socrates, preferred a conversational style of reasoning. He would talk with whomever he could and ask them to define the eternal nature of some familiar abstract idea -- friendship, beauty, justice, and courage. Conservatives like him and Plato simply assumed such objects existed; again, mathematical facts seemed to imply such eternal knowledge existed. Others, like Democritus, Plato, and Aristotle preferred a written and lecture style of reasoning; Plato and Aristotle both started their own schools in Athens and no doubt lectured in them. Thus, we can begin seeing how important education was to the Greeks; they too sensed it was the key to building a better world. Where they differed from each other was the definition of ‘better.’ For Plato better meant more controlled, less diverse, more closed, and more feudalistic. For Democritus and Protagoras better meant more freedom, equality, democracy, and variety. A Case for Character Training Like them, Dewey too saw how important education was to the health of any political system, especially democracy. After all, for almost all of civilization people had lived in feudal societies where the rights they had depended on the social power they had, whether it was military, monetary, or religious. But he also noticed how modern tax-supported public schools also aimed at keeping a status quo in place. In fact, throughout much of history students were regimented, taught to obey their teachers, and kept that way with physical punishment. In the late ancient period Augustine too was often wacked by his teachers, and even in the 1960s I too saw how Catholic education was based on physical punishment, almost on a daily basis. The school disciplinarian would daily walk around the lunchroom and bang together the heads of students laughing and enjoying themselves. In fact, it’s not too much to say the present state of our nation as largely disconnected from our political and economic systems is a direct result of our educational practices. Those 2 important systems are all but ignored in our public schools, as is the subject of character excellence. To say the least, the more those character habits are ignored, the easier it becomes for those in power to stay in power and keep increasing it too, as we’ve seen in the last few sections. In truth, CHARACTER development and skills were as important to many ancient liberal sophists as they were to modern liberals like Dewey; character habits like good speaking, honesty, helpfulness, lawfulness, and how to make an honest drachma or 2. Such habits can help keep one's freedom and knowledge growing all through life, and thus help make life more satisfying and rewarding. Without them life remains much like we see on our local news shows, full of violence and disrespect. Even some teachers were recently sentenced to prison terms for changing test score grades. For us liberal Deweyans, however, character excellence is a life-long practice and skill beginning in our public schools. It's the same way with medical or legal skills; no doctor or lawyer knows everything about their art, and so they merely KEEP PRACTICING those habit-arts all through life! It's the same way with character excellence; it's an always growing practice rather than a static skill; it challenges people to practice joyful and respectful actions all through life, in thousands of little different ways here and now. In truth, there are an infinite number of ways to practice kindness, sympathy, and helpfulness. Down through time such useful and practical character skills not only helped people keep learning more easily, but also live safer and more intelligent lives in democratic systems. For example, Protagoras said part of character excellence was the habit of respecting the law, no matter what country you were in, and so knowing what the law is became an important part of liberal excellence on a daily basis. Sadly, that skill too has been all but ignored in many, if not most, of our tax-supported public schools! How many young folks today would act more excellently if their schools focused on teaching our laws, rather than just more and more trivial academic facts about history and literature while remain largely useless for all but future teachers? Can't you just imagine Protagoras looking for a parking sign every time he parked his chariot, if parking signs existed at the time? In short practical-minded Protagoras celebrated useful character knowledge and skills; they helped make life less stressful and more enjoyable. After all, if you’re going to learn some habit-art, why not learn not only some useful habit, but how best to use it wisely and intelligently, rather than ignorantly and illegally? More often than not, such important character habits like knowing what the law says about many different actions helps preserve a person's freedom, rather than remaining a slave to their own unintelligent ideas and habits. No doubt, seeing even slaves as deserving of equal rights was another bit of liberal audacity Plato and Aristotle both could not accept. For them a feudal model of life and nature was firmly implanted! Plato once complained about slaves who were too well dressed; it made them more difficult to see. That was part of the world they lived in. It was a common feeling; many imagined everyone's Fate was all arranged at birth by 3 spirit-goddesses. No doubt, Plato and Aristotle didn't believe that, but moderate Aristotle believed some people should even be forced into slavery, even though if they were smart enough, many slaves were often given more freedom; some even became bank managers! Hundreds of years later Julius Caesar too felt justified in killing many thousands of Celts in France. Why? How else could such barbarians become truly civilized? Sounds like he definitely had more gall than kind and sympathetic feelings while in Gaul! So even in ancient Greece practical character habits became the liberal key to excellence in all things, especially in education. The more we practice such habits, and make them part of our will power, the easier it becomes to practice ethical excellence in our own democratic age. If practiced enough it becomes what many conservative and moderate psychologists call instinct! However, what that means in school is allowing students to first learn about the many different skills being practiced in the real world, and then allowing them to choose which one they would like to learn more about. No doubt, such liberal, practical, democratic actions will make it much easier to also teach the democratic character habits too, like tolerance and respect for all law-abiding people. Without such schools, feudalistic habits of intolerance and hate will continue on, as we can see daily in our media and newspapers. To this day in many places conservatives work to keep such democratic habits weak and hobbled in their growth. What’s more, religious ideas are still often used to defend such conservative actions; they might offend some god somewhere, or bring on some catastrophe. In fact, many religions continue practicing those ideas, and the more they do, the more intolerant people feel. Using Useful Ideas Before Plato was born, liberal Protagoras probably discovered a rather interesting educational question. Some practical person may’ve asked him: If whatever we experience is true for us, then why pay high fees to teachers like you to teach us about excellence? In short, if excellence is relative from city to city, nation to nation, and even from person to person, then why do we need Sophists telling us what they think excellence is? His answer, however, shows how really practical and pragmatic he was. In effect he said even though everyone is the measure of their own truth, not everyone’s truth works equally well in different social situations! Excellence in irrigating crop fields in one country, for example, may not be acceptable in another country, perhaps for religious reasons. For example, lying and thievery may be allowed in some places, but in a more civilized place neither one may work equally well. Thus knowing conditions here and now becomes another part of liberal character excellence. What is happening out there? If you visit and start talking about crop irrigation in one place, you can understand why people might think it less than excellent when they have laws against it. So Protagoras suggested an intelligent person will learn to respect the country’s laws they’re in, so life’s stresses would be reduced. It was just another example of practical reasoning. Why risk the chance of being thrown into jail, or worse, just for not respecting a country’s laws? Why try to fricassee a camel when it’s against the law? In short, for the well-traveled Protagoras, because excellence always varies from place to place, and from person to person, why not learn to respect all law-abiding people? It’s another example of how intelligent respect is one liberal democratic character habit useful in many different places! Is it all just ancient history! Even in the US, the world's oldest democracy, many conservative secular and religious folks today still feel some peaceful habits should be outlawed and forbidden, rather than tolerated; gay and lesbian equal marriage rights are merely one current example of that idea; a few decades ago it was equal rights for Africans, and in the 1800s it was equal rights for Irish immigrants. In fact, one liberal democratic character skill Protagoras taught remains excellent today: respect and obey any country's laws, as long as they're just and apply to everyone! And, even if they are unjust, work intelligently to change them if you work at all. That way you keep your freedom to keep making life better for everyone. How can education get more practical than that, and yet in many of our public schools today such ideas are only mentioned in books, if they’re mentioned at all, and rarely practiced if they’re practiced at all. If you're a real social pioneer you can challenge unfair and unjust laws in court, just to test them and maybe get them overturned, but such skills are rarely allowed to be practiced by students themselves! To us Deweyan liberals it’s another great weakness of our public schools. Most all of the learning remains confined to a merely boo-idea level of consciousness, rather than a deeper body-mind level. Protagoras’ liberal practical educational ideas, like teaching yourself useful kinds of respectful habit-arts, and of course testing them in the real world, no doubt inspired Aristotle, Dewey, and many other educators as well. For nature-loving Aristotle, founding a school became an intelligent way to build his own aristocratic models of philosophic excellence, and in it more than mere facts were to be taught. For him excellent ethical habits were those of a moderate aristocratic Greek gentleman, loaded with all its undemocratic feelings about equal rights and opportunities for anyone not a member of his aristocratic class. For the liberal and democratic Dewey, however, teaching useful and practical CHARACTER habits to all students in our public schools was the best way to keep strengthening our democracy and its liberal values of equality. If not, then such skills can even be eliminated merely within 1 generation! After all, everyone learns the habits they’re taught. If no one were taught intolerant habits they wouldn’t be practiced. Hopefully now the reader will see why Dewey based his liberal model of education on 3 pillars: fact, skills, and character development. Part of that character development depends a great deal on knowing what the law is, and the results of not respecting it. Thus, the following question: Why shouldn't young folks learn more about our laws every year they’re in school, as well as practicing such respect both in school and out? Why shouldn’t they also learn how to judge whether a law is fair and just, and helps make everyone’s life safer and more enjoyable? After all, what good is knowing a million facts if you didn't know how to wisely use them to make everyone’s life more enjoyable? Some German Nazis acted like real bastards because they used their scientific facts and skills destructively, rather than constructively and kindly. Dewey’s 3 Pillars of Educational Excellence. At the University of Chicago Dewey became friends with a woman who was helping immigrants learn more about character excellence and how to live best in their new urban and democratic surroundings. At her Hull House school Jane Addams taught poor undereducated immigrants how to use their government wisely, rather than let it merely use them and their tax money. Eventually she invited Dewey to lecture at Hull House; such lectures not only helped the immigrants, but also helped him explain his ideas of excellence with plain language, and thus help make his writing simpler and less technical. While in Chicago he also began seeing some more serious social problems immigrants were facing, and how they might be solved with some new, more useful, educational habits. With Addams’ help Dewey saw how character habits were more useful than even. Eventually they became one of Dewey's 3 liberal pillars of excellent education: factual knowledge, useful skills, and character habits. To this day, however, conservative educators continue ignoring character habits as a worthwhile educational goal! Again, they’re taken themselves out of the social improvement loop, so to speak. The more such habits are ignored in our schools, the more unintelligent actions keep happening outside of school, and the more taxpayer money must be used to keep shielding the public from such actions! In some places it now costs about $50,000 of tax money to keep just one prisoner from society! Multiply that by 2 million prisoners now jailed in the US, and you can get some idea of how taxpayer money continues being wasted unnecessarily! Just imagine how many more psychologists and student mentors could be hired by our public schools if that 100 billion dollars was spent there! Today, many of our state prisons are terribly overcrowded with young, able-bodied people who have been merely undereducated! They never were taught to enjoy working honestly and joyfully to build skills useful in the real world. They were often made to learn in a largely unnatural situation, namely to sit still and merely keep reading. And economically they were often treated as just another body useful for getting more state money! No doubt, to us Deweyan liberals, ignoring character development on a formal teaching level is one of the greatest weaknesses of US public education. It fosters and encourages many of the serious tragic life-wrecking social events we see every day around us. All criminal actions, and all the publicly paid systems to keep arresting, trying, and jailing millions of people would be greatly reduced if our public schools regularly taught the kinds of liberal character habits I’ve been talking about. To us liberals, trivial knowledge facts merely helps build trivial people. It’s another sad result of what happens when monopoly educational power stays in place, as it has in our public schools. To this day it remains controlled by a few educational bureaucrats who want to change nothing in the system. After all, they’re making good tax money for not much strenuous work. Only when enough people say enough, we want more liberal schools built in our own neighborhoods, will such schools begin to be built. As far as I can see, today the public continues being distracted from learning more about liberal education models with such issues like whether teachers should have tenure, or how many charter schools should be allow in our system? For us liberal Deweyans these are all side issues! The educational debate should be about what children are being taught in school, rather than continue to allowing trivial book knowledge to remain the main educational goal. In fact, these are anything but new educational ideas. Going all the back to ancient Greece, personal tutors taught the current character habits to their aristocratic students. Only such wealthy people could afford to hire such one-on-one tutors, and thus easily pass on to young folks the ideas parents wanted them to have. Even some Roman educators like Marcus Quintilianus (35-100 CE) pointed to their usefulness. But again, only a small class of wealthy aristocrats could afford such private tutors to home-school children. Even though the Roman Republic had recently become ruled by an all-powerful emperor, Marcus was liberal enough to realize the benefit of teaching all students such habits, whether rich or poor. In fact, for us Deweyan liberals, for thousands of years that had been education's main challenge! Dewey saw, the more young folks weren't taught such liberal democratic habit-arts in their schools, homes, and churches, the more intolerant students would become with their conservative ideas and habits. Thus, we got such atrocious and vicious actions in the Middle Ages like burning heretics alive in public, as well as helpless women and children condemned as anti-Christian and evil witches. In medieval Germany alone as many as 10,000 people were killed in one year! For him it was obvious: Democratic excellence creating a more peaceful and enjoyable world for everyone would more easily grow if excellent liberal character habits were taught to students every year they’re in school. The US founders simply weren’t very democratic. They built a central government to best help grow a wealthy upper class of businesspeople, rather than a more democratic social life for everyone, so they gave no educational powers to the central powers. Only with the recent growth of a more active federal government has it gained more power to shape public education. After 1954 it began sending troops to integrate the public schools. Dewey moved to Columbia in 1904. We can imagine, for a few moments, what life was like at the time. Dewey continued seeing many educational challenges as Africans continued being lynched in many southern states, and the racist KKK even marched in large numbers down Pennsylvania Ave. in 1920! Poor and uneducated foreigners were flooding into New York by the millions every year, including all of my grandparents; they just passed through on their way to Ohio. But many thousands stayed in New York and helped create the need for more housing, clothing, food, and schools. The entire social network was overloaded. To many of those foreigners, just having a bed to sleep in and a stove to cook on was a luxury, even if five people slept in a bed and only potatoes and vegetables were cooked. What’s more, the rather conservative public schools weren’t much help; mainly they helped immigrants learn some English and enough political facts to become citizens. However, many never learned the skills or creative habits useful in their new industrial democracy, and thus couldn’t teach them to their children. Neighborhood gangs roamed the streets stealing what they could just to stay alive. A wonderful movie showing what life was like around that time is Somebody Up There Likes Me. The schools didn’t teach children how to become honest cops or carpenters or even teach basic lawyer and doctor skills. Mainly, their goal was to just keep the kids busy with a series of passive book assignments for a few hours. By nature, however, kids and most adults are active experimental learners, as any parent soon learns. Naturally, caring liberals like Dewey asked how can the public schools help make their lives more rewarding, enjoyable, and less stressful? Like many Asian workers today, US immigrants made pennies a day while a few factory owners made fortunes. They simply weren’t interested in teaching their workers more intelligent skills like limiting their families to one or two kinds, what foods help build healthy bodies, and what laws should be respected. Many immigrant families thus turned to organize their criminal actions. Liberals like Dewey, for example, asked why merely keep giving children more book assignments if it didn't help build more useful skills and intelligent character habits. How could mere book assignments ever teach immigrants how to use the new government to make life safer for everyone, keep making life better? Why demand children keep memorizing trivial facts about American presidents, English novelists, and chemical formulas they didn’t want to learn and would probably never use in the real world? If such facts were to be learned, why not at least make them game-oriented and fun , like writing and performing their own presidential scenes, acting out the truths novelists were describing, learning their math, chemistry, and scientific facts while actually helping beautify and improve their own neighborhoods, and helping others learn more intelligent habit-arts? In short, how to stay intelligently connected with their surroundings in positive and constructive ways? Wouldn't such important skills help young folks not only find better kinds of work, and perhaps also start their own business and also use some of the profits to keep helping others? Aren’t those kinds of habits really what true civilization is all about? In short, what was educationally more important: teaching young folks trivial skills like how to work fractions and decimals year after year, or help them learn excellent character skills like honesty, creativity, helpfulness, and of course feeling what democratic tolerance feels like? No doubt, many conservative educators at first simply ignored such liberal ideas like vocational education courses; to them teaching excellent character habits was the parents' job, not theirs. But by 'passing that educational buck' to others they, in effect, helped keep their own neighborhoods degraded, encourage criminal activities for economic reasons, drug-habits of social withdrawal, and make life more stressful for taxpayers who paid for all those services to better control such actions. Again, everyone's taxes are used to keep funding schools, courts, prisons, and other remedial social services. For Dewey is just wasn’t’ very intelligent to keep our public school out of the life-improving loop, so to speak. It only kept hobbling the growth of a more democratic world. The more excellent character habits like health, lawfulness, and helpful business skills are ignored, the easier it is for young folks to fulfill the American fantasy of getting rich quickly with less than excellent actions! To this day, far too many young folks are quickly pressured to join a neighborhood gang, start demanding 'protection' money from neighborhood businesses, start abusing alcohol, drugs, vulnerable young women, and even thievery to solve boredom and money problems. Why not? It's all part of life in the big city, isn't it? Life’s a rat-race and a jungle isn’t it? And even if they do get caught committing such actions many quickly learn how to pay off the police, or go to jail and learn more criminal actions from those already there! Police corruption in the early 1900s was probably rampant in all major US cities. The movie Serpico showed how rampant the problem was in New York in the 1970s! Given the state of public awareness about education, creating more liberal schools, even in New York, was about as easy as walking on water. Many professional-minded parents naturally wanted their sons and daughters to become lawyers and doctors, and so any kind of industrial education was a step backward for them, not forward. In fact, when voters got a chance to start making their schools more liberal, like many other cities had done already, they rejected the idea during the first World War. Thus, except for creating more vocational options in some schools, the obsession with learning more and more academic trivia stayed pretty much the same. As a result, character habits continued being ignored. Poorly educated people continued living in poor neighborhoods and allowing their kids to practice more criminal kinds of habits. It seemed to be tribal warfare between conservatives and liberals with kids caught in between! Remember, both radio and television hadn't yet been invented, and even when they were they were used mainly for advertising and entertainment purposes, thus making people more eager to keep buying the goods corporations were making, like washing machines and expensive cars, jewelry, and don’t forget stocks and bonds. And because respectful character excellence wasn't taught, such cars often gave young men a place to force vulnerable women to give in sexually or get out and walk! When women weren’t taught about respectful and caring sex, or men about running an honest, lawful, and helpful repair shop, clothing factory, restaurant, or appliance store, then life remains the ‘rat-race’ it’s pretty much been for thousands of years, full of superstitions and myths. Even when a Prohibition amendment passed in the early 1900s outlawing the sale of alcohol, criminal gangs themselves became organized like corporations to keep selling it, and again paying off the police to look the other way. Even today, an traditional educational model based on trivia knowledge maintains its monopoly in public education. Most parents even today are still too undereducated about liberal models of education to even think better schools can be built, much less focus on actually building them in their own neighborhoods! They often still believe their schools should continue teaching only reading, writing, and arithmetic. Today, that monopoly is still maintained with the help of state laws, and they keep hobbling the growth of more liberal democratic schools. Even in supposedly more liberal charter schools the same kind of subjects are still forced on the most vulnerable among us, children! Teacher unions often went to state capitols and convinced politicians to pass such laws, making education improvement more difficult and practically impossible. In effect such state laws removed school improvement from local control and gave it to state officials. In fact, to this day conservative Republicans often called themselves educational reforms, and yet the reforms they suggest often change the flow of public tax money from non-profit public schools to for-profit private hands! It’s like the US Constitution merely changed the flow of public money from the British government to local aristocratic pockets. And union pay rates don’t apply to Charter schools, so the profits are even greater! Thus, teachers are left with the choice to teach more academic trivia or find some other work. Even in most Charter schools children are made to learn more and more facts-facts-facts, so the private owners and investors can collect more public tax money from the government! Such events have made liberal educational improvement difficult, if not practically impossible. Still, liberal progress hasn’t been stopped. Thanks to the growth of more liberal families, democratic progress continues growing. They care about empowering their children with more intelligently kinds of character habits! And I might add, that includes respectful sexual character habits too! What young woman today in much of the Western world doesn’t know what respectful sexual behavior is, and how they too should have a part in saying what should happen and when? But on the public school and Charter school levels, it seems the goal is still to teach academic facts, facts, and more facts. The program was firmly established in the late 1950s when the so-called Space Race began. Undemocratic conservatives convinced President Eisenhower himself to speak out against Dewye’s education ideas, and he did! Ike said Dewey’s ideas were the main reason why Russia’s space program was more advanced than the US’s! In reality, however, it seems the Russians merely captured more German rocket scientists after World War 2 than the US did! As a result, today almost everyone still believes forcing children to learn what they have little desire or use for remains the definition of good education, even though many children keep telling their parents they don’t like school? These days I hear some conservative politicians still talk about how their new educational programs will teach children to reason critically, and thus become more intelligent adults. As we’ll see, however, early in the 1900s liberal educators at Columbia like Edward Thorndike proved experimentally children learn to reason just as well in a project-oriented school, and in many cases better, than students in book-oriented schools. In any case, today probably most people still don’t know what better schools can look like, and even if they did they would often be legally kept from creating them without state permission! In short, our own education laws keep hobbling social improvements themselves! In fact, most people today have only experienced a passive book-oriented education model, and so continue naively believing making children sit at desks day after day, year after year, and remain tied to their books is educational excellence. To us Deweyan liberals it certainly is not! What’s more, educational history in the first half of the 1950s tells us Dewey’s ideas are more useful for building a more equal and democratic life for everyone! A more project and professions-oriented educational model is much more naturalistic and effective. It’s holistic, rather than merely verbal. Such a liberal educational model is more like the way children actually learn anything, namely with active kinds of practice! In them learning becomes more enjoyable, constructive, and productive because it’s based firmly on children development itself! However, education debate is practically non-existent. It’s all dictated from the top down, so to speak, just like feudalistic morals were dictated from the pope down, or laws were dictated from the king! Be honest now, when is the last time you heard any kind of meaningful debate about different educational models? Without such debate how can anyone have any real choice about what kinds of schools their tax money should be used for? Why shouldn’t parents and students have the right to start learning about a profession or career while they’re in school, so life can become less stressful once they graduate? Why should young folks enter their adult years knowing almost nothing about how to make a honest buck and help others in the process? In fact today, more than 200 years after the US was founded, most of our states in the world's oldest democracy still have unjust and unfair laws against same-sex marriage. True, they might soon all be negated by Supreme Court rulings, but when schools ignore liberal character habits, the underlying feelings of bigotry remain in place, rather than joy and feelings of wishing people well. Aren’t those the feelings all civilized people should learn? At least we liberals say they are. More than 100 years after the Civil War millions of people were still taught to hate and hobble African equal rights as much as possible! Just like philosophy itself, there are conservative, moderate, and liberal models of education, but when they fail to teach our democratic ideals of character excellence, like sharing rights equally, and how to respect others and our just laws, then how excellent are they for making everyone's life better? Should democratic habit-arts of equality, respect, or lawfulness be ignored by our schools just because people don’t realize how important they are? One Personal Recollection One similarity between liberal and conservative educational models is they both agree the ultimate goal of education is teaching students how to intelligently solve their own problems. Where they often differ is how young folks should learn to solve their own problems. Years ago, after I had taken some philosophy courses and how to ask some meaningful questions, rather than just sit around like a dope, I called into a radio talk show one day and asked 2 education professors what the best goal of public education was. At first they sounded a little surprised at such a basic question, but after a few moments they both agreed the goal was teaching students how to solve their own problems. No doubt, to both liberals like Dewey and traditional educators that goal is important; who wants to have adults stay dependent on others for solving their own problems? No doubt, many disabled people need help from others, but most people can learn to intelligently solve their own problems; after all, most problems aren’t very serious at all. So, the goal is teaching young folks how to intelligently answer life's challenges is a worthwhile one. Such skills help make life more satisfying, and thus keep growing as people. However, the big question is how should we go about teaching those important skills, like how to make a plan of action, and then experimentally test the plan to see its results? Conservative kinds of educators in general say knowing more book-facts is the best way to learn how to solve our own problems. It’s an old and traditional system. In the Middle Ages, for example, people learned to say certain prayers to help solve their problems, like disease, having a safe journey, not offending god, and asking for forgiveness. In short, merely reading examples of character excellence should be enough to teach students how to best solve their problems. For liberals like Dewey, however, what's needed is a much more active and organic kind of experimental testing and learning how such actions actually feel, so those ideas don’t become quickly forgotten, like happens regularly with mere book-facts. How many of the book-facts do typical 25 and 30 year olds remember from their 12 years of public school? So, to make ideas and skills something other than Alexander’s empire, that is narrow and shallow, it’s better to use active kinds of learning projects, rather than merely reading about them. If children want to learn, say, more about Behavioral psychology, then they might actually perform scenes from The Taming of the Shrew, or any other play where such examples exist. To liberals like Dewey that active kind of education model will always produce better results than merely reading about such examples in, say, a psychology book. In fact, only actions can best build any new habit-art. Merely reading without performing some idea leaves learning on merely a narrow and shallow verbal level of awareness, rather than a body-mind level of feeling AND idea, or as we say a body-mind level of awareness. It's the difference between merely talking about ideas and actually practicing them. The common proverb is: Actions speak louder than words! In short, modern Behavioral psychology says young folks need active practice to best learn any new habit; it is a psychology Dewey helped build! Mere reading neglects the entire feeling side of a person's body-mind, and so is much less than excellent learning, as we've seen with Plato's and Aristotle's contemplative reasoning art. It's one thing to merely think spirit-objects or eternal Forms exist, but to actually know they actually exist are 2 very different things. As we’ve seen, Plato’s Parmenides bravely demonstrated with mathematical precision why such objects were not be known and might never be known! I didn't ask it at the time I called in, but I should have: If knowing how to solve our own problems is education's main goal, then why do students made to go through 12 years of public schooling without getting any active training about solving either their own or hateful social problems? Wouldn't knowing how improving a diet habit, for example, be much easier if students knew how to actively experiment with their eating habits? And if not, then isn't our present healthcare crisis one result of neglecting such experimental learning, and relying instead on the government's help to solve healthcare problems our own bad eating habits often create?! After all, some 50% of all health problems are now said to be diet related, and the heavier people become, the more health problems they'll probably have, once again paid for with everyone's socialized tax money. And of course the more money is needed for that, the less money is available for continuing to improve and enjoy life itself. So, this question too seems more than a little reasonable: Are our own conservative book-oriented public schools really helping create many of the government programs conservatives say we shouldn’t have? Almost certainly, such programs will continue being needed as long as our public schools remain obsessed with teaching only more and more book-facts, and remain outside the loop of working to make life better for everyone! Yet another little lame limerick is offered to make the point. At memorizing definitions Jones was a whiz. Reading more as he felt some dental fizz. As teeth came from his head, He sheepishly said, My schools never taught what dental health is. 17. EDUCATIONAL MODELS, 102 Traditional Educational Weaknesses For we liberal Deweyan perhaps the greatest weakness of traditional schools is their ignore of our strongest learning art, active experimental learning. It’s a much more effective and natural learning tool than merely answering someone else’s book-questions year after year, For Dewey mere book-learning is unnatural. Why? It separates and isolates thinking from actively testing ideas, thus keeping knowledge on a purely verbal and mental level. For example, lucky students may read about useful character habits like helping others less well of, but that idea takes on another deeper meaning when such ideas are experimentally tested! In that situation the entire body is involved with the learning process, rather than just the verbal awareness. To his great credit even conservative Plato realized how important active kinds of learning are, and recommended his future leaders spend 15 years actively learning about life before they became leaders. And, a standing joke for Mark Twain was his saying he never let school get in the way of his education; he too realized the best knowledge is learned in active experimentation. It’s what gave his writings so much human depth and warmth. But, it seems even Mark missed something very important, namely the character art of using his fortune to help those less well off. He kept using his money merely to make more money, and the more his investments went broke, the more he had to work to make more money. If he’d have gone to a more liberal school where such character habits are a normal part of the day he almost certainly would have made his life less stressful and more enjoyable. Surely, the ‘Robin Hoods’ around him had fun taking it away from him with money-draining investments! As Dewey saw, for 12 years in traditional schools students are tied mainly to their books, ‘spoon-fed’ merely academic facts, like George Washington crossed the Delaware River during the Revolutionary War. However, how many students are allowed to more feel that fact in some kind of experimental body-mind way? How many students are allowed to write a short scene and actually feel how cold it was at the time, and why he was crossing the river in the first place? Washington crossed the Delaware because the plan he made to attack the British in Trenton, New Jersey needed to be tested and verified in life; it was part of the process of experimentally testing a plan there and then. What's more, if a rather rotund and overweight General Knox would have rocked the boat a little more, Washington might never have made it into New Jersey! How much more fun would learning be if children were allowed and encouraged to create such active learning situations. In short, the more young folks don't feel how important intelligent experimental learning and testing is, the more they remain immature and childlike. Again, the art is not difficult to teach. It simply means writing a plan of action, assigning different tasks to different students, and then actively test the plan; some adjustments to the original plan may be necessary, but then again, what plan is always accurate the first time? The earlier children learn that art, the easier it becomes to start solving their own problems intelligently! Again, in traditional schools teachers are almost forced to cover so much material in so much time, so students can score well on the end-of-year standardized test, and teachers can keep their jobs. However, what standardized test ever asked students what’s the best way to solve any problem intelligently? The obsession with making such tests so academically focused not only leads students to believe that’s what education should be about, but it artificially pressures teachers to keep education that way. Recently some teachers who changed students test scores were even sentenced to a year in jail; that’s how obsessed the conservative educational bureaucracy is with keeping education merely on a verbal level, and all but ignoring not only deeper, more natural, and more enjoyable kinds of learning, but useful character training too. As a result, students get almost no feeling or idea either about WHAT character excellence means or how to experimentally build it. Many leave school psychically crippled in a sense; they have few useful skills for living life well in the real world. The more such habits are ignored, the more difficult it becomes to earn an honest living after schools days are over, if, that is, they can even find a job they're interested in and pays enough to live on. More About a Liberal Educational Model Today we see some wasteful results of such educational weaknesses. Because most schools remain book-centered and fact-based, rather than individually student-centered and experimental, many students simply drop out of school as soon as the law allows. In fact, their educational needs are not being met! Why stay in school and keep learning useless academic facts. When is the last time the reader needed to prove a geometric theorem in the real world? And yet all students are made to study that art for a year! Algebra is the same way. In fact, that criticism might be leveled against most school subjects! Most students simply don't have a need to keep learning such facts; what do they have to do with life in the real world, where the American dream awaits? Almost always it seems such high schools would rather teach students to know things like why Othello caused Desdemona to commit suicide, and how to solve quadratic equations. But for Dewey, without character habits like community work and improvement, school merely keeps diverting student attention away from perhaps THE most important subject of all, namely PHYSICAL AND MENTAL HUMAN HEALTH and its 2 important habit-arts -- intelligent diet and exercise! Wealthy folks can afford to send their children to psychologists to help them learn more useful habits, but why should our tax-paid public schools keep ignoring such important skills while we keep spending some $600 billion a years building more guns and bombs? In what sense are those events worth celebrating in other countries? One result of such schools makes it more difficult to start making some positive contributions to our society; drug-dealing and criminal actions are much more profitable. In fact, as we'll see in Book 5's Models of Educational Excellence, the sooner learning the arts of experimental testing and character helpfulness, the easier it becomes for most everyone to keep educating themselves, rather than depending on others. When students discover how important excellent diet and exercise habits are in whatever career they choose, then they'll want to learn how to build those habits, and thus be better prepared for life itself, instead of just for the next test! Not learning to talk confidently, intelligently, and constructively is often another weakness of traditional schools. How many young folks are deathly afraid to say anything in front of a group? It’s certainly not because young folks aren’t capable of learning such skills; it’s mainly because they’re not allowed to practice them on a regular basis in conservative book-obsessed schools. For how many teachers is a completely silent classroom the best? What is our conservative educational bureaucracy afraid of by teaching students to speak up forcefully and rationally about events in the real world? Is it because military units function best when no one questions or talks about what’s going on? And how much more tragic is the situation when most of the information people learn about the world comes from talking, not reading or writing? How else can young folks learn to feel the art of kind and sympathetic talking when students are conditioned from grade 1 to mostly sit quietly and work from books, and when sports remain the art of merely defeating someone else, rather than learning how to intelligently keep improving our own skills of helpfulness? I hasten to add: such educational systems exist not just at the public school level. How many college students and athletes leave school with absolutely no feeling for using some of their money to help those in need, rather than merely build a bank account? And equally regrettable, how can students want to keep educating themselves when their question-asking habit is largely neglected by book assignments? In them the questions are already given, so again, without the habit of asking intelligent questions, students leave school crippled in that way? It often leads to psychic doldrums, so to speak, in which boredom becomes a strong feeling. Again, bored people are boring people. As a result, many students finish school not only afraid to say anything in front of an audience, but of not knowing anything worthwhile to say either! Evidently, since the 1950s that’s the way conservatives want young folks to be. It make life in the corporate and military worlds that much easier! They don’t want students knowing about over-population and independent kinds of thinking; they want young folks to start having a family so they have to work for whatever the corporation pays them. Thus, the more students are discouraged from talking in class about what they're learning, either in school or outside it, the more abstract skills like solving quadratic equations become meaningful; such equations, by the way, are useful for, say, finding how big a garden area might be, or even designing a piece of furniture. They have a use, but when they’re separated from constructive kinds of projects, they remain merely another mental diversion. Also, intelligent kinds of talking in class on a regular basis can not only help build all-important feelings of self-confidence, but also organizational skills. The better organized their weekly talk become, the more interesting they can be made. Conservative educators often focus mainly on teaching facts, facts, and more facts from books, books, and more books, but that’s often not all. Business skills too are often included, like typing and learning how to use our ever-growing number of electronic toys and tools. But Dewey was bold enough to ask what the results of such an education are. A passive kind of obedience was one result. The more students obey their teachers and don’t have any different learning goals themselves, then the more vulnerable they remain to people who test them for their character excellence once they leave school or home. All during his public school and university years Albert Einstein was interested only in math and science; one of his teachers even told him he would never amount to anything. Imagine what physics would be like today if Albert hadn’t remained interested in his own questions, like what is light and what would life look like if we could travel that fast? Again, is a passive and non-questioning habit really the one most cherished by our corporate and military leaders? Are they really the ones behind the creation of our book-obsessed educational systems? Well, to cite merely one piece of evidence. Admiral Hyman Rickover who helped build America’s nuclear submarine fleet in the 1950s, said as much. To him schools should teach only facts, facts, and more facts, and then let the connecting of their facts be someone else's responsibility higher up in the bureaucratic system, whether it's either military or corporate. Only they know best about the 'big picture', and what’s going on in the world. We can well imagine Socrates and Plato talking about the same kinds of ideas. To them running a government should be left to the older men who have more knowledge and experience; only their judgments can be best. Young and inexperienced people shouldn’t be given any political power, or as little as possible! It’s understandable; experience often makes people wiser, and obviously military knowledge too is seasoned and ripened with experience. However, don't even foot soldiers need character excellence, to know what's best to do with the facts they have around them? Should they just keep killing innocent people simply because they’re ordered to? For us liberal democrats, that like saying people can’t even ask why we should use our tax money to pay for 20 or 30 nuclear submarines when merely 1 of their missiles can literally level any city on earth? Should we really keep allowing people to have such power? Wouldn’t we all be better off if all such weapons were dismantled? In truth, the more people are conditioned merely to obey orders, rather than evaluate the facts for themselves, the greater the chances for massive amounts of brutality, as we saw during the Vietnam War. Babies are still being deformed by the poisons we dropped on that country! Who needs to be a rocket scientist to feel such situations call for intelligently evaluating facts rather than merely obeying others no matter what the results are? Many ancient Greeks like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle felt the un-criticized life is not worth living, but if we don’t teach young folks how to evaluate facts by their possible results, the more dangerous life becomes for everyone. Of what educational use is merely collecting more and more book-facts, and not thinking about their possible results in the real world. In such schools where critical thinking habits are taught, they become a much more important part of the community, rather than remained isolated from it. As we've already seen, I learned many isolated biological facts in school, but because I never learned to put them to use for building a more intelligent diet, I continued wrecking my own health. And here's another example of allowing only a few to tell us what the facts mean. In 2001 US intelligence services had gathered many, many facts about the 9-11 airplane hijackers; they were already here in the US taking flying lessons in different parts of the country! But such facts were never shared with different organizations, so they could be put together into a coordinated picture, and for also questioning them on why anyone would want to learn merely to fly a passenger airplane, rather than also learn to take-off and land it! The art of coordinating and using facts intelligently is definitely a more important skill than merely learning more and more facts; what do the facts mean and how can they be used to keep making life safe and productive? The more people know how to practice that creative and intelligent art, the safer we all become! Aristotle collected tons of biological facts from around his world and even organized many of them into some useful categories, but he missed evolution’s big picture; had he lived 10 years longer he may have been able to better see such a picture. In short, his un-criticized assumption about their being some eternal constant forms creating eternally constant groups of animals and plants made an evolutionary model of nature almost impossible for him. Evidently even Plato's Academy some ideas were beyond criticism! In short, we Deweyan liberals celebrate knowing facts; accurate information is needed. But to merely demand all students obey their teachers and learn the same facts, whether they want to or not, is not democratic education. At best it’s a conservative model of education aimed at maintaining a feudalistic class-based status quo! In more liberal schools children are taught how to use their facts and skills intelligently, constructively, helpfully, and if possible kindly! In truth, as test-scores and drop-out rates teach us, many students simply don't need to know more and more book-facts. Also, some 70% of high school students don’t go on the keep learning more and more book facts in college. And what’s more, much less than 30% don’t get a degree in 4 years. Today many urban schools have a drop-out rate as high as 50%! In other words, in some neighborhoods over half the students are leaving the one place they could be using as an excellent preparation into the world outside of school. So, because what's important about facts is how they’re used, shouldn't that educational fact help concerned parents keep pressuring their local schools to start including more naturalistic kinds of learning projects all through the 12 years of public schooling? The less that happens, then more and more students will continue entering their adult years psychically immature and crippled for excellently answering many of life's challenges, like obeying just laws and making only honest money. We continue seeing those kinds of results daily in our media. As John Galbraith saw, too many people, both educators and corporate supervisors, have become content to keep the class-based economic status quo in place, and so rarely even think about the social results of a 50% drop-out rate for some schools. Who cares? Let someone else deal with it! Parents aren’t the only ones in such an improvement loop. Students are too. Students too can accept the challenge to improve that 50% drop-out rate, so as to better meet different student learning desires. For example, why shouldn’t students wanting to be business people be able to make some ‘school money’ with a student business, and then use it to help those less fortunate? In short, why not turn student creativity and experimentation loose in a safe and constructive manner, to help more students stay in school and keep improving themselves as well as their neighborhoods? Such learning not only gets students more feelingly involved with local challenges, but also with helping others to help themselves. In short, the more students are encouraged to ACTIVELY AND EXPERIMENTALLY solve their own problems, the more their own educational and character excellence grows stronger, the more mature students will become, and the more their own schools will continue being improved. Believe it or not folks, nature has no desire to leave manmade projects alone, and that’s been a challenge for only about 4 billion years, give or take a New York minute of 2! As many are seeing today, education dollars are becoming less available as income and taxes remain stagnant. Especially during recessions tax revenues become even less, and so intelligence tells us more community volunteers are needed, especially in the lower grades, to help students start learning about intelligent experimentation. That shouldn’t be a problem now that millions of ‘baby-boomer’ retirees are now available. Then, as children enter their constructive stage of development they will need more help building the many workshops students can use to start learning about the skills they will use as adults, everything from computer, doctor, and legal shops to carpentry and plumbing. No doubt, money will also be saved from not needing all the books used in traditional schools. And teacher roles will be changed from finding and grading book assignments to one of mainly guidance, encouragement, and problem solving. In any case, however, the traditional separation of intelligent work habits from helpful character habits will end. And the more young folks learn to enjoy such habits and respect just laws, the less vulnerable they’ll become to criminal behavior and drug abuse, to name just 2, as well as merely making war-weapons endangering innocent people. Life is sacred. That’s not to say sometimes violence is needed against those who aim at harming and killing anyone, but thankfully such people are still a small minority. What's more, the more students keep intelligently criticizing and improving their own schools, the easier it will be get needed public funding to build and equip all the practical workshops at liberal schools. No one can say for sure how many shops will be needed at every school; each school and district has its own needs and so should be built to serve community needs. Still, food, clothing, and health shops will probably be useful in all schools. Even if students learn nothing else besides what mental and physical health is, and how to practice it, it’ll be a great improvement over many of our traditional schools. And, it’ll also be easier for students to volunteer when they’re adults, and feel gratitude to the school that they will feel cared for and nurtured them so well. They’ll also learn what habits they need to keep strengthening our democracy, like staying in contact with their representatives, voting, and protesting all the attempts of those trying to weaken it, so they can keep using the system for their own personal gain. In that way they’ll start building a social consciousness, rather than just caring about themselves. We still have many serious problems, like dangerous atomic weapons, global warming, environment pollution, and equality issues. To keep children isolated from those issues merely helps keep them in place. Why shouldn’t students be included in those improvement loops, and be trained to constructively criticize and improve not only their own schools, but their nation and world as well? Such critical thinking and constructive actions are another important place to practice intelligent experimentation, and perhaps even produce some real improvements. In any case, they’ll learn more about our strongest learning art – intelligent experimentation. After all, isn’t it more intelligent to keep experimenting with constructively engaging an enemy instead of merely keeping them isolated or kill them? No doubt, new obstacles will be felt in all learning projects, but that’s where skill like creative thinking and intelligent negotiation become useful, right? Experimenting With A New Educational Model Such traditional educational weaknesses as were mentioned earlier, like not actively teaching excellent character habit-arts on an active level of learning, have helped keep far too many young folks grossly undereducated and often frustrated. Also, school boredom is often a serious problem, and a sign of educational needs not being met. Thus parents are also challenged more than ever to also help their children learn more about all the useful and rewarding work available in the real world, and help them start learning about their own strengths and weaknesses, so they might feel where they can best use their talents. How many young folks leave school with knowing little about themselves, and so have little feeling for what kind of work they want to do? Thomas Edison’s mother was a fine example of such a caring parent. America’s greatest inventor went to public school for only a few years, and then his smart and creative mother home-schooled him! She encouraged him to build habits of constructive curiosity and imaginative question-asking, 2 useful habits for intelligent experimentation. While still in his teens he invented a better telegraph system. His mother knew how important it was to teach creativity's habit-art and how it depended on a question-asking habit. Asking about how things work and also how they might be improved helped focus and strengthen his art of intuitively creative thinking and testing. Those kinds of habits were used all through his life at his New Jersey lab too; sometimes he’d even lock the doors so his workers couldn’t get out until they helped find solutions to creating another invention. It also took those workers over a year to invent a useful working light bulb. Too bad the element neon wasn’t discovered until 1898 or else the problem would have been solved much easier and our world would have become much more colorful. We Deweyans ask why shouldn’t any student learn to practice such creative skills in whatever class they take? Any subject can be adapted to any student’s talents and needs, and so that kind of experimental learning can be encouraged in any workshop with the help of intelligent questions. After all, aren’t all the products we have today the result of such thinking? For example, how might we begin making our traditional schools more student centered instead of book centered? No doubt one useful idea is a small step-by-step approach to improvement, as we’ve seen Part 1 with building better habit-arts. If true, then to try to convert all schools in a district to an experimental workshop system, or even all the grades in one school all at once, might be too much of an adjustment for both students and teachers to make. It might cause more frustration than satisfaction. And so to avoid such possible results, a ‘baby-step’ approach to improvement might be best, say, making a plan for the first 3 grades where students are mainly using the senses to learn more about themselves and their world. So, projects using that fact can be more intelligently designed. With such thinking the reader can begin feeling some of the new challenges faced when trying to convert a traditional book-centered school into a more liberal child-centered school. They aim to take advantage of childhood’s 3 main stages of development; they are sense-based until about 7 or 8, a constructive phase between 8 and 14, and then as their brains become more developed they enter an abstract thinking phase. Many book-centered schools tend to ignore those first 2 stages of development, and keep children working on book assignments, which for many children soon become boring. In most students there’s little natural ability and desire to learning such abstract facts. And for another thing, conservative book-and-teacher-centered schools keep students basically inactive and confined to passive class work almost all the time, writing the answers to their book questions, and then having teachers grade their work. No doubt it’s easy work for teachers, but what important and useful character habits are students not learning in such schools, and how deeply are they feeling their importance to making life less stressful and more enjoyable? As a result, many students learn the habits often practiced all through the Middle Ages, namely passive obedient to those in authority, and to do whatever they’re told, rather than learn to think and act constructively for themselves. Such schools explain why that era lasted for over a thousand years, and why democratic habits even in the world’s oldest democracy is still weak and neglected! Also, students don't get much practice focusing on either personal or community improvements, like demanding living wages, more of a voice in political decision-making, and equality for all law-abiding citizens. Teaching such passive and obedient habits were useful to the social ruling class; they helped keep a feudal social structure solidly in place with various forms of slavery. Even as late as the early 1800s George Hegel, Germany's archconservative philosopher, echoed such ideas when he said: "Thought, as much as will, must commence with obedience." And the more such habits were encouraged the German, Japanese, and Italian schools, the easier it was for people like Hitler, shoguns, and Mussolini to make people soldiers. In today’s much more democratic and industrial world such habits are simply counterproductive in many situations. Liberal kinds of creative and experimental habits are much more useful in today’s world, and they help build a person’s individuality, creativity, independence, and reliable knowledge. They are, in fact, the kind of habits that helped a few people build Western civilization's life-changing Industrial Revolution shortly after Hegel died in 1831. What’s more, such experimental habits encourage more reliable and organic kinds of ideas, rather than believing their own ideas are absolute Truth for all time. Besides such creative habits are the normal way people learn, as can be seen from watching a group of even young children. Who ever saw a child learn to ride a bike, cook a meal, fix a broken toy, build a new invention, and learn how dangerous alcohol can be just from reading about them in books? And it's why caring and thoughtful parents often encourage their kids to keep experimenting, but intelligently rather than merely routinely! Such parents will also teach them to help others with their skills, rather than merely think only about their own comfort. As a result, liberal schools will begin looking differently from traditional ones; liberal schools will have more shops, like metal, auto, wood, garden, health, and clothing shops for students to actively their creative and experimental habit-arts. For liberal Dewey, because we’re all individuals, with our own powers of independent thinking, the child should be encouraged to keep actively practicing such intelligent habits. What intelligent mechanic doesn't know how to read a repair manual, use mathematics to figure out another outrageous repair bill, or how to tell someone they need a new muffler bearing? When the emphasis is on learning character excellence, then young folks can begin feeling how such habits only increases the chances for making their own life better. Why keep practicing habits that keep making life less than what it might be? Shouldn’t we be honest with ourselves about such education? If capitalism and democracy both work best when people know what excellent habits feel like, and practice them, then not to teach them merely weakens both our economy and our political system. Even today we see the results of mean and unkind discrimination of law-abiding and helpful people. How intelligent is that? After all, how vibrant and healthy for everyone’s health can any political system be when peoples’ main habit-art is obedience to merely old traditional ideas that started growing long before our modern democracies began growing? In more liberal schools children will learn ideas should be practiced just because they’ve been practiced for centuries! How much more stressful and dangerous did life remain just because many people continued believing slavery had been practiced for centuries and was, therefore, natural and normal? Communist Russia and China, Nazi Germany, and many other countries including the US all have seen, at times, examples of how dangerous life can become when people refuse to see their habits and ideas as merely the result of their practice, rather than believing they’re nature’s eternal and unchanging truth? Even today, in the US, the reluctance to experiment with liberalizing drug and sex worker laws may be doing more harm than good to many young folks. Blind and unintelligent obedience to the social status quo in effect keeps encouraging people to practice their routine habits, keep things as they are, don’t rock any boats, and keep allowing power-hungry and greedy people to keep increasing their power, rather than using it to help others. If nothing else, much of our own history is mainly a record of such people and the sometimes painful results of their actions. In short, only as people become more educated about how all habits are learned experimentally, and how to enjoy experimenting with building better ones, can intelligent change and progress grow at a more progressive pace. If not, tribal and gang warfare will continue on. How many students never realize they have the option of helping improve their local libraries, health clinics, and homeless services? In short, the more parents, teachers, and students realize they have the freedom to build more intelligent character habits, like better diet and exercise habits, and more community-improvement projects, then the more students will become anchored to life outside of school, the world they will eventually inherit. Such schools have a much better chance of improving many of our own social problems, like intolerance and hateful bigotry, and in the process put our socialized taxes to better use than building more wasteful prisons and deadly weapons. We Deweyan liberals like to ask, why shouldn’t students be included with such an improvement loop? Not to include them is merely to keep them sheltered, immature, and naïve. In other words, life has become something each of us helps make, rather than merely accepting what others say it should be. Why shouldn’t that fact be applied to our schools as well as our government? Just because kids drop-out doesn’t mean they want to quit learning; it often means they just want to learn different things than what’s being taught, and whatever that is there are intelligent and unintelligent ways of using such knowledge. Crooks exist in every profession. How many kids are lured into drug-dealing just for the money, or because everyone else is doing it, and how much do our own schools and drug laws keep encouraging kids to keep endangering their own lives? Sex Education???? What other examples illustrate Dewey’s educational models of excellence? Sex education is definitely another good example. One fact many people choose not to think about is the variety of sexual habits and actions, and so many people feel they don’t want their children learning about them wither. But, how intelligent is that? Not to know such facts only keeps one’s psyche narrow, shallow, and worst of all intolerant! What good is being ignorant about human habits when those habits are practiced in today’s world? Doesn’t such ignorance just help increase anxiety about others, rather than a more intelligent well-wishing? In fact, sex is a perfectly normal human need, and so why not teach high schoolers what some intelligent and acceptable expressions are? Here, of course, I’m certainly not recommending experimentation in the public schools, even though it no doubt exists in many of them today. But shouldn’t just that fact be reason enough to help students begin feeling what sexual respect looks like, and how it can even be treated with some humor and laughter? In many schools even reading about different sexual expressions would go a long way to making young adults feel more comfortable in the adult world. In the native world children are often married when they’re sexually mature. Wouldn’t better facts about sex be justified if it helped prevent even one unwanted pregnancy, or even one expression of sexual immaturity, like satisfying one’s self as quickly as possible? Shouldn’t high schools begin seeing sex too can be a creatively joyous and happy event each time it’s practiced, rather than the same ol’ same ol’? Why shouldn’t more schools be allowed to experiment with such classes on a mental level? After all, we’re all just human and there are many ways of expressing one’s sexual feelings intelligently, joyfully, and respectfully. No doubt, such excellent sex habits of demanding respect from a partner would help reduce much sexual trauma, and unnecessary worry and anxiety. They could even practice such respectful behavior in class, and thus reduce many irrational sexual fantasies about men acting dominantly and women acting passively. As liberal Protagoras liked to remind people, mankind is the measure of all things, of things that are bad and good. Sex education to one may, thus, be moral corruption to another. However, if such classes were merely another educational option to choose, rather than a required course for everyone, then students and parents would be free to make an intelligent choice about what they want their child to learn. That way such ideas can be learned only by those who choose to learn them. In any case it should be obvious, the freedom to keep intelligently experimenting with what children can learn is a very important part of liberal educational excellence. The more legislators keep restricting how our schools might be improved, the less free students become to see what excellence means to different kinds of situations. To us Deweyan liberals that result is certain less than excellent. We live in a world where people are conditioned to build many different kinds of habits, and not to realize that only keeps isolating and separating people from that world. What’s more, as more than 20 sexually-transmitted diseases teach us, the less students can learn about them in sex class, the more vulnerable they stay to getting them, and the more tax money is needed to pay for their health bills! So, why shouldn’t students be free to make such intelligent class choices in high school, just as they should be free to start learning about excellent diet and exercise habits all through grade school? Who knows? It may even help create some more intelligent ways of managing prostitution practices. After all, it’s been legal in much of Nevada for decades and believe it or not some women haven’t been corrupted, but liberated! What Is Psychological Health? Psychological health is another very important subject for we Deweyan liberals. What do we mean by it? What is it? How do we go about achieving it? Such questions were talked about in Part 1, but they can also be talked about to students, as well as actively practiced all through grade school. After all, such habits are useful throughout life, and so the sooner they’re learned, the better life becomes! For us some of the basic ideas of Behavioral psychology can be taught to students even at the sense-based stage of development. As we’ve been seeing, accurate and reliable psychological information is another new modern educational challenge. As late as the 1800s very intelligent modern sophists like Robert Ingersoll complained about not having some real dependable psychological knowledge about ourselves taught in our public schools, like what excellent speaking and working habits feel like, and the best way for young folks to experimentally learn such useful habits. Since then, however, psychologists like Dewey have learned a lot about how best to build new habits and skills, so why not empower young folks with such knowledge? Joyful and encouraging speaking habits can be learned a little more each day. After all, all people must live with themselves all through life, and yet much about such healthy psychological actions can keep weakening any destructive habits they may be learning. What are habits, and why is it so difficult to stop abusing tobacco or alcohol; eating less than excellent foods now offered on just about every block in every city; what is an excellent diet for my body; what is humor and why is it so important to psychological health; what’s the best way to learn such habits and thus make life more satisfying; and why should anyone pay honestly-earned money to merely keep harming themselves with less than excellent food? If those results aren’t promoted with healthful psychological actions, then what would be? How can we expect our own nation to keep using limited money for diet-related health problems and yet not teach young folks what physical health means, and how to actively learn more about it? If not, then we continue living in a naïve psychic world where merely by passing a constitutional amendment will stop people from abusing alcohol. We've already seen how important psychologically excellent habits can be, like how to enjoy improving our own weak, excessive, and unhealthy habits one ‘baby-step’ at a time. But if more people are to learn them, then shouldn’t they too be offered as subjects even to primary-age students? They can at least begin feeling what they’re like. And if so, then why aren’t more useful psychological classes a real option to students who often want to know more about their own body-minds, and what health means? Where is the intelligence in restricting such knowledge about body-mind health itself in our public schools? What can it feel like to build a better diet or exercise habit; how can they be strengthened; and how important is enjoyable practice for learning such habits? What does it feel like to build an intelligent plan for improving an unhealthful and dangerous habit, and then how can we best test the plan to see its results? And of course there's physical health as well. What exercises and foods best help us stay in ship-shape shape, and when’s the best time to practice them? Not only are such habit-arts useful all through life, but they also help students solve another important educational challenge -- building the inner enjoyable and fun feelings of a healthy body-mind, as well as intelligently knowing how to best control our own growth. It’s certainly no absolute guarantee of a long and productive life, but then again what is? Education’s Important Social Results Are such liberal educational ideas really too radical, bazaar, idealistic, or communistic? Not at all. They just reflect some of the useful knowledge science has recently discovered. As our newspapers and media remind us daily, unintelligent habits help make everyone’s life more stressful and dangerous; who doesn’t remember the chaos caused by 19 9-11 hijackers? Thus, weak and unintelligent educational habits help produce less-than-excellent social results. As is widely known, even in democratic countries like the US young folks often finish 12 years of public schooling and have almost no feeling for what character excellence is or job skills! That’s a social result every liberal person should be outraged about; we all pay for the social results of such schools. Even good students are at a big disadvantage compared to those who already know how to respect the law, keep only honest money, practice equal rights, and help others help themselves. In short, book knowledge is far from an excellent education! Without learning something about character excellence young folks often become vulnerable to acting like morons, with no respect for any law or person. And worse, they have no questions about how they can become more intelligent character artists, build better habits, and keep contributing to our nation’s well-being. In fact, learning just one character excellence, like obeying just laws, makes our country that much more excellent and allows more tax money to be spent on building more liberal schools. Normally students learn almost nothing about how their book-knowledge can be best used to improve their schools or neighborhoods. That’s yet another weak social result of our public schools. Probably in every city in the world even primary students can learn more about creatively using their book-facts for thousands of different beautification and improvement projects. Merely growing flowers for a local park can help young students begin feeling how important chemical and conservation facts are. Such projects would also begin strengthening creative thinking’s habit-art. What better place and time is there to start learning such habits than in the primary grades? Why shouldn't even 1st graders learn to feel such excellent ideas and their constructive social results, like where to find useful book-facts about growing flowers, how easy it is to keep building their sense of humor, positive speaking habits, how celebrate democratic equal rights, and begin learning more about body-mind health? Shouldn’t more parents and students be asking themselves what social results are our book-centered public schools helping produce? Such educational weaknesses of traditional schools keep weakening both people and our nation! Our millions in prisons are all evidence of how our traditional book-obsessed public schools are still out of the improvement character loop. And again, to house, feed, and clothe all those people are paid by taxpayers. Why shouldn’t our schools be places where young folks can start learning how to respect someone’s else property, how to help those less well off, how to speak honestly, how to earn honest money, and how to report those who pose a serious threat to others? The more such character excellence is ignored, the more our San Quentin’s and Sing-Sings get a multiple-occupancy room ready, all at taxpayer expense of course! According to one report California taxpayers now pay about $50,000 a year per inmate! And how many millions more remain undereducated but haven't yet turned to major criminal actions, like welfare and insurance fraud? Because people reproduce faster than they reconstruct and improve their schools, it’s still easy for dangerous and unhealthful habits to be pasted from one generation to the next. Obviously most parents are much more caring about what their children learn, and so help them become of more conscious of dangerous habits. But how many poor folks don’t have such caring and helpful parents? We see the results of unwanted children in homeless numbers in all our cities. Why shouldn’t they have better schools to teach them more excellent habits? Even in upper middleclass neighborhoods how many young folks begin using illegal drugs even before they leave school, to relieve their stressful muscular tensions, and even turn to gangs to help support their drug habits? Isn’t that alone a good reason to at least begin experimenting with decriminalizing drug use? And if it works to reduce crime rates, then wouldn’t that free up even more tax monies for more constructive educational work, like teaching students how to live joyfully and constructively, rather than depressively and destructively? How many people out there still have such habits, and feel even murdering innocent people is justified, or other gang members? The more such habits are neglected, the more it seems war has remained almost inevitable, from ancient Greece, to the 1800s when the US government almost killed our entire Native American population, to 2 World Wars, Korea, and Vietnam! Are those the social results of any truly civilized nation? Of course not. But unless more caring people begin to speak up, and want to help those disadvantaged young folks, those social results will almost certainly continue happening. Won’t war become extinct when people feel everyone else is sacred, and when it ceases to be at all profitable? Am I being too romantic, utopian, idealistic, and even unscientific? After all, how can you possibly reason with someone like a Hitler or a Stalin? British PM Chamberlain tried reasoning with Hitler and failed miserably, but doesn’t that teach us such excellent character habits need to be taught to everyone as soon as possible, in Germany as well as Britain? It may sound too optimistic but we liberal say even if Hitler had had a kinder and more intelligent education, one that helped him fulfill his dream of being an architect, the world would be a different place today? He wanted to help build useful building, and yet people kept telling him he didn’t have the talent for it, or encouraged him to practice the excellent skills, knowledge, and character habits he needn’t to become an architect! Eventually after Germany’s defeat in World War 1 he found a ‘scapegoat’ for his hatful feelings -- the Jews. Today US jails are already terribly over-crowded with inmates needing more civilized and respectful training and education, and when they don’t get it they often remain socially dangerous. Doesn’t it make much more sense to teach such habits BEFORE they learn unintelligent habits, rather than after they’ve learned them? Afterwards just makes learning more intelligent habits that much more difficult. What’s more, prison guards keep demanding ever more money from tax payers, and when taxes shrink during recessions then political leaders have little choice but to release some still-undereducated prisoners to help balance budgets! In a healthy democracy people would have demanded such educational improvement decades ago! Isn’t it time we faced this fact? Even the US is still far from a healthy functioning democracy, and from building schools where dreams are fulfilled rather than frustrated. No doubt there are a great many positive learning events going on in our public schools every day. I certainly don’t mean to suggest doomsday is our democracy is on the verge of becoming another military dictatorship. However, the more we ignore teaching such excellent character habits in favor of teaching habits of obedience and acceptance, the closer we move to such a government. Obviously many more students could be taught more about building excellent character habits IF more parents and children were free to experimentally work at improving their own neighborhoods and schools. We Deweyan liberals aren’t asking all public schools become more liberal all at once. We are asking for more freedom at the local level for caring and concerned parents and students to create such schools in their own neighborhoods! Without that freedom at a local level educational experimentation will continue within the same book-obsessed system we now have. Today it’s called the Common Core system, but it’s essentially the same book-centered system already in place. It’s like experimenting with, say, only different kinds of tea. What we liberals need is the freedom to experiment with milk, coffee, sodas, and waters! In any case, however, people still have the ultimate power in a democracy, even though our own feudalistic political system makes an improvement process more difficult. Just as the aristocracy make improvement for the serfs almost impossible in the Middle Ages, so too state and national laws keep making improvements at the local level more difficult. Not impossible, just more difficult. School improvement is just one example among many, drugs and prostitution laws are 2 other examples. With such a political system the feudal Middle Ages lives on. The improvement door is open somewhat. But for real experimentation to begin happening, more parents, teachers, and students need to start demanding the freedom to start a process of public school improvement! How many parents and students today still don’t even realize they can help build better student-centered schools if they have a plan and demand the freedom to experiment? How many of tomorrow’s criminals would start building more helpful and sympathetic character habits if they were allowed to read to the elderly and disabled even one day a week? Much of the time undereducated parents simply don’t know such character-building options are available, or why they’re so important. Most people come home from work dog-tired and ready for dinner, a few beers, and little else. Most people don’t even ask themselves how many young frustrated drop-outs could be helped to make their dreams become reality in more liberal schools, where students are given more of a choice besides learning more book-facts or leaving school. These aren’t just abstract ideas; they’re a felt reality playing out throughout the US, and no doubt much of the world too. Like any good experimentalist Dewey’s constructive public school criticisms in the early 1900s began focusing on specifics, like job training. Vocational schools, for example, were one of his suggestions, and they’ve grown tremendously since then. Many of Los Angles’ schools too now teach useful job skills for a specific service, like health care, performing arts, and business skills, so they help children learn some practical habits. All well and good. But, how many such students still don't learn what excellent community-service habits feel like? How many never learn how to help others with some of their money? And the more such character habits are formally neglected, the more government monies will certainly be needed to keep the dangerous social results of such neglect controlled by more police, courts, and prisons. How many ‘inner’ cities around the country have already become social ‘sewers’ where homeless people live? No doubt, it's useful to learn practical job skills like carpentry, welding, auto and computer repair, and experimental lab skills, but why should equally useful charity and philanthropy training stay conveniently ignored? When they are is it the result of conservative teachers who want to maintain a feudalistic class or tribal structure as much as possible? The good news is we’re not facing an immediate doomsday implosion, at least not until too much atmospheric carbon makes life impossible in many places. The world may well end in a carbon whimper, rather than in atomic blasts! Students today are getting many more educational options for character development than ever before. They can volunteer, for example, for many trash-collecting programs on the weekends, and with helping people overcome local disasters, like earthquakes and floods. But, again, aren't there more intelligent and helpful activities to learn other than sweeping streets? What about using all their scientific facts about plants and animals to build community gardens with senior citizens? Wouldn’t they be more fun and educational than sitting in some classroom day after day, memorizing soon-forgotten book facts? Wouldn’t such active learning projects help make their book-work even more meaningful? Wouldn’t it be great exercise for seniors too? During this relatively peaceful time, isn’t it time people started experimenting more with getting students out into our neighborhoods in a safe and healthy way? How many poor communities could use a community fish tank, and how many high schools students would love to build one with the intelligent constructive skills they learned in their public schools? No doubt there would be new safety challenges to overcome first, but students could even help solve them too. People are facing new economic challenges on a daily basis too, as obscenely wealthy people keep creating and maintaining a system where only they keep becoming wealthy. But if economists are right, and capitalism really runs on consumer choices, then why can’t our schools begin weaning students away from their books and begin feeling what it’s like to start demanding huge concentrations of wealth be better circulated for everyone’s benefit, and not just a few? And if adults are free to make the purchases they want, then why shouldn’t students be free to choose the classes they want to attend? Why not let the student market decide what their classes should be, and how they should be taught, just like consumers stock purchases help decide what businesses to grow? Who knows? Some teachers might even like such work more than merely grading papers and making tests. Again, all such reconstructive changes needn’t be abrupt, total, and thus too disruptive! They can be slow, gradual, and always improving; slow and steady wins the educational race too, doesn’t it? That way it’s easy to correct and improve weaknesses. Some of the wasteful social results already mentioned tell us more people should be free to experiment with our public schools. Each year tens of billions of dollars are already being spent by our police, courts, and prisons to merely correct or confine unhealthful character weaknesses. Wouldn’t it have been better for tax payers to teach more intelligent habits in grade-school? What judge or cop wouldn’t like to play more golf or tennis, or have more time to visit our schools and speak more about what respectful habit-arts students are learning? Wouldn’t the same also apply to doctors, psychologists, and lawyers? The longer we ignore such character excellence, the more obnoxious and wasteful social results are produced. By the time they get to prison it’s almost impossible to teach young folks more intelligent habit-arts. For years many will remain just as reasonable as Herr Hitler, and some even suffer the same suicidal fate. Timothy McVey was so angry he built a car bomb and killed over 200 people with it; how many young McVey’s are now in our public schools? Shouldn’t our schools have more psychologists working to find out who has such feelings, and then help them build more constructive ones? Aren’t our public schools the nature work place for our psychologists? Bottom line: Educational change is not impossible. Difficult yes, impossible no! Drug abuse is one example. Our legal system is realizing drug abuse is more of an educational problem than anything else; many people simply never were encouraged to teach themselves to enjoy life without drugs. Many of their public schools were places where serious, silent work was practiced most of all. No doubt, illegal drug abuse is still not widespread, but legal drug abuse seems to be much more widespread than it once was. In any case, learning to work and play enjoyably while in school would help reduce the need for such abuse, wouldn’t it? After all, what else do drugs do but relax a person and promote confident feelings? Once again, experimentation with more liberal schools is the only way to find out for sure! In any case such problems continue sapping billions to stop, say, Columbian coca planters, and still haven’t solved the problem of cocaine abuse here in the US. People continue paying for the drug, when they could just as easily get a legal prescription and also start talking to a drug counselor about building more healthful habits. At any rate, isn’t it worth experimenting with teaching more enjoyable habits in our public schools? Who knows for sure what useful social results will be produced? Like so many other personally weak, excessive, and unhealthful habits, drug abuse too is an educational problem, not a criminal problem! Again, the more young folks teach themselves the excellent character art of enjoying and celebrating life without drugs, the less need they'll have for them later on, and what better place is there to start learning such character habits than in our homes, churches, and schools? One day our churches may stop controlling others by teaching religious spirit-myths and instead focus only on helping people become more independent and learn how to intelligently help themselves. Why shouldn’t parents start demanding our public schools teach more than the so-called 3 R’s -- reading, writing, and arithmetic? Why shouldn’t they teach students how to become more independent and how to use book facts to keep making life more satisfying? What might such schools and churches look like? They would be places where everyone could learn more intelligent habit-arts, like how to make an intelligent practice plan, and then carefully test it. When building a more healthful diet, for example, student teams can first read and get some facts about different foods -- learn more about some healthful diet options and what results they might produce in their own bodies. Who knows, some may even discover ways to even improve on the book-facts! Then they can make a plan to test their ideas. As we’ve already seen, such active experimental learning has become our strongest learning art, and such planning and testing would begin building their feelings for that most important habit-art. What's more, if their testing also helped feed some of those less fortunate, like with a garden or fish farm, it would also begin building the useful character art of helping others. In that way learning would be much more active, experimental, and natural, just as it is outside of school! Instead of getting in education’s way such schools can make it more excellent, helping more students become more confident they can intelligently become what they want to become. Here's a great example of how neglected excellent character habits still are, even for gifted students at one of our best universities. Merely learning more and more mathematical facts helped a ‘genius’ earn a doctorate degree at Harvard, but he eventually became a murdering Unabomber who the public now supports with their taxes? Well at least his bombs were all mathematically correct, weren’t they? It’s yet another reason why we Deweyan liberals say character excellence -- KNOWING HOW TO USE FACTS INTELLIGENTLY TO HELP OTHERS AND OUR SELF -- might be THE most important educational goal! And to get that point across with a little more humor, and impress the idea on all peoples’ minds forever and ever, or as least on one person’s mind, here's yet another laboriously lame limerick! To a thief who was caught with the brass He was asked why act like an ass? Why not look twice, To find a nice Little computer rip-off class? No doubt, even criminal actions too need new skills just to stay in business. 18. MORE ABOUT LIBERAL EDUCATION, 102 Esthetic Experience in Our Schools That sounds like a very sophisticated kind of experience, but once again, odd-sounding words are often used to describe very simple ordinary experiences. Case in point: for us Deweyan liberals esthetic experience merely calls our conscious attention to our feeling here and now. Feeling, say, sunlight is an esthetic experience. What could be simpler? When children build their first finger painting, for example, they have some new esthetic experience -- they feel what the paint looks and feels like, and thus keep expanding their old set of esthetic feelings. And when they use such feeling to help others become a little smarter, their socially esthetic feelings grow as well. However, the more our public schools allow such experience to remain on a non-verbal subconscious level of awareness, the more disconnected from esthetic experience students become. Luckily philosophic history often talks about such feelings when it talks about learning and art. Ancient Greeks, for example, called such feelings qualities, like hot and cold, wet and dry. Thus, for Dewey, new esthetic feelings are important; they're the natural result of any new body-mind learning experience. As anyone knows, one’s first sexual experience is full of new esthetic feelings! It’s why such constructive building projects became important in his educational model. They further educate the entire body-mind of feelings AND ideas. Such experiences not only produce new ideas but new feelings as well. For him, another great weakness of our public schools is to quickly downplay feelings’ importance in learning by confining student work to merely book ideas! Such a conservative learning model soon makes school something to be endured, rather than enjoyed; the feeling of enjoyment is so important to learning any kind of new habit. Why keep practicing something that’s not enjoyable and fun? How many parents today not only ask their children what they learned in school today, but also about how they felt about such ideas -- what their esthetic learning felt like? How many parents today ignore their child’s bored feelings, and tell them that’s the way school is, rather than demanding the schools start producing more enjoyable esthetic learning experiences. Centuries ago Ben Franklin realized how important esthetic feelings were in education, and so suggest students get out of the classroom and go on field trips to feel how other people are working. Today students still go to museums, but when it’s only once or twice a year it doesn’t overcome most boring feelings about school. What’s more, how many parents never teach their children how to CONSCIOUSLY make their lives more enjoyable with playful esthetic experience by simply talking about that art? How many parents in fact keep allowing their public schools to continue wasting so much of students’ time and efforts learning mere mental ideas, rather than demand a more holistic body-mind approach to learn with more active learning projects? Such active learning projects also makes learning character habits like respect and honesty that much easier when they’re felt and not just redd about! How many people today are still esthetic children, and don’t realize how important enjoyable feelings are in any new learning experience? Such esthetic feelings help make life and learning less stressful, more enjoyable, and more satisfying! More liberal models of educational excellence like Dewey’s encourage all the above-mentioned kinds of esthetic excellence; they promote democratic and individual development. They nurture individual development, rather than keep isolating students from each other as well as bodily feelings from mental ideas. Mere book work emphasizes just the thinking and reasoning half of the body-mind. More liberal educational models like Dewey’s ask how can we better guide and encourage more enjoyable, respectful, and helpful feelings to keep growing in students, and thus weaken disrespectful and selfish feelings? Active and practical workshops and projects for students was the best answer to that question. Within them learning all the traditional skills like reading, writing, and arithmetic are learned naturally, rather than boringly and repetitively! Such work job-based workshops can best promote the practice of enjoyable esthetic feelings, and thus make learning itself more fun. Just the act of building something, whether it’s a table or a relationship, is itself capable of generating a very large number of new esthetic meanings and feelings. In fact, enjoyable esthetic feelings can turn any unsatisfying routine habit into a more creative habit-art. How many people have felt golf was too frustrating while they were learning it, and yet continued improving those feelings with more enjoyable practice? In fact, such enjoyable esthetic feelings have often been used to build a person’s sexual habits as well, so it’s intelligent to first ask a person you’re interested in what their sexual training has been. It just might save a lot of wasted time and frustration later on. New and unfelt esthetic feelings always grow during new experiences, but like anything else it takes some practice to first consciously notice them, and then to make them as enjoyable and fun as possible! Otherwise, all constructive work is merely unintelligent routine. Here is where teachers can be so useful; good liberal teachers help students verbalize their feelings, and thus make it easier to make a conscious plan to make them more enjoyable and fun. If you feel tired and tense, for example, then why not take a little break and relax those un-enjoyable feelings and start feeling more enjoyable ones? In fact, the word ‘enjoyable’ means able to produce joyful and happy feelings! What Place Has Physical Punishment? In such loving, caring, and enjoyable schools and homes, what need would there be for physical punishment? In fact, over 90% of criminals supported with excessive amounts of public tax money have been excessively abused as children! No doubt as a learning tool punishment has a very long history and practice. For centuries many Western scholars claimed Aristotle was one of the most educated men of all time, and yet he too said students should sometimes be whacked merely for not paying attention! Such esthetic experiences promote feelings of fear and obedience, the 2 cardinal excellences of a feudalistic political and social system. They in fact help define the educational challenge for we liberal Deweyan democrats! To his day both religious and public school educators still use paddling and other painful feelings as educational tools, sometimes even on students who merely show their joy and happiness; I’ve seen it myself. Our prisons too tell us how dangerous excessive punishment is. The more defenseless children are physically punished, the more it tends to create excessively dreadful feelings of resentment, anxiety, hostility, and of course hatred -- all those feelings often getting in the way of civilized living. True civilization for us Deweyan liberals is all about peace and helpfulness to those in our human tribe, rather than merely our own religious, political, or sexual tribe. To me, if any action is truly obscene, then excessively punishing defenseless children is certainly one of them. Perhaps the best response is to quickly let local child welfare people know about it and ask them to help. When conservative public schools continue focusing on book facts, and ignore more enjoyably active experimental kinds of learning, then it’s normal to student attention to wander and sometimes even lead to disruptive actions; they become discipline problems and either must be punished or removed from class altogether. The other alternative is to remain passive and obedience, like in fact many young girls are conditioned to do. There’s also an equally harmful form of punishment many teachers might practice, and that parents should know about, namely, punishing students with school work itself! How many times have frustrated and disruptive students been punished with repetitive writing assignments, like writing ‘I will be good’ a 100 times? Is it any wonder why far too many of our young folks learn not to like school, and leave as soon as they legally can; up to 50% of the student population in some inner city schools? Who wants to keep practicing the skills they’re punished with? Why make it more difficult to enjoy, love, and nurture the important skills of intelligent learning by linking them to punishment and painful feelings? The mission of our public schools is, or should be, to nurture esthetically enjoyable feelings of intelligent learning, rather than frustrate them. Hopefully the educational use of physical punishment is lessening, but excessive physical punishment seems still a social tragedy in far too many homes, as the 90% statistic tells us! The more excessive it is, the more it can twist and pervert children’s constructive and helpful feeling into destructive and hateful ones, like resentment and anger, unless of course you’re raising children who’ll make their living being spanked! Believe it or not some do and will. No law against it, right? As we’ve seen, there are more intelligent alternatives to punishment as an educational tool. Many people were lucky enough to have a warm, loving, and nurturing home life, where esthetically enjoyable feelings were encouraged. Their parents were their friends rather than their jail keeper. For such parents merely withdrawing their love and affection, until a child promises not to act selfishly or disrespectfully, is punishment enough. The late Senator Ted Kennedy described how his mother Rose sometimes withdrew her warm and enjoyable affection to encourage good habits in her children; that way they learned what actions were unacceptable and which weren’t. The problem was her husband Joseph practiced some disrespectful actions, especially against women, and so her son John Kennedy, for example, continued disrespectful actions, even to the point of becoming morally unfit to remain president. And of course guilt feelings have often been a part of Jewish education for centuries, often produced with both physical and psychic punishment. Humorist Woody Allen gives a classic example of it when he says he doesn’t believe in god, but still feels guilty about it! Is it possible to raise a child without any physical punishment? Why not? As a learned early in my teaching career, the more young folks are rewarded and praised for their constructive work, for respecting people, just laws, and helping others, then the less need there'll be for any negative kinds of punishment; they’ll feel good about doing what’s excellent, rather than what’s mean and unkind. Besides, merely hitting or isolating a child for misbehaving is not educational excellence; it still leaves a child ignorant about what actions ARE excellent. Punishment often teaches a child what not to do, rather than what to do later on, like how to help those with their problems. Thus rewarding children for their intelligent, kind, and sympathetic actions, and telling them why they're being rewarded, best helps them strengthen such habit-arts! It may even help increase memory power too. Is there an easier way to remember to bring home that octopus sushi and frog’s-leg ice cream? Obviously most parents already do great work raising their children; if not our world would certainly be much worse than it is now. But that certainly doesn’t mean millions of more people can become more active and assertive both politically and socially. Of course some conservatives may want to play around with our people-in-prison numbers to make it sound like it’s not really so outrageously wasteful. Someone might say two million is only about .6 % of our entire population, so forget about making our schools more enjoyable places of learning; they’re not that much of a problem! It’s just more ‘bleeding heart’ liberal scare tactics! But, aside from such statistical playing, the ever-increasing cost to taxpayers remains a very serious growing problem! The more precious tax money must be used to house, clothe, and feel people for their criminal actions, the less money will be available for learning to enjoy more intelligent kinds of actions in our public schools! If nothing else it’s still an example of unnecessary waste! Mere prison housing, feeding, and medical care runs into the tens of billions EACH YEAR! That result to me is certainly wasteful, as it no doubt is to many others, especially when our public schools could be using that money to build much more civilized habits before criminal feelings start growing. Imagine, just for a few moments, how many more psychologists, workshops, and useful community projects could become a part of public education if those billions were available to them. Imagine, just for a few moments, all the potentially great human resources and talents that could be liberated in our schools, instead of being spent on prisons year after year after year with little or no real benefit to society. How many folks get out of prison with the very same feelings and skills they went into prison with? In fact, many come of prison knowing even more about criminal activity! In truth, no one really knows how much stronger, more vibrant, more democratic, and more intolerant our nation would be of any form of feudalism, especially economic feudalism, if those 2 million had been better educated in their homes and public schools. Adult Education? Here’s yet another important liberal education question you might want to think about: Wouldn't it be a good idea to require parents spend a year learning about intelligent child care skills when they enroll their first child in school? No doubt, parents should have the freedom to raise their children as they see fit, as long as they’re lawful and not abusive, but shouldn't they also KNOW what excellent character habits are and how best to teach them? What better place is there to teach such important habit-arts than in our schools? Why keep naively assuming all young folks already know how to intelligently raise children, when in fact they don’t. Because we all pay taxes to house and feed in jail those with weak character habits and excessive criminal habits, don't we all have a right to demand everyone know something about one of our most important skills, namely intelligently raising a child? As it is now, we demand young folks know some important facts about driving a car before getting a license, so why should it be any different with raising a child to live intelligently in a democratic republic? No doubt, conservatives would argue against it. Since Plato conservatives have worked against teaching young folks any kind of democratic skills or intelligent scientific habits; for thousands of years experimental learning and democracy have been conservatives’ sworn enemies! They both weaken the power to control people, and keep them obedient. With such questions and facts it should be clear why controlling liberal education philosophy was so important to conservatives like Plato and even moderates like Aristotle. Real democrats work to end all aristocratic feudalistic social forms and give everyone the same equal rights and opportunity as everyone else! Such reforms are sign of democratic health and power, and public schools are where such habits should be taught. We Deweyan liberals aren't calling for an educational revolution all at once, overnight; that idea belongs to magical fantasies about how life works. But to completely ignore intelligent experimentation, or restrict it legally, is just as dangerous to democratic health. So we say it's best to merely take one baby-step at a time, to the next evolutionary step or plateau, and then keep building from there! Thus, our own neighborhood schools become the battle ground for we Deweyan liberals. If one can be improved with the ideas talked about here, then that’s what’s most important for us. One can lead to 2, and 3, and so on. Furthermore, for such progress we can all play a part, teachers, students, and parents. Even African religious leaders joined the loop to help build intelligent civil disobedient protest habits, rather than their own public schools. That to me is a classic example of how really important and useful our churches can be if they so choose, and how mean and vicious social habits can be improved with their help. History again shows even ol’ Tom Jefferson himself would probably have benefited from better lessons in democratic character excellence. Even though African Sally Hemmings bore him children he continued feeling Africans were generally incapable to reasoning intelligently. In that way he too needed more education. He also never seemed to learn how to intelligently control his own money! He died deeply in debt. Those conservatives who want to keep the educational status quo just like it is, and keep children ignorant about any ideas of excellence, can criticize these liberal educational ideas in a thousand different ways: it'll cost too much; it'll raise taxes; it'll weaken our society in other ways; it won't work; it's communistic and socialistic. For most of US history Native Americans, Africans and Asians were society's most hated people, followed closely behind by Jews, Irish, Catholics, and women. For such conservatives the status quo must be maintained at all costs, even if it means denying people their democratic rights to even vote, and our schools must be places where such habits are passed on! In other words, our schools must continue ignoring democratic ideals, even after more than 200 years of democratic evolution! That’s how important are public schools are to we Deweyan liberals. Selfish and unkind people may not realize an important fact of life; such habits often merely hurt themselves more than anyone else. Without good character training they may never realize ‘what goes around often comes around’; if they deny equal rights to others, then they too deserve to have their civil rights denied! As a result they end up hurting themselves by not treating all people with respect, honor, and equally! My own childhood definitely had many weaknesses, but such bigotry it didn’t have; my lawyer-father even helped integrate Chicago neighborhoods in the 1950s one house at a time. As a result, it’s easy for me to talk and act more liberally about equal rights for everyone! Along with Dewey I just honor and celebrate the democratic principles upon which our liberal tradition and country was founded; we’re all humans and so all deserve the same rights as anyone else. Obviously, democracy is a growth process, like any other habit-art, but the more our public schools are kept out of that growth loop, the more difficult improvement becomes. What liberal didn’t laugh when conservative President Bush 2 told us we could quickly build a cooperative democracy in Iraq when over 200 years we haven’t built one at home yet! And what hypocrisy it is to criticize China and Russia for human rights violations when many people in our own country still have hateful unintelligent feelings and ideas! Another Sign of Democratic Health: Educational Choice? Dewey criticized how book-obsessed public schools teach their prized factual textbook knowledge -- slave-like to an entire group, rather than as a free choice. As most adults already know, for 12 years students read about what someone else tells them is important to know. However, isn't that like going into an aerobics studio and allowing the instructor to tell us what kind of a body we should have? And on top of it, then college professors sometimes complain about students not having strong independent critical thinking skills! How on earth can children learn independent, creative, and critical question-asking skills when, for 12 years, they're made to merely find the book's 'right answers'? So naturally liberal educators like Dewey said such traditional schools really teach mostly habits of intellectual passivity and academic laziness! How can students become curious and want to keep learning when their own question-asking skills have been largely neglected for 12 years? As a result, how many students are happy to be done with school after high school, or even drop-out earlier? In short, when many students finish 12 years of traditional schooling not only are their own character habits not the best, but their all-important curiosity and question-asking skills are weak and greatly undeveloped! In that kind of educational situation is it any wonder many young folks turn to drugs and crime in response to a world they often feel psychically isolated from? Not encouraging all students to intelligently practice excellent learning habits like question-asking, and start learning what they themselves want to learn more about, in effect KEEPS children emotionally and intellectually immature! Is it any wonder young folks often are glad to go to war to relieve their frustrations; killing is easy, just pull the trigger? I’m innocent; I was just following orders. As a result, they often remain vulnerable to those promising quick money and happy times! Thus, Dewey criticized WHAT our schools teach -- their subjects. Traditional school subjects often ignore the practical side of education's coin, namely, how to use such knowledge and facts to keep improving life and building more helpful character habits. That, to him, was certainly less than educational excellence. In fact, such subjects are often used to find the most verbally advanced students; after all, brains are important for improving the species. So when some schools have a drop-out rates of nearly 50% how much objective evidence should people need? Their own school’s educational habits are plainly not satisfying important student needs. The answer is not to simply keep building more conservative book-obsessed schools, but to build schools where student have more educational choices to make. One promising educational option today is called Community Service work, or at least was an option before yet another serious economic recession once again began reducing tax funds for public schools. If one didn’t know better, one might believe our obscenely wealthy upper class would like nothing better than to end all non-profit public schools, so for-profit schools could more easily grow. In any case, a great challenge today is to keep such community service classes growing for students at all levels, from primary to the college level! Such learning is more vibrant, holistic, naturalistic, and more enjoyable than mere book-learning. Such classes give students a greater chance for some real practical community-improving work experience, and so we ask parents to support such programs as much as possible. No doubt, to us such classes are best if they are offered at the primary level, but any level is better than no level! After all, the last I heard seven year old kids were definitely people too! Another challenge is to make them something more than just street sweeping or trash collection. The challenge is to encourage students to see what improvements are possible in an area, make a plan to achieve them, and then test their plan. Such a plan might even include talking to people who could help fund such projects as a neighborhood park or a recycling center for all old electronic gadgets , or even how students could raise the needed money itself. Another liberal educational challenge is to help build a practical psychology workshop, where students could actually practice the healthful ideas they’re learning about, like working humorously and joyfully. Ideally, such classes would start at the primary level, help young sense-based learners learn what respectful and helpful ideas feel like. Almost certainly, only a few lucky students really know what habits are psychologically healthful, and which are dangerous. Once again, such Behavioral studies are easiest to teach at the primary level, and remain useful all through life, so why not start teaching them to children? Why should anyone naively expect anyone to practice psychological health when they’ve never been taught what it feels like? No doubt, many people who know little about Behavioral psychology might feel it’s somehow undermining all their values, but what is so dangerous about teaching students the useful, life-long art of intelligent SELF-TEACHING, or how to use rewards and a 'baby-step' method to slowly teach themselves what they want to learn? Aren't truly educated people those who know HOW to intelligently solve their own problems? If so, then wouldn't such classes easier to see peoples' own ACTIONS AND RESULTS are what're most important, not how they look and who they talk to? Wouldn't just that one idea make it much easier to feel more tolerant to those people who look differently than others, and who are labeled gays and lesbians? And more importantly, wouldn’t we ALL benefit if people learned intelligent habits are simply respectful to all law-abiding people? If you’re really another one of those ‘radical’ democratic educators, then it might be something even worth experimenting with. How many times in history have today’s 'radical' ideas, like equal rights, become tomorrow's democratic status quo? That certainly seems to be the trend, doesn’t it? Educational Results Beyond the Classroom Perhaps more than any other philosopher of the 1900s, Dewey also saw the possibilities such educational ideas create beyond the classroom for building a healthier democracy, where wealth-power is easily controlled with democratic power. Is it just coincidence our obscenely wealthy class has become even wealthier since our schools have become more book-obsessed since the late 1950s, and our universities have become less affordable to all but the wealthiest families. Only they can easily afford the huge costs of college, and so keep being lectured by conservative professors, many of whom want nothing more than to maintain our feudalistic status quo. In more liberal democratic schools children would have a choice about learning not only useful job skills, but also about useful character habits as well! He saw clearly how our public schools can be used not to build a healthier democracy, where equal rights are demanded for all, but rather merely maintain the political and economic status quo. If our public schools don’t teach such intelligent experimental habits on a formal basis, even to primary age students, then their entire character growth will remain stunted, immature, and even medieval. The recent explosion of business arts and skills need young folks who know how to experiment intelligently and creatively, how to learn new skills quickly, and how to use extra monies to help those less well off. No doubt, sometimes it takes some trial-and-error experimentation for students to discover what job skills they like best, and also learn how to enjoy experimentally learning more about them. It even took very intelligent Ben Franklin years to learn how important science was, and also begin experimentally learning how to build useful objects, like a lightning rod so as to better protect buildings and people from becoming cinders. Until then people continued using religious skills like prayer and worship to avoid lightning’s dangers. And even after the lightning rod was invented some religious conservatives condemned him for taking away some of god’s power to punish sinners! Such is the power of conservative habits to maintain the social status quo, even though the outside world around them is continually changing and evolving! More liberal democratic schools will make it easier for more people to start learning how to intelligently control constructive kinds of growth, rather than merely reject all such ideas. What better skill can there be in an always changing world? Without the help of our tax-supported public schools, real progress educating young folks about practicing or democratic ideals has been difficult. Good liberal schools are still relatively rare, even in the US, and population growth rates make the challenge even more difficult. Teachers must be trained themselves, new curriculums designed for more liberal schools, and then even allowed to grow in places where un-democratic habits are firmly in place. In those places conservatives and many moderates choose to block any such useful educational reforms; they want students to remain educated only about the habits they feel are best. Recently I even heard a high government Democratic education official flatly say character habits will never be formally taught in public schools, as if there was some eternal and unchanging natural law against it! Such un-democratic statements continue telling us true liberals should first focus on improving their own neighborhood schools, and thus increase the educational freedom for everyone! Conservatives know full well, the more young folks are liberated from their old routine educational habits of obedience to their teachers and books, and encouraged to more clearly see how political propaganda is used to maintain an economic, political, and educational status quo, the more vulnerable that feudalistic status quo becomes! That’s exactly what most conservatives and moderates have not wanted, do not now want, and almost certainly will never want! They want to keep making it easier for them to keep taking more of the public’s money, even if it’s used to build more useless and unneeded weapons, or give it to wealthy corporations and farmers who don’t need it. With more liberal public schools, more people will find it easier to elect more liberal politicians who aren’t afraid to tax the already obscenely wealthy at a much fairer rate than they now pay, and also work to restrict their putting millions of dollars into off-shore bank accounts, and thus avoid paying taxes at all! If there’s any kind of natural human law, it might be this: those with power will keep working to maintain, conserve, and increase it as much as possible! Western history is literally brimming with examples of that idea, and it’s still brimming to this day! This also seems rather safe to say. Without more liberal democratic-oriented public schools, our so-called cultural wars between conservatives and liberals will continue being won by a small class of very wealthy people. Thus, stress and frustration will continue being felt by most everyone; stressful economic recessions seem to be happening even more frequently these days. People should thus know: true conservatives want children to continue learning habits of obedience and meek acceptance of the ideas and feelings they're given to learn. Such habits grow stronger every time a child works on another academically trivial book assignment, and is made to feel they are the most important things to know. As we’ve seen in these pages, from Plato on, what’s been most important for conservatives is maintaining their feudalistic status quo, whether its based on secular or religious assumptions! The more such conservative and moderate aristocratic assumptions were challenged, the more room became available to build more liberal democratic habits and skills. Also worth thinking about is this idea too. Our conservative book-oriented public schools make it easier for students to join some kind of military service where obedience to those with authority is not just expected, but demanded. From the 1890s on US military outfits have often been forcing people in other countries to accept US goods and services, and thus, with the help of obedient soldiers, enslaving them with perpetual debt to US banks and the wealthy upper class! Such obedient soldiers have been making it easy to enforce those goals by even cold-bloodedly killing and murdering anyone who might rebel against them; Vietnam was merely one brutal and vicious example among hundreds occurring throughout the 1900s while building a US economic and military empire. As we've seen, after he retired Marine General Smedley Butler said flatly he acted as just a high class muscleman obeying orders from Wall Street and wealthy financiers! No doubt, these days that empire is maintained more with economic power than military force, with orgs. like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, but they continue working to maintain a feudalistic economic status quo. To his credit, Aristotle said to use money merely to make more money should not be allowed, and he also saw how it was often used to buy more political and economic power. But without also suggesting democratic ways to better control that power for everyone’s benefit, they remain merely 2 ideas. While some corporations were making millions of dollars during World War 1selling guns and weapons, the US government passed a law forbidding people to even speak against the war; the First Amendment be damned, there was money to be made. It's yet another example of how money will distort any democratic freedom in its path. For us Deweyan liberals such military and economic reality both rest on young folks obeying for most of 12 years what they’re told to do by their teachers, without any practical freedom or encouragement to even question the usefulness of any such assignments. Again, in the corporate world such unquestioning habits of obedience are useful; corporate leaders don’t want anyone questioning the pay they get, the working conditions they have, or the work they do. All such freedoms would merely endanger their own profits and salaries. As a result, many corporations have been fighting for decades against union worker power! To this day women are often paid less than men for the same work, mostly because they haven’t learned to organize themselves and thus increase their economic power. They haven’t yet learned healthy democratic habits! In fact, union membership is at an all-time low these days while corporate profits are at an all-time high! We Deweyan liberals say this situation is a direct result of conservative educational practices in our own public schools, and until they change it’s naïve to believe life will change in any meaningful way! The addiction to money can be just as dangerous as the addiction to any dangerous drug. Many religious conservatives too still believe, with Plato, it’s absolutely necessary to keep others and our nation as free as possible from sin and irreligious habits; the current fight against same-sex marriage is merely one example. In short, for all such reasons the battle to build more liberal democratic public schools continues to this day! For us liberals the main reason is fairly easy to see: the more people are conditioned to feel some of their ideas reflect absolute truth, the more likely they are to resist any challenges to them. The more people feel as Aristotle did, that some people are natural slaves, and should be treated that way, the easier it was for mean, violent, and vicious racial and sexual hatreds to continue on, and thus making our democracy much less healthy than it might be. Liberals like Dewey, on the other hand, not only recognized such a reality, but also began challenging it by helping build more liberal democratic schools where child development stages were more respected. Even many ancient conservatives have said children should be allowed to play and learn with games until they’re almost teenagers. For Dewey such liberal ideas would make it easier to keep educating youngsters about actually building a more peaceful and productive world for everyone, and not just a small class of obscenely wealthy folks. Teaching creatively experimental habits and skills while learning useful employment skills is basically how liberal schools differ from conservative ones. Too many young folks still haven’t been allowed or encouraged to learn such important skills, and thus make life less difficult for themselves and our nation more democratic with equal rights and opportunities for all. Naturally, such liberal democratic schools would rest on all of the ideas mentioned so far, like the experimental learning of practical and useful knowledge and skills, the freedom to choose and learn more about a career path while still in school, and how to use our creative ideas as helpful tools, rather than merely building a bank account. No doubt, today we face many of the same social challenges mankind has faced for thousands of years, and have been frustrated by conservatives for thousands of years too! Without such a practical and useful democratic educational model, we continue facing serious social and personal problems, like economic slavery, drug addiction, gang violence, social disrespect, forced prostitution, and juvenile and adult crime to name just 6 obnoxious results. They continue telling us our traditional book-centered educational models need improving. Those results are not the result of corrupt liberal ideas and feelings, much less an evil human nature, as conservatives even today tell us. They’re the result of conservative educational models of education kept in practice for thousands of years first with religious ideas, and today also with secular ideas about conservative values being the best values of all. It’s an old sophist debate trick; when something is your fault blame the other person as much and as often as you can! In truth, however, much of our modern world today is the direct result of conservative institutions. For example, today conservative ideas about the value of a small minority having vast amounts of economic wealth and power are useful for a few conservative politicians to stay in power and keep working to maintain such a feudal economic system. Those few thousand people have more wealth and political power than 50% of the population combined!? Is that in fact the best kind of social model to make life better for everyone? Real life conditions emphatically tell us it is not! No doubt, much has been accomplished and improved for many people in our modern world in merely the past 200 years. Millions of people are now being fed, clothed, housed, and better educated than ever before, thanks to experimental science and more liberal political improvements. However, as many also know, life has also remained very brutal for many as well. For far too many young folks today, not having useful job skills when they leave high school continues making them vulnerable to some of the most dehumanizing habits ever practiced, like addicting young women to drugs and forcing them into prostitution merely to feed their pimp’s drug habit! The more people are educated to look the other way, the easier it becomes to continue such actions. So, isn’t it natural to ask if our own public schools are partly to blame for such results? Why shouldn’t students be educated to not only quickly report such events, but also to learn useful job skill so it would be easier to resist such actions? Don’t young women have the right to learn such skills? Thanks in part to our book-obsessed schools, hundreds of thousands of young women runaways will begin leading such a life, and living with the psychic scars for the rest of their lives unless they get some expert professional help. Such events can be reduced with the help of fully staffed caring public schools helping learn how to demand respect from others while they enjoyable learn useful job skills. Often such young women attended schools where building more helpful and practical skills was thought to be beyond education’s scope, and thus be unprofessional! Conservatives have been arguing like that for centuries. If we’re to build more useful skills for our modern democratic world, then a willingness to experiment with new ideas is another useful habit-art. Not feeling some ideas shouldn’t be experimented with even for a short time, like with equal marriage rights, prevents people from seeing the actual results from such actions, and thus have some objective evidence one way or another! Have such results made life any different, and if so in what way? Such an intelligent experimental habit-art is the natural result of seeing ideas as merely mental tools, not absolute truth. When students are better educated about our experimental Behavioral psychology, it becomes easier to feel some ideas should be experimented with, just to see their results. How would my life change if I allowed gay and lesbian couples to marry? What would be the social results if more students were allowed to learn the job skills they want to learn, and had more democratic freedom to choose school rules and student representatives? As it is now, many young folks leave school with weak feelings for those important skills, and thus keep allowing others to build the kind of world we now have. In fact, as many as 500,000 young folks become vulnerable runaways every year who often get forced into prostitution by brutal males already addicted to drugs. Thus, it becomes practically impossible to even think about how their own neighborhood schools could be helping improve that situation by enjoyably teaching more useful job skills to young folks. Also, what‘s wrong with experimentally testing for a short time the idea of legalizing prostitution and drug use, just to see what results might be produced? Sex is a human need, and so learning to express it in socially healthy ways is an important habit-art. How can life possibly keep becoming better and more satisfying for everyone unless more people treat their ideas experimentally, and see what results are actually produced? Without such feelings for experimental learning we simply remain in the same old routine ruts of paying to feed and house drug users and sellers in prison at about $50,000 each a year! Then, when they get out they’re back on the streets within days luring more young teenage women into the same actions. How useful for social health is it to keep ignoring how young folks want to start learning some useful job skills even while they’re in elementary school? Why shouldn’t our schools help students build practical clothing, law enforcement, medical and legal skills so they can begin serving community needs even while in school? Dewey’s new liberal models of educational excellence are saying this is OUR world to experiment with intelligently, and the more we do, the easier it becomes to find better ways of living and judging any idea or action. In fact, with freedom from believing any routine idea or ritual reflects nature’s absolute truth has come the freedom to keep experimenting with all intelligent kinds of growth, rather than keep obeying a status quo producing such obnoxious results. If some students want to learn how be bus drivers, then why not also teach them how to be creative and intelligent drivers who know how to enjoy their needed public service work? No institution stays the same forever. Perhaps the best example of that is some of our religious organizations; many are working to make their followers more humane and humanistic, and focused on helping those who still have many old conservative ideas about life and nature. What better goal could any organization possibly have? Many liberals today say such liberal humanistic goals are religion’s oldest and most worthwhile. For example, many fundamental Christian sects now regularly use Behavioral psychology methods to help those addicted to old conservative ideas, and thus teach the art of intelligently growing better habits one step at a time and one day at a time. The more they do, the more they improve life in this world -- the only people-friendly world for many billions of miles around! Is there any better way for religious folks to express their love than encouraging people to intelligently enjoy the art of guiding their own excellent growth? Isn't that the best goal of a truly liberated religion, as it is with a truly liberal education? To us Deweyan liberals, the more people feel all of life should be a self-directed educational growth, and stay focused on improving life for everyone, the more sensitive they’ll become to controlling those who want to keep enslaving as many as possible for their own comfort! Teaching others to enjoy guiding their growth intelligently and experimentally embodies the new modern liberal model of ideas as mental tools and democratic equal rights as the best political system. To us Deweyan liberals, all those social organizations treating only their ideas as absolute Truth are more psychically enslaving than liberating, and more controlling than loving and respectful. After all, nature never has had only one model of truth, and almost certainly never will have. Many liberal people today have dedicated their lives to teaching their new models of ideas as experimental mental tools. Indeed, with such humanistic ideas there are as many different 'roads to heaven', feelings about being born again, and becoming saved as there are people on earth! The popular saying is there are more ways than 1 to skin a cat. Such tolerant feelings are yet another new naturalistic result of seeing all ideas as experimental. With its help we can also more deeply celebrate some new modern heroes who actively worked for democracy's ideal of equal rights, like Susan Anthony, Ben Franklin, Jane Addams, Martin Luther King Jr., and John Dewey, as well as millions of other liberals who're working for the same result each and every day. For example, the more Susan Anthony sensed women were mainly taught how to be obedient second-class citizens, the more deeply she felt the idea of inequality as merely another social weakness, and thus as something to keep experimentally improving. Voting rights for women became his mission! Why should anyone tolerate half the population not having an equal right to vote, or not having reproductive freedom? Isn’t expanding such equal rights what all humane organizations do? Such a modern democratic world continues unfolding. In fact, just a few hundred years ago, in the 1700s, many Christians routinely believed this idea was absolute truth: some women and children become possessed by devils and evil spirits, and so should be burned as witches to save their souls. One more example may be useful. About 30,000 years ago Neandertals failed to improve their routine habits of living while the newly evolved sapien peoples continued spreading out around the globe. Thus, within a few thousand years they became extinct. The more Neandertals practiced their old routine hunting habits, the more difficult it was to experiment with new ones, and thus continue feeling life’s enjoyments. It’s not just prehistoric history either; such a reality continues on even today. Recently secular totalitarian leaders have shown how dangerous routine habits of obedience can be. Stalin, Hitler, and Pol Pot all demanded obedience to their models of truth, while killing millions of people who allowed them the power to do so. To us Deweyan liberals, even these examples from human history are enlightening. They help teach us we the people have the power to build a more satisfying world for everyone, and unless we focus that democratic power we will be responsible for whatever else happens; unless the people act together and more democratically, our world will remain feudalistic. If liberals like Dewey are right, if all our ideas depend on HUMAN habit-arts, then more liberal democratic schools will build such a world more quickly, a kinder, more respectful, and helpful world where children’s helpful dreams are fulfilled rather than frustrated. Who knows, maybe even one day peace may break out all over the world! Imagine that, aye?? Stranger things have happened, haven't they? However, almost certainly it'll never happen unless we ourselves start looking at more intelligent and humane models of education, economics, nature, and politics. The more that happens, the easier it’ll become for such a world to keep evolving. Little feisty Jonathan went to school in May, Mother had roused him from bed where he lay. While studying an octagonal cask, He raised his hand and asked, Hey, am I gonna learn anything useful today? 16. EDUCATION: CONSERVATIVE AND DEWEYAN, 101 In this and the following 2 sections we take Book 1's longest look at Dewey's liberal educational models of excellence. Usually the philosophy of education is treated as a minor philosophic subject, if it’s treated at all. As in so many ways, Plato was an exception to that rule; his most famous book Republic is essentially a book on educational philosophy. For Dewey, however, and many other liberals, education was one of philosophy's most important subjects, if not the most important! Only with better education can people begin seeing more intelligent ways of acting and guiding their lives, and thus build better habits. Luckily Dewey lived at a time when many Americans wanted to keep improving their lives and governments -- the Progressive Era -- and so in many places around the country many of his educational ideas were experimented with, tested, and continued on into the 1950s! At such schools young folks were helped to learn useful job skills as well as important character habits, like helping others and respecting just laws, as well as learn how to intelligently change unjust ones. For example, for a while Gary, Indiana's entire school district began using many of his ideas in the 1910s, as did the Chicago Vocational School system, and of course later in life entire country’s like Turkey, China, and Japan asked him for educational advice about making their own schools more excellent. They all wanted to keep improving their schools so their young folks would learn more intelligent habit-arts and thus lessen many of their social problems, like crime, unemployment, and helping their economies become more industrial and competitive. Even though he went to China decades before the Communists took over, today China produces more engineers than anyone else and their economy is rapidly becoming world-class, second only to the US. In any case, however, these 3 sections are not just for new teachers, but also for parents and students of education; after all, parents are the most important teachers for any child! Our Main Criticisms For we liberal Deweyans, for too long US education has been out of the progressive improvement loop, so to speak. Its basic education philosophy has been too conservative and even medieval. For us, educational excellence is the best and ONLY way for people AND societies to keep growing and evolving more peaceful and intelligent habit arts, but the more traditional schools remain, the more difficult that goal becomes. Such book-obsessed schools make it more difficult to learn all the democratic and experimental habits making life all it can be. To Dewey liberal education was the best key for teaching young folks how best to keep improving all their habit-arts, like healthcare, charity, exercise, lawfulness, and respect for equal rights. Again, without such a liberal educational system, many social problems remain an economic drag, like fighting crime, underemployment, unemployment, crippling social discrimination, drug abuse, health problems, democratic weaknesses, not to mention global warming and war itself. For Dewey all such modern social challenges can most rapidly be improved only with effective and practical educational ideas and practices, ones in which students make an emotional commitment to learning what feels best to them, rather than being regimented and made to learn what they often have no desire or need to learn. The less young folks make that emotional commitment, the sooner they forget what they spent years being made to learn. And so for us Deweyan liberals children should be free to choose a career path as soon as possible, even in elementary school! Such an emotional commitment makes it much easier to then teach students the valuable character habits they’ll need to become successful lawyers, doctors, engineers, police people, carpenters, plumbers, or whatever, and also the writing, reading, and calculating skills schools now try to teach. So, if Dewey's right, if the emotional commitment to learn practical employment skills is the best educational model for any kind of learning, then child psychology becomes one of the most important subjects of all. Without knowing something about the 3 main stages of child development, it’s almost impossible to build such schools, as Plato himself saw thousands of years ago. In general those stages are a playfully sense-based stage until about 7, a constructive stage until about 11 or 12, and then, as the brain matures, a more intellectual stage capable of grasping more abstract ideas. Thus, without accepting such a child psychology, and instead yoking students to book-work for 12 years, it will take much longer for almost anyone to learn any kind of excellence! And the more that doesn’t happen, the more vulnerable millions of young folks will remain to all of society’s unintelligent temptations and vices. On the other hand, the more schools are based on that psychology, the more naturalistic and less stressful school becoming, and the more children will want to be there. After helping found the American Association of University Professors, and becoming its first president, Dewey published his best educational book, Democracy and Education. Also The School and Society is a good little introductory book about elementary education. More About Dewey After he moved to the newly opened University of Chicago in 1894 Dewey opened its famous Lab School; there he began testing his liberal ideas. It’s still operating today, helping students learn valuable computer skills. After his undergraduate studies he taught briefly at the high school level in Pennsylvania, and there he began feeling how artificial conservative educational models were; without emotionally committing themselves to learn all the book facts they were being asked to learn, school for most students became a place merely to go to until the law said they could leave. For how many students is that the reality even today? In fact, even today most students just don’t need to know all those book facts college professors of education said they should learn. Also, they often justified their book-based models on producing so-called well-rounded students who learn a little of many different subjects. Again, at such schools students quickly forgot the ideas they learned merely to pass the next test. Thus, education for most everyone remained shallow, superficial, and worst of all, useless for much of life outside the school room! Greatly undereducated parents didn’t know enough about education to challenge such an educational model. Thus, often students weren’t prepared for the new jobs being created as science and technology continued creating them. In short, Dewey realized the whole feeling-side of education was largely missing in traditional classrooms; it was mostly just telling students to learn academic subjects at merely a mechanically verbal level of learning, rather than a holistic level of feeling AND verbal learning. So, like Alexander’s empire, conservative public education covered a lot of ground but it was only a few inches deep. And the work was easy; teachers just needed to stay a day or 2 ahead of the students’ book assignments. But again, such facts were all but useless in the real world outside of school. Another result was to ignore the far more useful subject of character development. Thus, again, many students remained vulnerable to all the anti-social actions going on in their own neighborhoods. Police brutality thus became intensified as more people broke the law mainly for economic reasons. They didn’t have the skills to work at better paying jobs, and thus racial segregation and discrimination continued making life needlessly stressful. In Chicago Dewey got the chance to test some of his more holistic and naturalistic ideas of learning, based on a sounder model of child psychology. There he saw the results of making learning an active, sense-based, enjoyable, and natural as learning outside of school. He wanted children to learn about history, chemistry, physics, but he also wanted such subjects taught not just from books in the higher grades, but from active and holistic learning experience! That way, a child’s bodily feelings would be just as educational as talking about ideas. In short, Dewey saw how knowledge should be located in one’s muscles as much as one’s brain. For example, having young students at the sense-based stage of development build a garden would also begin teaching them some elementary chemistry, biology, and mathematical facts. Also, it would make those ideas more meaningful because the experience was active, rather than a passive desk-centered model where student muscles are kept out of the educational loop, so to speak. After all, such children learn best with active practice. He also began experimenting with building projects for students at the constructive stage of development. He saw how even his own children learned best when they actively experimented intelligently to build what they wanted, and when teachers helped them feel what intelligent actions felt like. Students were to first make a detailed plan for their projects, and then actually test it themselves to see its results. Such holistic and organic learning experiences made learning important intelligent and experimental ideas easier and more enjoyable, and it also increased their carpentry, electrical, and plumbing skills. What kind of fertilizer, for example, was best for a garden, and how much of it was best? What is fertilizer? Are there different kinds? How is it made? Such questions begin opening up for young children the entire world of experimental research, and not just for a few, but for all students. Then, after moving to Columbia University in New York in 1904, he continued writing about education and convincing more people how our traditional public schools could be even better with the addition of constructive or project kinds of learning. If children wanted to learn more about politics, then they would make a list of questions, plan a trip to city hall, and talk with politicians who could answer their questions. Such learning projects would be much more meaningful to students than merely passively reading about politics. Then, when students’ body-minds are ready to study abstract ideas, the last 2 years of high school could be devoted to those studies, especially for students going on to college. Such a learning model was also useful for promoting democratic feelings of equality; each student played some part in such projects. Some Ancient Education History As with so many other philosophic ideas, liberal and active models of education go back not only to ancient Greek Sophists and Atomists, but they were used by our native ancestors for millions of years! All useful tools and habits were actively built experimentally, since the first stone tool was built over 2 million years ago! Normally, native children are taught to build their own useful skills, tools, and weapons during their constructive stage of childhood. And often it was the only way women were educated until the 1800! In ancient Greece, many Sophists like Protagoras became the college professors of the time, traveling from city to city and giving lectures about what students should practice. Sometimes they sold their books too! In fact, Dewey says how their new liberal questions about learning helped build the classic model of philosophy which lasted thousands of years! What is learning? Can character excellence be taught, or was it just a random gift from the gods? What is the best political, ethical, and educational system? Is there one or many? Such questions helped define philosophy’s 6 main topics, namely nature, learning, ethics, politics, education, and art. As they went from city to city they gave lectures for which they charged a fee; hey, sophists gotta eat too, right? What’s more, the lectures were aimed at teaching young folks practical skills for living more intelligently in the new democratic systems evolving around Greece. For example, learning how to speak well in public and in the law courts, where juries were sometimes 500 people; many people were afraid to speak in front of such large groups. They also lectured about important skills like estate management. Books were expensive and thus almost non-existent, and so lecturing gave young folks a chance to hear about new ideas they could practice for themselves. Thus, the new skills useful in a democratic society were learned. Such skills made it easier to take advantage of opportunities growing at the time. We've already seen one example of it when Thales made a lot of money selling olive oil presses one year. Needless to say, many of those ancient liberal democratic Sophists were secular-minded. To them, learning useful skills made living here and now more secure and worthwhile. Unlike conservative, Plato many liberal Sophists didn’t bother about any other realm except our natural one; Protagoras frankly admitted his not knowing about any other world besides our natural one. After all, with centuries of practical colony building in back of them, and many smashed fingers along the way, many Sophists were confident their own practical experimental learning model would be useful to many people. Aesop's practical little stories written at that time were about what practical skills might be useful, and they’re still popular reading today. With Socrates’ (d. 399) help ethical questions became another part of classical philosophy. So, is it any wonder one of the most prominent 4th century BCE sophists, a man named Antiphon wrote (Fr. 60) “Primary among human concerns is education” And of course one of the founders of Western liberalism, Democritus, himself realized its importance too; he tells us he would rather discover one law of nature than be a king in any entire country! In China too Confucius said with education all class divisions fad. In short, education helps us see all people are related and deserve the same rights as everyone else. The business-oriented democratic world of the 400s BCE was challenging Greek men like they had never been challenged before; women and slaves were pretty much out of the public loop. Sophist teachers helped fill those new educational needs. Men needed to get better at building businesses, talking respectfully with people, and also at guiding their government as well as defending themselves in court. Thus debate and reasoning skills were needed. Even slaves were welcomed to attend, as long as they paid the fee. As a result, old Greek political institutions continued being reconstructed along democratic lines, as is our modern world, and those with more intelligent thinking and acting habits had a big advantage in that world. It became easier to make an honest drachma or two. Socrates, of course, Democritus, Plato, Aristotle, and many others soon began painting their philosophic answers to such challenging questions, and within a few decades Western civilization had liberal, moderate, and conservative educational models of excellence, although Aristotle’s wasn’t very detailed. Just as today, where they differed was in what they thought was excellent to know, and how they could best learn it. Thus, different models of nature and learning began growing. Greeks being Greeks, it wasn't soon before conservatives like Plato began challenging Democritus’s liberal naturalistic models of excellence. His religious habits were very strong; in fact his Republic rested on knowing Spirit-Objects; he felt they were the best objects to know, much like Christians would say for many centuries during the Middle Ages. Naturally, Plato educational model was far from democratic. Instead it focused mainly on how to educate a few elite students rather than everyone; many conservatives cherish such feelings to this day. In the Republic he described his youthful conservative spirit-feelings about life and education, like how only future philosopher-kings should be educated for some 50 years before they were given power. After that time they would continue enforcing a very conservative model of life on everyone, limiting both democratic and religious freedoms for everyone. As mentioned earlier, no agnostics or atheists would be allowed. However, even he saw how some liberal ideas were useful. For example, his future rulers were to spend some 15 years in practical work between the ages of 35 and 50. They would then learn something about the problems and potentials of life. After that, then while ruling their city-state, they would return to more abstract subjects, like contemplating nature's eternal and unchanging spirit-objects -- the Spirit-Objects he thought governed all of nature. Because our natural world was merely a reflection of that spirit-world, only its objects could teach people what the best knowledge was all about, and thus make their actions most excellent. Sadly, however, we’ve seen how Plato eventually realized such objects could not be known entirely, or even with any degree of certainty. So, on a logical level they remained merely an assumption with no real evidence for them. Conservatives like Socrates and Plato, and moderates like Aristotle, thought like many traditional educators still think today: Mere thinking and reasoning is the most excellent learning art. That idea lives today in many of our public schools when they emphasis book-study for 12 years as the best form of education. Some, like Socrates, preferred a conversational style of reasoning. He would talk with whomever he could and ask them to define the eternal nature of some familiar abstract idea -- friendship, beauty, justice, and courage. Conservatives like him and Plato simply assumed such objects existed; again, mathematical facts seemed to imply such eternal knowledge existed. Others, like Democritus, Plato, and Aristotle preferred a written and lecture style of reasoning; Plato and Aristotle both started their own schools in Athens and no doubt lectured in them. Thus, we can begin seeing how important education was to the Greeks; they too sensed it was the key to building a better world. Where they differed from each other was the definition of ‘better.’ For Plato better meant more controlled, less diverse, more closed, and more feudalistic. For Democritus and Protagoras better meant more freedom, equality, democracy, and variety. A Case for Character Training Like them, Dewey too saw how important education was to the health of any political system, especially democracy. After all, for almost all of civilization people had lived in feudal societies where the rights they had depended on the social power they had, whether it was military, monetary, or religious. But he also noticed how modern tax-supported public schools also aimed at keeping a status quo in place. In fact, throughout much of history students were regimented, taught to obey their teachers, and kept that way with physical punishment. In the late ancient period Augustine too was often wacked by his teachers, and even in the 1960s I too saw how Catholic education was based on physical punishment, almost on a daily basis. The school disciplinarian would daily walk around the lunchroom and bang together the heads of students laughing and enjoying themselves. In fact, it’s not too much to say the present state of our nation as largely disconnected from our political and economic systems is a direct result of our educational practices. Those 2 important systems are all but ignored in our public schools, as is the subject of character excellence. To say the least, the more those character habits are ignored, the easier it becomes for those in power to stay in power and keep increasing it too, as we’ve seen in the last few sections. In truth, CHARACTER development and skills were as important to many ancient liberal sophists as they were to modern liberals like Dewey; character habits like good speaking, honesty, helpfulness, lawfulness, and how to make an honest drachma or 2. Such habits can help keep one's freedom and knowledge growing all through life, and thus help make life more satisfying and rewarding. Without them life remains much like we see on our local news shows, full of violence and disrespect. Even some teachers were recently sentenced to prison terms for changing test score grades. For us liberal Deweyans, however, character excellence is a life-long practice and skill beginning in our public schools. It's the same way with medical or legal skills; no doctor or lawyer knows everything about their art, and so they merely KEEP PRACTICING those habit-arts all through life! It's the same way with character excellence; it's an always growing practice rather than a static skill; it challenges people to practice joyful and respectful actions all through life, in thousands of little different ways here and now. In truth, there are an infinite number of ways to practice kindness, sympathy, and helpfulness. Down through time such useful and practical character skills not only helped people keep learning more easily, but also live safer and more intelligent lives in democratic systems. For example, Protagoras said part of character excellence was the habit of respecting the law, no matter what country you were in, and so knowing what the law is became an important part of liberal excellence on a daily basis. Sadly, that skill too has been all but ignored in many, if not most, of our tax-supported public schools! How many young folks today would act more excellently if their schools focused on teaching our laws, rather than just more and more trivial academic facts about history and literature while remain largely useless for all but future teachers? Can't you just imagine Protagoras looking for a parking sign every time he parked his chariot, if parking signs existed at the time? In short practical-minded Protagoras celebrated useful character knowledge and skills; they helped make life less stressful and more enjoyable. After all, if you’re going to learn some habit-art, why not learn not only some useful habit, but how best to use it wisely and intelligently, rather than ignorantly and illegally? More often than not, such important character habits like knowing what the law says about many different actions helps preserve a person's freedom, rather than remaining a slave to their own unintelligent ideas and habits. No doubt, seeing even slaves as deserving of equal rights was another bit of liberal audacity Plato and Aristotle both could not accept. For them a feudal model of life and nature was firmly implanted! Plato once complained about slaves who were too well dressed; it made them more difficult to see. That was part of the world they lived in. It was a common feeling; many imagined everyone's Fate was all arranged at birth by 3 spirit-goddesses. No doubt, Plato and Aristotle didn't believe that, but moderate Aristotle believed some people should even be forced into slavery, even though if they were smart enough, many slaves were often given more freedom; some even became bank managers! Hundreds of years later Julius Caesar too felt justified in killing many thousands of Celts in France. Why? How else could such barbarians become truly civilized? Sounds like he definitely had more gall than kind and sympathetic feelings while in Gaul! So even in ancient Greece practical character habits became the liberal key to excellence in all things, especially in education. The more we practice such habits, and make them part of our will power, the easier it becomes to practice ethical excellence in our own democratic age. If practiced enough it becomes what many conservative and moderate psychologists call instinct! However, what that means in school is allowing students to first learn about the many different skills being practiced in the real world, and then allowing them to choose which one they would like to learn more about. No doubt, such liberal, practical, democratic actions will make it much easier to also teach the democratic character habits too, like tolerance and respect for all law-abiding people. Without such schools, feudalistic habits of intolerance and hate will continue on, as we can see daily in our media and newspapers. To this day in many places conservatives work to keep such democratic habits weak and hobbled in their growth. What’s more, religious ideas are still often used to defend such conservative actions; they might offend some god somewhere, or bring on some catastrophe. In fact, many religions continue practicing those ideas, and the more they do, the more intolerant people feel. Using Useful Ideas Before Plato was born, liberal Protagoras probably discovered a rather interesting educational question. Some practical person may’ve asked him: If whatever we experience is true for us, then why pay high fees to teachers like you to teach us about excellence? In short, if excellence is relative from city to city, nation to nation, and even from person to person, then why do we need Sophists telling us what they think excellence is? His answer, however, shows how really practical and pragmatic he was. In effect he said even though everyone is the measure of their own truth, not everyone’s truth works equally well in different social situations! Excellence in irrigating crop fields in one country, for example, may not be acceptable in another country, perhaps for religious reasons. For example, lying and thievery may be allowed in some places, but in a more civilized place neither one may work equally well. Thus knowing conditions here and now becomes another part of liberal character excellence. What is happening out there? If you visit and start talking about crop irrigation in one place, you can understand why people might think it less than excellent when they have laws against it. So Protagoras suggested an intelligent person will learn to respect the country’s laws they’re in, so life’s stresses would be reduced. It was just another example of practical reasoning. Why risk the chance of being thrown into jail, or worse, just for not respecting a country’s laws? Why try to fricassee a camel when it’s against the law? In short, for the well-traveled Protagoras, because excellence always varies from place to place, and from person to person, why not learn to respect all law-abiding people? It’s another example of how intelligent respect is one liberal democratic character habit useful in many different places! Is it all just ancient history! Even in the US, the world's oldest democracy, many conservative secular and religious folks today still feel some peaceful habits should be outlawed and forbidden, rather than tolerated; gay and lesbian equal marriage rights are merely one current example of that idea; a few decades ago it was equal rights for Africans, and in the 1800s it was equal rights for Irish immigrants. In fact, one liberal democratic character skill Protagoras taught remains excellent today: respect and obey any country's laws, as long as they're just and apply to everyone! And, even if they are unjust, work intelligently to change them if you work at all. That way you keep your freedom to keep making life better for everyone. How can education get more practical than that, and yet in many of our public schools today such ideas are only mentioned in books, if they’re mentioned at all, and rarely practiced if they’re practiced at all. If you're a real social pioneer you can challenge unfair and unjust laws in court, just to test them and maybe get them overturned, but such skills are rarely allowed to be practiced by students themselves! To us Deweyan liberals it’s another great weakness of our public schools. Most all of the learning remains confined to a merely boo-idea level of consciousness, rather than a deeper body-mind level. Protagoras’ liberal practical educational ideas, like teaching yourself useful kinds of respectful habit-arts, and of course testing them in the real world, no doubt inspired Aristotle, Dewey, and many other educators as well. For nature-loving Aristotle, founding a school became an intelligent way to build his own aristocratic models of philosophic excellence, and in it more than mere facts were to be taught. For him excellent ethical habits were those of a moderate aristocratic Greek gentleman, loaded with all its undemocratic feelings about equal rights and opportunities for anyone not a member of his aristocratic class. For the liberal and democratic Dewey, however, teaching useful and practical CHARACTER habits to all students in our public schools was the best way to keep strengthening our democracy and its liberal values of equality. If not, then such skills can even be eliminated merely within 1 generation! After all, everyone learns the habits they’re taught. If no one were taught intolerant habits they wouldn’t be practiced. Hopefully now the reader will see why Dewey based his liberal model of education on 3 pillars: fact, skills, and character development. Part of that character development depends a great deal on knowing what the law is, and the results of not respecting it. Thus, the following question: Why shouldn't young folks learn more about our laws every year they’re in school, as well as practicing such respect both in school and out? Why shouldn’t they also learn how to judge whether a law is fair and just, and helps make everyone’s life safer and more enjoyable? After all, what good is knowing a million facts if you didn't know how to wisely use them to make everyone’s life more enjoyable? Some German Nazis acted like real bastards because they used their scientific facts and skills destructively, rather than constructively and kindly. Dewey’s 3 Pillars of Educational Excellence. At the University of Chicago Dewey became friends with a woman who was helping immigrants learn more about character excellence and how to live best in their new urban and democratic surroundings. At her Hull House school Jane Addams taught poor undereducated immigrants how to use their government wisely, rather than let it merely use them and their tax money. Eventually she invited Dewey to lecture at Hull House; such lectures not only helped the immigrants, but also helped him explain his ideas of excellence with plain language, and thus help make his writing simpler and less technical. While in Chicago he also began seeing some more serious social problems immigrants were facing, and how they might be solved with some new, more useful, educational habits. With Addams’ help Dewey saw how character habits were more useful than even. Eventually they became one of Dewey's 3 liberal pillars of excellent education: factual knowledge, useful skills, and character habits. To this day, however, conservative educators continue ignoring character habits as a worthwhile educational goal! Again, they’re taken themselves out of the social improvement loop, so to speak. The more such habits are ignored in our schools, the more unintelligent actions keep happening outside of school, and the more taxpayer money must be used to keep shielding the public from such actions! In some places it now costs about $50,000 of tax money to keep just one prisoner from society! Multiply that by 2 million prisoners now jailed in the US, and you can get some idea of how taxpayer money continues being wasted unnecessarily! Just imagine how many more psychologists and student mentors could be hired by our public schools if that 100 billion dollars was spent there! Today, many of our state prisons are terribly overcrowded with young, able-bodied people who have been merely undereducated! They never were taught to enjoy working honestly and joyfully to build skills useful in the real world. They were often made to learn in a largely unnatural situation, namely to sit still and merely keep reading. And economically they were often treated as just another body useful for getting more state money! No doubt, to us Deweyan liberals, ignoring character development on a formal teaching level is one of the greatest weaknesses of US public education. It fosters and encourages many of the serious tragic life-wrecking social events we see every day around us. All criminal actions, and all the publicly paid systems to keep arresting, trying, and jailing millions of people would be greatly reduced if our public schools regularly taught the kinds of liberal character habits I’ve been talking about. To us liberals, trivial knowledge facts merely helps build trivial people. It’s another sad result of what happens when monopoly educational power stays in place, as it has in our public schools. To this day it remains controlled by a few educational bureaucrats who want to change nothing in the system. After all, they’re making good tax money for not much strenuous work. Only when enough people say enough, we want more liberal schools built in our own neighborhoods, will such schools begin to be built. As far as I can see, today the public continues being distracted from learning more about liberal education models with such issues like whether teachers should have tenure, or how many charter schools should be allow in our system? For us liberal Deweyans these are all side issues! The educational debate should be about what children are being taught in school, rather than continue to allowing trivial book knowledge to remain the main educational goal. In fact, these are anything but new educational ideas. Going all the back to ancient Greece, personal tutors taught the current character habits to their aristocratic students. Only such wealthy people could afford to hire such one-on-one tutors, and thus easily pass on to young folks the ideas parents wanted them to have. Even some Roman educators like Marcus Quintilianus (35-100 CE) pointed to their usefulness. But again, only a small class of wealthy aristocrats could afford such private tutors to home-school children. Even though the Roman Republic had recently become ruled by an all-powerful emperor, Marcus was liberal enough to realize the benefit of teaching all students such habits, whether rich or poor. In fact, for us Deweyan liberals, for thousands of years that had been education's main challenge! Dewey saw, the more young folks weren't taught such liberal democratic habit-arts in their schools, homes, and churches, the more intolerant students would become with their conservative ideas and habits. Thus, we got such atrocious and vicious actions in the Middle Ages like burning heretics alive in public, as well as helpless women and children condemned as anti-Christian and evil witches. In medieval Germany alone as many as 10,000 people were killed in one year! For him it was obvious: Democratic excellence creating a more peaceful and enjoyable world for everyone would more easily grow if excellent liberal character habits were taught to students every year they’re in school. The US founders simply weren’t very democratic. They built a central government to best help grow a wealthy upper class of businesspeople, rather than a more democratic social life for everyone, so they gave no educational powers to the central powers. Only with the recent growth of a more active federal government has it gained more power to shape public education. After 1954 it began sending troops to integrate the public schools. Dewey moved to Columbia in 1904. We can imagine, for a few moments, what life was like at the time. Dewey continued seeing many educational challenges as Africans continued being lynched in many southern states, and the racist KKK even marched in large numbers down Pennsylvania Ave. in 1920! Poor and uneducated foreigners were flooding into New York by the millions every year, including all of my grandparents; they just passed through on their way to Ohio. But many thousands stayed in New York and helped create the need for more housing, clothing, food, and schools. The entire social network was overloaded. To many of those foreigners, just having a bed to sleep in and a stove to cook on was a luxury, even if five people slept in a bed and only potatoes and vegetables were cooked. What’s more, the rather conservative public schools weren’t much help; mainly they helped immigrants learn some English and enough political facts to become citizens. However, many never learned the skills or creative habits useful in their new industrial democracy, and thus couldn’t teach them to their children. Neighborhood gangs roamed the streets stealing what they could just to stay alive. A wonderful movie showing what life was like around that time is Somebody Up There Likes Me. The schools didn’t teach children how to become honest cops or carpenters or even teach basic lawyer and doctor skills. Mainly, their goal was to just keep the kids busy with a series of passive book assignments for a few hours. By nature, however, kids and most adults are active experimental learners, as any parent soon learns. Naturally, caring liberals like Dewey asked how can the public schools help make their lives more rewarding, enjoyable, and less stressful? Like many Asian workers today, US immigrants made pennies a day while a few factory owners made fortunes. They simply weren’t interested in teaching their workers more intelligent skills like limiting their families to one or two kinds, what foods help build healthy bodies, and what laws should be respected. Many immigrant families thus turned to organize their criminal actions. Liberals like Dewey, for example, asked why merely keep giving children more book assignments if it didn't help build more useful skills and intelligent character habits. How could mere book assignments ever teach immigrants how to use the new government to make life safer for everyone, keep making life better? Why demand children keep memorizing trivial facts about American presidents, English novelists, and chemical formulas they didn’t want to learn and would probably never use in the real world? If such facts were to be learned, why not at least make them game-oriented and fun , like writing and performing their own presidential scenes, acting out the truths novelists were describing, learning their math, chemistry, and scientific facts while actually helping beautify and improve their own neighborhoods, and helping others learn more intelligent habit-arts? In short, how to stay intelligently connected with their surroundings in positive and constructive ways? Wouldn't such important skills help young folks not only find better kinds of work, and perhaps also start their own business and also use some of the profits to keep helping others? Aren’t those kinds of habits really what true civilization is all about? In short, what was educationally more important: teaching young folks trivial skills like how to work fractions and decimals year after year, or help them learn excellent character skills like honesty, creativity, helpfulness, and of course feeling what democratic tolerance feels like? No doubt, many conservative educators at first simply ignored such liberal ideas like vocational education courses; to them teaching excellent character habits was the parents' job, not theirs. But by 'passing that educational buck' to others they, in effect, helped keep their own neighborhoods degraded, encourage criminal activities for economic reasons, drug-habits of social withdrawal, and make life more stressful for taxpayers who paid for all those services to better control such actions. Again, everyone's taxes are used to keep funding schools, courts, prisons, and other remedial social services. For Dewey is just wasn’t’ very intelligent to keep our public school out of the life-improving loop, so to speak. It only kept hobbling the growth of a more democratic world. The more excellent character habits like health, lawfulness, and helpful business skills are ignored, the easier it is for young folks to fulfill the American fantasy of getting rich quickly with less than excellent actions! To this day, far too many young folks are quickly pressured to join a neighborhood gang, start demanding 'protection' money from neighborhood businesses, start abusing alcohol, drugs, vulnerable young women, and even thievery to solve boredom and money problems. Why not? It's all part of life in the big city, isn't it? Life’s a rat-race and a jungle isn’t it? And even if they do get caught committing such actions many quickly learn how to pay off the police, or go to jail and learn more criminal actions from those already there! Police corruption in the early 1900s was probably rampant in all major US cities. The movie Serpico showed how rampant the problem was in New York in the 1970s! Given the state of public awareness about education, creating more liberal schools, even in New York, was about as easy as walking on water. Many professional-minded parents naturally wanted their sons and daughters to become lawyers and doctors, and so any kind of industrial education was a step backward for them, not forward. In fact, when voters got a chance to start making their schools more liberal, like many other cities had done already, they rejected the idea during the first World War. Thus, except for creating more vocational options in some schools, the obsession with learning more and more academic trivia stayed pretty much the same. As a result, character habits continued being ignored. Poorly educated people continued living in poor neighborhoods and allowing their kids to practice more criminal kinds of habits. It seemed to be tribal warfare between conservatives and liberals with kids caught in between! Remember, both radio and television hadn't yet been invented, and even when they were they were used mainly for advertising and entertainment purposes, thus making people more eager to keep buying the goods corporations were making, like washing machines and expensive cars, jewelry, and don’t forget stocks and bonds. And because respectful character excellence wasn't taught, such cars often gave young men a place to force vulnerable women to give in sexually or get out and walk! When women weren’t taught about respectful and caring sex, or men about running an honest, lawful, and helpful repair shop, clothing factory, restaurant, or appliance store, then life remains the ‘rat-race’ it’s pretty much been for thousands of years, full of superstitions and myths. Even when a Prohibition amendment passed in the early 1900s outlawing the sale of alcohol, criminal gangs themselves became organized like corporations to keep selling it, and again paying off the police to look the other way. Even today, an traditional educational model based on trivia knowledge maintains its monopoly in public education. Most parents even today are still too undereducated about liberal models of education to even think better schools can be built, much less focus on actually building them in their own neighborhoods! They often still believe their schools should continue teaching only reading, writing, and arithmetic. Today, that monopoly is still maintained with the help of state laws, and they keep hobbling the growth of more liberal democratic schools. Even in supposedly more liberal charter schools the same kind of subjects are still forced on the most vulnerable among us, children! Teacher unions often went to state capitols and convinced politicians to pass such laws, making education improvement more difficult and practically impossible. In effect such state laws removed school improvement from local control and gave it to state officials. In fact, to this day conservative Republicans often called themselves educational reforms, and yet the reforms they suggest often change the flow of public tax money from non-profit public schools to for-profit private hands! It’s like the US Constitution merely changed the flow of public money from the British government to local aristocratic pockets. And union pay rates don’t apply to Charter schools, so the profits are even greater! Thus, teachers are left with the choice to teach more academic trivia or find some other work. Even in most Charter schools children are made to learn more and more facts-facts-facts, so the private owners and investors can collect more public tax money from the government! Such events have made liberal educational improvement difficult, if not practically impossible. Still, liberal progress hasn’t been stopped. Thanks to the growth of more liberal families, democratic progress continues growing. They care about empowering their children with more intelligently kinds of character habits! And I might add, that includes respectful sexual character habits too! What young woman today in much of the Western world doesn’t know what respectful sexual behavior is, and how they too should have a part in saying what should happen and when? But on the public school and Charter school levels, it seems the goal is still to teach academic facts, facts, and more facts. The program was firmly established in the late 1950s when the so-called Space Race began. Undemocratic conservatives convinced President Eisenhower himself to speak out against Dewye’s education ideas, and he did! Ike said Dewey’s ideas were the main reason why Russia’s space program was more advanced than the US’s! In reality, however, it seems the Russians merely captured more German rocket scientists after World War 2 than the US did! As a result, today almost everyone still believes forcing children to learn what they have little desire or use for remains the definition of good education, even though many children keep telling their parents they don’t like school? These days I hear some conservative politicians still talk about how their new educational programs will teach children to reason critically, and thus become more intelligent adults. As we’ll see, however, early in the 1900s liberal educators at Columbia like Edward Thorndike proved experimentally children learn to reason just as well in a project-oriented school, and in many cases better, than students in book-oriented schools. In any case, today probably most people still don’t know what better schools can look like, and even if they did they would often be legally kept from creating them without state permission! In short, our own education laws keep hobbling social improvements themselves! In fact, most people today have only experienced a passive book-oriented education model, and so continue naively believing making children sit at desks day after day, year after year, and remain tied to their books is educational excellence. To us Deweyan liberals it certainly is not! What’s more, educational history in the first half of the 1950s tells us Dewey’s ideas are more useful for building a more equal and democratic life for everyone! A more project and professions-oriented educational model is much more naturalistic and effective. It’s holistic, rather than merely verbal. Such a liberal educational model is more like the way children actually learn anything, namely with active kinds of practice! In them learning becomes more enjoyable, constructive, and productive because it’s based firmly on children development itself! However, education debate is practically non-existent. It’s all dictated from the top down, so to speak, just like feudalistic morals were dictated from the pope down, or laws were dictated from the king! Be honest now, when is the last time you heard any kind of meaningful debate about different educational models? Without such debate how can anyone have any real choice about what kinds of schools their tax money should be used for? Why shouldn’t parents and students have the right to start learning about a profession or career while they’re in school, so life can become less stressful once they graduate? Why should young folks enter their adult years knowing almost nothing about how to make a honest buck and help others in the process? In fact today, more than 200 years after the US was founded, most of our states in the world's oldest democracy still have unjust and unfair laws against same-sex marriage. True, they might soon all be negated by Supreme Court rulings, but when schools ignore liberal character habits, the underlying feelings of bigotry remain in place, rather than joy and feelings of wishing people well. Aren’t those the feelings all civilized people should learn? At least we liberals say they are. More than 100 years after the Civil War millions of people were still taught to hate and hobble African equal rights as much as possible! Just like philosophy itself, there are conservative, moderate, and liberal models of education, but when they fail to teach our democratic ideals of character excellence, like sharing rights equally, and how to respect others and our just laws, then how excellent are they for making everyone's life better? Should democratic habit-arts of equality, respect, or lawfulness be ignored by our schools just because people don’t realize how important they are? One Personal Recollection One similarity between liberal and conservative educational models is they both agree the ultimate goal of education is teaching students how to intelligently solve their own problems. Where they often differ is how young folks should learn to solve their own problems. Years ago, after I had taken some philosophy courses and how to ask some meaningful questions, rather than just sit around like a dope, I called into a radio talk show one day and asked 2 education professors what the best goal of public education was. At first they sounded a little surprised at such a basic question, but after a few moments they both agreed the goal was teaching students how to solve their own problems. No doubt, to both liberals like Dewey and traditional educators that goal is important; who wants to have adults stay dependent on others for solving their own problems? No doubt, many disabled people need help from others, but most people can learn to intelligently solve their own problems; after all, most problems aren’t very serious at all. So, the goal is teaching young folks how to intelligently answer life's challenges is a worthwhile one. Such skills help make life more satisfying, and thus keep growing as people. However, the big question is how should we go about teaching those important skills, like how to make a plan of action, and then experimentally test the plan to see its results? Conservative kinds of educators in general say knowing more book-facts is the best way to learn how to solve our own problems. It’s an old and traditional system. In the Middle Ages, for example, people learned to say certain prayers to help solve their problems, like disease, having a safe journey, not offending god, and asking for forgiveness. In short, merely reading examples of character excellence should be enough to teach students how to best solve their problems. For liberals like Dewey, however, what's needed is a much more active and organic kind of experimental testing and learning how such actions actually feel, so those ideas don’t become quickly forgotten, like happens regularly with mere book-facts. How many of the book-facts do typical 25 and 30 year olds remember from their 12 years of public school? So, to make ideas and skills something other than Alexander’s empire, that is narrow and shallow, it’s better to use active kinds of learning projects, rather than merely reading about them. If children want to learn, say, more about Behavioral psychology, then they might actually perform scenes from The Taming of the Shrew, or any other play where such examples exist. To liberals like Dewey that active kind of education model will always produce better results than merely reading about such examples in, say, a psychology book. In fact, only actions can best build any new habit-art. Merely reading without performing some idea leaves learning on merely a narrow and shallow verbal level of awareness, rather than a body-mind level of feeling AND idea, or as we say a body-mind level of awareness. It's the difference between merely talking about ideas and actually practicing them. The common proverb is: Actions speak louder than words! In short, modern Behavioral psychology says young folks need active practice to best learn any new habit; it is a psychology Dewey helped build! Mere reading neglects the entire feeling side of a person's body-mind, and so is much less than excellent learning, as we've seen with Plato's and Aristotle's contemplative reasoning art. It's one thing to merely think spirit-objects or eternal Forms exist, but to actually know they actually exist are 2 very different things. As we’ve seen, Plato’s Parmenides bravely demonstrated with mathematical precision why such objects were not be known and might never be known! I didn't ask it at the time I called in, but I should have: If knowing how to solve our own problems is education's main goal, then why do students made to go through 12 years of public schooling without getting any active training about solving either their own or hateful social problems? Wouldn't knowing how improving a diet habit, for example, be much easier if students knew how to actively experiment with their eating habits? And if not, then isn't our present healthcare crisis one result of neglecting such experimental learning, and relying instead on the government's help to solve healthcare problems our own bad eating habits often create?! After all, some 50% of all health problems are now said to be diet related, and the heavier people become, the more health problems they'll probably have, once again paid for with everyone's socialized tax money. And of course the more money is needed for that, the less money is available for continuing to improve and enjoy life itself. So, this question too seems more than a little reasonable: Are our own conservative book-oriented public schools really helping create many of the government programs conservatives say we shouldn’t have? Almost certainly, such programs will continue being needed as long as our public schools remain obsessed with teaching only more and more book-facts, and remain outside the loop of working to make life better for everyone! Yet another little lame limerick is offered to make the point. At memorizing definitions Jones was a whiz. Reading more as he felt some dental fizz. As teeth came from his head, He sheepishly said, My schools never taught what dental health is. 17. EDUCATIONAL MODELS, 102 Traditional Educational Weaknesses For we liberal Deweyan perhaps the greatest weakness of traditional schools is their ignore of our strongest learning art, active experimental learning. It’s a much more effective and natural learning tool than merely answering someone else’s book-questions year after year, For Dewey mere book-learning is unnatural. Why? It separates and isolates thinking from actively testing ideas, thus keeping knowledge on a purely verbal and mental level. For example, lucky students may read about useful character habits like helping others less well of, but that idea takes on another deeper meaning when such ideas are experimentally tested! In that situation the entire body is involved with the learning process, rather than just the verbal awareness. To his great credit even conservative Plato realized how important active kinds of learning are, and recommended his future leaders spend 15 years actively learning about life before they became leaders. And, a standing joke for Mark Twain was his saying he never let school get in the way of his education; he too realized the best knowledge is learned in active experimentation. It’s what gave his writings so much human depth and warmth. But, it seems even Mark missed something very important, namely the character art of using his fortune to help those less well off. He kept using his money merely to make more money, and the more his investments went broke, the more he had to work to make more money. If he’d have gone to a more liberal school where such character habits are a normal part of the day he almost certainly would have made his life less stressful and more enjoyable. Surely, the ‘Robin Hoods’ around him had fun taking it away from him with money-draining investments! As Dewey saw, for 12 years in traditional schools students are tied mainly to their books, ‘spoon-fed’ merely academic facts, like George Washington crossed the Delaware River during the Revolutionary War. However, how many students are allowed to more feel that fact in some kind of experimental body-mind way? How many students are allowed to write a short scene and actually feel how cold it was at the time, and why he was crossing the river in the first place? Washington crossed the Delaware because the plan he made to attack the British in Trenton, New Jersey needed to be tested and verified in life; it was part of the process of experimentally testing a plan there and then. What's more, if a rather rotund and overweight General Knox would have rocked the boat a little more, Washington might never have made it into New Jersey! How much more fun would learning be if children were allowed and encouraged to create such active learning situations. In short, the more young folks don't feel how important intelligent experimental learning and testing is, the more they remain immature and childlike. Again, the art is not difficult to teach. It simply means writing a plan of action, assigning different tasks to different students, and then actively test the plan; some adjustments to the original plan may be necessary, but then again, what plan is always accurate the first time? The earlier children learn that art, the easier it becomes to start solving their own problems intelligently! Again, in traditional schools teachers are almost forced to cover so much material in so much time, so students can score well on the end-of-year standardized test, and teachers can keep their jobs. However, what standardized test ever asked students what’s the best way to solve any problem intelligently? The obsession with making such tests so academically focused not only leads students to believe that’s what education should be about, but it artificially pressures teachers to keep education that way. Recently some teachers who changed students test scores were even sentenced to a year in jail; that’s how obsessed the conservative educational bureaucracy is with keeping education merely on a verbal level, and all but ignoring not only deeper, more natural, and more enjoyable kinds of learning, but useful character training too. As a result, students get almost no feeling or idea either about WHAT character excellence means or how to experimentally build it. Many leave school psychically crippled in a sense; they have few useful skills for living life well in the real world. The more such habits are ignored, the more difficult it becomes to earn an honest living after schools days are over, if, that is, they can even find a job they're interested in and pays enough to live on. More About a Liberal Educational Model Today we see some wasteful results of such educational weaknesses. Because most schools remain book-centered and fact-based, rather than individually student-centered and experimental, many students simply drop out of school as soon as the law allows. In fact, their educational needs are not being met! Why stay in school and keep learning useless academic facts. When is the last time the reader needed to prove a geometric theorem in the real world? And yet all students are made to study that art for a year! Algebra is the same way. In fact, that criticism might be leveled against most school subjects! Most students simply don't have a need to keep learning such facts; what do they have to do with life in the real world, where the American dream awaits? Almost always it seems such high schools would rather teach students to know things like why Othello caused Desdemona to commit suicide, and how to solve quadratic equations. But for Dewey, without character habits like community work and improvement, school merely keeps diverting student attention away from perhaps THE most important subject of all, namely PHYSICAL AND MENTAL HUMAN HEALTH and its 2 important habit-arts -- intelligent diet and exercise! Wealthy folks can afford to send their children to psychologists to help them learn more useful habits, but why should our tax-paid public schools keep ignoring such important skills while we keep spending some $600 billion a years building more guns and bombs? In what sense are those events worth celebrating in other countries? One result of such schools makes it more difficult to start making some positive contributions to our society; drug-dealing and criminal actions are much more profitable. In fact, as we'll see in Book 5's Models of Educational Excellence, the sooner learning the arts of experimental testing and character helpfulness, the easier it becomes for most everyone to keep educating themselves, rather than depending on others. When students discover how important excellent diet and exercise habits are in whatever career they choose, then they'll want to learn how to build those habits, and thus be better prepared for life itself, instead of just for the next test! Not learning to talk confidently, intelligently, and constructively is often another weakness of traditional schools. How many young folks are deathly afraid to say anything in front of a group? It’s certainly not because young folks aren’t capable of learning such skills; it’s mainly because they’re not allowed to practice them on a regular basis in conservative book-obsessed schools. For how many teachers is a completely silent classroom the best? What is our conservative educational bureaucracy afraid of by teaching students to speak up forcefully and rationally about events in the real world? Is it because military units function best when no one questions or talks about what’s going on? And how much more tragic is the situation when most of the information people learn about the world comes from talking, not reading or writing? How else can young folks learn to feel the art of kind and sympathetic talking when students are conditioned from grade 1 to mostly sit quietly and work from books, and when sports remain the art of merely defeating someone else, rather than learning how to intelligently keep improving our own skills of helpfulness? I hasten to add: such educational systems exist not just at the public school level. How many college students and athletes leave school with absolutely no feeling for using some of their money to help those in need, rather than merely build a bank account? And equally regrettable, how can students want to keep educating themselves when their question-asking habit is largely neglected by book assignments? In them the questions are already given, so again, without the habit of asking intelligent questions, students leave school crippled in that way? It often leads to psychic doldrums, so to speak, in which boredom becomes a strong feeling. Again, bored people are boring people. As a result, many students finish school not only afraid to say anything in front of an audience, but of not knowing anything worthwhile to say either! Evidently, since the 1950s that’s the way conservatives want young folks to be. It make life in the corporate and military worlds that much easier! They don’t want students knowing about over-population and independent kinds of thinking; they want young folks to start having a family so they have to work for whatever the corporation pays them. Thus, the more students are discouraged from talking in class about what they're learning, either in school or outside it, the more abstract skills like solving quadratic equations become meaningful; such equations, by the way, are useful for, say, finding how big a garden area might be, or even designing a piece of furniture. They have a use, but when they’re separated from constructive kinds of projects, they remain merely another mental diversion. Also, intelligent kinds of talking in class on a regular basis can not only help build all-important feelings of self-confidence, but also organizational skills. The better organized their weekly talk become, the more interesting they can be made. Conservative educators often focus mainly on teaching facts, facts, and more facts from books, books, and more books, but that’s often not all. Business skills too are often included, like typing and learning how to use our ever-growing number of electronic toys and tools. But Dewey was bold enough to ask what the results of such an education are. A passive kind of obedience was one result. The more students obey their teachers and don’t have any different learning goals themselves, then the more vulnerable they remain to people who test them for their character excellence once they leave school or home. All during his public school and university years Albert Einstein was interested only in math and science; one of his teachers even told him he would never amount to anything. Imagine what physics would be like today if Albert hadn’t remained interested in his own questions, like what is light and what would life look like if we could travel that fast? Again, is a passive and non-questioning habit really the one most cherished by our corporate and military leaders? Are they really the ones behind the creation of our book-obsessed educational systems? Well, to cite merely one piece of evidence. Admiral Hyman Rickover who helped build America’s nuclear submarine fleet in the 1950s, said as much. To him schools should teach only facts, facts, and more facts, and then let the connecting of their facts be someone else's responsibility higher up in the bureaucratic system, whether it's either military or corporate. Only they know best about the 'big picture', and what’s going on in the world. We can well imagine Socrates and Plato talking about the same kinds of ideas. To them running a government should be left to the older men who have more knowledge and experience; only their judgments can be best. Young and inexperienced people shouldn’t be given any political power, or as little as possible! It’s understandable; experience often makes people wiser, and obviously military knowledge too is seasoned and ripened with experience. However, don't even foot soldiers need character excellence, to know what's best to do with the facts they have around them? Should they just keep killing innocent people simply because they’re ordered to? For us liberal democrats, that like saying people can’t even ask why we should use our tax money to pay for 20 or 30 nuclear submarines when merely 1 of their missiles can literally level any city on earth? Should we really keep allowing people to have such power? Wouldn’t we all be better off if all such weapons were dismantled? In truth, the more people are conditioned merely to obey orders, rather than evaluate the facts for themselves, the greater the chances for massive amounts of brutality, as we saw during the Vietnam War. Babies are still being deformed by the poisons we dropped on that country! Who needs to be a rocket scientist to feel such situations call for intelligently evaluating facts rather than merely obeying others no matter what the results are? Many ancient Greeks like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle felt the un-criticized life is not worth living, but if we don’t teach young folks how to evaluate facts by their possible results, the more dangerous life becomes for everyone. Of what educational use is merely collecting more and more book-facts, and not thinking about their possible results in the real world. In such schools where critical thinking habits are taught, they become a much more important part of the community, rather than remained isolated from it. As we've already seen, I learned many isolated biological facts in school, but because I never learned to put them to use for building a more intelligent diet, I continued wrecking my own health. And here's another example of allowing only a few to tell us what the facts mean. In 2001 US intelligence services had gathered many, many facts about the 9-11 airplane hijackers; they were already here in the US taking flying lessons in different parts of the country! But such facts were never shared with different organizations, so they could be put together into a coordinated picture, and for also questioning them on why anyone would want to learn merely to fly a passenger airplane, rather than also learn to take-off and land it! The art of coordinating and using facts intelligently is definitely a more important skill than merely learning more and more facts; what do the facts mean and how can they be used to keep making life safe and productive? The more people know how to practice that creative and intelligent art, the safer we all become! Aristotle collected tons of biological facts from around his world and even organized many of them into some useful categories, but he missed evolution’s big picture; had he lived 10 years longer he may have been able to better see such a picture. In short, his un-criticized assumption about their being some eternal constant forms creating eternally constant groups of animals and plants made an evolutionary model of nature almost impossible for him. Evidently even Plato's Academy some ideas were beyond criticism! In short, we Deweyan liberals celebrate knowing facts; accurate information is needed. But to merely demand all students obey their teachers and learn the same facts, whether they want to or not, is not democratic education. At best it’s a conservative model of education aimed at maintaining a feudalistic class-based status quo! In more liberal schools children are taught how to use their facts and skills intelligently, constructively, helpfully, and if possible kindly! In truth, as test-scores and drop-out rates teach us, many students simply don't need to know more and more book-facts. Also, some 70% of high school students don’t go on the keep learning more and more book facts in college. And what’s more, much less than 30% don’t get a degree in 4 years. Today many urban schools have a drop-out rate as high as 50%! In other words, in some neighborhoods over half the students are leaving the one place they could be using as an excellent preparation into the world outside of school. So, because what's important about facts is how they’re used, shouldn't that educational fact help concerned parents keep pressuring their local schools to start including more naturalistic kinds of learning projects all through the 12 years of public schooling? The less that happens, then more and more students will continue entering their adult years psychically immature and crippled for excellently answering many of life's challenges, like obeying just laws and making only honest money. We continue seeing those kinds of results daily in our media. As John Galbraith saw, too many people, both educators and corporate supervisors, have become content to keep the class-based economic status quo in place, and so rarely even think about the social results of a 50% drop-out rate for some schools. Who cares? Let someone else deal with it! Parents aren’t the only ones in such an improvement loop. Students are too. Students too can accept the challenge to improve that 50% drop-out rate, so as to better meet different student learning desires. For example, why shouldn’t students wanting to be business people be able to make some ‘school money’ with a student business, and then use it to help those less fortunate? In short, why not turn student creativity and experimentation loose in a safe and constructive manner, to help more students stay in school and keep improving themselves as well as their neighborhoods? Such learning not only gets students more feelingly involved with local challenges, but also with helping others to help themselves. In short, the more students are encouraged to ACTIVELY AND EXPERIMENTALLY solve their own problems, the more their own educational and character excellence grows stronger, the more mature students will become, and the more their own schools will continue being improved. Believe it or not folks, nature has no desire to leave manmade projects alone, and that’s been a challenge for only about 4 billion years, give or take a New York minute of 2! As many are seeing today, education dollars are becoming less available as income and taxes remain stagnant. Especially during recessions tax revenues become even less, and so intelligence tells us more community volunteers are needed, especially in the lower grades, to help students start learning about intelligent experimentation. That shouldn’t be a problem now that millions of ‘baby-boomer’ retirees are now available. Then, as children enter their constructive stage of development they will need more help building the many workshops students can use to start learning about the skills they will use as adults, everything from computer, doctor, and legal shops to carpentry and plumbing. No doubt, money will also be saved from not needing all the books used in traditional schools. And teacher roles will be changed from finding and grading book assignments to one of mainly guidance, encouragement, and problem solving. In any case, however, the traditional separation of intelligent work habits from helpful character habits will end. And the more young folks learn to enjoy such habits and respect just laws, the less vulnerable they’ll become to criminal behavior and drug abuse, to name just 2, as well as merely making war-weapons endangering innocent people. Life is sacred. That’s not to say sometimes violence is needed against those who aim at harming and killing anyone, but thankfully such people are still a small minority. What's more, the more students keep intelligently criticizing and improving their own schools, the easier it will be get needed public funding to build and equip all the practical workshops at liberal schools. No one can say for sure how many shops will be needed at every school; each school and district has its own needs and so should be built to serve community needs. Still, food, clothing, and health shops will probably be useful in all schools. Even if students learn nothing else besides what mental and physical health is, and how to practice it, it’ll be a great improvement over many of our traditional schools. And, it’ll also be easier for students to volunteer when they’re adults, and feel gratitude to the school that they will feel cared for and nurtured them so well. They’ll also learn what habits they need to keep strengthening our democracy, like staying in contact with their representatives, voting, and protesting all the attempts of those trying to weaken it, so they can keep using the system for their own personal gain. In that way they’ll start building a social consciousness, rather than just caring about themselves. We still have many serious problems, like dangerous atomic weapons, global warming, environment pollution, and equality issues. To keep children isolated from those issues merely helps keep them in place. Why shouldn’t students be included in those improvement loops, and be trained to constructively criticize and improve not only their own schools, but their nation and world as well? Such critical thinking and constructive actions are another important place to practice intelligent experimentation, and perhaps even produce some real improvements. In any case, they’ll learn more about our strongest learning art – intelligent experimentation. After all, isn’t it more intelligent to keep experimenting with constructively engaging an enemy instead of merely keeping them isolated or kill them? No doubt, new obstacles will be felt in all learning projects, but that’s where skill like creative thinking and intelligent negotiation become useful, right? Experimenting With A New Educational Model Such traditional educational weaknesses as were mentioned earlier, like not actively teaching excellent character habit-arts on an active level of learning, have helped keep far too many young folks grossly undereducated and often frustrated. Also, school boredom is often a serious problem, and a sign of educational needs not being met. Thus parents are also challenged more than ever to also help their children learn more about all the useful and rewarding work available in the real world, and help them start learning about their own strengths and weaknesses, so they might feel where they can best use their talents. How many young folks leave school with knowing little about themselves, and so have little feeling for what kind of work they want to do? Thomas Edison’s mother was a fine example of such a caring parent. America’s greatest inventor went to public school for only a few years, and then his smart and creative mother home-schooled him! She encouraged him to build habits of constructive curiosity and imaginative question-asking, 2 useful habits for intelligent experimentation. While still in his teens he invented a better telegraph system. His mother knew how important it was to teach creativity's habit-art and how it depended on a question-asking habit. Asking about how things work and also how they might be improved helped focus and strengthen his art of intuitively creative thinking and testing. Those kinds of habits were used all through his life at his New Jersey lab too; sometimes he’d even lock the doors so his workers couldn’t get out until they helped find solutions to creating another invention. It also took those workers over a year to invent a useful working light bulb. Too bad the element neon wasn’t discovered until 1898 or else the problem would have been solved much easier and our world would have become much more colorful. We Deweyans ask why shouldn’t any student learn to practice such creative skills in whatever class they take? Any subject can be adapted to any student’s talents and needs, and so that kind of experimental learning can be encouraged in any workshop with the help of intelligent questions. After all, aren’t all the products we have today the result of such thinking? For example, how might we begin making our traditional schools more student centered instead of book centered? No doubt one useful idea is a small step-by-step approach to improvement, as we’ve seen Part 1 with building better habit-arts. If true, then to try to convert all schools in a district to an experimental workshop system, or even all the grades in one school all at once, might be too much of an adjustment for both students and teachers to make. It might cause more frustration than satisfaction. And so to avoid such possible results, a ‘baby-step’ approach to improvement might be best, say, making a plan for the first 3 grades where students are mainly using the senses to learn more about themselves and their world. So, projects using that fact can be more intelligently designed. With such thinking the reader can begin feeling some of the new challenges faced when trying to convert a traditional book-centered school into a more liberal child-centered school. They aim to take advantage of childhood’s 3 main stages of development; they are sense-based until about 7 or 8, a constructive phase between 8 and 14, and then as their brains become more developed they enter an abstract thinking phase. Many book-centered schools tend to ignore those first 2 stages of development, and keep children working on book assignments, which for many children soon become boring. In most students there’s little natural ability and desire to learning such abstract facts. And for another thing, conservative book-and-teacher-centered schools keep students basically inactive and confined to passive class work almost all the time, writing the answers to their book questions, and then having teachers grade their work. No doubt it’s easy work for teachers, but what important and useful character habits are students not learning in such schools, and how deeply are they feeling their importance to making life less stressful and more enjoyable? As a result, many students learn the habits often practiced all through the Middle Ages, namely passive obedient to those in authority, and to do whatever they’re told, rather than learn to think and act constructively for themselves. Such schools explain why that era lasted for over a thousand years, and why democratic habits even in the world’s oldest democracy is still weak and neglected! Also, students don't get much practice focusing on either personal or community improvements, like demanding living wages, more of a voice in political decision-making, and equality for all law-abiding citizens. Teaching such passive and obedient habits were useful to the social ruling class; they helped keep a feudal social structure solidly in place with various forms of slavery. Even as late as the early 1800s George Hegel, Germany's archconservative philosopher, echoed such ideas when he said: "Thought, as much as will, must commence with obedience." And the more such habits were encouraged the German, Japanese, and Italian schools, the easier it was for people like Hitler, shoguns, and Mussolini to make people soldiers. In today’s much more democratic and industrial world such habits are simply counterproductive in many situations. Liberal kinds of creative and experimental habits are much more useful in today’s world, and they help build a person’s individuality, creativity, independence, and reliable knowledge. They are, in fact, the kind of habits that helped a few people build Western civilization's life-changing Industrial Revolution shortly after Hegel died in 1831. What’s more, such experimental habits encourage more reliable and organic kinds of ideas, rather than believing their own ideas are absolute Truth for all time. Besides such creative habits are the normal way people learn, as can be seen from watching a group of even young children. Who ever saw a child learn to ride a bike, cook a meal, fix a broken toy, build a new invention, and learn how dangerous alcohol can be just from reading about them in books? And it's why caring and thoughtful parents often encourage their kids to keep experimenting, but intelligently rather than merely routinely! Such parents will also teach them to help others with their skills, rather than merely think only about their own comfort. As a result, liberal schools will begin looking differently from traditional ones; liberal schools will have more shops, like metal, auto, wood, garden, health, and clothing shops for students to actively their creative and experimental habit-arts. For liberal Dewey, because we’re all individuals, with our own powers of independent thinking, the child should be encouraged to keep actively practicing such intelligent habits. What intelligent mechanic doesn't know how to read a repair manual, use mathematics to figure out another outrageous repair bill, or how to tell someone they need a new muffler bearing? When the emphasis is on learning character excellence, then young folks can begin feeling how such habits only increases the chances for making their own life better. Why keep practicing habits that keep making life less than what it might be? Shouldn’t we be honest with ourselves about such education? If capitalism and democracy both work best when people know what excellent habits feel like, and practice them, then not to teach them merely weakens both our economy and our political system. Even today we see the results of mean and unkind discrimination of law-abiding and helpful people. How intelligent is that? After all, how vibrant and healthy for everyone’s health can any political system be when peoples’ main habit-art is obedience to merely old traditional ideas that started growing long before our modern democracies began growing? In more liberal schools children will learn ideas should be practiced just because they’ve been practiced for centuries! How much more stressful and dangerous did life remain just because many people continued believing slavery had been practiced for centuries and was, therefore, natural and normal? Communist Russia and China, Nazi Germany, and many other countries including the US all have seen, at times, examples of how dangerous life can become when people refuse to see their habits and ideas as merely the result of their practice, rather than believing they’re nature’s eternal and unchanging truth? Even today, in the US, the reluctance to experiment with liberalizing drug and sex worker laws may be doing more harm than good to many young folks. Blind and unintelligent obedience to the social status quo in effect keeps encouraging people to practice their routine habits, keep things as they are, don’t rock any boats, and keep allowing power-hungry and greedy people to keep increasing their power, rather than using it to help others. If nothing else, much of our own history is mainly a record of such people and the sometimes painful results of their actions. In short, only as people become more educated about how all habits are learned experimentally, and how to enjoy experimenting with building better ones, can intelligent change and progress grow at a more progressive pace. If not, tribal and gang warfare will continue on. How many students never realize they have the option of helping improve their local libraries, health clinics, and homeless services? In short, the more parents, teachers, and students realize they have the freedom to build more intelligent character habits, like better diet and exercise habits, and more community-improvement projects, then the more students will become anchored to life outside of school, the world they will eventually inherit. Such schools have a much better chance of improving many of our own social problems, like intolerance and hateful bigotry, and in the process put our socialized taxes to better use than building more wasteful prisons and deadly weapons. We Deweyan liberals like to ask, why shouldn’t students be included with such an improvement loop? Not to include them is merely to keep them sheltered, immature, and naïve. In other words, life has become something each of us helps make, rather than merely accepting what others say it should be. Why shouldn’t that fact be applied to our schools as well as our government? Just because kids drop-out doesn’t mean they want to quit learning; it often means they just want to learn different things than what’s being taught, and whatever that is there are intelligent and unintelligent ways of using such knowledge. Crooks exist in every profession. How many kids are lured into drug-dealing just for the money, or because everyone else is doing it, and how much do our own schools and drug laws keep encouraging kids to keep endangering their own lives? Sex Education???? What other examples illustrate Dewey’s educational models of excellence? Sex education is definitely another good example. One fact many people choose not to think about is the variety of sexual habits and actions, and so many people feel they don’t want their children learning about them wither. But, how intelligent is that? Not to know such facts only keeps one’s psyche narrow, shallow, and worst of all intolerant! What good is being ignorant about human habits when those habits are practiced in today’s world? Doesn’t such ignorance just help increase anxiety about others, rather than a more intelligent well-wishing? In fact, sex is a perfectly normal human need, and so why not teach high schoolers what some intelligent and acceptable expressions are? Here, of course, I’m certainly not recommending experimentation in the public schools, even though it no doubt exists in many of them today. But shouldn’t just that fact be reason enough to help students begin feeling what sexual respect looks like, and how it can even be treated with some humor and laughter? In many schools even reading about different sexual expressions would go a long way to making young adults feel more comfortable in the adult world. In the native world children are often married when they’re sexually mature. Wouldn’t better facts about sex be justified if it helped prevent even one unwanted pregnancy, or even one expression of sexual immaturity, like satisfying one’s self as quickly as possible? Shouldn’t high schools begin seeing sex too can be a creatively joyous and happy event each time it’s practiced, rather than the same ol’ same ol’? Why shouldn’t more schools be allowed to experiment with such classes on a mental level? After all, we’re all just human and there are many ways of expressing one’s sexual feelings intelligently, joyfully, and respectfully. No doubt, such excellent sex habits of demanding respect from a partner would help reduce much sexual trauma, and unnecessary worry and anxiety. They could even practice such respectful behavior in class, and thus reduce many irrational sexual fantasies about men acting dominantly and women acting passively. As liberal Protagoras liked to remind people, mankind is the measure of all things, of things that are bad and good. Sex education to one may, thus, be moral corruption to another. However, if such classes were merely another educational option to choose, rather than a required course for everyone, then students and parents would be free to make an intelligent choice about what they want their child to learn. That way such ideas can be learned only by those who choose to learn them. In any case it should be obvious, the freedom to keep intelligently experimenting with what children can learn is a very important part of liberal educational excellence. The more legislators keep restricting how our schools might be improved, the less free students become to see what excellence means to different kinds of situations. To us Deweyan liberals that result is certain less than excellent. We live in a world where people are conditioned to build many different kinds of habits, and not to realize that only keeps isolating and separating people from that world. What’s more, as more than 20 sexually-transmitted diseases teach us, the less students can learn about them in sex class, the more vulnerable they stay to getting them, and the more tax money is needed to pay for their health bills! So, why shouldn’t students be free to make such intelligent class choices in high school, just as they should be free to start learning about excellent diet and exercise habits all through grade school? Who knows? It may even help create some more intelligent ways of managing prostitution practices. After all, it’s been legal in much of Nevada for decades and believe it or not some women haven’t been corrupted, but liberated! What Is Psychological Health? Psychological health is another very important subject for we Deweyan liberals. What do we mean by it? What is it? How do we go about achieving it? Such questions were talked about in Part 1, but they can also be talked about to students, as well as actively practiced all through grade school. After all, such habits are useful throughout life, and so the sooner they’re learned, the better life becomes! For us some of the basic ideas of Behavioral psychology can be taught to students even at the sense-based stage of development. As we’ve been seeing, accurate and reliable psychological information is another new modern educational challenge. As late as the 1800s very intelligent modern sophists like Robert Ingersoll complained about not having some real dependable psychological knowledge about ourselves taught in our public schools, like what excellent speaking and working habits feel like, and the best way for young folks to experimentally learn such useful habits. Since then, however, psychologists like Dewey have learned a lot about how best to build new habits and skills, so why not empower young folks with such knowledge? Joyful and encouraging speaking habits can be learned a little more each day. After all, all people must live with themselves all through life, and yet much about such healthy psychological actions can keep weakening any destructive habits they may be learning. What are habits, and why is it so difficult to stop abusing tobacco or alcohol; eating less than excellent foods now offered on just about every block in every city; what is an excellent diet for my body; what is humor and why is it so important to psychological health; what’s the best way to learn such habits and thus make life more satisfying; and why should anyone pay honestly-earned money to merely keep harming themselves with less than excellent food? If those results aren’t promoted with healthful psychological actions, then what would be? How can we expect our own nation to keep using limited money for diet-related health problems and yet not teach young folks what physical health means, and how to actively learn more about it? If not, then we continue living in a naïve psychic world where merely by passing a constitutional amendment will stop people from abusing alcohol. We've already seen how important psychologically excellent habits can be, like how to enjoy improving our own weak, excessive, and unhealthy habits one ‘baby-step’ at a time. But if more people are to learn them, then shouldn’t they too be offered as subjects even to primary-age students? They can at least begin feeling what they’re like. And if so, then why aren’t more useful psychological classes a real option to students who often want to know more about their own body-minds, and what health means? Where is the intelligence in restricting such knowledge about body-mind health itself in our public schools? What can it feel like to build a better diet or exercise habit; how can they be strengthened; and how important is enjoyable practice for learning such habits? What does it feel like to build an intelligent plan for improving an unhealthful and dangerous habit, and then how can we best test the plan to see its results? And of course there's physical health as well. What exercises and foods best help us stay in ship-shape shape, and when’s the best time to practice them? Not only are such habit-arts useful all through life, but they also help students solve another important educational challenge -- building the inner enjoyable and fun feelings of a healthy body-mind, as well as intelligently knowing how to best control our own growth. It’s certainly no absolute guarantee of a long and productive life, but then again what is? Education’s Important Social Results Are such liberal educational ideas really too radical, bazaar, idealistic, or communistic? Not at all. They just reflect some of the useful knowledge science has recently discovered. As our newspapers and media remind us daily, unintelligent habits help make everyone’s life more stressful and dangerous; who doesn’t remember the chaos caused by 19 9-11 hijackers? Thus, weak and unintelligent educational habits help produce less-than-excellent social results. As is widely known, even in democratic countries like the US young folks often finish 12 years of public schooling and have almost no feeling for what character excellence is or job skills! That’s a social result every liberal person should be outraged about; we all pay for the social results of such schools. Even good students are at a big disadvantage compared to those who already know how to respect the law, keep only honest money, practice equal rights, and help others help themselves. In short, book knowledge is far from an excellent education! Without learning something about character excellence young folks often become vulnerable to acting like morons, with no respect for any law or person. And worse, they have no questions about how they can become more intelligent character artists, build better habits, and keep contributing to our nation’s well-being. In fact, learning just one character excellence, like obeying just laws, makes our country that much more excellent and allows more tax money to be spent on building more liberal schools. Normally students learn almost nothing about how their book-knowledge can be best used to improve their schools or neighborhoods. That’s yet another weak social result of our public schools. Probably in every city in the world even primary students can learn more about creatively using their book-facts for thousands of different beautification and improvement projects. Merely growing flowers for a local park can help young students begin feeling how important chemical and conservation facts are. Such projects would also begin strengthening creative thinking’s habit-art. What better place and time is there to start learning such habits than in the primary grades? Why shouldn't even 1st graders learn to feel such excellent ideas and their constructive social results, like where to find useful book-facts about growing flowers, how easy it is to keep building their sense of humor, positive speaking habits, how celebrate democratic equal rights, and begin learning more about body-mind health? Shouldn’t more parents and students be asking themselves what social results are our book-centered public schools helping produce? Such educational weaknesses of traditional schools keep weakening both people and our nation! Our millions in prisons are all evidence of how our traditional book-obsessed public schools are still out of the improvement character loop. And again, to house, feed, and clothe all those people are paid by taxpayers. Why shouldn’t our schools be places where young folks can start learning how to respect someone’s else property, how to help those less well off, how to speak honestly, how to earn honest money, and how to report those who pose a serious threat to others? The more such character excellence is ignored, the more our San Quentin’s and Sing-Sings get a multiple-occupancy room ready, all at taxpayer expense of course! According to one report California taxpayers now pay about $50,000 a year per inmate! And how many millions more remain undereducated but haven't yet turned to major criminal actions, like welfare and insurance fraud? Because people reproduce faster than they reconstruct and improve their schools, it’s still easy for dangerous and unhealthful habits to be pasted from one generation to the next. Obviously most parents are much more caring about what their children learn, and so help them become of more conscious of dangerous habits. But how many poor folks don’t have such caring and helpful parents? We see the results of unwanted children in homeless numbers in all our cities. Why shouldn’t they have better schools to teach them more excellent habits? Even in upper middleclass neighborhoods how many young folks begin using illegal drugs even before they leave school, to relieve their stressful muscular tensions, and even turn to gangs to help support their drug habits? Isn’t that alone a good reason to at least begin experimenting with decriminalizing drug use? And if it works to reduce crime rates, then wouldn’t that free up even more tax monies for more constructive educational work, like teaching students how to live joyfully and constructively, rather than depressively and destructively? How many people out there still have such habits, and feel even murdering innocent people is justified, or other gang members? The more such habits are neglected, the more it seems war has remained almost inevitable, from ancient Greece, to the 1800s when the US government almost killed our entire Native American population, to 2 World Wars, Korea, and Vietnam! Are those the social results of any truly civilized nation? Of course not. But unless more caring people begin to speak up, and want to help those disadvantaged young folks, those social results will almost certainly continue happening. Won’t war become extinct when people feel everyone else is sacred, and when it ceases to be at all profitable? Am I being too romantic, utopian, idealistic, and even unscientific? After all, how can you possibly reason with someone like a Hitler or a Stalin? British PM Chamberlain tried reasoning with Hitler and failed miserably, but doesn’t that teach us such excellent character habits need to be taught to everyone as soon as possible, in Germany as well as Britain? It may sound too optimistic but we liberal say even if Hitler had had a kinder and more intelligent education, one that helped him fulfill his dream of being an architect, the world would be a different place today? He wanted to help build useful building, and yet people kept telling him he didn’t have the talent for it, or encouraged him to practice the excellent skills, knowledge, and character habits he needn’t to become an architect! Eventually after Germany’s defeat in World War 1 he found a ‘scapegoat’ for his hatful feelings -- the Jews. Today US jails are already terribly over-crowded with inmates needing more civilized and respectful training and education, and when they don’t get it they often remain socially dangerous. Doesn’t it make much more sense to teach such habits BEFORE they learn unintelligent habits, rather than after they’ve learned them? Afterwards just makes learning more intelligent habits that much more difficult. What’s more, prison guards keep demanding ever more money from tax payers, and when taxes shrink during recessions then political leaders have little choice but to release some still-undereducated prisoners to help balance budgets! In a healthy democracy people would have demanded such educational improvement decades ago! Isn’t it time we faced this fact? Even the US is still far from a healthy functioning democracy, and from building schools where dreams are fulfilled rather than frustrated. No doubt there are a great many positive learning events going on in our public schools every day. I certainly don’t mean to suggest doomsday is our democracy is on the verge of becoming another military dictatorship. However, the more we ignore teaching such excellent character habits in favor of teaching habits of obedience and acceptance, the closer we move to such a government. Obviously many more students could be taught more about building excellent character habits IF more parents and children were free to experimentally work at improving their own neighborhoods and schools. We Deweyan liberals aren’t asking all public schools become more liberal all at once. We are asking for more freedom at the local level for caring and concerned parents and students to create such schools in their own neighborhoods! Without that freedom at a local level educational experimentation will continue within the same book-obsessed system we now have. Today it’s called the Common Core system, but it’s essentially the same book-centered system already in place. It’s like experimenting with, say, only different kinds of tea. What we liberals need is the freedom to experiment with milk, coffee, sodas, and waters! In any case, however, people still have the ultimate power in a democracy, even though our own feudalistic political system makes an improvement process more difficult. Just as the aristocracy make improvement for the serfs almost impossible in the Middle Ages, so too state and national laws keep making improvements at the local level more difficult. Not impossible, just more difficult. School improvement is just one example among many, drugs and prostitution laws are 2 other examples. With such a political system the feudal Middle Ages lives on. The improvement door is open somewhat. But for real experimentation to begin happening, more parents, teachers, and students need to start demanding the freedom to start a process of public school improvement! How many parents and students today still don’t even realize they can help build better student-centered schools if they have a plan and demand the freedom to experiment? How many of tomorrow’s criminals would start building more helpful and sympathetic character habits if they were allowed to read to the elderly and disabled even one day a week? Much of the time undereducated parents simply don’t know such character-building options are available, or why they’re so important. Most people come home from work dog-tired and ready for dinner, a few beers, and little else. Most people don’t even ask themselves how many young frustrated drop-outs could be helped to make their dreams become reality in more liberal schools, where students are given more of a choice besides learning more book-facts or leaving school. These aren’t just abstract ideas; they’re a felt reality playing out throughout the US, and no doubt much of the world too. Like any good experimentalist Dewey’s constructive public school criticisms in the early 1900s began focusing on specifics, like job training. Vocational schools, for example, were one of his suggestions, and they’ve grown tremendously since then. Many of Los Angles’ schools too now teach useful job skills for a specific service, like health care, performing arts, and business skills, so they help children learn some practical habits. All well and good. But, how many such students still don't learn what excellent community-service habits feel like? How many never learn how to help others with some of their money? And the more such character habits are formally neglected, the more government monies will certainly be needed to keep the dangerous social results of such neglect controlled by more police, courts, and prisons. How many ‘inner’ cities around the country have already become social ‘sewers’ where homeless people live? No doubt, it's useful to learn practical job skills like carpentry, welding, auto and computer repair, and experimental lab skills, but why should equally useful charity and philanthropy training stay conveniently ignored? When they are is it the result of conservative teachers who want to maintain a feudalistic class or tribal structure as much as possible? The good news is we’re not facing an immediate doomsday implosion, at least not until too much atmospheric carbon makes life impossible in many places. The world may well end in a carbon whimper, rather than in atomic blasts! Students today are getting many more educational options for character development than ever before. They can volunteer, for example, for many trash-collecting programs on the weekends, and with helping people overcome local disasters, like earthquakes and floods. But, again, aren't there more intelligent and helpful activities to learn other than sweeping streets? What about using all their scientific facts about plants and animals to build community gardens with senior citizens? Wouldn’t they be more fun and educational than sitting in some classroom day after day, memorizing soon-forgotten book facts? Wouldn’t such active learning projects help make their book-work even more meaningful? Wouldn’t it be great exercise for seniors too? During this relatively peaceful time, isn’t it time people started experimenting more with getting students out into our neighborhoods in a safe and healthy way? How many poor communities could use a community fish tank, and how many high schools students would love to build one with the intelligent constructive skills they learned in their public schools? No doubt there would be new safety challenges to overcome first, but students could even help solve them too. People are facing new economic challenges on a daily basis too, as obscenely wealthy people keep creating and maintaining a system where only they keep becoming wealthy. But if economists are right, and capitalism really runs on consumer choices, then why can’t our schools begin weaning students away from their books and begin feeling what it’s like to start demanding huge concentrations of wealth be better circulated for everyone’s benefit, and not just a few? And if adults are free to make the purchases they want, then why shouldn’t students be free to choose the classes they want to attend? Why not let the student market decide what their classes should be, and how they should be taught, just like consumers stock purchases help decide what businesses to grow? Who knows? Some teachers might even like such work more than merely grading papers and making tests. Again, all such reconstructive changes needn’t be abrupt, total, and thus too disruptive! They can be slow, gradual, and always improving; slow and steady wins the educational race too, doesn’t it? That way it’s easy to correct and improve weaknesses. Some of the wasteful social results already mentioned tell us more people should be free to experiment with our public schools. Each year tens of billions of dollars are already being spent by our police, courts, and prisons to merely correct or confine unhealthful character weaknesses. Wouldn’t it have been better for tax payers to teach more intelligent habits in grade-school? What judge or cop wouldn’t like to play more golf or tennis, or have more time to visit our schools and speak more about what respectful habit-arts students are learning? Wouldn’t the same also apply to doctors, psychologists, and lawyers? The longer we ignore such character excellence, the more obnoxious and wasteful social results are produced. By the time they get to prison it’s almost impossible to teach young folks more intelligent habit-arts. For years many will remain just as reasonable as Herr Hitler, and some even suffer the same suicidal fate. Timothy McVey was so angry he built a car bomb and killed over 200 people with it; how many young McVey’s are now in our public schools? Shouldn’t our schools have more psychologists working to find out who has such feelings, and then help them build more constructive ones? Aren’t our public schools the nature work place for our psychologists? Bottom line: Educational change is not impossible. Difficult yes, impossible no! Drug abuse is one example. Our legal system is realizing drug abuse is more of an educational problem than anything else; many people simply never were encouraged to teach themselves to enjoy life without drugs. Many of their public schools were places where serious, silent work was practiced most of all. No doubt, illegal drug abuse is still not widespread, but legal drug abuse seems to be much more widespread than it once was. In any case, learning to work and play enjoyably while in school would help reduce the need for such abuse, wouldn’t it? After all, what else do drugs do but relax a person and promote confident feelings? Once again, experimentation with more liberal schools is the only way to find out for sure! In any case such problems continue sapping billions to stop, say, Columbian coca planters, and still haven’t solved the problem of cocaine abuse here in the US. People continue paying for the drug, when they could just as easily get a legal prescription and also start talking to a drug counselor about building more healthful habits. At any rate, isn’t it worth experimenting with teaching more enjoyable habits in our public schools? Who knows for sure what useful social results will be produced? Like so many other personally weak, excessive, and unhealthful habits, drug abuse too is an educational problem, not a criminal problem! Again, the more young folks teach themselves the excellent character art of enjoying and celebrating life without drugs, the less need they'll have for them later on, and what better place is there to start learning such character habits than in our homes, churches, and schools? One day our churches may stop controlling others by teaching religious spirit-myths and instead focus only on helping people become more independent and learn how to intelligently help themselves. Why shouldn’t parents start demanding our public schools teach more than the so-called 3 R’s -- reading, writing, and arithmetic? Why shouldn’t they teach students how to become more independent and how to use book facts to keep making life more satisfying? What might such schools and churches look like? They would be places where everyone could learn more intelligent habit-arts, like how to make an intelligent practice plan, and then carefully test it. When building a more healthful diet, for example, student teams can first read and get some facts about different foods -- learn more about some healthful diet options and what results they might produce in their own bodies. Who knows, some may even discover ways to even improve on the book-facts! Then they can make a plan to test their ideas. As we’ve already seen, such active experimental learning has become our strongest learning art, and such planning and testing would begin building their feelings for that most important habit-art. What's more, if their testing also helped feed some of those less fortunate, like with a garden or fish farm, it would also begin building the useful character art of helping others. In that way learning would be much more active, experimental, and natural, just as it is outside of school! Instead of getting in education’s way such schools can make it more excellent, helping more students become more confident they can intelligently become what they want to become. Here's a great example of how neglected excellent character habits still are, even for gifted students at one of our best universities. Merely learning more and more mathematical facts helped a ‘genius’ earn a doctorate degree at Harvard, but he eventually became a murdering Unabomber who the public now supports with their taxes? Well at least his bombs were all mathematically correct, weren’t they? It’s yet another reason why we Deweyan liberals say character excellence -- KNOWING HOW TO USE FACTS INTELLIGENTLY TO HELP OTHERS AND OUR SELF -- might be THE most important educational goal! And to get that point across with a little more humor, and impress the idea on all peoples’ minds forever and ever, or as least on one person’s mind, here's yet another laboriously lame limerick! To a thief who was caught with the brass He was asked why act like an ass? Why not look twice, To find a nice Little computer rip-off class? No doubt, even criminal actions too need new skills just to stay in business. 18. MORE ABOUT LIBERAL EDUCATION, 102 Esthetic Experience in Our Schools That sounds like a very sophisticated kind of experience, but once again, odd-sounding words are often used to describe very simple ordinary experiences. Case in point: for us Deweyan liberals esthetic experience merely calls our conscious attention to our feeling here and now. Feeling, say, sunlight is an esthetic experience. What could be simpler? When children build their first finger painting, for example, they have some new esthetic experience -- they feel what the paint looks and feels like, and thus keep expanding their old set of esthetic feelings. And when they use such feeling to help others become a little smarter, their socially esthetic feelings grow as well. However, the more our public schools allow such experience to remain on a non-verbal subconscious level of awareness, the more disconnected from esthetic experience students become. Luckily philosophic history often talks about such feelings when it talks about learning and art. Ancient Greeks, for example, called such feelings qualities, like hot and cold, wet and dry. Thus, for Dewey, new esthetic feelings are important; they're the natural result of any new body-mind learning experience. As anyone knows, one’s first sexual experience is full of new esthetic feelings! It’s why such constructive building projects became important in his educational model. They further educate the entire body-mind of feelings AND ideas. Such experiences not only produce new ideas but new feelings as well. For him, another great weakness of our public schools is to quickly downplay feelings’ importance in learning by confining student work to merely book ideas! Such a conservative learning model soon makes school something to be endured, rather than enjoyed; the feeling of enjoyment is so important to learning any kind of new habit. Why keep practicing something that’s not enjoyable and fun? How many parents today not only ask their children what they learned in school today, but also about how they felt about such ideas -- what their esthetic learning felt like? How many parents today ignore their child’s bored feelings, and tell them that’s the way school is, rather than demanding the schools start producing more enjoyable esthetic learning experiences. Centuries ago Ben Franklin realized how important esthetic feelings were in education, and so suggest students get out of the classroom and go on field trips to feel how other people are working. Today students still go to museums, but when it’s only once or twice a year it doesn’t overcome most boring feelings about school. What’s more, how many parents never teach their children how to CONSCIOUSLY make their lives more enjoyable with playful esthetic experience by simply talking about that art? How many parents in fact keep allowing their public schools to continue wasting so much of students’ time and efforts learning mere mental ideas, rather than demand a more holistic body-mind approach to learn with more active learning projects? Such active learning projects also makes learning character habits like respect and honesty that much easier when they’re felt and not just redd about! How many people today are still esthetic children, and don’t realize how important enjoyable feelings are in any new learning experience? Such esthetic feelings help make life and learning less stressful, more enjoyable, and more satisfying! More liberal models of educational excellence like Dewey’s encourage all the above-mentioned kinds of esthetic excellence; they promote democratic and individual development. They nurture individual development, rather than keep isolating students from each other as well as bodily feelings from mental ideas. Mere book work emphasizes just the thinking and reasoning half of the body-mind. More liberal educational models like Dewey’s ask how can we better guide and encourage more enjoyable, respectful, and helpful feelings to keep growing in students, and thus weaken disrespectful and selfish feelings? Active and practical workshops and projects for students was the best answer to that question. Within them learning all the traditional skills like reading, writing, and arithmetic are learned naturally, rather than boringly and repetitively! Such work job-based workshops can best promote the practice of enjoyable esthetic feelings, and thus make learning itself more fun. Just the act of building something, whether it’s a table or a relationship, is itself capable of generating a very large number of new esthetic meanings and feelings. In fact, enjoyable esthetic feelings can turn any unsatisfying routine habit into a more creative habit-art. How many people have felt golf was too frustrating while they were learning it, and yet continued improving those feelings with more enjoyable practice? In fact, such enjoyable esthetic feelings have often been used to build a person’s sexual habits as well, so it’s intelligent to first ask a person you’re interested in what their sexual training has been. It just might save a lot of wasted time and frustration later on. New and unfelt esthetic feelings always grow during new experiences, but like anything else it takes some practice to first consciously notice them, and then to make them as enjoyable and fun as possible! Otherwise, all constructive work is merely unintelligent routine. Here is where teachers can be so useful; good liberal teachers help students verbalize their feelings, and thus make it easier to make a conscious plan to make them more enjoyable and fun. If you feel tired and tense, for example, then why not take a little break and relax those un-enjoyable feelings and start feeling more enjoyable ones? In fact, the word ‘enjoyable’ means able to produce joyful and happy feelings! What Place Has Physical Punishment? In such loving, caring, and enjoyable schools and homes, what need would there be for physical punishment? In fact, over 90% of criminals supported with excessive amounts of public tax money have been excessively abused as children! No doubt as a learning tool punishment has a very long history and practice. For centuries many Western scholars claimed Aristotle was one of the most educated men of all time, and yet he too said students should sometimes be whacked merely for not paying attention! Such esthetic experiences promote feelings of fear and obedience, the 2 cardinal excellences of a feudalistic political and social system. They in fact help define the educational challenge for we liberal Deweyan democrats! To his day both religious and public school educators still use paddling and other painful feelings as educational tools, sometimes even on students who merely show their joy and happiness; I’ve seen it myself. Our prisons too tell us how dangerous excessive punishment is. The more defenseless children are physically punished, the more it tends to create excessively dreadful feelings of resentment, anxiety, hostility, and of course hatred -- all those feelings often getting in the way of civilized living. True civilization for us Deweyan liberals is all about peace and helpfulness to those in our human tribe, rather than merely our own religious, political, or sexual tribe. To me, if any action is truly obscene, then excessively punishing defenseless children is certainly one of them. Perhaps the best response is to quickly let local child welfare people know about it and ask them to help. When conservative public schools continue focusing on book facts, and ignore more enjoyably active experimental kinds of learning, then it’s normal to student attention to wander and sometimes even lead to disruptive actions; they become discipline problems and either must be punished or removed from class altogether. The other alternative is to remain passive and obedience, like in fact many young girls are conditioned to do. There’s also an equally harmful form of punishment many teachers might practice, and that parents should know about, namely, punishing students with school work itself! How many times have frustrated and disruptive students been punished with repetitive writing assignments, like writing ‘I will be good’ a 100 times? Is it any wonder why far too many of our young folks learn not to like school, and leave as soon as they legally can; up to 50% of the student population in some inner city schools? Who wants to keep practicing the skills they’re punished with? Why make it more difficult to enjoy, love, and nurture the important skills of intelligent learning by linking them to punishment and painful feelings? The mission of our public schools is, or should be, to nurture esthetically enjoyable feelings of intelligent learning, rather than frustrate them. Hopefully the educational use of physical punishment is lessening, but excessive physical punishment seems still a social tragedy in far too many homes, as the 90% statistic tells us! The more excessive it is, the more it can twist and pervert children’s constructive and helpful feeling into destructive and hateful ones, like resentment and anger, unless of course you’re raising children who’ll make their living being spanked! Believe it or not some do and will. No law against it, right? As we’ve seen, there are more intelligent alternatives to punishment as an educational tool. Many people were lucky enough to have a warm, loving, and nurturing home life, where esthetically enjoyable feelings were encouraged. Their parents were their friends rather than their jail keeper. For such parents merely withdrawing their love and affection, until a child promises not to act selfishly or disrespectfully, is punishment enough. The late Senator Ted Kennedy described how his mother Rose sometimes withdrew her warm and enjoyable affection to encourage good habits in her children; that way they learned what actions were unacceptable and which weren’t. The problem was her husband Joseph practiced some disrespectful actions, especially against women, and so her son John Kennedy, for example, continued disrespectful actions, even to the point of becoming morally unfit to remain president. And of course guilt feelings have often been a part of Jewish education for centuries, often produced with both physical and psychic punishment. Humorist Woody Allen gives a classic example of it when he says he doesn’t believe in god, but still feels guilty about it! Is it possible to raise a child without any physical punishment? Why not? As a learned early in my teaching career, the more young folks are rewarded and praised for their constructive work, for respecting people, just laws, and helping others, then the less need there'll be for any negative kinds of punishment; they’ll feel good about doing what’s excellent, rather than what’s mean and unkind. Besides, merely hitting or isolating a child for misbehaving is not educational excellence; it still leaves a child ignorant about what actions ARE excellent. Punishment often teaches a child what not to do, rather than what to do later on, like how to help those with their problems. Thus rewarding children for their intelligent, kind, and sympathetic actions, and telling them why they're being rewarded, best helps them strengthen such habit-arts! It may even help increase memory power too. Is there an easier way to remember to bring home that octopus sushi and frog’s-leg ice cream? Obviously most parents already do great work raising their children; if not our world would certainly be much worse than it is now. But that certainly doesn’t mean millions of more people can become more active and assertive both politically and socially. Of course some conservatives may want to play around with our people-in-prison numbers to make it sound like it’s not really so outrageously wasteful. Someone might say two million is only about .6 % of our entire population, so forget about making our schools more enjoyable places of learning; they’re not that much of a problem! It’s just more ‘bleeding heart’ liberal scare tactics! But, aside from such statistical playing, the ever-increasing cost to taxpayers remains a very serious growing problem! The more precious tax money must be used to house, clothe, and feel people for their criminal actions, the less money will be available for learning to enjoy more intelligent kinds of actions in our public schools! If nothing else it’s still an example of unnecessary waste! Mere prison housing, feeding, and medical care runs into the tens of billions EACH YEAR! That result to me is certainly wasteful, as it no doubt is to many others, especially when our public schools could be using that money to build much more civilized habits before criminal feelings start growing. Imagine, just for a few moments, how many more psychologists, workshops, and useful community projects could become a part of public education if those billions were available to them. Imagine, just for a few moments, all the potentially great human resources and talents that could be liberated in our schools, instead of being spent on prisons year after year after year with little or no real benefit to society. How many folks get out of prison with the very same feelings and skills they went into prison with? In fact, many come of prison knowing even more about criminal activity! In truth, no one really knows how much stronger, more vibrant, more democratic, and more intolerant our nation would be of any form of feudalism, especially economic feudalism, if those 2 million had been better educated in their homes and public schools. Adult Education? Here’s yet another important liberal education question you might want to think about: Wouldn't it be a good idea to require parents spend a year learning about intelligent child care skills when they enroll their first child in school? No doubt, parents should have the freedom to raise their children as they see fit, as long as they’re lawful and not abusive, but shouldn't they also KNOW what excellent character habits are and how best to teach them? What better place is there to teach such important habit-arts than in our schools? Why keep naively assuming all young folks already know how to intelligently raise children, when in fact they don’t. Because we all pay taxes to house and feed in jail those with weak character habits and excessive criminal habits, don't we all have a right to demand everyone know something about one of our most important skills, namely intelligently raising a child? As it is now, we demand young folks know some important facts about driving a car before getting a license, so why should it be any different with raising a child to live intelligently in a democratic republic? No doubt, conservatives would argue against it. Since Plato conservatives have worked against teaching young folks any kind of democratic skills or intelligent scientific habits; for thousands of years experimental learning and democracy have been conservatives’ sworn enemies! They both weaken the power to control people, and keep them obedient. With such questions and facts it should be clear why controlling liberal education philosophy was so important to conservatives like Plato and even moderates like Aristotle. Real democrats work to end all aristocratic feudalistic social forms and give everyone the same equal rights and opportunity as everyone else! Such reforms are sign of democratic health and power, and public schools are where such habits should be taught. We Deweyan liberals aren't calling for an educational revolution all at once, overnight; that idea belongs to magical fantasies about how life works. But to completely ignore intelligent experimentation, or restrict it legally, is just as dangerous to democratic health. So we say it's best to merely take one baby-step at a time, to the next evolutionary step or plateau, and then keep building from there! Thus, our own neighborhood schools become the battle ground for we Deweyan liberals. If one can be improved with the ideas talked about here, then that’s what’s most important for us. One can lead to 2, and 3, and so on. Furthermore, for such progress we can all play a part, teachers, students, and parents. Even African religious leaders joined the loop to help build intelligent civil disobedient protest habits, rather than their own public schools. That to me is a classic example of how really important and useful our churches can be if they so choose, and how mean and vicious social habits can be improved with their help. History again shows even ol’ Tom Jefferson himself would probably have benefited from better lessons in democratic character excellence. Even though African Sally Hemmings bore him children he continued feeling Africans were generally incapable to reasoning intelligently. In that way he too needed more education. He also never seemed to learn how to intelligently control his own money! He died deeply in debt. Those conservatives who want to keep the educational status quo just like it is, and keep children ignorant about any ideas of excellence, can criticize these liberal educational ideas in a thousand different ways: it'll cost too much; it'll raise taxes; it'll weaken our society in other ways; it won't work; it's communistic and socialistic. For most of US history Native Americans, Africans and Asians were society's most hated people, followed closely behind by Jews, Irish, Catholics, and women. For such conservatives the status quo must be maintained at all costs, even if it means denying people their democratic rights to even vote, and our schools must be places where such habits are passed on! In other words, our schools must continue ignoring democratic ideals, even after more than 200 years of democratic evolution! That’s how important are public schools are to we Deweyan liberals. Selfish and unkind people may not realize an important fact of life; such habits often merely hurt themselves more than anyone else. Without good character training they may never realize ‘what goes around often comes around’; if they deny equal rights to others, then they too deserve to have their civil rights denied! As a result they end up hurting themselves by not treating all people with respect, honor, and equally! My own childhood definitely had many weaknesses, but such bigotry it didn’t have; my lawyer-father even helped integrate Chicago neighborhoods in the 1950s one house at a time. As a result, it’s easy for me to talk and act more liberally about equal rights for everyone! Along with Dewey I just honor and celebrate the democratic principles upon which our liberal tradition and country was founded; we’re all humans and so all deserve the same rights as anyone else. Obviously, democracy is a growth process, like any other habit-art, but the more our public schools are kept out of that growth loop, the more difficult improvement becomes. What liberal didn’t laugh when conservative President Bush 2 told us we could quickly build a cooperative democracy in Iraq when over 200 years we haven’t built one at home yet! And what hypocrisy it is to criticize China and Russia for human rights violations when many people in our own country still have hateful unintelligent feelings and ideas! Another Sign of Democratic Health: Educational Choice? Dewey criticized how book-obsessed public schools teach their prized factual textbook knowledge -- slave-like to an entire group, rather than as a free choice. As most adults already know, for 12 years students read about what someone else tells them is important to know. However, isn't that like going into an aerobics studio and allowing the instructor to tell us what kind of a body we should have? And on top of it, then college professors sometimes complain about students not having strong independent critical thinking skills! How on earth can children learn independent, creative, and critical question-asking skills when, for 12 years, they're made to merely find the book's 'right answers'? So naturally liberal educators like Dewey said such traditional schools really teach mostly habits of intellectual passivity and academic laziness! How can students become curious and want to keep learning when their own question-asking skills have been largely neglected for 12 years? As a result, how many students are happy to be done with school after high school, or even drop-out earlier? In short, when many students finish 12 years of traditional schooling not only are their own character habits not the best, but their all-important curiosity and question-asking skills are weak and greatly undeveloped! In that kind of educational situation is it any wonder many young folks turn to drugs and crime in response to a world they often feel psychically isolated from? Not encouraging all students to intelligently practice excellent learning habits like question-asking, and start learning what they themselves want to learn more about, in effect KEEPS children emotionally and intellectually immature! Is it any wonder young folks often are glad to go to war to relieve their frustrations; killing is easy, just pull the trigger? I’m innocent; I was just following orders. As a result, they often remain vulnerable to those promising quick money and happy times! Thus, Dewey criticized WHAT our schools teach -- their subjects. Traditional school subjects often ignore the practical side of education's coin, namely, how to use such knowledge and facts to keep improving life and building more helpful character habits. That, to him, was certainly less than educational excellence. In fact, such subjects are often used to find the most verbally advanced students; after all, brains are important for improving the species. So when some schools have a drop-out rates of nearly 50% how much objective evidence should people need? Their own school’s educational habits are plainly not satisfying important student needs. The answer is not to simply keep building more conservative book-obsessed schools, but to build schools where student have more educational choices to make. One promising educational option today is called Community Service work, or at least was an option before yet another serious economic recession once again began reducing tax funds for public schools. If one didn’t know better, one might believe our obscenely wealthy upper class would like nothing better than to end all non-profit public schools, so for-profit schools could more easily grow. In any case, a great challenge today is to keep such community service classes growing for students at all levels, from primary to the college level! Such learning is more vibrant, holistic, naturalistic, and more enjoyable than mere book-learning. Such classes give students a greater chance for some real practical community-improving work experience, and so we ask parents to support such programs as much as possible. No doubt, to us such classes are best if they are offered at the primary level, but any level is better than no level! After all, the last I heard seven year old kids were definitely people too! Another challenge is to make them something more than just street sweeping or trash collection. The challenge is to encourage students to see what improvements are possible in an area, make a plan to achieve them, and then test their plan. Such a plan might even include talking to people who could help fund such projects as a neighborhood park or a recycling center for all old electronic gadgets , or even how students could raise the needed money itself. Another liberal educational challenge is to help build a practical psychology workshop, where students could actually practice the healthful ideas they’re learning about, like working humorously and joyfully. Ideally, such classes would start at the primary level, help young sense-based learners learn what respectful and helpful ideas feel like. Almost certainly, only a few lucky students really know what habits are psychologically healthful, and which are dangerous. Once again, such Behavioral studies are easiest to teach at the primary level, and remain useful all through life, so why not start teaching them to children? Why should anyone naively expect anyone to practice psychological health when they’ve never been taught what it feels like? No doubt, many people who know little about Behavioral psychology might feel it’s somehow undermining all their values, but what is so dangerous about teaching students the useful, life-long art of intelligent SELF-TEACHING, or how to use rewards and a 'baby-step' method to slowly teach themselves what they want to learn? Aren't truly educated people those who know HOW to intelligently solve their own problems? If so, then wouldn't such classes easier to see peoples' own ACTIONS AND RESULTS are what're most important, not how they look and who they talk to? Wouldn't just that one idea make it much easier to feel more tolerant to those people who look differently than others, and who are labeled gays and lesbians? And more importantly, wouldn’t we ALL benefit if people learned intelligent habits are simply respectful to all law-abiding people? If you’re really another one of those ‘radical’ democratic educators, then it might be something even worth experimenting with. How many times in history have today’s 'radical' ideas, like equal rights, become tomorrow's democratic status quo? That certainly seems to be the trend, doesn’t it? Educational Results Beyond the Classroom Perhaps more than any other philosopher of the 1900s, Dewey also saw the possibilities such educational ideas create beyond the classroom for building a healthier democracy, where wealth-power is easily controlled with democratic power. Is it just coincidence our obscenely wealthy class has become even wealthier since our schools have become more book-obsessed since the late 1950s, and our universities have become less affordable to all but the wealthiest families. Only they can easily afford the huge costs of college, and so keep being lectured by conservative professors, many of whom want nothing more than to maintain our feudalistic status quo. In more liberal democratic schools children would have a choice about learning not only useful job skills, but also about useful character habits as well! He saw clearly how our public schools can be used not to build a healthier democracy, where equal rights are demanded for all, but rather merely maintain the political and economic status quo. If our public schools don’t teach such intelligent experimental habits on a formal basis, even to primary age students, then their entire character growth will remain stunted, immature, and even medieval. The recent explosion of business arts and skills need young folks who know how to experiment intelligently and creatively, how to learn new skills quickly, and how to use extra monies to help those less well off. No doubt, sometimes it takes some trial-and-error experimentation for students to discover what job skills they like best, and also learn how to enjoy experimentally learning more about them. It even took very intelligent Ben Franklin years to learn how important science was, and also begin experimentally learning how to build useful objects, like a lightning rod so as to better protect buildings and people from becoming cinders. Until then people continued using religious skills like prayer and worship to avoid lightning’s dangers. And even after the lightning rod was invented some religious conservatives condemned him for taking away some of god’s power to punish sinners! Such is the power of conservative habits to maintain the social status quo, even though the outside world around them is continually changing and evolving! More liberal democratic schools will make it easier for more people to start learning how to intelligently control constructive kinds of growth, rather than merely reject all such ideas. What better skill can there be in an always changing world? Without the help of our tax-supported public schools, real progress educating young folks about practicing or democratic ideals has been difficult. Good liberal schools are still relatively rare, even in the US, and population growth rates make the challenge even more difficult. Teachers must be trained themselves, new curriculums designed for more liberal schools, and then even allowed to grow in places where un-democratic habits are firmly in place. In those places conservatives and many moderates choose to block any such useful educational reforms; they want students to remain educated only about the habits they feel are best. Recently I even heard a high government Democratic education official flatly say character habits will never be formally taught in public schools, as if there was some eternal and unchanging natural law against it! Such un-democratic statements continue telling us true liberals should first focus on improving their own neighborhood schools, and thus increase the educational freedom for everyone! Conservatives know full well, the more young folks are liberated from their old routine educational habits of obedience to their teachers and books, and encouraged to more clearly see how political propaganda is used to maintain an economic, political, and educational status quo, the more vulnerable that feudalistic status quo becomes! That’s exactly what most conservatives and moderates have not wanted, do not now want, and almost certainly will never want! They want to keep making it easier for them to keep taking more of the public’s money, even if it’s used to build more useless and unneeded weapons, or give it to wealthy corporations and farmers who don’t need it. With more liberal public schools, more people will find it easier to elect more liberal politicians who aren’t afraid to tax the already obscenely wealthy at a much fairer rate than they now pay, and also work to restrict their putting millions of dollars into off-shore bank accounts, and thus avoid paying taxes at all! If there’s any kind of natural human law, it might be this: those with power will keep working to maintain, conserve, and increase it as much as possible! Western history is literally brimming with examples of that idea, and it’s still brimming to this day! This also seems rather safe to say. Without more liberal democratic-oriented public schools, our so-called cultural wars between conservatives and liberals will continue being won by a small class of very wealthy people. Thus, stress and frustration will continue being felt by most everyone; stressful economic recessions seem to be happening even more frequently these days. People should thus know: true conservatives want children to continue learning habits of obedience and meek acceptance of the ideas and feelings they're given to learn. Such habits grow stronger every time a child works on another academically trivial book assignment, and is made to feel they are the most important things to know. As we’ve seen in these pages, from Plato on, what’s been most important for conservatives is maintaining their feudalistic status quo, whether its based on secular or religious assumptions! The more such conservative and moderate aristocratic assumptions were challenged, the more room became available to build more liberal democratic habits and skills. Also worth thinking about is this idea too. Our conservative book-oriented public schools make it easier for students to join some kind of military service where obedience to those with authority is not just expected, but demanded. From the 1890s on US military outfits have often been forcing people in other countries to accept US goods and services, and thus, with the help of obedient soldiers, enslaving them with perpetual debt to US banks and the wealthy upper class! Such obedient soldiers have been making it easy to enforce those goals by even cold-bloodedly killing and murdering anyone who might rebel against them; Vietnam was merely one brutal and vicious example among hundreds occurring throughout the 1900s while building a US economic and military empire. As we've seen, after he retired Marine General Smedley Butler said flatly he acted as just a high class muscleman obeying orders from Wall Street and wealthy financiers! No doubt, these days that empire is maintained more with economic power than military force, with orgs. like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, but they continue working to maintain a feudalistic economic status quo. To his credit, Aristotle said to use money merely to make more money should not be allowed, and he also saw how it was often used to buy more political and economic power. But without also suggesting democratic ways to better control that power for everyone’s benefit, they remain merely 2 ideas. While some corporations were making millions of dollars during World War 1selling guns and weapons, the US government passed a law forbidding people to even speak against the war; the First Amendment be damned, there was money to be made. It's yet another example of how money will distort any democratic freedom in its path. For us Deweyan liberals such military and economic reality both rest on young folks obeying for most of 12 years what they’re told to do by their teachers, without any practical freedom or encouragement to even question the usefulness of any such assignments. Again, in the corporate world such unquestioning habits of obedience are useful; corporate leaders don’t want anyone questioning the pay they get, the working conditions they have, or the work they do. All such freedoms would merely endanger their own profits and salaries. As a result, many corporations have been fighting for decades against union worker power! To this day women are often paid less than men for the same work, mostly because they haven’t learned to organize themselves and thus increase their economic power. They haven’t yet learned healthy democratic habits! In fact, union membership is at an all-time low these days while corporate profits are at an all-time high! We Deweyan liberals say this situation is a direct result of conservative educational practices in our own public schools, and until they change it’s naïve to believe life will change in any meaningful way! The addiction to money can be just as dangerous as the addiction to any dangerous drug. Many religious conservatives too still believe, with Plato, it’s absolutely necessary to keep others and our nation as free as possible from sin and irreligious habits; the current fight against same-sex marriage is merely one example. In short, for all such reasons the battle to build more liberal democratic public schools continues to this day! For us liberals the main reason is fairly easy to see: the more people are conditioned to feel some of their ideas reflect absolute truth, the more likely they are to resist any challenges to them. The more people feel as Aristotle did, that some people are natural slaves, and should be treated that way, the easier it was for mean, violent, and vicious racial and sexual hatreds to continue on, and thus making our democracy much less healthy than it might be. Liberals like Dewey, on the other hand, not only recognized such a reality, but also began challenging it by helping build more liberal democratic schools where child development stages were more respected. Even many ancient conservatives have said children should be allowed to play and learn with games until they’re almost teenagers. For Dewey such liberal ideas would make it easier to keep educating youngsters about actually building a more peaceful and productive world for everyone, and not just a small class of obscenely wealthy folks. Teaching creatively experimental habits and skills while learning useful employment skills is basically how liberal schools differ from conservative ones. Too many young folks still haven’t been allowed or encouraged to learn such important skills, and thus make life less difficult for themselves and our nation more democratic with equal rights and opportunities for all. Naturally, such liberal democratic schools would rest on all of the ideas mentioned so far, like the experimental learning of practical and useful knowledge and skills, the freedom to choose and learn more about a career path while still in school, and how to use our creative ideas as helpful tools, rather than merely building a bank account. No doubt, today we face many of the same social challenges mankind has faced for thousands of years, and have been frustrated by conservatives for thousands of years too! Without such a practical and useful democratic educational model, we continue facing serious social and personal problems, like economic slavery, drug addiction, gang violence, social disrespect, forced prostitution, and juvenile and adult crime to name just 6 obnoxious results. They continue telling us our traditional book-centered educational models need improving. Those results are not the result of corrupt liberal ideas and feelings, much less an evil human nature, as conservatives even today tell us. They’re the result of conservative educational models of education kept in practice for thousands of years first with religious ideas, and today also with secular ideas about conservative values being the best values of all. It’s an old sophist debate trick; when something is your fault blame the other person as much and as often as you can! In truth, however, much of our modern world today is the direct result of conservative institutions. For example, today conservative ideas about the value of a small minority having vast amounts of economic wealth and power are useful for a few conservative politicians to stay in power and keep working to maintain such a feudal economic system. Those few thousand people have more wealth and political power than 50% of the population combined!? Is that in fact the best kind of social model to make life better for everyone? Real life conditions emphatically tell us it is not! No doubt, much has been accomplished and improved for many people in our modern world in merely the past 200 years. Millions of people are now being fed, clothed, housed, and better educated than ever before, thanks to experimental science and more liberal political improvements. However, as many also know, life has also remained very brutal for many as well. For far too many young folks today, not having useful job skills when they leave high school continues making them vulnerable to some of the most dehumanizing habits ever practiced, like addicting young women to drugs and forcing them into prostitution merely to feed their pimp’s drug habit! The more people are educated to look the other way, the easier it becomes to continue such actions. So, isn’t it natural to ask if our own public schools are partly to blame for such results? Why shouldn’t students be educated to not only quickly report such events, but also to learn useful job skill so it would be easier to resist such actions? Don’t young women have the right to learn such skills? Thanks in part to our book-obsessed schools, hundreds of thousands of young women runaways will begin leading such a life, and living with the psychic scars for the rest of their lives unless they get some expert professional help. Such events can be reduced with the help of fully staffed caring public schools helping learn how to demand respect from others while they enjoyable learn useful job skills. Often such young women attended schools where building more helpful and practical skills was thought to be beyond education’s scope, and thus be unprofessional! Conservatives have been arguing like that for centuries. If we’re to build more useful skills for our modern democratic world, then a willingness to experiment with new ideas is another useful habit-art. Not feeling some ideas shouldn’t be experimented with even for a short time, like with equal marriage rights, prevents people from seeing the actual results from such actions, and thus have some objective evidence one way or another! Have such results made life any different, and if so in what way? Such an intelligent experimental habit-art is the natural result of seeing ideas as merely mental tools, not absolute truth. When students are better educated about our experimental Behavioral psychology, it becomes easier to feel some ideas should be experimented with, just to see their results. How would my life change if I allowed gay and lesbian couples to marry? What would be the social results if more students were allowed to learn the job skills they want to learn, and had more democratic freedom to choose school rules and student representatives? As it is now, many young folks leave school with weak feelings for those important skills, and thus keep allowing others to build the kind of world we now have. In fact, as many as 500,000 young folks become vulnerable runaways every year who often get forced into prostitution by brutal males already addicted to drugs. Thus, it becomes practically impossible to even think about how their own neighborhood schools could be helping improve that situation by enjoyably teaching more useful job skills to young folks. Also, what‘s wrong with experimentally testing for a short time the idea of legalizing prostitution and drug use, just to see what results might be produced? Sex is a human need, and so learning to express it in socially healthy ways is an important habit-art. How can life possibly keep becoming better and more satisfying for everyone unless more people treat their ideas experimentally, and see what results are actually produced? Without such feelings for experimental learning we simply remain in the same old routine ruts of paying to feed and house drug users and sellers in prison at about $50,000 each a year! Then, when they get out they’re back on the streets within days luring more young teenage women into the same actions. How useful for social health is it to keep ignoring how young folks want to start learning some useful job skills even while they’re in elementary school? Why shouldn’t our schools help students build practical clothing, law enforcement, medical and legal skills so they can begin serving community needs even while in school? Dewey’s new liberal models of educational excellence are saying this is OUR world to experiment with intelligently, and the more we do, the easier it becomes to find better ways of living and judging any idea or action. In fact, with freedom from believing any routine idea or ritual reflects nature’s absolute truth has come the freedom to keep experimenting with all intelligent kinds of growth, rather than keep obeying a status quo producing such obnoxious results. If some students want to learn how be bus drivers, then why not also teach them how to be creative and intelligent drivers who know how to enjoy their needed public service work? No institution stays the same forever. Perhaps the best example of that is some of our religious organizations; many are working to make their followers more humane and humanistic, and focused on helping those who still have many old conservative ideas about life and nature. What better goal could any organization possibly have? Many liberals today say such liberal humanistic goals are religion’s oldest and most worthwhile. For example, many fundamental Christian sects now regularly use Behavioral psychology methods to help those addicted to old conservative ideas, and thus teach the art of intelligently growing better habits one step at a time and one day at a time. The more they do, the more they improve life in this world -- the only people-friendly world for many billions of miles around! Is there any better way for religious folks to express their love than encouraging people to intelligently enjoy the art of guiding their own excellent growth? Isn't that the best goal of a truly liberated religion, as it is with a truly liberal education? To us Deweyan liberals, the more people feel all of life should be a self-directed educational growth, and stay focused on improving life for everyone, the more sensitive they’ll become to controlling those who want to keep enslaving as many as possible for their own comfort! Teaching others to enjoy guiding their growth intelligently and experimentally embodies the new modern liberal model of ideas as mental tools and democratic equal rights as the best political system. To us Deweyan liberals, all those social organizations treating only their ideas as absolute Truth are more psychically enslaving than liberating, and more controlling than loving and respectful. After all, nature never has had only one model of truth, and almost certainly never will have. Many liberal people today have dedicated their lives to teaching their new models of ideas as experimental mental tools. Indeed, with such humanistic ideas there are as many different 'roads to heaven', feelings about being born again, and becoming saved as there are people on earth! The popular saying is there are more ways than 1 to skin a cat. Such tolerant feelings are yet another new naturalistic result of seeing all ideas as experimental. With its help we can also more deeply celebrate some new modern heroes who actively worked for democracy's ideal of equal rights, like Susan Anthony, Ben Franklin, Jane Addams, Martin Luther King Jr., and John Dewey, as well as millions of other liberals who're working for the same result each and every day. For example, the more Susan Anthony sensed women were mainly taught how to be obedient second-class citizens, the more deeply she felt the idea of inequality as merely another social weakness, and thus as something to keep experimentally improving. Voting rights for women became his mission! Why should anyone tolerate half the population not having an equal right to vote, or not having reproductive freedom? Isn’t expanding such equal rights what all humane organizations do? Such a modern democratic world continues unfolding. In fact, just a few hundred years ago, in the 1700s, many Christians routinely believed this idea was absolute truth: some women and children become possessed by devils and evil spirits, and so should be burned as witches to save their souls. One more example may be useful. About 30,000 years ago Neandertals failed to improve their routine habits of living while the newly evolved sapien peoples continued spreading out around the globe. Thus, within a few thousand years they became extinct. The more Neandertals practiced their old routine hunting habits, the more difficult it was to experiment with new ones, and thus continue feeling life’s enjoyments. It’s not just prehistoric history either; such a reality continues on even today. Recently secular totalitarian leaders have shown how dangerous routine habits of obedience can be. Stalin, Hitler, and Pol Pot all demanded obedience to their models of truth, while killing millions of people who allowed them the power to do so. To us Deweyan liberals, even these examples from human history are enlightening. They help teach us we the people have the power to build a more satisfying world for everyone, and unless we focus that democratic power we will be responsible for whatever else happens; unless the people act together and more democratically, our world will remain feudalistic. If liberals like Dewey are right, if all our ideas depend on HUMAN habit-arts, then more liberal democratic schools will build such a world more quickly, a kinder, more respectful, and helpful world where children’s helpful dreams are fulfilled rather than frustrated. Who knows, maybe even one day peace may break out all over the world! Imagine that, aye?? Stranger things have happened, haven't they? However, almost certainly it'll never happen unless we ourselves start looking at more intelligent and humane models of education, economics, nature, and politics. The more that happens, the easier it’ll become for such a world to keep evolving. Little feisty Jonathan went to school in May, Mother had roused him from bed where he lay. While studying an octagonal cask, He raised his hand and asked, Hey, am I gonna learn anything useful today? 16. EDUCATION: CONSERVATIVE AND DEWEYAN, 101 In this and the following 2 sections we take Book 1's longest look at Dewey's liberal educational models of excellence. Usually the philosophy of education is treated as a minor philosophic subject, if it’s treated at all. As in so many ways, Plato was an exception to that rule; his most famous book Republic is essentially a book on educational philosophy. For Dewey, however, and many other liberals, education was one of philosophy's most important subjects, if not the most important! Only with better education can people begin seeing more intelligent ways of acting and guiding their lives, and thus build better habits. Luckily Dewey lived at a time when many Americans wanted to keep improving their lives and governments -- the Progressive Era -- and so in many places around the country many of his educational ideas were experimented with, tested, and continued on into the 1950s! At such schools young folks were helped to learn useful job skills as well as important character habits, like helping others and respecting just laws, as well as learn how to intelligently change unjust ones. For example, for a while Gary, Indiana's entire school district began using many of his ideas in the 1910s, as did the Chicago Vocational School system, and of course later in life entire country’s like Turkey, China, and Japan asked him for educational advice about making their own schools more excellent. They all wanted to keep improving their schools so their young folks would learn more intelligent habit-arts and thus lessen many of their social problems, like crime, unemployment, and helping their economies become more industrial and competitive. Even though he went to China decades before the Communists took over, today China produces more engineers than anyone else and their economy is rapidly becoming world-class, second only to the US. In any case, however, these 3 sections are not just for new teachers, but also for parents and students of education; after all, parents are the most important teachers for any child! Our Main Criticisms For we liberal Deweyans, for too long US education has been out of the progressive improvement loop, so to speak. Its basic education philosophy has been too conservative and even medieval. For us, educational excellence is the best and ONLY way for people AND societies to keep growing and evolving more peaceful and intelligent habit arts, but the more traditional schools remain, the more difficult that goal becomes. Such book-obsessed schools make it more difficult to learn all the democratic and experimental habits making life all it can be. To Dewey liberal education was the best key for teaching young folks how best to keep improving all their habit-arts, like healthcare, charity, exercise, lawfulness, and respect for equal rights. Again, without such a liberal educational system, many social problems remain an economic drag, like fighting crime, underemployment, unemployment, crippling social discrimination, drug abuse, health problems, democratic weaknesses, not to mention global warming and war itself. For Dewey all such modern social challenges can most rapidly be improved only with effective and practical educational ideas and practices, ones in which students make an emotional commitment to learning what feels best to them, rather than being regimented and made to learn what they often have no desire or need to learn. The less young folks make that emotional commitment, the sooner they forget what they spent years being made to learn. And so for us Deweyan liberals children should be free to choose a career path as soon as possible, even in elementary school! Such an emotional commitment makes it much easier to then teach students the valuable character habits they’ll need to become successful lawyers, doctors, engineers, police people, carpenters, plumbers, or whatever, and also the writing, reading, and calculating skills schools now try to teach. So, if Dewey's right, if the emotional commitment to learn practical employment skills is the best educational model for any kind of learning, then child psychology becomes one of the most important subjects of all. Without knowing something about the 3 main stages of child development, it’s almost impossible to build such schools, as Plato himself saw thousands of years ago. In general those stages are a playfully sense-based stage until about 7, a constructive stage until about 11 or 12, and then, as the brain matures, a more intellectual stage capable of grasping more abstract ideas. Thus, without accepting such a child psychology, and instead yoking students to book-work for 12 years, it will take much longer for almost anyone to learn any kind of excellence! And the more that doesn’t happen, the more vulnerable millions of young folks will remain to all of society’s unintelligent temptations and vices. On the other hand, the more schools are based on that psychology, the more naturalistic and less stressful school becoming, and the more children will want to be there. After helping found the American Association of University Professors, and becoming its first president, Dewey published his best educational book, Democracy and Education. Also The School and Society is a good little introductory book about elementary education. More About Dewey After he moved to the newly opened University of Chicago in 1894 Dewey opened its famous Lab School; there he began testing his liberal ideas. It’s still operating today, helping students learn valuable computer skills. After his undergraduate studies he taught briefly at the high school level in Pennsylvania, and there he began feeling how artificial conservative educational models were; without emotionally committing themselves to learn all the book facts they were being asked to learn, school for most students became a place merely to go to until the law said they could leave. For how many students is that the reality even today? In fact, even today most students just don’t need to know all those book facts college professors of education said they should learn. Also, they often justified their book-based models on producing so-called well-rounded students who learn a little of many different subjects. Again, at such schools students quickly forgot the ideas they learned merely to pass the next test. Thus, education for most everyone remained shallow, superficial, and worst of all, useless for much of life outside the school room! Greatly undereducated parents didn’t know enough about education to challenge such an educational model. Thus, often students weren’t prepared for the new jobs being created as science and technology continued creating them. In short, Dewey realized the whole feeling-side of education was largely missing in traditional classrooms; it was mostly just telling students to learn academic subjects at merely a mechanically verbal level of learning, rather than a holistic level of feeling AND verbal learning. So, like Alexander’s empire, conservative public education covered a lot of ground but it was only a few inches deep. And the work was easy; teachers just needed to stay a day or 2 ahead of the students’ book assignments. But again, such facts were all but useless in the real world outside of school. Another result was to ignore the far more useful subject of character development. Thus, again, many students remained vulnerable to all the anti-social actions going on in their own neighborhoods. Police brutality thus became intensified as more people broke the law mainly for economic reasons. They didn’t have the skills to work at better paying jobs, and thus racial segregation and discrimination continued making life needlessly stressful. In Chicago Dewey got the chance to test some of his more holistic and naturalistic ideas of learning, based on a sounder model of child psychology. There he saw the results of making learning an active, sense-based, enjoyable, and natural as learning outside of school. He wanted children to learn about history, chemistry, physics, but he also wanted such subjects taught not just from books in the higher grades, but from active and holistic learning experience! That way, a child’s bodily feelings would be just as educational as talking about ideas. In short, Dewey saw how knowledge should be located in one’s muscles as much as one’s brain. For example, having young students at the sense-based stage of development build a garden would also begin teaching them some elementary chemistry, biology, and mathematical facts. Also, it would make those ideas more meaningful because the experience was active, rather than a passive desk-centered model where student muscles are kept out of the educational loop, so to speak. After all, such children learn best with active practice. He also began experimenting with building projects for students at the constructive stage of development. He saw how even his own children learned best when they actively experimented intelligently to build what they wanted, and when teachers helped them feel what intelligent actions felt like. Students were to first make a detailed plan for their projects, and then actually test it themselves to see its results. Such holistic and organic learning experiences made learning important intelligent and experimental ideas easier and more enjoyable, and it also increased their carpentry, electrical, and plumbing skills. What kind of fertilizer, for example, was best for a garden, and how much of it was best? What is fertilizer? Are there different kinds? How is it made? Such questions begin opening up for young children the entire world of experimental research, and not just for a few, but for all students. Then, after moving to Columbia University in New York in 1904, he continued writing about education and convincing more people how our traditional public schools could be even better with the addition of constructive or project kinds of learning. If children wanted to learn more about politics, then they would make a list of questions, plan a trip to city hall, and talk with politicians who could answer their questions. Such learning projects would be much more meaningful to students than merely passively reading about politics. Then, when students’ body-minds are ready to study abstract ideas, the last 2 years of high school could be devoted to those studies, especially for students going on to college. Such a learning model was also useful for promoting democratic feelings of equality; each student played some part in such projects. Some Ancient Education History As with so many other philosophic ideas, liberal and active models of education go back not only to ancient Greek Sophists and Atomists, but they were used by our native ancestors for millions of years! All useful tools and habits were actively built experimentally, since the first stone tool was built over 2 million years ago! Normally, native children are taught to build their own useful skills, tools, and weapons during their constructive stage of childhood. And often it was the only way women were educated until the 1800! In ancient Greece, many Sophists like Protagoras became the college professors of the time, traveling from city to city and giving lectures about what students should practice. Sometimes they sold their books too! In fact, Dewey says how their new liberal questions about learning helped build the classic model of philosophy which lasted thousands of years! What is learning? Can character excellence be taught, or was it just a random gift from the gods? What is the best political, ethical, and educational system? Is there one or many? Such questions helped define philosophy’s 6 main topics, namely nature, learning, ethics, politics, education, and art. As they went from city to city they gave lectures for which they charged a fee; hey, sophists gotta eat too, right? What’s more, the lectures were aimed at teaching young folks practical skills for living more intelligently in the new democratic systems evolving around Greece. For example, learning how to speak well in public and in the law courts, where juries were sometimes 500 people; many people were afraid to speak in front of such large groups. They also lectured about important skills like estate management. Books were expensive and thus almost non-existent, and so lecturing gave young folks a chance to hear about new ideas they could practice for themselves. Thus, the new skills useful in a democratic society were learned. Such skills made it easier to take advantage of opportunities growing at the time. We've already seen one example of it when Thales made a lot of money selling olive oil presses one year. Needless to say, many of those ancient liberal democratic Sophists were secular-minded. To them, learning useful skills made living here and now more secure and worthwhile. Unlike conservative, Plato many liberal Sophists didn’t bother about any other realm except our natural one; Protagoras frankly admitted his not knowing about any other world besides our natural one. After all, with centuries of practical colony building in back of them, and many smashed fingers along the way, many Sophists were confident their own practical experimental learning model would be useful to many people. Aesop's practical little stories written at that time were about what practical skills might be useful, and they’re still popular reading today. With Socrates’ (d. 399) help ethical questions became another part of classical philosophy. So, is it any wonder one of the most prominent 4th century BCE sophists, a man named Antiphon wrote (Fr. 60) “Primary among human concerns is education” And of course one of the founders of Western liberalism, Democritus, himself realized its importance too; he tells us he would rather discover one law of nature than be a king in any entire country! In China too Confucius said with education all class divisions fad. In short, education helps us see all people are related and deserve the same rights as everyone else. The business-oriented democratic world of the 400s BCE was challenging Greek men like they had never been challenged before; women and slaves were pretty much out of the public loop. Sophist teachers helped fill those new educational needs. Men needed to get better at building businesses, talking respectfully with people, and also at guiding their government as well as defending themselves in court. Thus debate and reasoning skills were needed. Even slaves were welcomed to attend, as long as they paid the fee. As a result, old Greek political institutions continued being reconstructed along democratic lines, as is our modern world, and those with more intelligent thinking and acting habits had a big advantage in that world. It became easier to make an honest drachma or two. Socrates, of course, Democritus, Plato, Aristotle, and many others soon began painting their philosophic answers to such challenging questions, and within a few decades Western civilization had liberal, moderate, and conservative educational models of excellence, although Aristotle’s wasn’t very detailed. Just as today, where they differed was in what they thought was excellent to know, and how they could best learn it. Thus, different models of nature and learning began growing. Greeks being Greeks, it wasn't soon before conservatives like Plato began challenging Democritus’s liberal naturalistic models of excellence. His religious habits were very strong; in fact his Republic rested on knowing Spirit-Objects; he felt they were the best objects to know, much like Christians would say for many centuries during the Middle Ages. Naturally, Plato educational model was far from democratic. Instead it focused mainly on how to educate a few elite students rather than everyone; many conservatives cherish such feelings to this day. In the Republic he described his youthful conservative spirit-feelings about life and education, like how only future philosopher-kings should be educated for some 50 years before they were given power. After that time they would continue enforcing a very conservative model of life on everyone, limiting both democratic and religious freedoms for everyone. As mentioned earlier, no agnostics or atheists would be allowed. However, even he saw how some liberal ideas were useful. For example, his future rulers were to spend some 15 years in practical work between the ages of 35 and 50. They would then learn something about the problems and potentials of life. After that, then while ruling their city-state, they would return to more abstract subjects, like contemplating nature's eternal and unchanging spirit-objects -- the Spirit-Objects he thought governed all of nature. Because our natural world was merely a reflection of that spirit-world, only its objects could teach people what the best knowledge was all about, and thus make their actions most excellent. Sadly, however, we’ve seen how Plato eventually realized such objects could not be known entirely, or even with any degree of certainty. So, on a logical level they remained merely an assumption with no real evidence for them. Conservatives like Socrates and Plato, and moderates like Aristotle, thought like many traditional educators still think today: Mere thinking and reasoning is the most excellent learning art. That idea lives today in many of our public schools when they emphasis book-study for 12 years as the best form of education. Some, like Socrates, preferred a conversational style of reasoning. He would talk with whomever he could and ask them to define the eternal nature of some familiar abstract idea -- friendship, beauty, justice, and courage. Conservatives like him and Plato simply assumed such objects existed; again, mathematical facts seemed to imply such eternal knowledge existed. Others, like Democritus, Plato, and Aristotle preferred a written and lecture style of reasoning; Plato and Aristotle both started their own schools in Athens and no doubt lectured in them. Thus, we can begin seeing how important education was to the Greeks; they too sensed it was the key to building a better world. Where they differed from each other was the definition of ‘better.’ For Plato better meant more controlled, less diverse, more closed, and more feudalistic. For Democritus and Protagoras better meant more freedom, equality, democracy, and variety. A Case for Character Training Like them, Dewey too saw how important education was to the health of any political system, especially democracy. After all, for almost all of civilization people had lived in feudal societies where the rights they had depended on the social power they had, whether it was military, monetary, or religious. But he also noticed how modern tax-supported public schools also aimed at keeping a status quo in place. In fact, throughout much of history students were regimented, taught to obey their teachers, and kept that way with physical punishment. In the late ancient period Augustine too was often wacked by his teachers, and even in the 1960s I too saw how Catholic education was based on physical punishment, almost on a daily basis. The school disciplinarian would daily walk around the lunchroom and bang together the heads of students laughing and enjoying themselves. In fact, it’s not too much to say the present state of our nation as largely disconnected from our political and economic systems is a direct result of our educational practices. Those 2 important systems are all but ignored in our public schools, as is the subject of character excellence. To say the least, the more those character habits are ignored, the easier it becomes for those in power to stay in power and keep increasing it too, as we’ve seen in the last few sections. In truth, CHARACTER development and skills were as important to many ancient liberal sophists as they were to modern liberals like Dewey; character habits like good speaking, honesty, helpfulness, lawfulness, and how to make an honest drachma or 2. Such habits can help keep one's freedom and knowledge growing all through life, and thus help make life more satisfying and rewarding. Without them life remains much like we see on our local news shows, full of violence and disrespect. Even some teachers were recently sentenced to prison terms for changing test score grades. For us liberal Deweyans, however, character excellence is a life-long practice and skill beginning in our public schools. It's the same way with medical or legal skills; no doctor or lawyer knows everything about their art, and so they merely KEEP PRACTICING those habit-arts all through life! It's the same way with character excellence; it's an always growing practice rather than a static skill; it challenges people to practice joyful and respectful actions all through life, in thousands of little different ways here and now. In truth, there are an infinite number of ways to practice kindness, sympathy, and helpfulness. Down through time such useful and practical character skills not only helped people keep learning more easily, but also live safer and more intelligent lives in democratic systems. For example, Protagoras said part of character excellence was the habit of respecting the law, no matter what country you were in, and so knowing what the law is became an important part of liberal excellence on a daily basis. Sadly, that skill too has been all but ignored in many, if not most, of our tax-supported public schools! How many young folks today would act more excellently if their schools focused on teaching our laws, rather than just more and more trivial academic facts about history and literature while remain largely useless for all but future teachers? Can't you just imagine Protagoras looking for a parking sign every time he parked his chariot, if parking signs existed at the time? In short practical-minded Protagoras celebrated useful character knowledge and skills; they helped make life less stressful and more enjoyable. After all, if you’re going to learn some habit-art, why not learn not only some useful habit, but how best to use it wisely and intelligently, rather than ignorantly and illegally? More often than not, such important character habits like knowing what the law says about many different actions helps preserve a person's freedom, rather than remaining a slave to their own unintelligent ideas and habits. No doubt, seeing even slaves as deserving of equal rights was another bit of liberal audacity Plato and Aristotle both could not accept. For them a feudal model of life and nature was firmly implanted! Plato once complained about slaves who were too well dressed; it made them more difficult to see. That was part of the world they lived in. It was a common feeling; many imagined everyone's Fate was all arranged at birth by 3 spirit-goddesses. No doubt, Plato and Aristotle didn't believe that, but moderate Aristotle believed some people should even be forced into slavery, even though if they were smart enough, many slaves were often given more freedom; some even became bank managers! Hundreds of years later Julius Caesar too felt justified in killing many thousands of Celts in France. Why? How else could such barbarians become truly civilized? Sounds like he definitely had more gall than kind and sympathetic feelings while in Gaul! So even in ancient Greece practical character habits became the liberal key to excellence in all things, especially in education. The more we practice such habits, and make them part of our will power, the easier it becomes to practice ethical excellence in our own democratic age. If practiced enough it becomes what many conservative and moderate psychologists call instinct! However, what that means in school is allowing students to first learn about the many different skills being practiced in the real world, and then allowing them to choose which one they would like to learn more about. No doubt, such liberal, practical, democratic actions will make it much easier to also teach the democratic character habits too, like tolerance and respect for all law-abiding people. Without such schools, feudalistic habits of intolerance and hate will continue on, as we can see daily in our media and newspapers. To this day in many places conservatives work to keep such democratic habits weak and hobbled in their growth. What’s more, religious ideas are still often used to defend such conservative actions; they might offend some god somewhere, or bring on some catastrophe. In fact, many religions continue practicing those ideas, and the more they do, the more intolerant people feel. Using Useful Ideas Before Plato was born, liberal Protagoras probably discovered a rather interesting educational question. Some practical person may’ve asked him: If whatever we experience is true for us, then why pay high fees to teachers like you to teach us about excellence? In short, if excellence is relative from city to city, nation to nation, and even from person to person, then why do we need Sophists telling us what they think excellence is? His answer, however, shows how really practical and pragmatic he was. In effect he said even though everyone is the measure of their own truth, not everyone’s truth works equally well in different social situations! Excellence in irrigating crop fields in one country, for example, may not be acceptable in another country, perhaps for religious reasons. For example, lying and thievery may be allowed in some places, but in a more civilized place neither one may work equally well. Thus knowing conditions here and now becomes another part of liberal character excellence. What is happening out there? If you visit and start talking about crop irrigation in one place, you can understand why people might think it less than excellent when they have laws against it. So Protagoras suggested an intelligent person will learn to respect the country’s laws they’re in, so life’s stresses would be reduced. It was just another example of practical reasoning. Why risk the chance of being thrown into jail, or worse, just for not respecting a country’s laws? Why try to fricassee a camel when it’s against the law? In short, for the well-traveled Protagoras, because excellence always varies from place to place, and from person to person, why not learn to respect all law-abiding people? It’s another example of how intelligent respect is one liberal democratic character habit useful in many different places! Is it all just ancient history! Even in the US, the world's oldest democracy, many conservative secular and religious folks today still feel some peaceful habits should be outlawed and forbidden, rather than tolerated; gay and lesbian equal marriage rights are merely one current example of that idea; a few decades ago it was equal rights for Africans, and in the 1800s it was equal rights for Irish immigrants. In fact, one liberal democratic character skill Protagoras taught remains excellent today: respect and obey any country's laws, as long as they're just and apply to everyone! And, even if they are unjust, work intelligently to change them if you work at all. That way you keep your freedom to keep making life better for everyone. How can education get more practical than that, and yet in many of our public schools today such ideas are only mentioned in books, if they’re mentioned at all, and rarely practiced if they’re practiced at all. If you're a real social pioneer you can challenge unfair and unjust laws in court, just to test them and maybe get them overturned, but such skills are rarely allowed to be practiced by students themselves! To us Deweyan liberals it’s another great weakness of our public schools. Most all of the learning remains confined to a merely boo-idea level of consciousness, rather than a deeper body-mind level. Protagoras’ liberal practical educational ideas, like teaching yourself useful kinds of respectful habit-arts, and of course testing them in the real world, no doubt inspired Aristotle, Dewey, and many other educators as well. For nature-loving Aristotle, founding a school became an intelligent way to build his own aristocratic models of philosophic excellence, and in it more than mere facts were to be taught. For him excellent ethical habits were those of a moderate aristocratic Greek gentleman, loaded with all its undemocratic feelings about equal rights and opportunities for anyone not a member of his aristocratic class. For the liberal and democratic Dewey, however, teaching useful and practical CHARACTER habits to all students in our public schools was the best way to keep strengthening our democracy and its liberal values of equality. If not, then such skills can even be eliminated merely within 1 generation! After all, everyone learns the habits they’re taught. If no one were taught intolerant habits they wouldn’t be practiced. Hopefully now the reader will see why Dewey based his liberal model of education on 3 pillars: fact, skills, and character development. Part of that character development depends a great deal on knowing what the law is, and the results of not respecting it. Thus, the following question: Why shouldn't young folks learn more about our laws every year they’re in school, as well as practicing such respect both in school and out? Why shouldn’t they also learn how to judge whether a law is fair and just, and helps make everyone’s life safer and more enjoyable? After all, what good is knowing a million facts if you didn't know how to wisely use them to make everyone’s life more enjoyable? Some German Nazis acted like real bastards because they used their scientific facts and skills destructively, rather than constructively and kindly. Dewey’s 3 Pillars of Educational Excellence. At the University of Chicago Dewey became friends with a woman who was helping immigrants learn more about character excellence and how to live best in their new urban and democratic surroundings. At her Hull House school Jane Addams taught poor undereducated immigrants how to use their government wisely, rather than let it merely use them and their tax money. Eventually she invited Dewey to lecture at Hull House; such lectures not only helped the immigrants, but also helped him explain his ideas of excellence with plain language, and thus help make his writing simpler and less technical. While in Chicago he also began seeing some more serious social problems immigrants were facing, and how they might be solved with some new, more useful, educational habits. With Addams’ help Dewey saw how character habits were more useful than even. Eventually they became one of Dewey's 3 liberal pillars of excellent education: factual knowledge, useful skills, and character habits. To this day, however, conservative educators continue ignoring character habits as a worthwhile educational goal! Again, they’re taken themselves out of the social improvement loop, so to speak. The more such habits are ignored in our schools, the more unintelligent actions keep happening outside of school, and the more taxpayer money must be used to keep shielding the public from such actions! In some places it now costs about $50,000 of tax money to keep just one prisoner from society! Multiply that by 2 million prisoners now jailed in the US, and you can get some idea of how taxpayer money continues being wasted unnecessarily! Just imagine how many more psychologists and student mentors could be hired by our public schools if that 100 billion dollars was spent there! Today, many of our state prisons are terribly overcrowded with young, able-bodied people who have been merely undereducated! They never were taught to enjoy working honestly and joyfully to build skills useful in the real world. They were often made to learn in a largely unnatural situation, namely to sit still and merely keep reading. And economically they were often treated as just another body useful for getting more state money! No doubt, to us Deweyan liberals, ignoring character development on a formal teaching level is one of the greatest weaknesses of US public education. It fosters and encourages many of the serious tragic life-wrecking social events we see every day around us. All criminal actions, and all the publicly paid systems to keep arresting, trying, and jailing millions of people would be greatly reduced if our public schools regularly taught the kinds of liberal character habits I’ve been talking about. To us liberals, trivial knowledge facts merely helps build trivial people. It’s another sad result of what happens when monopoly educational power stays in place, as it has in our public schools. To this day it remains controlled by a few educational bureaucrats who want to change nothing in the system. After all, they’re making good tax money for not much strenuous work. Only when enough people say enough, we want more liberal schools built in our own neighborhoods, will such schools begin to be built. As far as I can see, today the public continues being distracted from learning more about liberal education models with such issues like whether teachers should have tenure, or how many charter schools should be allow in our system? For us liberal Deweyans these are all side issues! The educational debate should be about what children are being taught in school, rather than continue to allowing trivial book knowledge to remain the main educational goal. In fact, these are anything but new educational ideas. Going all the back to ancient Greece, personal tutors taught the current character habits to their aristocratic students. Only such wealthy people could afford to hire such one-on-one tutors, and thus easily pass on to young folks the ideas parents wanted them to have. Even some Roman educators like Marcus Quintilianus (35-100 CE) pointed to their usefulness. But again, only a small class of wealthy aristocrats could afford such private tutors to home-school children. Even though the Roman Republic had recently become ruled by an all-powerful emperor, Marcus was liberal enough to realize the benefit of teaching all students such habits, whether rich or poor. In fact, for us Deweyan liberals, for thousands of years that had been education's main challenge! Dewey saw, the more young folks weren't taught such liberal democratic habit-arts in their schools, homes, and churches, the more intolerant students would become with their conservative ideas and habits. Thus, we got such atrocious and vicious actions in the Middle Ages like burning heretics alive in public, as well as helpless women and children condemned as anti-Christian and evil witches. In medieval Germany alone as many as 10,000 people were killed in one year! For him it was obvious: Democratic excellence creating a more peaceful and enjoyable world for everyone would more easily grow if excellent liberal character habits were taught to students every year they’re in school. The US founders simply weren’t very democratic. They built a central government to best help grow a wealthy upper class of businesspeople, rather than a more democratic social life for everyone, so they gave no educational powers to the central powers. Only with the recent growth of a more active federal government has it gained more power to shape public education. After 1954 it began sending troops to integrate the public schools. Dewey moved to Columbia in 1904. We can imagine, for a few moments, what life was like at the time. Dewey continued seeing many educational challenges as Africans continued being lynched in many southern states, and the racist KKK even marched in large numbers down Pennsylvania Ave. in 1920! Poor and uneducated foreigners were flooding into New York by the millions every year, including all of my grandparents; they just passed through on their way to Ohio. But many thousands stayed in New York and helped create the need for more housing, clothing, food, and schools. The entire social network was overloaded. To many of those foreigners, just having a bed to sleep in and a stove to cook on was a luxury, even if five people slept in a bed and only potatoes and vegetables were cooked. What’s more, the rather conservative public schools weren’t much help; mainly they helped immigrants learn some English and enough political facts to become citizens. However, many never learned the skills or creative habits useful in their new industrial democracy, and thus couldn’t teach them to their children. Neighborhood gangs roamed the streets stealing what they could just to stay alive. A wonderful movie showing what life was like around that time is Somebody Up There Likes Me. The schools didn’t teach children how to become honest cops or carpenters or even teach basic lawyer and doctor skills. Mainly, their goal was to just keep the kids busy with a series of passive book assignments for a few hours. By nature, however, kids and most adults are active experimental learners, as any parent soon learns. Naturally, caring liberals like Dewey asked how can the public schools help make their lives more rewarding, enjoyable, and less stressful? Like many Asian workers today, US immigrants made pennies a day while a few factory owners made fortunes. They simply weren’t interested in teaching their workers more intelligent skills like limiting their families to one or two kinds, what foods help build healthy bodies, and what laws should be respected. Many immigrant families thus turned to organize their criminal actions. Liberals like Dewey, for example, asked why merely keep giving children more book assignments if it didn't help build more useful skills and intelligent character habits. How could mere book assignments ever teach immigrants how to use the new government to make life safer for everyone, keep making life better? Why demand children keep memorizing trivial facts about American presidents, English novelists, and chemical formulas they didn’t want to learn and would probably never use in the real world? If such facts were to be learned, why not at least make them game-oriented and fun , like writing and performing their own presidential scenes, acting out the truths novelists were describing, learning their math, chemistry, and scientific facts while actually helping beautify and improve their own neighborhoods, and helping others learn more intelligent habit-arts? In short, how to stay intelligently connected with their surroundings in positive and constructive ways? Wouldn't such important skills help young folks not only find better kinds of work, and perhaps also start their own business and also use some of the profits to keep helping others? Aren’t those kinds of habits really what true civilization is all about? In short, what was educationally more important: teaching young folks trivial skills like how to work fractions and decimals year after year, or help them learn excellent character skills like honesty, creativity, helpfulness, and of course feeling what democratic tolerance feels like? No doubt, many conservative educators at first simply ignored such liberal ideas like vocational education courses; to them teaching excellent character habits was the parents' job, not theirs. But by 'passing that educational buck' to others they, in effect, helped keep their own neighborhoods degraded, encourage criminal activities for economic reasons, drug-habits of social withdrawal, and make life more stressful for taxpayers who paid for all those services to better control such actions. Again, everyone's taxes are used to keep funding schools, courts, prisons, and other remedial social services. For Dewey is just wasn’t’ very intelligent to keep our public school out of the life-improving loop, so to speak. It only kept hobbling the growth of a more democratic world. The more excellent character habits like health, lawfulness, and helpful business skills are ignored, the easier it is for young folks to fulfill the American fantasy of getting rich quickly with less than excellent actions! To this day, far too many young folks are quickly pressured to join a neighborhood gang, start demanding 'protection' money from neighborhood businesses, start abusing alcohol, drugs, vulnerable young women, and even thievery to solve boredom and money problems. Why not? It's all part of life in the big city, isn't it? Life’s a rat-race and a jungle isn’t it? And even if they do get caught committing such actions many quickly learn how to pay off the police, or go to jail and learn more criminal actions from those already there! Police corruption in the early 1900s was probably rampant in all major US cities. The movie Serpico showed how rampant the problem was in New York in the 1970s! Given the state of public awareness about education, creating more liberal schools, even in New York, was about as easy as walking on water. Many professional-minded parents naturally wanted their sons and daughters to become lawyers and doctors, and so any kind of industrial education was a step backward for them, not forward. In fact, when voters got a chance to start making their schools more liberal, like many other cities had done already, they rejected the idea during the first World War. Thus, except for creating more vocational options in some schools, the obsession with learning more and more academic trivia stayed pretty much the same. As a result, character habits continued being ignored. Poorly educated people continued living in poor neighborhoods and allowing their kids to practice more criminal kinds of habits. It seemed to be tribal warfare between conservatives and liberals with kids caught in between! Remember, both radio and television hadn't yet been invented, and even when they were they were used mainly for advertising and entertainment purposes, thus making people more eager to keep buying the goods corporations were making, like washing machines and expensive cars, jewelry, and don’t forget stocks and bonds. And because respectful character excellence wasn't taught, such cars often gave young men a place to force vulnerable women to give in sexually or get out and walk! When women weren’t taught about respectful and caring sex, or men about running an honest, lawful, and helpful repair shop, clothing factory, restaurant, or appliance store, then life remains the ‘rat-race’ it’s pretty much been for thousands of years, full of superstitions and myths. Even when a Prohibition amendment passed in the early 1900s outlawing the sale of alcohol, criminal gangs themselves became organized like corporations to keep selling it, and again paying off the police to look the other way. Even today, an traditional educational model based on trivia knowledge maintains its monopoly in public education. Most parents even today are still too undereducated about liberal models of education to even think better schools can be built, much less focus on actually building them in their own neighborhoods! They often still believe their schools should continue teaching only reading, writing, and arithmetic. Today, that monopoly is still maintained with the help of state laws, and they keep hobbling the growth of more liberal democratic schools. Even in supposedly more liberal charter schools the same kind of subjects are still forced on the most vulnerable among us, children! Teacher unions often went to state capitols and convinced politicians to pass such laws, making education improvement more difficult and practically impossible. In effect such state laws removed school improvement from local control and gave it to state officials. In fact, to this day conservative Republicans often called themselves educational reforms, and yet the reforms they suggest often change the flow of public tax money from non-profit public schools to for-profit private hands! It’s like the US Constitution merely changed the flow of public money from the British government to local aristocratic pockets. And union pay rates don’t apply to Charter schools, so the profits are even greater! Thus, teachers are left with the choice to teach more academic trivia or find some other work. Even in most Charter schools children are made to learn more and more facts-facts-facts, so the private owners and investors can collect more public tax money from the government! Such events have made liberal educational improvement difficult, if not practically impossible. Still, liberal progress hasn’t been stopped. Thanks to the growth of more liberal families, democratic progress continues growing. They care about empowering their children with more intelligently kinds of character habits! And I might add, that includes respectful sexual character habits too! What young woman today in much of the Western world doesn’t know what respectful sexual behavior is, and how they too should have a part in saying what should happen and when? But on the public school and Charter school levels, it seems the goal is still to teach academic facts, facts, and more facts. The program was firmly established in the late 1950s when the so-called Space Race began. Undemocratic conservatives convinced President Eisenhower himself to speak out against Dewye’s education ideas, and he did! Ike said Dewey’s ideas were the main reason why Russia’s space program was more advanced than the US’s! In reality, however, it seems the Russians merely captured more German rocket scientists after World War 2 than the US did! As a result, today almost everyone still believes forcing children to learn what they have little desire or use for remains the definition of good education, even though many children keep telling their parents they don’t like school? These days I hear some conservative politicians still talk about how their new educational programs will teach children to reason critically, and thus become more intelligent adults. As we’ll see, however, early in the 1900s liberal educators at Columbia like Edward Thorndike proved experimentally children learn to reason just as well in a project-oriented school, and in many cases better, than students in book-oriented schools. In any case, today probably most people still don’t know what better schools can look like, and even if they did they would often be legally kept from creating them without state permission! In short, our own education laws keep hobbling social improvements themselves! In fact, most people today have only experienced a passive book-oriented education model, and so continue naively believing making children sit at desks day after day, year after year, and remain tied to their books is educational excellence. To us Deweyan liberals it certainly is not! What’s more, educational history in the first half of the 1950s tells us Dewey’s ideas are more useful for building a more equal and democratic life for everyone! A more project and professions-oriented educational model is much more naturalistic and effective. It’s holistic, rather than merely verbal. Such a liberal educational model is more like the way children actually learn anything, namely with active kinds of practice! In them learning becomes more enjoyable, constructive, and productive because it’s based firmly on children development itself! However, education debate is practically non-existent. It’s all dictated from the top down, so to speak, just like feudalistic morals were dictated from the pope down, or laws were dictated from the king! Be honest now, when is the last time you heard any kind of meaningful debate about different educational models? Without such debate how can anyone have any real choice about what kinds of schools their tax money should be used for? Why shouldn’t parents and students have the right to start learning about a profession or career while they’re in school, so life can become less stressful once they graduate? Why should young folks enter their adult years knowing almost nothing about how to make a honest buck and help others in the process? In fact today, more than 200 years after the US was founded, most of our states in the world's oldest democracy still have unjust and unfair laws against same-sex marriage. True, they might soon all be negated by Supreme Court rulings, but when schools ignore liberal character habits, the underlying feelings of bigotry remain in place, rather than joy and feelings of wishing people well. Aren’t those the feelings all civilized people should learn? At least we liberals say they are. More than 100 years after the Civil War millions of people were still taught to hate and hobble African equal rights as much as possible! Just like philosophy itself, there are conservative, moderate, and liberal models of education, but when they fail to teach our democratic ideals of character excellence, like sharing rights equally, and how to respect others and our just laws, then how excellent are they for making everyone's life better? Should democratic habit-arts of equality, respect, or lawfulness be ignored by our schools just because people don’t realize how important they are? One Personal Recollection One similarity between liberal and conservative educational models is they both agree the ultimate goal of education is teaching students how to intelligently solve their own problems. Where they often differ is how young folks should learn to solve their own problems. Years ago, after I had taken some philosophy courses and how to ask some meaningful questions, rather than just sit around like a dope, I called into a radio talk show one day and asked 2 education professors what the best goal of public education was. At first they sounded a little surprised at such a basic question, but after a few moments they both agreed the goal was teaching students how to solve their own problems. No doubt, to both liberals like Dewey and traditional educators that goal is important; who wants to have adults stay dependent on others for solving their own problems? No doubt, many disabled people need help from others, but most people can learn to intelligently solve their own problems; after all, most problems aren’t very serious at all. So, the goal is teaching young folks how to intelligently answer life's challenges is a worthwhile one. Such skills help make life more satisfying, and thus keep growing as people. However, the big question is how should we go about teaching those important skills, like how to make a plan of action, and then experimentally test the plan to see its results? Conservative kinds of educators in general say knowing more book-facts is the best way to learn how to solve our own problems. It’s an old and traditional system. In the Middle Ages, for example, people learned to say certain prayers to help solve their problems, like disease, having a safe journey, not offending god, and asking for forgiveness. In short, merely reading examples of character excellence should be enough to teach students how to best solve their problems. For liberals like Dewey, however, what's needed is a much more active and organic kind of experimental testing and learning how such actions actually feel, so those ideas don’t become quickly forgotten, like happens regularly with mere book-facts. How many of the book-facts do typical 25 and 30 year olds remember from their 12 years of public school? So, to make ideas and skills something other than Alexander’s empire, that is narrow and shallow, it’s better to use active kinds of learning projects, rather than merely reading about them. If children want to learn, say, more about Behavioral psychology, then they might actually perform scenes from The Taming of the Shrew, or any other play where such examples exist. To liberals like Dewey that active kind of education model will always produce better results than merely reading about such examples in, say, a psychology book. In fact, only actions can best build any new habit-art. Merely reading without performing some idea leaves learning on merely a narrow and shallow verbal level of awareness, rather than a body-mind level of feeling AND idea, or as we say a body-mind level of awareness. It's the difference between merely talking about ideas and actually practicing them. The common proverb is: Actions speak louder than words! In short, modern Behavioral psychology says young folks need active practice to best learn any new habit; it is a psychology Dewey helped build! Mere reading neglects the entire feeling side of a person's body-mind, and so is much less than excellent learning, as we've seen with Plato's and Aristotle's contemplative reasoning art. It's one thing to merely think spirit-objects or eternal Forms exist, but to actually know they actually exist are 2 very different things. As we’ve seen, Plato’s Parmenides bravely demonstrated with mathematical precision why such objects were not be known and might never be known! I didn't ask it at the time I called in, but I should have: If knowing how to solve our own problems is education's main goal, then why do students made to go through 12 years of public schooling without getting any active training about solving either their own or hateful social problems? Wouldn't knowing how improving a diet habit, for example, be much easier if students knew how to actively experiment with their eating habits? And if not, then isn't our present healthcare crisis one result of neglecting such experimental learning, and relying instead on the government's help to solve healthcare problems our own bad eating habits often create?! After all, some 50% of all health problems are now said to be diet related, and the heavier people become, the more health problems they'll probably have, once again paid for with everyone's socialized tax money. And of course the more money is needed for that, the less money is available for continuing to improve and enjoy life itself. So, this question too seems more than a little reasonable: Are our own conservative book-oriented public schools really helping create many of the government programs conservatives say we shouldn’t have? Almost certainly, such programs will continue being needed as long as our public schools remain obsessed with teaching only more and more book-facts, and remain outside the loop of working to make life better for everyone! Yet another little lame limerick is offered to make the point. At memorizing definitions Jones was a whiz. Reading more as he felt some dental fizz. As teeth came from his head, He sheepishly said, My schools never taught what dental health is. 17. EDUCATIONAL MODELS, 102 Traditional Educational Weaknesses For we liberal Deweyan perhaps the greatest weakness of traditional schools is their ignore of our strongest learning art, active experimental learning. It’s a much more effective and natural learning tool than merely answering someone else’s book-questions year after year, For Dewey mere book-learning is unnatural. Why? It separates and isolates thinking from actively testing ideas, thus keeping knowledge on a purely verbal and mental level. For example, lucky students may read about useful character habits like helping others less well of, but that idea takes on another deeper meaning when such ideas are experimentally tested! In that situation the entire body is involved with the learning process, rather than just the verbal awareness. To his great credit even conservative Plato realized how important active kinds of learning are, and recommended his future leaders spend 15 years actively learning about life before they became leaders. And, a standing joke for Mark Twain was his saying he never let school get in the way of his education; he too realized the best knowledge is learned in active experimentation. It’s what gave his writings so much human depth and warmth. But, it seems even Mark missed something very important, namely the character art of using his fortune to help those less well off. He kept using his money merely to make more money, and the more his investments went broke, the more he had to work to make more money. If he’d have gone to a more liberal school where such character habits are a normal part of the day he almost certainly would have made his life less stressful and more enjoyable. Surely, the ‘Robin Hoods’ around him had fun taking it away from him with money-draining investments! As Dewey saw, for 12 years in traditional schools students are tied mainly to their books, ‘spoon-fed’ merely academic facts, like George Washington crossed the Delaware River during the Revolutionary War. However, how many students are allowed to more feel that fact in some kind of experimental body-mind way? How many students are allowed to write a short scene and actually feel how cold it was at the time, and why he was crossing the river in the first place? Washington crossed the Delaware because the plan he made to attack the British in Trenton, New Jersey needed to be tested and verified in life; it was part of the process of experimentally testing a plan there and then. What's more, if a rather rotund and overweight General Knox would have rocked the boat a little more, Washington might never have made it into New Jersey! How much more fun would learning be if children were allowed and encouraged to create such active learning situations. In short, the more young folks don't feel how important intelligent experimental learning and testing is, the more they remain immature and childlike. Again, the art is not difficult to teach. It simply means writing a plan of action, assigning different tasks to different students, and then actively test the plan; some adjustments to the original plan may be necessary, but then again, what plan is always accurate the first time? The earlier children learn that art, the easier it becomes to start solving their own problems intelligently! Again, in traditional schools teachers are almost forced to cover so much material in so much time, so students can score well on the end-of-year standardized test, and teachers can keep their jobs. However, what standardized test ever asked students what’s the best way to solve any problem intelligently? The obsession with making such tests so academically focused not only leads students to believe that’s what education should be about, but it artificially pressures teachers to keep education that way. Recently some teachers who changed students test scores were even sentenced to a year in jail; that’s how obsessed the conservative educational bureaucracy is with keeping education merely on a verbal level, and all but ignoring not only deeper, more natural, and more enjoyable kinds of learning, but useful character training too. As a result, students get almost no feeling or idea either about WHAT character excellence means or how to experimentally build it. Many leave school psychically crippled in a sense; they have few useful skills for living life well in the real world. The more such habits are ignored, the more difficult it becomes to earn an honest living after schools days are over, if, that is, they can even find a job they're interested in and pays enough to live on. More About a Liberal Educational Model Today we see some wasteful results of such educational weaknesses. Because most schools remain book-centered and fact-based, rather than individually student-centered and experimental, many students simply drop out of school as soon as the law allows. In fact, their educational needs are not being met! Why stay in school and keep learning useless academic facts. When is the last time the reader needed to prove a geometric theorem in the real world? And yet all students are made to study that art for a year! Algebra is the same way. In fact, that criticism might be leveled against most school subjects! Most students simply don't have a need to keep learning such facts; what do they have to do with life in the real world, where the American dream awaits? Almost always it seems such high schools would rather teach students to know things like why Othello caused Desdemona to commit suicide, and how to solve quadratic equations. But for Dewey, without character habits like community work and improvement, school merely keeps diverting student attention away from perhaps THE most important subject of all, namely PHYSICAL AND MENTAL HUMAN HEALTH and its 2 important habit-arts -- intelligent diet and exercise! Wealthy folks can afford to send their children to psychologists to help them learn more useful habits, but why should our tax-paid public schools keep ignoring such important skills while we keep spending some $600 billion a years building more guns and bombs? In what sense are those events worth celebrating in other countries? One result of such schools makes it more difficult to start making some positive contributions to our society; drug-dealing and criminal actions are much more profitable. In fact, as we'll see in Book 5's Models of Educational Excellence, the sooner learning the arts of experimental testing and character helpfulness, the easier it becomes for most everyone to keep educating themselves, rather than depending on others. When students discover how important excellent diet and exercise habits are in whatever career they choose, then they'll want to learn how to build those habits, and thus be better prepared for life itself, instead of just for the next test! Not learning to talk confidently, intelligently, and constructively is often another weakness of traditional schools. How many young folks are deathly afraid to say anything in front of a group? It’s certainly not because young folks aren’t capable of learning such skills; it’s mainly because they’re not allowed to practice them on a regular basis in conservative book-obsessed schools. For how many teachers is a completely silent classroom the best? What is our conservative educational bureaucracy afraid of by teaching students to speak up forcefully and rationally about events in the real world? Is it because military units function best when no one questions or talks about what’s going on? And how much more tragic is the situation when most of the information people learn about the world comes from talking, not reading or writing? How else can young folks learn to feel the art of kind and sympathetic talking when students are conditioned from grade 1 to mostly sit quietly and work from books, and when sports remain the art of merely defeating someone else, rather than learning how to intelligently keep improving our own skills of helpfulness? I hasten to add: such educational systems exist not just at the public school level. How many college students and athletes leave school with absolutely no feeling for using some of their money to help those in need, rather than merely build a bank account? And equally regrettable, how can students want to keep educating themselves when their question-asking habit is largely neglected by book assignments? In them the questions are already given, so again, without the habit of asking intelligent questions, students leave school crippled in that way? It often leads to psychic doldrums, so to speak, in which boredom becomes a strong feeling. Again, bored people are boring people. As a result, many students finish school not only afraid to say anything in front of an audience, but of not knowing anything worthwhile to say either! Evidently, since the 1950s that’s the way conservatives want young folks to be. It make life in the corporate and military worlds that much easier! They don’t want students knowing about over-population and independent kinds of thinking; they want young folks to start having a family so they have to work for whatever the corporation pays them. Thus, the more students are discouraged from talking in class about what they're learning, either in school or outside it, the more abstract skills like solving quadratic equations become meaningful; such equations, by the way, are useful for, say, finding how big a garden area might be, or even designing a piece of furniture. They have a use, but when they’re separated from constructive kinds of projects, they remain merely another mental diversion. Also, intelligent kinds of talking in class on a regular basis can not only help build all-important feelings of self-confidence, but also organizational skills. The better organized their weekly talk become, the more interesting they can be made. Conservative educators often focus mainly on teaching facts, facts, and more facts from books, books, and more books, but that’s often not all. Business skills too are often included, like typing and learning how to use our ever-growing number of electronic toys and tools. But Dewey was bold enough to ask what the results of such an education are. A passive kind of obedience was one result. The more students obey their teachers and don’t have any different learning goals themselves, then the more vulnerable they remain to people who test them for their character excellence once they leave school or home. All during his public school and university years Albert Einstein was interested only in math and science; one of his teachers even told him he would never amount to anything. Imagine what physics would be like today if Albert hadn’t remained interested in his own questions, like what is light and what would life look like if we could travel that fast? Again, is a passive and non-questioning habit really the one most cherished by our corporate and military leaders? Are they really the ones behind the creation of our book-obsessed educational systems? Well, to cite merely one piece of evidence. Admiral Hyman Rickover who helped build America’s nuclear submarine fleet in the 1950s, said as much. To him schools should teach only facts, facts, and more facts, and then let the connecting of their facts be someone else's responsibility higher up in the bureaucratic system, whether it's either military or corporate. Only they know best about the 'big picture', and what’s going on in the world. We can well imagine Socrates and Plato talking about the same kinds of ideas. To them running a government should be left to the older men who have more knowledge and experience; only their judgments can be best. Young and inexperienced people shouldn’t be given any political power, or as little as possible! It’s understandable; experience often makes people wiser, and obviously military knowledge too is seasoned and ripened with experience. However, don't even foot soldiers need character excellence, to know what's best to do with the facts they have around them? Should they just keep killing innocent people simply because they’re ordered to? For us liberal democrats, that like saying people can’t even ask why we should use our tax money to pay for 20 or 30 nuclear submarines when merely 1 of their missiles can literally level any city on earth? Should we really keep allowing people to have such power? Wouldn’t we all be better off if all such weapons were dismantled? In truth, the more people are conditioned merely to obey orders, rather than evaluate the facts for themselves, the greater the chances for massive amounts of brutality, as we saw during the Vietnam War. Babies are still being deformed by the poisons we dropped on that country! Who needs to be a rocket scientist to feel such situations call for intelligently evaluating facts rather than merely obeying others no matter what the results are? Many ancient Greeks like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle felt the un-criticized life is not worth living, but if we don’t teach young folks how to evaluate facts by their possible results, the more dangerous life becomes for everyone. Of what educational use is merely collecting more and more book-facts, and not thinking about their possible results in the real world. In such schools where critical thinking habits are taught, they become a much more important part of the community, rather than remained isolated from it. As we've already seen, I learned many isolated biological facts in school, but because I never learned to put them to use for building a more intelligent diet, I continued wrecking my own health. And here's another example of allowing only a few to tell us what the facts mean. In 2001 US intelligence services had gathered many, many facts about the 9-11 airplane hijackers; they were already here in the US taking flying lessons in different parts of the country! But such facts were never shared with different organizations, so they could be put together into a coordinated picture, and for also questioning them on why anyone would want to learn merely to fly a passenger airplane, rather than also learn to take-off and land it! The art of coordinating and using facts intelligently is definitely a more important skill than merely learning more and more facts; what do the facts mean and how can they be used to keep making life safe and productive? The more people know how to practice that creative and intelligent art, the safer we all become! Aristotle collected tons of biological facts from around his world and even organized many of them into some useful categories, but he missed evolution’s big picture; had he lived 10 years longer he may have been able to better see such a picture. In short, his un-criticized assumption about their being some eternal constant forms creating eternally constant groups of animals and plants made an evolutionary model of nature almost impossible for him. Evidently even Plato's Academy some ideas were beyond criticism! In short, we Deweyan liberals celebrate knowing facts; accurate information is needed. But to merely demand all students obey their teachers and learn the same facts, whether they want to or not, is not democratic education. At best it’s a conservative model of education aimed at maintaining a feudalistic class-based status quo! In more liberal schools children are taught how to use their facts and skills intelligently, constructively, helpfully, and if possible kindly! In truth, as test-scores and drop-out rates teach us, many students simply don't need to know more and more book-facts. Also, some 70% of high school students don’t go on the keep learning more and more book facts in college. And what’s more, much less than 30% don’t get a degree in 4 years. Today many urban schools have a drop-out rate as high as 50%! In other words, in some neighborhoods over half the students are leaving the one place they could be using as an excellent preparation into the world outside of school. So, because what's important about facts is how they’re used, shouldn't that educational fact help concerned parents keep pressuring their local schools to start including more naturalistic kinds of learning projects all through the 12 years of public schooling? The less that happens, then more and more students will continue entering their adult years psychically immature and crippled for excellently answering many of life's challenges, like obeying just laws and making only honest money. We continue seeing those kinds of results daily in our media. As John Galbraith saw, too many people, both educators and corporate supervisors, have become content to keep the class-based economic status quo in place, and so rarely even think about the social results of a 50% drop-out rate for some schools. Who cares? Let someone else deal with it! Parents aren’t the only ones in such an improvement loop. Students are too. Students too can accept the challenge to improve that 50% drop-out rate, so as to better meet different student learning desires. For example, why shouldn’t students wanting to be business people be able to make some ‘school money’ with a student business, and then use it to help those less fortunate? In short, why not turn student creativity and experimentation loose in a safe and constructive manner, to help more students stay in school and keep improving themselves as well as their neighborhoods? Such learning not only gets students more feelingly involved with local challenges, but also with helping others to help themselves. In short, the more students are encouraged to ACTIVELY AND EXPERIMENTALLY solve their own problems, the more their own educational and character excellence grows stronger, the more mature students will become, and the more their own schools will continue being improved. Believe it or not folks, nature has no desire to leave manmade projects alone, and that’s been a challenge for only about 4 billion years, give or take a New York minute of 2! As many are seeing today, education dollars are becoming less available as income and taxes remain stagnant. Especially during recessions tax revenues become even less, and so intelligence tells us more community volunteers are needed, especially in the lower grades, to help students start learning about intelligent experimentation. That shouldn’t be a problem now that millions of ‘baby-boomer’ retirees are now available. Then, as children enter their constructive stage of development they will need more help building the many workshops students can use to start learning about the skills they will use as adults, everything from computer, doctor, and legal shops to carpentry and plumbing. No doubt, money will also be saved from not needing all the books used in traditional schools. And teacher roles will be changed from finding and grading book assignments to one of mainly guidance, encouragement, and problem solving. In any case, however, the traditional separation of intelligent work habits from helpful character habits will end. And the more young folks learn to enjoy such habits and respect just laws, the less vulnerable they’ll become to criminal behavior and drug abuse, to name just 2, as well as merely making war-weapons endangering innocent people. Life is sacred. That’s not to say sometimes violence is needed against those who aim at harming and killing anyone, but thankfully such people are still a small minority. What's more, the more students keep intelligently criticizing and improving their own schools, the easier it will be get needed public funding to build and equip all the practical workshops at liberal schools. No one can say for sure how many shops will be needed at every school; each school and district has its own needs and so should be built to serve community needs. Still, food, clothing, and health shops will probably be useful in all schools. Even if students learn nothing else besides what mental and physical health is, and how to practice it, it’ll be a great improvement over many of our traditional schools. And, it’ll also be easier for students to volunteer when they’re adults, and feel gratitude to the school that they will feel cared for and nurtured them so well. They’ll also learn what habits they need to keep strengthening our democracy, like staying in contact with their representatives, voting, and protesting all the attempts of those trying to weaken it, so they can keep using the system for their own personal gain. In that way they’ll start building a social consciousness, rather than just caring about themselves. We still have many serious problems, like dangerous atomic weapons, global warming, environment pollution, and equality issues. To keep children isolated from those issues merely helps keep them in place. Why shouldn’t students be included in those improvement loops, and be trained to constructively criticize and improve not only their own schools, but their nation and world as well? Such critical thinking and constructive actions are another important place to practice intelligent experimentation, and perhaps even produce some real improvements. In any case, they’ll learn more about our strongest learning art – intelligent experimentation. After all, isn’t it more intelligent to keep experimenting with constructively engaging an enemy instead of merely keeping them isolated or kill them? No doubt, new obstacles will be felt in all learning projects, but that’s where skill like creative thinking and intelligent negotiation become useful, right? Experimenting With A New Educational Model Such traditional educational weaknesses as were mentioned earlier, like not actively teaching excellent character habit-arts on an active level of learning, have helped keep far too many young folks grossly undereducated and often frustrated. Also, school boredom is often a serious problem, and a sign of educational needs not being met. Thus parents are also challenged more than ever to also help their children learn more about all the useful and rewarding work available in the real world, and help them start learning about their own strengths and weaknesses, so they might feel where they can best use their talents. How many young folks leave school with knowing little about themselves, and so have little feeling for what kind of work they want to do? Thomas Edison’s mother was a fine example of such a caring parent. America’s greatest inventor went to public school for only a few years, and then his smart and creative mother home-schooled him! She encouraged him to build habits of constructive curiosity and imaginative question-asking, 2 useful habits for intelligent experimentation. While still in his teens he invented a better telegraph system. His mother knew how important it was to teach creativity's habit-art and how it depended on a question-asking habit. Asking about how things work and also how they might be improved helped focus and strengthen his art of intuitively creative thinking and testing. Those kinds of habits were used all through his life at his New Jersey lab too; sometimes he’d even lock the doors so his workers couldn’t get out until they helped find solutions to creating another invention. It also took those workers over a year to invent a useful working light bulb. Too bad the element neon wasn’t discovered until 1898 or else the problem would have been solved much easier and our world would have become much more colorful. We Deweyans ask why shouldn’t any student learn to practice such creative skills in whatever class they take? Any subject can be adapted to any student’s talents and needs, and so that kind of experimental learning can be encouraged in any workshop with the help of intelligent questions. After all, aren’t all the products we have today the result of such thinking? For example, how might we begin making our traditional schools more student centered instead of book centered? No doubt one useful idea is a small step-by-step approach to improvement, as we’ve seen Part 1 with building better habit-arts. If true, then to try to convert all schools in a district to an experimental workshop system, or even all the grades in one school all at once, might be too much of an adjustment for both students and teachers to make. It might cause more frustration than satisfaction. And so to avoid such possible results, a ‘baby-step’ approach to improvement might be best, say, making a plan for the first 3 grades where students are mainly using the senses to learn more about themselves and their world. So, projects using that fact can be more intelligently designed. With such thinking the reader can begin feeling some of the new challenges faced when trying to convert a traditional book-centered school into a more liberal child-centered school. They aim to take advantage of childhood’s 3 main stages of development; they are sense-based until about 7 or 8, a constructive phase between 8 and 14, and then as their brains become more developed they enter an abstract thinking phase. Many book-centered schools tend to ignore those first 2 stages of development, and keep children working on book assignments, which for many children soon become boring. In most students there’s little natural ability and desire to learning such abstract facts. And for another thing, conservative book-and-teacher-centered schools keep students basically inactive and confined to passive class work almost all the time, writing the answers to their book questions, and then having teachers grade their work. No doubt it’s easy work for teachers, but what important and useful character habits are students not learning in such schools, and how deeply are they feeling their importance to making life less stressful and more enjoyable? As a result, many students learn the habits often practiced all through the Middle Ages, namely passive obedient to those in authority, and to do whatever they’re told, rather than learn to think and act constructively for themselves. Such schools explain why that era lasted for over a thousand years, and why democratic habits even in the world’s oldest democracy is still weak and neglected! Also, students don't get much practice focusing on either personal or community improvements, like demanding living wages, more of a voice in political decision-making, and equality for all law-abiding citizens. Teaching such passive and obedient habits were useful to the social ruling class; they helped keep a feudal social structure solidly in place with various forms of slavery. Even as late as the early 1800s George Hegel, Germany's archconservative philosopher, echoed such ideas when he said: "Thought, as much as will, must commence with obedience." And the more such habits were encouraged the German, Japanese, and Italian schools, the easier it was for people like Hitler, shoguns, and Mussolini to make people soldiers. In today’s much more democratic and industrial world such habits are simply counterproductive in many situations. Liberal kinds of creative and experimental habits are much more useful in today’s world, and they help build a person’s individuality, creativity, independence, and reliable knowledge. They are, in fact, the kind of habits that helped a few people build Western civilization's life-changing Industrial Revolution shortly after Hegel died in 1831. What’s more, such experimental habits encourage more reliable and organic kinds of ideas, rather than believing their own ideas are absolute Truth for all time. Besides such creative habits are the normal way people learn, as can be seen from watching a group of even young children. Who ever saw a child learn to ride a bike, cook a meal, fix a broken toy, build a new invention, and learn how dangerous alcohol can be just from reading about them in books? And it's why caring and thoughtful parents often encourage their kids to keep experimenting, but intelligently rather than merely routinely! Such parents will also teach them to help others with their skills, rather than merely think only about their own comfort. As a result, liberal schools will begin looking differently from traditional ones; liberal schools will have more shops, like metal, auto, wood, garden, health, and clothing shops for students to actively their creative and experimental habit-arts. For liberal Dewey, because we’re all individuals, with our own powers of independent thinking, the child should be encouraged to keep actively practicing such intelligent habits. What intelligent mechanic doesn't know how to read a repair manual, use mathematics to figure out another outrageous repair bill, or how to tell someone they need a new muffler bearing? When the emphasis is on learning character excellence, then young folks can begin feeling how such habits only increases the chances for making their own life better. Why keep practicing habits that keep making life less than what it might be? Shouldn’t we be honest with ourselves about such education? If capitalism and democracy both work best when people know what excellent habits feel like, and practice them, then not to teach them merely weakens both our economy and our political system. Even today we see the results of mean and unkind discrimination of law-abiding and helpful people. How intelligent is that? After all, how vibrant and healthy for everyone’s health can any political system be when peoples’ main habit-art is obedience to merely old traditional ideas that started growing long before our modern democracies began growing? In more liberal schools children will learn ideas should be practiced just because they’ve been practiced for centuries! How much more stressful and dangerous did life remain just because many people continued believing slavery had been practiced for centuries and was, therefore, natural and normal? Communist Russia and China, Nazi Germany, and many other countries including the US all have seen, at times, examples of how dangerous life can become when people refuse to see their habits and ideas as merely the result of their practice, rather than believing they’re nature’s eternal and unchanging truth? Even today, in the US, the reluctance to experiment with liberalizing drug and sex worker laws may be doing more harm than good to many young folks. Blind and unintelligent obedience to the social status quo in effect keeps encouraging people to practice their routine habits, keep things as they are, don’t rock any boats, and keep allowing power-hungry and greedy people to keep increasing their power, rather than using it to help others. If nothing else, much of our own history is mainly a record of such people and the sometimes painful results of their actions. In short, only as people become more educated about how all habits are learned experimentally, and how to enjoy experimenting with building better ones, can intelligent change and progress grow at a more progressive pace. If not, tribal and gang warfare will continue on. How many students never realize they have the option of helping improve their local libraries, health clinics, and homeless services? In short, the more parents, teachers, and students realize they have the freedom to build more intelligent character habits, like better diet and exercise habits, and more community-improvement projects, then the more students will become anchored to life outside of school, the world they will eventually inherit. Such schools have a much better chance of improving many of our own social problems, like intolerance and hateful bigotry, and in the process put our socialized taxes to better use than building more wasteful prisons and deadly weapons. We Deweyan liberals like to ask, why shouldn’t students be included with such an improvement loop? Not to include them is merely to keep them sheltered, immature, and naïve. In other words, life has become something each of us helps make, rather than merely accepting what others say it should be. Why shouldn’t that fact be applied to our schools as well as our government? Just because kids drop-out doesn’t mean they want to quit learning; it often means they just want to learn different things than what’s being taught, and whatever that is there are intelligent and unintelligent ways of using such knowledge. Crooks exist in every profession. How many kids are lured into drug-dealing just for the money, or because everyone else is doing it, and how much do our own schools and drug laws keep encouraging kids to keep endangering their own lives? Sex Education???? What other examples illustrate Dewey’s educational models of excellence? Sex education is definitely another good example. One fact many people choose not to think about is the variety of sexual habits and actions, and so many people feel they don’t want their children learning about them wither. But, how intelligent is that? Not to know such facts only keeps one’s psyche narrow, shallow, and worst of all intolerant! What good is being ignorant about human habits when those habits are practiced in today’s world? Doesn’t such ignorance just help increase anxiety about others, rather than a more intelligent well-wishing? In fact, sex is a perfectly normal human need, and so why not teach high schoolers what some intelligent and acceptable expressions are? Here, of course, I’m certainly not recommending experimentation in the public schools, even though it no doubt exists in many of them today. But shouldn’t just that fact be reason enough to help students begin feeling what sexual respect looks like, and how it can even be treated with some humor and laughter? In many schools even reading about different sexual expressions would go a long way to making young adults feel more comfortable in the adult world. In the native world children are often married when they’re sexually mature. Wouldn’t better facts about sex be justified if it helped prevent even one unwanted pregnancy, or even one expression of sexual immaturity, like satisfying one’s self as quickly as possible? Shouldn’t high schools begin seeing sex too can be a creatively joyous and happy event each time it’s practiced, rather than the same ol’ same ol’? Why shouldn’t more schools be allowed to experiment with such classes on a mental level? After all, we’re all just human and there are many ways of expressing one’s sexual feelings intelligently, joyfully, and respectfully. No doubt, such excellent sex habits of demanding respect from a partner would help reduce much sexual trauma, and unnecessary worry and anxiety. They could even practice such respectful behavior in class, and thus reduce many irrational sexual fantasies about men acting dominantly and women acting passively. As liberal Protagoras liked to remind people, mankind is the measure of all things, of things that are bad and good. Sex education to one may, thus, be moral corruption to another. However, if such classes were merely another educational option to choose, rather than a required course for everyone, then students and parents would be free to make an intelligent choice about what they want their child to learn. That way such ideas can be learned only by those who choose to learn them. In any case it should be obvious, the freedom to keep intelligently experimenting with what children can learn is a very important part of liberal educational excellence. The more legislators keep restricting how our schools might be improved, the less free students become to see what excellence means to different kinds of situations. To us Deweyan liberals that result is certain less than excellent. We live in a world where people are conditioned to build many different kinds of habits, and not to realize that only keeps isolating and separating people from that world. What’s more, as more than 20 sexually-transmitted diseases teach us, the less students can learn about them in sex class, the more vulnerable they stay to getting them, and the more tax money is needed to pay for their health bills! So, why shouldn’t students be free to make such intelligent class choices in high school, just as they should be free to start learning about excellent diet and exercise habits all through grade school? Who knows? It may even help create some more intelligent ways of managing prostitution practices. After all, it’s been legal in much of Nevada for decades and believe it or not some women haven’t been corrupted, but liberated! What Is Psychological Health? Psychological health is another very important subject for we Deweyan liberals. What do we mean by it? What is it? How do we go about achieving it? Such questions were talked about in Part 1, but they can also be talked about to students, as well as actively practiced all through grade school. After all, such habits are useful throughout life, and so the sooner they’re learned, the better life becomes! For us some of the basic ideas of Behavioral psychology can be taught to students even at the sense-based stage of development. As we’ve been seeing, accurate and reliable psychological information is another new modern educational challenge. As late as the 1800s very intelligent modern sophists like Robert Ingersoll complained about not having some real dependable psychological knowledge about ourselves taught in our public schools, like what excellent speaking and working habits feel like, and the best way for young folks to experimentally learn such useful habits. Since then, however, psychologists like Dewey have learned a lot about how best to build new habits and skills, so why not empower young folks with such knowledge? Joyful and encouraging speaking habits can be learned a little more each day. After all, all people must live with themselves all through life, and yet much about such healthy psychological actions can keep weakening any destructive habits they may be learning. What are habits, and why is it so difficult to stop abusing tobacco or alcohol; eating less than excellent foods now offered on just about every block in every city; what is an excellent diet for my body; what is humor and why is it so important to psychological health; what’s the best way to learn such habits and thus make life more satisfying; and why should anyone pay honestly-earned money to merely keep harming themselves with less than excellent food? If those results aren’t promoted with healthful psychological actions, then what would be? How can we expect our own nation to keep using limited money for diet-related health problems and yet not teach young folks what physical health means, and how to actively learn more about it? If not, then we continue living in a naïve psychic world where merely by passing a constitutional amendment will stop people from abusing alcohol. We've already seen how important psychologically excellent habits can be, like how to enjoy improving our own weak, excessive, and unhealthy habits one ‘baby-step’ at a time. But if more people are to learn them, then shouldn’t they too be offered as subjects even to primary-age students? They can at least begin feeling what they’re like. And if so, then why aren’t more useful psychological classes a real option to students who often want to know more about their own body-minds, and what health means? Where is the intelligence in restricting such knowledge about body-mind health itself in our public schools? What can it feel like to build a better diet or exercise habit; how can they be strengthened; and how important is enjoyable practice for learning such habits? What does it feel like to build an intelligent plan for improving an unhealthful and dangerous habit, and then how can we best test the plan to see its results? And of course there's physical health as well. What exercises and foods best help us stay in ship-shape shape, and when’s the best time to practice them? Not only are such habit-arts useful all through life, but they also help students solve another important educational challenge -- building the inner enjoyable and fun feelings of a healthy body-mind, as well as intelligently knowing how to best control our own growth. It’s certainly no absolute guarantee of a long and productive life, but then again what is? Education’s Important Social Results Are such liberal educational ideas really too radical, bazaar, idealistic, or communistic? Not at all. They just reflect some of the useful knowledge science has recently discovered. As our newspapers and media remind us daily, unintelligent habits help make everyone’s life more stressful and dangerous; who doesn’t remember the chaos caused by 19 9-11 hijackers? Thus, weak and unintelligent educational habits help produce less-than-excellent social results. As is widely known, even in democratic countries like the US young folks often finish 12 years of public schooling and have almost no feeling for what character excellence is or job skills! That’s a social result every liberal person should be outraged about; we all pay for the social results of such schools. Even good students are at a big disadvantage compared to those who already know how to respect the law, keep only honest money, practice equal rights, and help others help themselves. In short, book knowledge is far from an excellent education! Without learning something about character excellence young folks often become vulnerable to acting like morons, with no respect for any law or person. And worse, they have no questions about how they can become more intelligent character artists, build better habits, and keep contributing to our nation’s well-being. In fact, learning just one character excellence, like obeying just laws, makes our country that much more excellent and allows more tax money to be spent on building more liberal schools. Normally students learn almost nothing about how their book-knowledge can be best used to improve their schools or neighborhoods. That’s yet another weak social result of our public schools. Probably in every city in the world even primary students can learn more about creatively using their book-facts for thousands of different beautification and improvement projects. Merely growing flowers for a local park can help young students begin feeling how important chemical and conservation facts are. Such projects would also begin strengthening creative thinking’s habit-art. What better place and time is there to start learning such habits than in the primary grades? Why shouldn't even 1st graders learn to feel such excellent ideas and their constructive social results, like where to find useful book-facts about growing flowers, how easy it is to keep building their sense of humor, positive speaking habits, how celebrate democratic equal rights, and begin learning more about body-mind health? Shouldn’t more parents and students be asking themselves what social results are our book-centered public schools helping produce? Such educational weaknesses of traditional schools keep weakening both people and our nation! Our millions in prisons are all evidence of how our traditional book-obsessed public schools are still out of the improvement character loop. And again, to house, feed, and clothe all those people are paid by taxpayers. Why shouldn’t our schools be places where young folks can start learning how to respect someone’s else property, how to help those less well off, how to speak honestly, how to earn honest money, and how to report those who pose a serious threat to others? The more such character excellence is ignored, the more our San Quentin’s and Sing-Sings get a multiple-occupancy room ready, all at taxpayer expense of course! According to one report California taxpayers now pay about $50,000 a year per inmate! And how many millions more remain undereducated but haven't yet turned to major criminal actions, like welfare and insurance fraud? Because people reproduce faster than they reconstruct and improve their schools, it’s still easy for dangerous and unhealthful habits to be pasted from one generation to the next. Obviously most parents are much more caring about what their children learn, and so help them become of more conscious of dangerous habits. But how many poor folks don’t have such caring and helpful parents? We see the results of unwanted children in homeless numbers in all our cities. Why shouldn’t they have better schools to teach them more excellent habits? Even in upper middleclass neighborhoods how many young folks begin using illegal drugs even before they leave school, to relieve their stressful muscular tensions, and even turn to gangs to help support their drug habits? Isn’t that alone a good reason to at least begin experimenting with decriminalizing drug use? And if it works to reduce crime rates, then wouldn’t that free up even more tax monies for more constructive educational work, like teaching students how to live joyfully and constructively, rather than depressively and destructively? How many people out there still have such habits, and feel even murdering innocent people is justified, or other gang members? The more such habits are neglected, the more it seems war has remained almost inevitable, from ancient Greece, to the 1800s when the US government almost killed our entire Native American population, to 2 World Wars, Korea, and Vietnam! Are those the social results of any truly civilized nation? Of course not. But unless more caring people begin to speak up, and want to help those disadvantaged young folks, those social results will almost certainly continue happening. Won’t war become extinct when people feel everyone else is sacred, and when it ceases to be at all profitable? Am I being too romantic, utopian, idealistic, and even unscientific? After all, how can you possibly reason with someone like a Hitler or a Stalin? British PM Chamberlain tried reasoning with Hitler and failed miserably, but doesn’t that teach us such excellent character habits need to be taught to everyone as soon as possible, in Germany as well as Britain? It may sound too optimistic but we liberal say even if Hitler had had a kinder and more intelligent education, one that helped him fulfill his dream of being an architect, the world would be a different place today? He wanted to help build useful building, and yet people kept telling him he didn’t have the talent for it, or encouraged him to practice the excellent skills, knowledge, and character habits he needn’t to become an architect! Eventually after Germany’s defeat in World War 1 he found a ‘scapegoat’ for his hatful feelings -- the Jews. Today US jails are already terribly over-crowded with inmates needing more civilized and respectful training and education, and when they don’t get it they often remain socially dangerous. Doesn’t it make much more sense to teach such habits BEFORE they learn unintelligent habits, rather than after they’ve learned them? Afterwards just makes learning more intelligent habits that much more difficult. What’s more, prison guards keep demanding ever more money from tax payers, and when taxes shrink during recessions then political leaders have little choice but to release some still-undereducated prisoners to help balance budgets! In a healthy democracy people would have demanded such educational improvement decades ago! Isn’t it time we faced this fact? Even the US is still far from a healthy functioning democracy, and from building schools where dreams are fulfilled rather than frustrated. No doubt there are a great many positive learning events going on in our public schools every day. I certainly don’t mean to suggest doomsday is our democracy is on the verge of becoming another military dictatorship. However, the more we ignore teaching such excellent character habits in favor of teaching habits of obedience and acceptance, the closer we move to such a government. Obviously many more students could be taught more about building excellent character habits IF more parents and children were free to experimentally work at improving their own neighborhoods and schools. We Deweyan liberals aren’t asking all public schools become more liberal all at once. We are asking for more freedom at the local level for caring and concerned parents and students to create such schools in their own neighborhoods! Without that freedom at a local level educational experimentation will continue within the same book-obsessed system we now have. Today it’s called the Common Core system, but it’s essentially the same book-centered system already in place. It’s like experimenting with, say, only different kinds of tea. What we liberals need is the freedom to experiment with milk, coffee, sodas, and waters! In any case, however, people still have the ultimate power in a democracy, even though our own feudalistic political system makes an improvement process more difficult. Just as the aristocracy make improvement for the serfs almost impossible in the Middle Ages, so too state and national laws keep making improvements at the local level more difficult. Not impossible, just more difficult. School improvement is just one example among many, drugs and prostitution laws are 2 other examples. With such a political system the feudal Middle Ages lives on. The improvement door is open somewhat. But for real experimentation to begin happening, more parents, teachers, and students need to start demanding the freedom to start a process of public school improvement! How many parents and students today still don’t even realize they can help build better student-centered schools if they have a plan and demand the freedom to experiment? How many of tomorrow’s criminals would start building more helpful and sympathetic character habits if they were allowed to read to the elderly and disabled even one day a week? Much of the time undereducated parents simply don’t know such character-building options are available, or why they’re so important. Most people come home from work dog-tired and ready for dinner, a few beers, and little else. Most people don’t even ask themselves how many young frustrated drop-outs could be helped to make their dreams become reality in more liberal schools, where students are given more of a choice besides learning more book-facts or leaving school. These aren’t just abstract ideas; they’re a felt reality playing out throughout the US, and no doubt much of the world too. Like any good experimentalist Dewey’s constructive public school criticisms in the early 1900s began focusing on specifics, like job training. Vocational schools, for example, were one of his suggestions, and they’ve grown tremendously since then. Many of Los Angles’ schools too now teach useful job skills for a specific service, like health care, performing arts, and business skills, so they help children learn some practical habits. All well and good. But, how many such students still don't learn what excellent community-service habits feel like? How many never learn how to help others with some of their money? And the more such character habits are formally neglected, the more government monies will certainly be needed to keep the dangerous social results of such neglect controlled by more police, courts, and prisons. How many ‘inner’ cities around the country have already become social ‘sewers’ where homeless people live? No doubt, it's useful to learn practical job skills like carpentry, welding, auto and computer repair, and experimental lab skills, but why should equally useful charity and philanthropy training stay conveniently ignored? When they are is it the result of conservative teachers who want to maintain a feudalistic class or tribal structure as much as possible? The good news is we’re not facing an immediate doomsday implosion, at least not until too much atmospheric carbon makes life impossible in many places. The world may well end in a carbon whimper, rather than in atomic blasts! Students today are getting many more educational options for character development than ever before. They can volunteer, for example, for many trash-collecting programs on the weekends, and with helping people overcome local disasters, like earthquakes and floods. But, again, aren't there more intelligent and helpful activities to learn other than sweeping streets? What about using all their scientific facts about plants and animals to build community gardens with senior citizens? Wouldn’t they be more fun and educational than sitting in some classroom day after day, memorizing soon-forgotten book facts? Wouldn’t such active learning projects help make their book-work even more meaningful? Wouldn’t it be great exercise for seniors too? During this relatively peaceful time, isn’t it time people started experimenting more with getting students out into our neighborhoods in a safe and healthy way? How many poor communities could use a community fish tank, and how many high schools students would love to build one with the intelligent constructive skills they learned in their public schools? No doubt there would be new safety challenges to overcome first, but students could even help solve them too. People are facing new economic challenges on a daily basis too, as obscenely wealthy people keep creating and maintaining a system where only they keep becoming wealthy. But if economists are right, and capitalism really runs on consumer choices, then why can’t our schools begin weaning students away from their books and begin feeling what it’s like to start demanding huge concentrations of wealth be better circulated for everyone’s benefit, and not just a few? And if adults are free to make the purchases they want, then why shouldn’t students be free to choose the classes they want to attend? Why not let the student market decide what their classes should be, and how they should be taught, just like consumers stock purchases help decide what businesses to grow? Who knows? Some teachers might even like such work more than merely grading papers and making tests. Again, all such reconstructive changes needn’t be abrupt, total, and thus too disruptive! They can be slow, gradual, and always improving; slow and steady wins the educational race too, doesn’t it? That way it’s easy to correct and improve weaknesses. Some of the wasteful social results already mentioned tell us more people should be free to experiment with our public schools. Each year tens of billions of dollars are already being spent by our police, courts, and prisons to merely correct or confine unhealthful character weaknesses. Wouldn’t it have been better for tax payers to teach more intelligent habits in grade-school? What judge or cop wouldn’t like to play more golf or tennis, or have more time to visit our schools and speak more about what respectful habit-arts students are learning? Wouldn’t the same also apply to doctors, psychologists, and lawyers? The longer we ignore such character excellence, the more obnoxious and wasteful social results are produced. By the time they get to prison it’s almost impossible to teach young folks more intelligent habit-arts. For years many will remain just as reasonable as Herr Hitler, and some even suffer the same suicidal fate. Timothy McVey was so angry he built a car bomb and killed over 200 people with it; how many young McVey’s are now in our public schools? Shouldn’t our schools have more psychologists working to find out who has such feelings, and then help them build more constructive ones? Aren’t our public schools the nature work place for our psychologists? Bottom line: Educational change is not impossible. Difficult yes, impossible no! Drug abuse is one example. Our legal system is realizing drug abuse is more of an educational problem than anything else; many people simply never were encouraged to teach themselves to enjoy life without drugs. Many of their public schools were places where serious, silent work was practiced most of all. No doubt, illegal drug abuse is still not widespread, but legal drug abuse seems to be much more widespread than it once was. In any case, learning to work and play enjoyably while in school would help reduce the need for such abuse, wouldn’t it? After all, what else do drugs do but relax a person and promote confident feelings? Once again, experimentation with more liberal schools is the only way to find out for sure! In any case such problems continue sapping billions to stop, say, Columbian coca planters, and still haven’t solved the problem of cocaine abuse here in the US. People continue paying for the drug, when they could just as easily get a legal prescription and also start talking to a drug counselor about building more healthful habits. At any rate, isn’t it worth experimenting with teaching more enjoyable habits in our public schools? Who knows for sure what useful social results will be produced? Like so many other personally weak, excessive, and unhealthful habits, drug abuse too is an educational problem, not a criminal problem! Again, the more young folks teach themselves the excellent character art of enjoying and celebrating life without drugs, the less need they'll have for them later on, and what better place is there to start learning such character habits than in our homes, churches, and schools? One day our churches may stop controlling others by teaching religious spirit-myths and instead focus only on helping people become more independent and learn how to intelligently help themselves. Why shouldn’t parents start demanding our public schools teach more than the so-called 3 R’s -- reading, writing, and arithmetic? Why shouldn’t they teach students how to become more independent and how to use book facts to keep making life more satisfying? What might such schools and churches look like? They would be places where everyone could learn more intelligent habit-arts, like how to make an intelligent practice plan, and then carefully test it. When building a more healthful diet, for example, student teams can first read and get some facts about different foods -- learn more about some healthful diet options and what results they might produce in their own bodies. Who knows, some may even discover ways to even improve on the book-facts! Then they can make a plan to test their ideas. As we’ve already seen, such active experimental learning has become our strongest learning art, and such planning and testing would begin building their feelings for that most important habit-art. What's more, if their testing also helped feed some of those less fortunate, like with a garden or fish farm, it would also begin building the useful character art of helping others. In that way learning would be much more active, experimental, and natural, just as it is outside of school! Instead of getting in education’s way such schools can make it more excellent, helping more students become more confident they can intelligently become what they want to become. Here's a great example of how neglected excellent character habits still are, even for gifted students at one of our best universities. Merely learning more and more mathematical facts helped a ‘genius’ earn a doctorate degree at Harvard, but he eventually became a murdering Unabomber who the public now supports with their taxes? Well at least his bombs were all mathematically correct, weren’t they? It’s yet another reason why we Deweyan liberals say character excellence -- KNOWING HOW TO USE FACTS INTELLIGENTLY TO HELP OTHERS AND OUR SELF -- might be THE most important educational goal! And to get that point across with a little more humor, and impress the idea on all peoples’ minds forever and ever, or as least on one person’s mind, here's yet another laboriously lame limerick! To a thief who was caught with the brass He was asked why act like an ass? Why not look twice, To find a nice Little computer rip-off class? No doubt, even criminal actions too need new skills just to stay in business. 18. MORE ABOUT LIBERAL EDUCATION, 102 Esthetic Experience in Our Schools That sounds like a very sophisticated kind of experience, but once again, odd-sounding words are often used to describe very simple ordinary experiences. Case in point: for us Deweyan liberals esthetic experience merely calls our conscious attention to our feeling here and now. Feeling, say, sunlight is an esthetic experience. What could be simpler? When children build their first finger painting, for example, they have some new esthetic experience -- they feel what the paint looks and feels like, and thus keep expanding their old set of esthetic feelings. And when they use such feeling to help others become a little smarter, their socially esthetic feelings grow as well. However, the more our public schools allow such experience to remain on a non-verbal subconscious level of awareness, the more disconnected from esthetic experience students become. Luckily philosophic history often talks about such feelings when it talks about learning and art. Ancient Greeks, for example, called such feelings qualities, like hot and cold, wet and dry. Thus, for Dewey, new esthetic feelings are important; they're the natural result of any new body-mind learning experience. As anyone knows, one’s first sexual experience is full of new esthetic feelings! It’s why such constructive building projects became important in his educational model. They further educate the entire body-mind of feelings AND ideas. Such experiences not only produce new ideas but new feelings as well. For him, another great weakness of our public schools is to quickly downplay feelings’ importance in learning by confining student work to merely book ideas! Such a conservative learning model soon makes school something to be endured, rather than enjoyed; the feeling of enjoyment is so important to learning any kind of new habit. Why keep practicing something that’s not enjoyable and fun? How many parents today not only ask their children what they learned in school today, but also about how they felt about such ideas -- what their esthetic learning felt like? How many parents today ignore their child’s bored feelings, and tell them that’s the way school is, rather than demanding the schools start producing more enjoyable esthetic learning experiences. Centuries ago Ben Franklin realized how important esthetic feelings were in education, and so suggest students get out of the classroom and go on field trips to feel how other people are working. Today students still go to museums, but when it’s only once or twice a year it doesn’t overcome most boring feelings about school. What’s more, how many parents never teach their children how to CONSCIOUSLY make their lives more enjoyable with playful esthetic experience by simply talking about that art? How many parents in fact keep allowing their public schools to continue wasting so much of students’ time and efforts learning mere mental ideas, rather than demand a more holistic body-mind approach to learn with more active learning projects? Such active learning projects also makes learning character habits like respect and honesty that much easier when they’re felt and not just redd about! How many people today are still esthetic children, and don’t realize how important enjoyable feelings are in any new learning experience? Such esthetic feelings help make life and learning less stressful, more enjoyable, and more satisfying! More liberal models of educational excellence like Dewey’s encourage all the above-mentioned kinds of esthetic excellence; they promote democratic and individual development. They nurture individual development, rather than keep isolating students from each other as well as bodily feelings from mental ideas. Mere book work emphasizes just the thinking and reasoning half of the body-mind. More liberal educational models like Dewey’s ask how can we better guide and encourage more enjoyable, respectful, and helpful feelings to keep growing in students, and thus weaken disrespectful and selfish feelings? Active and practical workshops and projects for students was the best answer to that question. Within them learning all the traditional skills like reading, writing, and arithmetic are learned naturally, rather than boringly and repetitively! Such work job-based workshops can best promote the practice of enjoyable esthetic feelings, and thus make learning itself more fun. Just the act of building something, whether it’s a table or a relationship, is itself capable of generating a very large number of new esthetic meanings and feelings. In fact, enjoyable esthetic feelings can turn any unsatisfying routine habit into a more creative habit-art. How many people have felt golf was too frustrating while they were learning it, and yet continued improving those feelings with more enjoyable practice? In fact, such enjoyable esthetic feelings have often been used to build a person’s sexual habits as well, so it’s intelligent to first ask a person you’re interested in what their sexual training has been. It just might save a lot of wasted time and frustration later on. New and unfelt esthetic feelings always grow during new experiences, but like anything else it takes some practice to first consciously notice them, and then to make them as enjoyable and fun as possible! Otherwise, all constructive work is merely unintelligent routine. Here is where teachers can be so useful; good liberal teachers help students verbalize their feelings, and thus make it easier to make a conscious plan to make them more enjoyable and fun. If you feel tired and tense, for example, then why not take a little break and relax those un-enjoyable feelings and start feeling more enjoyable ones? In fact, the word ‘enjoyable’ means able to produce joyful and happy feelings! What Place Has Physical Punishment? In such loving, caring, and enjoyable schools and homes, what need would there be for physical punishment? In fact, over 90% of criminals supported with excessive amounts of public tax money have been excessively abused as children! No doubt as a learning tool punishment has a very long history and practice. For centuries many Western scholars claimed Aristotle was one of the most educated men of all time, and yet he too said students should sometimes be whacked merely for not paying attention! Such esthetic experiences promote feelings of fear and obedience, the 2 cardinal excellences of a feudalistic political and social system. They in fact help define the educational challenge for we liberal Deweyan democrats! To his day both religious and public school educators still use paddling and other painful feelings as educational tools, sometimes even on students who merely show their joy and happiness; I’ve seen it myself. Our prisons too tell us how dangerous excessive punishment is. The more defenseless children are physically punished, the more it tends to create excessively dreadful feelings of resentment, anxiety, hostility, and of course hatred -- all those feelings often getting in the way of civilized living. True civilization for us Deweyan liberals is all about peace and helpfulness to those in our human tribe, rather than merely our own religious, political, or sexual tribe. To me, if any action is truly obscene, then excessively punishing defenseless children is certainly one of them. Perhaps the best response is to quickly let local child welfare people know about it and ask them to help. When conservative public schools continue focusing on book facts, and ignore more enjoyably active experimental kinds of learning, then it’s normal to student attention to wander and sometimes even lead to disruptive actions; they become discipline problems and either must be punished or removed from class altogether. The other alternative is to remain passive and obedience, like in fact many young girls are conditioned to do. There’s also an equally harmful form of punishment many teachers might practice, and that parents should know about, namely, punishing students with school work itself! How many times have frustrated and disruptive students been punished with repetitive writing assignments, like writing ‘I will be good’ a 100 times? Is it any wonder why far too many of our young folks learn not to like school, and leave as soon as they legally can; up to 50% of the student population in some inner city schools? Who wants to keep practicing the skills they’re punished with? Why make it more difficult to enjoy, love, and nurture the important skills of intelligent learning by linking them to punishment and painful feelings? The mission of our public schools is, or should be, to nurture esthetically enjoyable feelings of intelligent learning, rather than frustrate them. Hopefully the educational use of physical punishment is lessening, but excessive physical punishment seems still a social tragedy in far too many homes, as the 90% statistic tells us! The more excessive it is, the more it can twist and pervert children’s constructive and helpful feeling into destructive and hateful ones, like resentment and anger, unless of course you’re raising children who’ll make their living being spanked! Believe it or not some do and will. No law against it, right? As we’ve seen, there are more intelligent alternatives to punishment as an educational tool. Many people were lucky enough to have a warm, loving, and nurturing home life, where esthetically enjoyable feelings were encouraged. Their parents were their friends rather than their jail keeper. For such parents merely withdrawing their love and affection, until a child promises not to act selfishly or disrespectfully, is punishment enough. The late Senator Ted Kennedy described how his mother Rose sometimes withdrew her warm and enjoyable affection to encourage good habits in her children; that way they learned what actions were unacceptable and which weren’t. The problem was her husband Joseph practiced some disrespectful actions, especially against women, and so her son John Kennedy, for example, continued disrespectful actions, even to the point of becoming morally unfit to remain president. And of course guilt feelings have often been a part of Jewish education for centuries, often produced with both physical and psychic punishment. Humorist Woody Allen gives a classic example of it when he says he doesn’t believe in god, but still feels guilty about it! Is it possible to raise a child without any physical punishment? Why not? As a learned early in my teaching career, the more young folks are rewarded and praised for their constructive work, for respecting people, just laws, and helping others, then the less need there'll be for any negative kinds of punishment; they’ll feel good about doing what’s excellent, rather than what’s mean and unkind. Besides, merely hitting or isolating a child for misbehaving is not educational excellence; it still leaves a child ignorant about what actions ARE excellent. Punishment often teaches a child what not to do, rather than what to do later on, like how to help those with their problems. Thus rewarding children for their intelligent, kind, and sympathetic actions, and telling them why they're being rewarded, best helps them strengthen such habit-arts! It may even help increase memory power too. Is there an easier way to remember to bring home that octopus sushi and frog’s-leg ice cream? Obviously most parents already do great work raising their children; if not our world would certainly be much worse than it is now. But that certainly doesn’t mean millions of more people can become more active and assertive both politically and socially. Of course some conservatives may want to play around with our people-in-prison numbers to make it sound like it’s not really so outrageously wasteful. Someone might say two million is only about .6 % of our entire population, so forget about making our schools more enjoyable places of learning; they’re not that much of a problem! It’s just more ‘bleeding heart’ liberal scare tactics! But, aside from such statistical playing, the ever-increasing cost to taxpayers remains a very serious growing problem! The more precious tax money must be used to house, clothe, and feel people for their criminal actions, the less money will be available for learning to enjoy more intelligent kinds of actions in our public schools! If nothing else it’s still an example of unnecessary waste! Mere prison housing, feeding, and medical care runs into the tens of billions EACH YEAR! That result to me is certainly wasteful, as it no doubt is to many others, especially when our public schools could be using that money to build much more civilized habits before criminal feelings start growing. Imagine, just for a few moments, how many more psychologists, workshops, and useful community projects could become a part of public education if those billions were available to them. Imagine, just for a few moments, all the potentially great human resources and talents that could be liberated in our schools, instead of being spent on prisons year after year after year with little or no real benefit to society. How many folks get out of prison with the very same feelings and skills they went into prison with? In fact, many come of prison knowing even more about criminal activity! In truth, no one really knows how much stronger, more vibrant, more democratic, and more intolerant our nation would be of any form of feudalism, especially economic feudalism, if those 2 million had been better educated in their homes and public schools. Adult Education? Here’s yet another important liberal education question you might want to think about: Wouldn't it be a good idea to require parents spend a year learning about intelligent child care skills when they enroll their first child in school? No doubt, parents should have the freedom to raise their children as they see fit, as long as they’re lawful and not abusive, but shouldn't they also KNOW what excellent character habits are and how best to teach them? What better place is there to teach such important habit-arts than in our schools? Why keep naively assuming all young folks already know how to intelligently raise children, when in fact they don’t. Because we all pay taxes to house and feed in jail those with weak character habits and excessive criminal habits, don't we all have a right to demand everyone know something about one of our most important skills, namely intelligently raising a child? As it is now, we demand young folks know some important facts about driving a car before getting a license, so why should it be any different with raising a child to live intelligently in a democratic republic? No doubt, conservatives would argue against it. Since Plato conservatives have worked against teaching young folks any kind of democratic skills or intelligent scientific habits; for thousands of years experimental learning and democracy have been conservatives’ sworn enemies! They both weaken the power to control people, and keep them obedient. With such questions and facts it should be clear why controlling liberal education philosophy was so important to conservatives like Plato and even moderates like Aristotle. Real democrats work to end all aristocratic feudalistic social forms and give everyone the same equal rights and opportunity as everyone else! Such reforms are sign of democratic health and power, and public schools are where such habits should be taught. We Deweyan liberals aren't calling for an educational revolution all at once, overnight; that idea belongs to magical fantasies about how life works. But to completely ignore intelligent experimentation, or restrict it legally, is just as dangerous to democratic health. So we say it's best to merely take one baby-step at a time, to the next evolutionary step or plateau, and then keep building from there! Thus, our own neighborhood schools become the battle ground for we Deweyan liberals. If one can be improved with the ideas talked about here, then that’s what’s most important for us. One can lead to 2, and 3, and so on. Furthermore, for such progress we can all play a part, teachers, students, and parents. Even African religious leaders joined the loop to help build intelligent civil disobedient protest habits, rather than their own public schools. That to me is a classic example of how really important and useful our churches can be if they so choose, and how mean and vicious social habits can be improved with their help. History again shows even ol’ Tom Jefferson himself would probably have benefited from better lessons in democratic character excellence. Even though African Sally Hemmings bore him children he continued feeling Africans were generally incapable to reasoning intelligently. In that way he too needed more education. He also never seemed to learn how to intelligently control his own money! He died deeply in debt. Those conservatives who want to keep the educational status quo just like it is, and keep children ignorant about any ideas of excellence, can criticize these liberal educational ideas in a thousand different ways: it'll cost too much; it'll raise taxes; it'll weaken our society in other ways; it won't work; it's communistic and socialistic. For most of US history Native Americans, Africans and Asians were society's most hated people, followed closely behind by Jews, Irish, Catholics, and women. For such conservatives the status quo must be maintained at all costs, even if it means denying people their democratic rights to even vote, and our schools must be places where such habits are passed on! In other words, our schools must continue ignoring democratic ideals, even after more than 200 years of democratic evolution! That’s how important are public schools are to we Deweyan liberals. Selfish and unkind people may not realize an important fact of life; such habits often merely hurt themselves more than anyone else. Without good character training they may never realize ‘what goes around often comes around’; if they deny equal rights to others, then they too deserve to have their civil rights denied! As a result they end up hurting themselves by not treating all people with respect, honor, and equally! My own childhood definitely had many weaknesses, but such bigotry it didn’t have; my lawyer-father even helped integrate Chicago neighborhoods in the 1950s one house at a time. As a result, it’s easy for me to talk and act more liberally about equal rights for everyone! Along with Dewey I just honor and celebrate the democratic principles upon which our liberal tradition and country was founded; we’re all humans and so all deserve the same rights as anyone else. Obviously, democracy is a growth process, like any other habit-art, but the more our public schools are kept out of that growth loop, the more difficult improvement becomes. What liberal didn’t laugh when conservative President Bush 2 told us we could quickly build a cooperative democracy in Iraq when over 200 years we haven’t built one at home yet! And what hypocrisy it is to criticize China and Russia for human rights violations when many people in our own country still have hateful unintelligent feelings and ideas! Another Sign of Democratic Health: Educational Choice? Dewey criticized how book-obsessed public schools teach their prized factual textbook knowledge -- slave-like to an entire group, rather than as a free choice. As most adults already know, for 12 years students read about what someone else tells them is important to know. However, isn't that like going into an aerobics studio and allowing the instructor to tell us what kind of a body we should have? And on top of it, then college professors sometimes complain about students not having strong independent critical thinking skills! How on earth can children learn independent, creative, and critical question-asking skills when, for 12 years, they're made to merely find the book's 'right answers'? So naturally liberal educators like Dewey said such traditional schools really teach mostly habits of intellectual passivity and academic laziness! How can students become curious and want to keep learning when their own question-asking skills have been largely neglected for 12 years? As a result, how many students are happy to be done with school after high school, or even drop-out earlier? In short, when many students finish 12 years of traditional schooling not only are their own character habits not the best, but their all-important curiosity and question-asking skills are weak and greatly undeveloped! In that kind of educational situation is it any wonder many young folks turn to drugs and crime in response to a world they often feel psychically isolated from? Not encouraging all students to intelligently practice excellent learning habits like question-asking, and start learning what they themselves want to learn more about, in effect KEEPS children emotionally and intellectually immature! Is it any wonder young folks often are glad to go to war to relieve their frustrations; killing is easy, just pull the trigger? I’m innocent; I was just following orders. As a result, they often remain vulnerable to those promising quick money and happy times! Thus, Dewey criticized WHAT our schools teach -- their subjects. Traditional school subjects often ignore the practical side of education's coin, namely, how to use such knowledge and facts to keep improving life and building more helpful character habits. That, to him, was certainly less than educational excellence. In fact, such subjects are often used to find the most verbally advanced students; after all, brains are important for improving the species. So when some schools have a drop-out rates of nearly 50% how much objective evidence should people need? Their own school’s educational habits are plainly not satisfying important student needs. The answer is not to simply keep building more conservative book-obsessed schools, but to build schools where student have more educational choices to make. One promising educational option today is called Community Service work, or at least was an option before yet another serious economic recession once again began reducing tax funds for public schools. If one didn’t know better, one might believe our obscenely wealthy upper class would like nothing better than to end all non-profit public schools, so for-profit schools could more easily grow. In any case, a great challenge today is to keep such community service classes growing for students at all levels, from primary to the college level! Such learning is more vibrant, holistic, naturalistic, and more enjoyable than mere book-learning. Such classes give students a greater chance for some real practical community-improving work experience, and so we ask parents to support such programs as much as possible. No doubt, to us such classes are best if they are offered at the primary level, but any level is better than no level! After all, the last I heard seven year old kids were definitely people too! Another challenge is to make them something more than just street sweeping or trash collection. The challenge is to encourage students to see what improvements are possible in an area, make a plan to achieve them, and then test their plan. Such a plan might even include talking to people who could help fund such projects as a neighborhood park or a recycling center for all old electronic gadgets , or even how students could raise the needed money itself. Another liberal educational challenge is to help build a practical psychology workshop, where students could actually practice the healthful ideas they’re learning about, like working humorously and joyfully. Ideally, such classes would start at the primary level, help young sense-based learners learn what respectful and helpful ideas feel like. Almost certainly, only a few lucky students really know what habits are psychologically healthful, and which are dangerous. Once again, such Behavioral studies are easiest to teach at the primary level, and remain useful all through life, so why not start teaching them to children? Why should anyone naively expect anyone to practice psychological health when they’ve never been taught what it feels like? No doubt, many people who know little about Behavioral psychology might feel it’s somehow undermining all their values, but what is so dangerous about teaching students the useful, life-long art of intelligent SELF-TEACHING, or how to use rewards and a 'baby-step' method to slowly teach themselves what they want to learn? Aren't truly educated people those who know HOW to intelligently solve their own problems? If so, then wouldn't such classes easier to see peoples' own ACTIONS AND RESULTS are what're most important, not how they look and who they talk to? Wouldn't just that one idea make it much easier to feel more tolerant to those people who look differently than others, and who are labeled gays and lesbians? And more importantly, wouldn’t we ALL benefit if people learned intelligent habits are simply respectful to all law-abiding people? If you’re really another one of those ‘radical’ democratic educators, then it might be something even worth experimenting with. How many times in history have today’s 'radical' ideas, like equal rights, become tomorrow's democratic status quo? That certainly seems to be the trend, doesn’t it? Educational Results Beyond the Classroom Perhaps more than any other philosopher of the 1900s, Dewey also saw the possibilities such educational ideas create beyond the classroom for building a healthier democracy, where wealth-power is easily controlled with democratic power. Is it just coincidence our obscenely wealthy class has become even wealthier since our schools have become more book-obsessed since the late 1950s, and our universities have become less affordable to all but the wealthiest families. Only they can easily afford the huge costs of college, and so keep being lectured by conservative professors, many of whom want nothing more than to maintain our feudalistic status quo. In more liberal democratic schools children would have a choice about learning not only useful job skills, but also about useful character habits as well! He saw clearly how our public schools can be used not to build a healthier democracy, where equal rights are demanded for all, but rather merely maintain the political and economic status quo. If our public schools don’t teach such intelligent experimental habits on a formal basis, even to primary age students, then their entire character growth will remain stunted, immature, and even medieval. The recent explosion of business arts and skills need young folks who know how to experiment intelligently and creatively, how to learn new skills quickly, and how to use extra monies to help those less well off. No doubt, sometimes it takes some trial-and-error experimentation for students to discover what job skills they like best, and also learn how to enjoy experimentally learning more about them. It even took very intelligent Ben Franklin years to learn how important science was, and also begin experimentally learning how to build useful objects, like a lightning rod so as to better protect buildings and people from becoming cinders. Until then people continued using religious skills like prayer and worship to avoid lightning’s dangers. And even after the lightning rod was invented some religious conservatives condemned him for taking away some of god’s power to punish sinners! Such is the power of conservative habits to maintain the social status quo, even though the outside world around them is continually changing and evolving! More liberal democratic schools will make it easier for more people to start learning how to intelligently control constructive kinds of growth, rather than merely reject all such ideas. What better skill can there be in an always changing world? Without the help of our tax-supported public schools, real progress educating young folks about practicing or democratic ideals has been difficult. Good liberal schools are still relatively rare, even in the US, and population growth rates make the challenge even more difficult. Teachers must be trained themselves, new curriculums designed for more liberal schools, and then even allowed to grow in places where un-democratic habits are firmly in place. In those places conservatives and many moderates choose to block any such useful educational reforms; they want students to remain educated only about the habits they feel are best. Recently I even heard a high government Democratic education official flatly say character habits will never be formally taught in public schools, as if there was some eternal and unchanging natural law against it! Such un-democratic statements continue telling us true liberals should first focus on improving their own neighborhood schools, and thus increase the educational freedom for everyone! Conservatives know full well, the more young folks are liberated from their old routine educational habits of obedience to their teachers and books, and encouraged to more clearly see how political propaganda is used to maintain an economic, political, and educational status quo, the more vulnerable that feudalistic status quo becomes! That’s exactly what most conservatives and moderates have not wanted, do not now want, and almost certainly will never want! They want to keep making it easier for them to keep taking more of the public’s money, even if it’s used to build more useless and unneeded weapons, or give it to wealthy corporations and farmers who don’t need it. With more liberal public schools, more people will find it easier to elect more liberal politicians who aren’t afraid to tax the already obscenely wealthy at a much fairer rate than they now pay, and also work to restrict their putting millions of dollars into off-shore bank accounts, and thus avoid paying taxes at all! If there’s any kind of natural human law, it might be this: those with power will keep working to maintain, conserve, and increase it as much as possible! Western history is literally brimming with examples of that idea, and it’s still brimming to this day! This also seems rather safe to say. Without more liberal democratic-oriented public schools, our so-called cultural wars between conservatives and liberals will continue being won by a small class of very wealthy people. Thus, stress and frustration will continue being felt by most everyone; stressful economic recessions seem to be happening even more frequently these days. People should thus know: true conservatives want children to continue learning habits of obedience and meek acceptance of the ideas and feelings they're given to learn. Such habits grow stronger every time a child works on another academically trivial book assignment, and is made to feel they are the most important things to know. As we’ve seen in these pages, from Plato on, what’s been most important for conservatives is maintaining their feudalistic status quo, whether its based on secular or religious assumptions! The more such conservative and moderate aristocratic assumptions were challenged, the more room became available to build more liberal democratic habits and skills. Also worth thinking about is this idea too. Our conservative book-oriented public schools make it easier for students to join some kind of military service where obedience to those with authority is not just expected, but demanded. From the 1890s on US military outfits have often been forcing people in other countries to accept US goods and services, and thus, with the help of obedient soldiers, enslaving them with perpetual debt to US banks and the wealthy upper class! Such obedient soldiers have been making it easy to enforce those goals by even cold-bloodedly killing and murdering anyone who might rebel against them; Vietnam was merely one brutal and vicious example among hundreds occurring throughout the 1900s while building a US economic and military empire. As we've seen, after he retired Marine General Smedley Butler said flatly he acted as just a high class muscleman obeying orders from Wall Street and wealthy financiers! No doubt, these days that empire is maintained more with economic power than military force, with orgs. like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, but they continue working to maintain a feudalistic economic status quo. To his credit, Aristotle said to use money merely to make more money should not be allowed, and he also saw how it was often used to buy more political and economic power. But without also suggesting democratic ways to better control that power for everyone’s benefit, they remain merely 2 ideas. While some corporations were making millions of dollars during World War 1selling guns and weapons, the US government passed a law forbidding people to even speak against the war; the First Amendment be damned, there was money to be made. It's yet another example of how money will distort any democratic freedom in its path. For us Deweyan liberals such military and economic reality both rest on young folks obeying for most of 12 years what they’re told to do by their teachers, without any practical freedom or encouragement to even question the usefulness of any such assignments. Again, in the corporate world such unquestioning habits of obedience are useful; corporate leaders don’t want anyone questioning the pay they get, the working conditions they have, or the work they do. All such freedoms would merely endanger their own profits and salaries. As a result, many corporations have been fighting for decades against union worker power! To this day women are often paid less than men for the same work, mostly because they haven’t learned to organize themselves and thus increase their economic power. They haven’t yet learned healthy democratic habits! In fact, union membership is at an all-time low these days while corporate profits are at an all-time high! We Deweyan liberals say this situation is a direct result of conservative educational practices in our own public schools, and until they change it’s naïve to believe life will change in any meaningful way! The addiction to money can be just as dangerous as the addiction to any dangerous drug. Many religious conservatives too still believe, with Plato, it’s absolutely necessary to keep others and our nation as free as possible from sin and irreligious habits; the current fight against same-sex marriage is merely one example. In short, for all such reasons the battle to build more liberal democratic public schools continues to this day! For us liberals the main reason is fairly easy to see: the more people are conditioned to feel some of their ideas reflect absolute truth, the more likely they are to resist any challenges to them. The more people feel as Aristotle did, that some people are natural slaves, and should be treated that way, the easier it was for mean, violent, and vicious racial and sexual hatreds to continue on, and thus making our democracy much less healthy than it might be. Liberals like Dewey, on the other hand, not only recognized such a reality, but also began challenging it by helping build more liberal democratic schools where child development stages were more respected. Even many ancient conservatives have said children should be allowed to play and learn with games until they’re almost teenagers. For Dewey such liberal ideas would make it easier to keep educating youngsters about actually building a more peaceful and productive world for everyone, and not just a small class of obscenely wealthy folks. Teaching creatively experimental habits and skills while learning useful employment skills is basically how liberal schools differ from conservative ones. Too many young folks still haven’t been allowed or encouraged to learn such important skills, and thus make life less difficult for themselves and our nation more democratic with equal rights and opportunities for all. Naturally, such liberal democratic schools would rest on all of the ideas mentioned so far, like the experimental learning of practical and useful knowledge and skills, the freedom to choose and learn more about a career path while still in school, and how to use our creative ideas as helpful tools, rather than merely building a bank account. No doubt, today we face many of the same social challenges mankind has faced for thousands of years, and have been frustrated by conservatives for thousands of years too! Without such a practical and useful democratic educational model, we continue facing serious social and personal problems, like economic slavery, drug addiction, gang violence, social disrespect, forced prostitution, and juvenile and adult crime to name just 6 obnoxious results. They continue telling us our traditional book-centered educational models need improving. Those results are not the result of corrupt liberal ideas and feelings, much less an evil human nature, as conservatives even today tell us. They’re the result of conservative educational models of education kept in practice for thousands of years first with religious ideas, and today also with secular ideas about conservative values being the best values of all. It’s an old sophist debate trick; when something is your fault blame the other person as much and as often as you can! In truth, however, much of our modern world today is the direct result of conservative institutions. For example, today conservative ideas about the value of a small minority having vast amounts of economic wealth and power are useful for a few conservative politicians to stay in power and keep working to maintain such a feudal economic system. Those few thousand people have more wealth and political power than 50% of the population combined!? Is that in fact the best kind of social model to make life better for everyone? Real life conditions emphatically tell us it is not! No doubt, much has been accomplished and improved for many people in our modern world in merely the past 200 years. Millions of people are now being fed, clothed, housed, and better educated than ever before, thanks to experimental science and more liberal political improvements. However, as many also know, life has also remained very brutal for many as well. For far too many young folks today, not having useful job skills when they leave high school continues making them vulnerable to some of the most dehumanizing habits ever practiced, like addicting young women to drugs and forcing them into prostitution merely to feed their pimp’s drug habit! The more people are educated to look the other way, the easier it becomes to continue such actions. So, isn’t it natural to ask if our own public schools are partly to blame for such results? Why shouldn’t students be educated to not only quickly report such events, but also to learn useful job skill so it would be easier to resist such actions? Don’t young women have the right to learn such skills? Thanks in part to our book-obsessed schools, hundreds of thousands of young women runaways will begin leading such a life, and living with the psychic scars for the rest of their lives unless they get some expert professional help. Such events can be reduced with the help of fully staffed caring public schools helping learn how to demand respect from others while they enjoyable learn useful job skills. Often such young women attended schools where building more helpful and practical skills was thought to be beyond education’s scope, and thus be unprofessional! Conservatives have been arguing like that for centuries. If we’re to build more useful skills for our modern democratic world, then a willingness to experiment with new ideas is another useful habit-art. Not feeling some ideas shouldn’t be experimented with even for a short time, like with equal marriage rights, prevents people from seeing the actual results from such actions, and thus have some objective evidence one way or another! Have such results made life any different, and if so in what way? Such an intelligent experimental habit-art is the natural result of seeing ideas as merely mental tools, not absolute truth. When students are better educated about our experimental Behavioral psychology, it becomes easier to feel some ideas should be experimented with, just to see their results. How would my life change if I allowed gay and lesbian couples to marry? What would be the social results if more students were allowed to learn the job skills they want to learn, and had more democratic freedom to choose school rules and student representatives? As it is now, many young folks leave school with weak feelings for those important skills, and thus keep allowing others to build the kind of world we now have. In fact, as many as 500,000 young folks become vulnerable runaways every year who often get forced into prostitution by brutal males already addicted to drugs. Thus, it becomes practically impossible to even think about how their own neighborhood schools could be helping improve that situation by enjoyably teaching more useful job skills to young folks. Also, what‘s wrong with experimentally testing for a short time the idea of legalizing prostitution and drug use, just to see what results might be produced? Sex is a human need, and so learning to express it in socially healthy ways is an important habit-art. How can life possibly keep becoming better and more satisfying for everyone unless more people treat their ideas experimentally, and see what results are actually produced? Without such feelings for experimental learning we simply remain in the same old routine ruts of paying to feed and house drug users and sellers in prison at about $50,000 each a year! Then, when they get out they’re back on the streets within days luring more young teenage women into the same actions. How useful for social health is it to keep ignoring how young folks want to start learning some useful job skills even while they’re in elementary school? Why shouldn’t our schools help students build practical clothing, law enforcement, medical and legal skills so they can begin serving community needs even while in school? Dewey’s new liberal models of educational excellence are saying this is OUR world to experiment with intelligently, and the more we do, the easier it becomes to find better ways of living and judging any idea or action. In fact, with freedom from believing any routine idea or ritual reflects nature’s absolute truth has come the freedom to keep experimenting with all intelligent kinds of growth, rather than keep obeying a status quo producing such obnoxious results. If some students want to learn how be bus drivers, then why not also teach them how to be creative and intelligent drivers who know how to enjoy their needed public service work? No institution stays the same forever. Perhaps the best example of that is some of our religious organizations; many are working to make their followers more humane and humanistic, and focused on helping those who still have many old conservative ideas about life and nature. What better goal could any organization possibly have? Many liberals today say such liberal humanistic goals are religion’s oldest and most worthwhile. For example, many fundamental Christian sects now regularly use Behavioral psychology methods to help those addicted to old conservative ideas, and thus teach the art of intelligently growing better habits one step at a time and one day at a time. The more they do, the more they improve life in this world -- the only people-friendly world for many billions of miles around! Is there any better way for religious folks to express their love than encouraging people to intelligently enjoy the art of guiding their own excellent growth? Isn't that the best goal of a truly liberated religion, as it is with a truly liberal education? To us Deweyan liberals, the more people feel all of life should be a self-directed educational growth, and stay focused on improving life for everyone, the more sensitive they’ll become to controlling those who want to keep enslaving as many as possible for their own comfort! Teaching others to enjoy guiding their growth intelligently and experimentally embodies the new modern liberal model of ideas as mental tools and democratic equal rights as the best political system. To us Deweyan liberals, all those social organizations treating only their ideas as absolute Truth are more psychically enslaving than liberating, and more controlling than loving and respectful. After all, nature never has had only one model of truth, and almost certainly never will have. Many liberal people today have dedicated their lives to teaching their new models of ideas as experimental mental tools. Indeed, with such humanistic ideas there are as many different 'roads to heaven', feelings about being born again, and becoming saved as there are people on earth! The popular saying is there are more ways than 1 to skin a cat. Such tolerant feelings are yet another new naturalistic result of seeing all ideas as experimental. With its help we can also more deeply celebrate some new modern heroes who actively worked for democracy's ideal of equal rights, like Susan Anthony, Ben Franklin, Jane Addams, Martin Luther King Jr., and John Dewey, as well as millions of other liberals who're working for the same result each and every day. For example, the more Susan Anthony sensed women were mainly taught how to be obedient second-class citizens, the more deeply she felt the idea of inequality as merely another social weakness, and thus as something to keep experimentally improving. Voting rights for women became his mission! Why should anyone tolerate half the population not having an equal right to vote, or not having reproductive freedom? Isn’t expanding such equal rights what all humane organizations do? Such a modern democratic world continues unfolding. In fact, just a few hundred years ago, in the 1700s, many Christians routinely believed this idea was absolute truth: some women and children become possessed by devils and evil spirits, and so should be burned as witches to save their souls. One more example may be useful. About 30,000 years ago Neandertals failed to improve their routine habits of living while the newly evolved sapien peoples continued spreading out around the globe. Thus, within a few thousand years they became extinct. The more Neandertals practiced their old routine hunting habits, the more difficult it was to experiment with new ones, and thus continue feeling life’s enjoyments. It’s not just prehistoric history either; such a reality continues on even today. Recently secular totalitarian leaders have shown how dangerous routine habits of obedience can be. Stalin, Hitler, and Pol Pot all demanded obedience to their models of truth, while killing millions of people who allowed them the power to do so. To us Deweyan liberals, even these examples from human history are enlightening. They help teach us we the people have the power to build a more satisfying world for everyone, and unless we focus that democratic power we will be responsible for whatever else happens; unless the people act together and more democratically, our world will remain feudalistic. If liberals like Dewey are right, if all our ideas depend on HUMAN habit-arts, then more liberal democratic schools will build such a world more quickly, a kinder, more respectful, and helpful world where children’s helpful dreams are fulfilled rather than frustrated. Who knows, maybe even one day peace may break out all over the world! Imagine that, aye?? Stranger things have happened, haven't they? However, almost certainly it'll never happen unless we ourselves start looking at more intelligent and humane models of education, economics, nature, and politics. The more that happens, the easier it’ll become for such a world to keep evolving. Little feisty Jonathan went to school in May, Mother had roused him from bed where he lay. While studying an octagonal cask, He raised his hand and asked, Hey, am I gonna learn anything useful today? 16. EDUCATION: CONSERVATIVE AND DEWEYAN, 101 In this and the following 2 sections we take Book 1's longest look at Dewey's liberal educational models of excellence. Usually the philosophy of education is treated as a minor philosophic subject, if it’s treated at all. As in so many ways, Plato was an exception to that rule; his most famous book Republic is essentially a book on educational philosophy. For Dewey, however, and many other liberals, education was one of philosophy's most important subjects, if not the most important! Only with better education can people begin seeing more intelligent ways of acting and guiding their lives, and thus build better habits. Luckily Dewey lived at a time when many Americans wanted to keep improving their lives and governments -- the Progressive Era -- and so in many places around the country many of his educational ideas were experimented with, tested, and continued on into the 1950s! At such schools young folks were helped to learn useful job skills as well as important character habits, like helping others and respecting just laws, as well as learn how to intelligently change unjust ones. For example, for a while Gary, Indiana's entire school district began using many of his ideas in the 1910s, as did the Chicago Vocational School system, and of course later in life entire country’s like Turkey, China, and Japan asked him for educational advice about making their own schools more excellent. They all wanted to keep improving their schools so their young folks would learn more intelligent habit-arts and thus lessen many of their social problems, like crime, unemployment, and helping their economies become more industrial and competitive. Even though he went to China decades before the Communists took over, today China produces more engineers than anyone else and their economy is rapidly becoming world-class, second only to the US. In any case, however, these 3 sections are not just for new teachers, but also for parents and students of education; after all, parents are the most important teachers for any child! Our Main Criticisms For we liberal Deweyans, for too long US education has been out of the progressive improvement loop, so to speak. Its basic education philosophy has been too conservative and even medieval. For us, educational excellence is the best and ONLY way for people AND societies to keep growing and evolving more peaceful and intelligent habit arts, but the more traditional schools remain, the more difficult that goal becomes. Such book-obsessed schools make it more difficult to learn all the democratic and experimental habits making life all it can be. To Dewey liberal education was the best key for teaching young folks how best to keep improving all their habit-arts, like healthcare, charity, exercise, lawfulness, and respect for equal rights. Again, without such a liberal educational system, many social problems remain an economic drag, like fighting crime, underemployment, unemployment, crippling social discrimination, drug abuse, health problems, democratic weaknesses, not to mention global warming and war itself. For Dewey all such modern social challenges can most rapidly be improved only with effective and practical educational ideas and practices, ones in which students make an emotional commitment to learning what feels best to them, rather than being regimented and made to learn what they often have no desire or need to learn. The less young folks make that emotional commitment, the sooner they forget what they spent years being made to learn. And so for us Deweyan liberals children should be free to choose a career path as soon as possible, even in elementary school! Such an emotional commitment makes it much easier to then teach students the valuable character habits they’ll need to become successful lawyers, doctors, engineers, police people, carpenters, plumbers, or whatever, and also the writing, reading, and calculating skills schools now try to teach. So, if Dewey's right, if the emotional commitment to learn practical employment skills is the best educational model for any kind of learning, then child psychology becomes one of the most important subjects of all. Without knowing something about the 3 main stages of child development, it’s almost impossible to build such schools, as Plato himself saw thousands of years ago. In general those stages are a playfully sense-based stage until about 7, a constructive stage until about 11 or 12, and then, as the brain matures, a more intellectual stage capable of grasping more abstract ideas. Thus, without accepting such a child psychology, and instead yoking students to book-work for 12 years, it will take much longer for almost anyone to learn any kind of excellence! And the more that doesn’t happen, the more vulnerable millions of young folks will remain to all of society’s unintelligent temptations and vices. On the other hand, the more schools are based on that psychology, the more naturalistic and less stressful school becoming, and the more children will want to be there. After helping found the American Association of University Professors, and becoming its first president, Dewey published his best educational book, Democracy and Education. Also The School and Society is a good little introductory book about elementary education. More About Dewey After he moved to the newly opened University of Chicago in 1894 Dewey opened its famous Lab School; there he began testing his liberal ideas. It’s still operating today, helping students learn valuable computer skills. After his undergraduate studies he taught briefly at the high school level in Pennsylvania, and there he began feeling how artificial conservative educational models were; without emotionally committing themselves to learn all the book facts they were being asked to learn, school for most students became a place merely to go to until the law said they could leave. For how many students is that the reality even today? In fact, even today most students just don’t need to know all those book facts college professors of education said they should learn. Also, they often justified their book-based models on producing so-called well-rounded students who learn a little of many different subjects. Again, at such schools students quickly forgot the ideas they learned merely to pass the next test. Thus, education for most everyone remained shallow, superficial, and worst of all, useless for much of life outside the school room! Greatly undereducated parents didn’t know enough about education to challenge such an educational model. Thus, often students weren’t prepared for the new jobs being created as science and technology continued creating them. In short, Dewey realized the whole feeling-side of education was largely missing in traditional classrooms; it was mostly just telling students to learn academic subjects at merely a mechanically verbal level of learning, rather than a holistic level of feeling AND verbal learning. So, like Alexander’s empire, conservative public education covered a lot of ground but it was only a few inches deep. And the work was easy; teachers just needed to stay a day or 2 ahead of the students’ book assignments. But again, such facts were all but useless in the real world outside of school. Another result was to ignore the far more useful subject of character development. Thus, again, many students remained vulnerable to all the anti-social actions going on in their own neighborhoods. Police brutality thus became intensified as more people broke the law mainly for economic reasons. They didn’t have the skills to work at better paying jobs, and thus racial segregation and discrimination continued making life needlessly stressful. In Chicago Dewey got the chance to test some of his more holistic and naturalistic ideas of learning, based on a sounder model of child psychology. There he saw the results of making learning an active, sense-based, enjoyable, and natural as learning outside of school. He wanted children to learn about history, chemistry, physics, but he also wanted such subjects taught not just from books in the higher grades, but from active and holistic learning experience! That way, a child’s bodily feelings would be just as educational as talking about ideas. In short, Dewey saw how knowledge should be located in one’s muscles as much as one’s brain. For example, having young students at the sense-based stage of development build a garden would also begin teaching them some elementary chemistry, biology, and mathematical facts. Also, it would make those ideas more meaningful because the experience was active, rather than a passive desk-centered model where student muscles are kept out of the educational loop, so to speak. After all, such children learn best with active practice. He also began experimenting with building projects for students at the constructive stage of development. He saw how even his own children learned best when they actively experimented intelligently to build what they wanted, and when teachers helped them feel what intelligent actions felt like. Students were to first make a detailed plan for their projects, and then actually test it themselves to see its results. Such holistic and organic learning experiences made learning important intelligent and experimental ideas easier and more enjoyable, and it also increased their carpentry, electrical, and plumbing skills. What kind of fertilizer, for example, was best for a garden, and how much of it was best? What is fertilizer? Are there different kinds? How is it made? Such questions begin opening up for young children the entire world of experimental research, and not just for a few, but for all students. Then, after moving to Columbia University in New York in 1904, he continued writing about education and convincing more people how our traditional public schools could be even better with the addition of constructive or project kinds of learning. If children wanted to learn more about politics, then they would make a list of questions, plan a trip to city hall, and talk with politicians who could answer their questions. Such learning projects would be much more meaningful to students than merely passively reading about politics. Then, when students’ body-minds are ready to study abstract ideas, the last 2 years of high school could be devoted to those studies, especially for students going on to college. Such a learning model was also useful for promoting democratic feelings of equality; each student played some part in such projects. Some Ancient Education History As with so many other philosophic ideas, liberal and active models of education go back not only to ancient Greek Sophists and Atomists, but they were used by our native ancestors for millions of years! All useful tools and habits were actively built experimentally, since the first stone tool was built over 2 million years ago! Normally, native children are taught to build their own useful skills, tools, and weapons during their constructive stage of childhood. And often it was the only way women were educated until the 1800! In ancient Greece, many Sophists like Protagoras became the college professors of the time, traveling from city to city and giving lectures about what students should practice. Sometimes they sold their books too! In fact, Dewey says how their new liberal questions about learning helped build the classic model of philosophy which lasted thousands of years! What is learning? Can character excellence be taught, or was it just a random gift from the gods? What is the best political, ethical, and educational system? Is there one or many? Such questions helped define philosophy’s 6 main topics, namely nature, learning, ethics, politics, education, and art. As they went from city to city they gave lectures for which they charged a fee; hey, sophists gotta eat too, right? What’s more, the lectures were aimed at teaching young folks practical skills for living more intelligently in the new democratic systems evolving around Greece. For example, learning how to speak well in public and in the law courts, where juries were sometimes 500 people; many people were afraid to speak in front of such large groups. They also lectured about important skills like estate management. Books were expensive and thus almost non-existent, and so lecturing gave young folks a chance to hear about new ideas they could practice for themselves. Thus, the new skills useful in a democratic society were learned. Such skills made it easier to take advantage of opportunities growing at the time. We've already seen one example of it when Thales made a lot of money selling olive oil presses one year. Needless to say, many of those ancient liberal democratic Sophists were secular-minded. To them, learning useful skills made living here and now more secure and worthwhile. Unlike conservative, Plato many liberal Sophists didn’t bother about any other realm except our natural one; Protagoras frankly admitted his not knowing about any other world besides our natural one. After all, with centuries of practical colony building in back of them, and many smashed fingers along the way, many Sophists were confident their own practical experimental learning model would be useful to many people. Aesop's practical little stories written at that time were about what practical skills might be useful, and they’re still popular reading today. With Socrates’ (d. 399) help ethical questions became another part of classical philosophy. So, is it any wonder one of the most prominent 4th century BCE sophists, a man named Antiphon wrote (Fr. 60) “Primary among human concerns is education” And of course one of the founders of Western liberalism, Democritus, himself realized its importance too; he tells us he would rather discover one law of nature than be a king in any entire country! In China too Confucius said with education all class divisions fad. In short, education helps us see all people are related and deserve the same rights as everyone else. The business-oriented democratic world of the 400s BCE was challenging Greek men like they had never been challenged before; women and slaves were pretty much out of the public loop. Sophist teachers helped fill those new educational needs. Men needed to get better at building businesses, talking respectfully with people, and also at guiding their government as well as defending themselves in court. Thus debate and reasoning skills were needed. Even slaves were welcomed to attend, as long as they paid the fee. As a result, old Greek political institutions continued being reconstructed along democratic lines, as is our modern world, and those with more intelligent thinking and acting habits had a big advantage in that world. It became easier to make an honest drachma or two. Socrates, of course, Democritus, Plato, Aristotle, and many others soon began painting their philosophic answers to such challenging questions, and within a few decades Western civilization had liberal, moderate, and conservative educational models of excellence, although Aristotle’s wasn’t very detailed. Just as today, where they differed was in what they thought was excellent to know, and how they could best learn it. Thus, different models of nature and learning began growing. Greeks being Greeks, it wasn't soon before conservatives like Plato began challenging Democritus’s liberal naturalistic models of excellence. His religious habits were very strong; in fact his Republic rested on knowing Spirit-Objects; he felt they were the best objects to know, much like Christians would say for many centuries during the Middle Ages. Naturally, Plato educational model was far from democratic. Instead it focused mainly on how to educate a few elite students rather than everyone; many conservatives cherish such feelings to this day. In the Republic he described his youthful conservative spirit-feelings about life and education, like how only future philosopher-kings should be educated for some 50 years before they were given power. After that time they would continue enforcing a very conservative model of life on everyone, limiting both democratic and religious freedoms for everyone. As mentioned earlier, no agnostics or atheists would be allowed. However, even he saw how some liberal ideas were useful. For example, his future rulers were to spend some 15 years in practical work between the ages of 35 and 50. They would then learn something about the problems and potentials of life. After that, then while ruling their city-state, they would return to more abstract subjects, like contemplating nature's eternal and unchanging spirit-objects -- the Spirit-Objects he thought governed all of nature. Because our natural world was merely a reflection of that spirit-world, only its objects could teach people what the best knowledge was all about, and thus make their actions most excellent. Sadly, however, we’ve seen how Plato eventually realized such objects could not be known entirely, or even with any degree of certainty. So, on a logical level they remained merely an assumption with no real evidence for them. Conservatives like Socrates and Plato, and moderates like Aristotle, thought like many traditional educators still think today: Mere thinking and reasoning is the most excellent learning art. That idea lives today in many of our public schools when they emphasis book-study for 12 years as the best form of education. Some, like Socrates, preferred a conversational style of reasoning. He would talk with whomever he could and ask them to define the eternal nature of some familiar abstract idea -- friendship, beauty, justice, and courage. Conservatives like him and Plato simply assumed such objects existed; again, mathematical facts seemed to imply such eternal knowledge existed. Others, like Democritus, Plato, and Aristotle preferred a written and lecture style of reasoning; Plato and Aristotle both started their own schools in Athens and no doubt lectured in them. Thus, we can begin seeing how important education was to the Greeks; they too sensed it was the key to building a better world. Where they differed from each other was the definition of ‘better.’ For Plato better meant more controlled, less diverse, more closed, and more feudalistic. For Democritus and Protagoras better meant more freedom, equality, democracy, and variety. A Case for Character Training Like them, Dewey too saw how important education was to the health of any political system, especially democracy. After all, for almost all of civilization people had lived in feudal societies where the rights they had depended on the social power they had, whether it was military, monetary, or religious. But he also noticed how modern tax-supported public schools also aimed at keeping a status quo in place. In fact, throughout much of history students were regimented, taught to obey their teachers, and kept that way with physical punishment. In the late ancient period Augustine too was often wacked by his teachers, and even in the 1960s I too saw how Catholic education was based on physical punishment, almost on a daily basis. The school disciplinarian would daily walk around the lunchroom and bang together the heads of students laughing and enjoying themselves. In fact, it’s not too much to say the present state of our nation as largely disconnected from our political and economic systems is a direct result of our educational practices. Those 2 important systems are all but ignored in our public schools, as is the subject of character excellence. To say the least, the more those character habits are ignored, the easier it becomes for those in power to stay in power and keep increasing it too, as we’ve seen in the last few sections. In truth, CHARACTER development and skills were as important to many ancient liberal sophists as they were to modern liberals like Dewey; character habits like good speaking, honesty, helpfulness, lawfulness, and how to make an honest drachma or 2. Such habits can help keep one's freedom and knowledge growing all through life, and thus help make life more satisfying and rewarding. Without them life remains much like we see on our local news shows, full of violence and disrespect. Even some teachers were recently sentenced to prison terms for changing test score grades. For us liberal Deweyans, however, character excellence is a life-long practice and skill beginning in our public schools. It's the same way with medical or legal skills; no doctor or lawyer knows everything about their art, and so they merely KEEP PRACTICING those habit-arts all through life! It's the same way with character excellence; it's an always growing practice rather than a static skill; it challenges people to practice joyful and respectful actions all through life, in thousands of little different ways here and now. In truth, there are an infinite number of ways to practice kindness, sympathy, and helpfulness. Down through time such useful and practical character skills not only helped people keep learning more easily, but also live safer and more intelligent lives in democratic systems. For example, Protagoras said part of character excellence was the habit of respecting the law, no matter what country you were in, and so knowing what the law is became an important part of liberal excellence on a daily basis. Sadly, that skill too has been all but ignored in many, if not most, of our tax-supported public schools! How many young folks today would act more excellently if their schools focused on teaching our laws, rather than just more and more trivial academic facts about history and literature while remain largely useless for all but future teachers? Can't you just imagine Protagoras looking for a parking sign every time he parked his chariot, if parking signs existed at the time? In short practical-minded Protagoras celebrated useful character knowledge and skills; they helped make life less stressful and more enjoyable. After all, if you’re going to learn some habit-art, why not learn not only some useful habit, but how best to use it wisely and intelligently, rather than ignorantly and illegally? More often than not, such important character habits like knowing what the law says about many different actions helps preserve a person's freedom, rather than remaining a slave to their own unintelligent ideas and habits. No doubt, seeing even slaves as deserving of equal rights was another bit of liberal audacity Plato and Aristotle both could not accept. For them a feudal model of life and nature was firmly implanted! Plato once complained about slaves who were too well dressed; it made them more difficult to see. That was part of the world they lived in. It was a common feeling; many imagined everyone's Fate was all arranged at birth by 3 spirit-goddesses. No doubt, Plato and Aristotle didn't believe that, but moderate Aristotle believed some people should even be forced into slavery, even though if they were smart enough, many slaves were often given more freedom; some even became bank managers! Hundreds of years later Julius Caesar too felt justified in killing many thousands of Celts in France. Why? How else could such barbarians become truly civilized? Sounds like he definitely had more gall than kind and sympathetic feelings while in Gaul! So even in ancient Greece practical character habits became the liberal key to excellence in all things, especially in education. The more we practice such habits, and make them part of our will power, the easier it becomes to practice ethical excellence in our own democratic age. If practiced enough it becomes what many conservative and moderate psychologists call instinct! However, what that means in school is allowing students to first learn about the many different skills being practiced in the real world, and then allowing them to choose which one they would like to learn more about. No doubt, such liberal, practical, democratic actions will make it much easier to also teach the democratic character habits too, like tolerance and respect for all law-abiding people. Without such schools, feudalistic habits of intolerance and hate will continue on, as we can see daily in our media and newspapers. To this day in many places conservatives work to keep such democratic habits weak and hobbled in their growth. What’s more, religious ideas are still often used to defend such conservative actions; they might offend some god somewhere, or bring on some catastrophe. In fact, many religions continue practicing those ideas, and the more they do, the more intolerant people feel. Using Useful Ideas Before Plato was born, liberal Protagoras probably discovered a rather interesting educational question. Some practical person may’ve asked him: If whatever we experience is true for us, then why pay high fees to teachers like you to teach us about excellence? In short, if excellence is relative from city to city, nation to nation, and even from person to person, then why do we need Sophists telling us what they think excellence is? His answer, however, shows how really practical and pragmatic he was. In effect he said even though everyone is the measure of their own truth, not everyone’s truth works equally well in different social situations! Excellence in irrigating crop fields in one country, for example, may not be acceptable in another country, perhaps for religious reasons. For example, lying and thievery may be allowed in some places, but in a more civilized place neither one may work equally well. Thus knowing conditions here and now becomes another part of liberal character excellence. What is happening out there? If you visit and start talking about crop irrigation in one place, you can understand why people might think it less than excellent when they have laws against it. So Protagoras suggested an intelligent person will learn to respect the country’s laws they’re in, so life’s stresses would be reduced. It was just another example of practical reasoning. Why risk the chance of being thrown into jail, or worse, just for not respecting a country’s laws? Why try to fricassee a camel when it’s against the law? In short, for the well-traveled Protagoras, because excellence always varies from place to place, and from person to person, why not learn to respect all law-abiding people? It’s another example of how intelligent respect is one liberal democratic character habit useful in many different places! Is it all just ancient history! Even in the US, the world's oldest democracy, many conservative secular and religious folks today still feel some peaceful habits should be outlawed and forbidden, rather than tolerated; gay and lesbian equal marriage rights are merely one current example of that idea; a few decades ago it was equal rights for Africans, and in the 1800s it was equal rights for Irish immigrants. In fact, one liberal democratic character skill Protagoras taught remains excellent today: respect and obey any country's laws, as long as they're just and apply to everyone! And, even if they are unjust, work intelligently to change them if you work at all. That way you keep your freedom to keep making life better for everyone. How can education get more practical than that, and yet in many of our public schools today such ideas are only mentioned in books, if they’re mentioned at all, and rarely practiced if they’re practiced at all. If you're a real social pioneer you can challenge unfair and unjust laws in court, just to test them and maybe get them overturned, but such skills are rarely allowed to be practiced by students themselves! To us Deweyan liberals it’s another great weakness of our public schools. Most all of the learning remains confined to a merely boo-idea level of consciousness, rather than a deeper body-mind level. Protagoras’ liberal practical educational ideas, like teaching yourself useful kinds of respectful habit-arts, and of course testing them in the real world, no doubt inspired Aristotle, Dewey, and many other educators as well. For nature-loving Aristotle, founding a school became an intelligent way to build his own aristocratic models of philosophic excellence, and in it more than mere facts were to be taught. For him excellent ethical habits were those of a moderate aristocratic Greek gentleman, loaded with all its undemocratic feelings about equal rights and opportunities for anyone not a member of his aristocratic class. For the liberal and democratic Dewey, however, teaching useful and practical CHARACTER habits to all students in our public schools was the best way to keep strengthening our democracy and its liberal values of equality. If not, then such skills can even be eliminated merely within 1 generation! After all, everyone learns the habits they’re taught. If no one were taught intolerant habits they wouldn’t be practiced. Hopefully now the reader will see why Dewey based his liberal model of education on 3 pillars: fact, skills, and character development. Part of that character development depends a great deal on knowing what the law is, and the results of not respecting it. Thus, the following question: Why shouldn't young folks learn more about our laws every year they’re in school, as well as practicing such respect both in school and out? Why shouldn’t they also learn how to judge whether a law is fair and just, and helps make everyone’s life safer and more enjoyable? After all, what good is knowing a million facts if you didn't know how to wisely use them to make everyone’s life more enjoyable? Some German Nazis acted like real bastards because they used their scientific facts and skills destructively, rather than constructively and kindly. Dewey’s 3 Pillars of Educational Excellence. At the University of Chicago Dewey became friends with a woman who was helping immigrants learn more about character excellence and how to live best in their new urban and democratic surroundings. At her Hull House school Jane Addams taught poor undereducated immigrants how to use their government wisely, rather than let it merely use them and their tax money. Eventually she invited Dewey to lecture at Hull House; such lectures not only helped the immigrants, but also helped him explain his ideas of excellence with plain language, and thus help make his writing simpler and less technical. While in Chicago he also began seeing some more serious social problems immigrants were facing, and how they might be solved with some new, more useful, educational habits. With Addams’ help Dewey saw how character habits were more useful than even. Eventually they became one of Dewey's 3 liberal pillars of excellent education: factual knowledge, useful skills, and character habits. To this day, however, conservative educators continue ignoring character habits as a worthwhile educational goal! Again, they’re taken themselves out of the social improvement loop, so to speak. The more such habits are ignored in our schools, the more unintelligent actions keep happening outside of school, and the more taxpayer money must be used to keep shielding the public from such actions! In some places it now costs about $50,000 of tax money to keep just one prisoner from society! Multiply that by 2 million prisoners now jailed in the US, and you can get some idea of how taxpayer money continues being wasted unnecessarily! Just imagine how many more psychologists and student mentors could be hired by our public schools if that 100 billion dollars was spent there! Today, many of our state prisons are terribly overcrowded with young, able-bodied people who have been merely undereducated! They never were taught to enjoy working honestly and joyfully to build skills useful in the real world. They were often made to learn in a largely unnatural situation, namely to sit still and merely keep reading. And economically they were often treated as just another body useful for getting more state money! No doubt, to us Deweyan liberals, ignoring character development on a formal teaching level is one of the greatest weaknesses of US public education. It fosters and encourages many of the serious tragic life-wrecking social events we see every day around us. All criminal actions, and all the publicly paid systems to keep arresting, trying, and jailing millions of people would be greatly reduced if our public schools regularly taught the kinds of liberal character habits I’ve been talking about. To us liberals, trivial knowledge facts merely helps build trivial people. It’s another sad result of what happens when monopoly educational power stays in place, as it has in our public schools. To this day it remains controlled by a few educational bureaucrats who want to change nothing in the system. After all, they’re making good tax money for not much strenuous work. Only when enough people say enough, we want more liberal schools built in our own neighborhoods, will such schools begin to be built. As far as I can see, today the public continues being distracted from learning more about liberal education models with such issues like whether teachers should have tenure, or how many charter schools should be allow in our system? For us liberal Deweyans these are all side issues! The educational debate should be about what children are being taught in school, rather than continue to allowing trivial book knowledge to remain the main educational goal. In fact, these are anything but new educational ideas. Going all the back to ancient Greece, personal tutors taught the current character habits to their aristocratic students. Only such wealthy people could afford to hire such one-on-one tutors, and thus easily pass on to young folks the ideas parents wanted them to have. Even some Roman educators like Marcus Quintilianus (35-100 CE) pointed to their usefulness. But again, only a small class of wealthy aristocrats could afford such private tutors to home-school children. Even though the Roman Republic had recently become ruled by an all-powerful emperor, Marcus was liberal enough to realize the benefit of teaching all students such habits, whether rich or poor. In fact, for us Deweyan liberals, for thousands of years that had been education's main challenge! Dewey saw, the more young folks weren't taught such liberal democratic habit-arts in their schools, homes, and churches, the more intolerant students would become with their conservative ideas and habits. Thus, we got such atrocious and vicious actions in the Middle Ages like burning heretics alive in public, as well as helpless women and children condemned as anti-Christian and evil witches. In medieval Germany alone as many as 10,000 people were killed in one year! For him it was obvious: Democratic excellence creating a more peaceful and enjoyable world for everyone would more easily grow if excellent liberal character habits were taught to students every year they’re in school. The US founders simply weren’t very democratic. They built a central government to best help grow a wealthy upper class of businesspeople, rather than a more democratic social life for everyone, so they gave no educational powers to the central powers. Only with the recent growth of a more active federal government has it gained more power to shape public education. After 1954 it began sending troops to integrate the public schools. Dewey moved to Columbia in 1904. We can imagine, for a few moments, what life was like at the time. Dewey continued seeing many educational challenges as Africans continued being lynched in many southern states, and the racist KKK even marched in large numbers down Pennsylvania Ave. in 1920! Poor and uneducated foreigners were flooding into New York by the millions every year, including all of my grandparents; they just passed through on their way to Ohio. But many thousands stayed in New York and helped create the need for more housing, clothing, food, and schools. The entire social network was overloaded. To many of those foreigners, just having a bed to sleep in and a stove to cook on was a luxury, even if five people slept in a bed and only potatoes and vegetables were cooked. What’s more, the rather conservative public schools weren’t much help; mainly they helped immigrants learn some English and enough political facts to become citizens. However, many never learned the skills or creative habits useful in their new industrial democracy, and thus couldn’t teach them to their children. Neighborhood gangs roamed the streets stealing what they could just to stay alive. A wonderful movie showing what life was like around that time is Somebody Up There Likes Me. The schools didn’t teach children how to become honest cops or carpenters or even teach basic lawyer and doctor skills. Mainly, their goal was to just keep the kids busy with a series of passive book assignments for a few hours. By nature, however, kids and most adults are active experimental learners, as any parent soon learns. Naturally, caring liberals like Dewey asked how can the public schools help make their lives more rewarding, enjoyable, and less stressful? Like many Asian workers today, US immigrants made pennies a day while a few factory owners made fortunes. They simply weren’t interested in teaching their workers more intelligent skills like limiting their families to one or two kinds, what foods help build healthy bodies, and what laws should be respected. Many immigrant families thus turned to organize their criminal actions. Liberals like Dewey, for example, asked why merely keep giving children more book assignments if it didn't help build more useful skills and intelligent character habits. How could mere book assignments ever teach immigrants how to use the new government to make life safer for everyone, keep making life better? Why demand children keep memorizing trivial facts about American presidents, English novelists, and chemical formulas they didn’t want to learn and would probably never use in the real world? If such facts were to be learned, why not at least make them game-oriented and fun , like writing and performing their own presidential scenes, acting out the truths novelists were describing, learning their math, chemistry, and scientific facts while actually helping beautify and improve their own neighborhoods, and helping others learn more intelligent habit-arts? In short, how to stay intelligently connected with their surroundings in positive and constructive ways? Wouldn't such important skills help young folks not only find better kinds of work, and perhaps also start their own business and also use some of the profits to keep helping others? Aren’t those kinds of habits really what true civilization is all about? In short, what was educationally more important: teaching young folks trivial skills like how to work fractions and decimals year after year, or help them learn excellent character skills like honesty, creativity, helpfulness, and of course feeling what democratic tolerance feels like? No doubt, many conservative educators at first simply ignored such liberal ideas like vocational education courses; to them teaching excellent character habits was the parents' job, not theirs. But by 'passing that educational buck' to others they, in effect, helped keep their own neighborhoods degraded, encourage criminal activities for economic reasons, drug-habits of social withdrawal, and make life more stressful for taxpayers who paid for all those services to better control such actions. Again, everyone's taxes are used to keep funding schools, courts, prisons, and other remedial social services. For Dewey is just wasn’t’ very intelligent to keep our public school out of the life-improving loop, so to speak. It only kept hobbling the growth of a more democratic world. The more excellent character habits like health, lawfulness, and helpful business skills are ignored, the easier it is for young folks to fulfill the American fantasy of getting rich quickly with less than excellent actions! To this day, far too many young folks are quickly pressured to join a neighborhood gang, start demanding 'protection' money from neighborhood businesses, start abusing alcohol, drugs, vulnerable young women, and even thievery to solve boredom and money problems. Why not? It's all part of life in the big city, isn't it? Life’s a rat-race and a jungle isn’t it? And even if they do get caught committing such actions many quickly learn how to pay off the police, or go to jail and learn more criminal actions from those already there! Police corruption in the early 1900s was probably rampant in all major US cities. The movie Serpico showed how rampant the problem was in New York in the 1970s! Given the state of public awareness about education, creating more liberal schools, even in New York, was about as easy as walking on water. Many professional-minded parents naturally wanted their sons and daughters to become lawyers and doctors, and so any kind of industrial education was a step backward for them, not forward. In fact, when voters got a chance to start making their schools more liberal, like many other cities had done already, they rejected the idea during the first World War. Thus, except for creating more vocational options in some schools, the obsession with learning more and more academic trivia stayed pretty much the same. As a result, character habits continued being ignored. Poorly educated people continued living in poor neighborhoods and allowing their kids to practice more criminal kinds of habits. It seemed to be tribal warfare between conservatives and liberals with kids caught in between! Remember, both radio and television hadn't yet been invented, and even when they were they were used mainly for advertising and entertainment purposes, thus making people more eager to keep buying the goods corporations were making, like washing machines and expensive cars, jewelry, and don’t forget stocks and bonds. And because respectful character excellence wasn't taught, such cars often gave young men a place to force vulnerable women to give in sexually or get out and walk! When women weren’t taught about respectful and caring sex, or men about running an honest, lawful, and helpful repair shop, clothing factory, restaurant, or appliance store, then life remains the ‘rat-race’ it’s pretty much been for thousands of years, full of superstitions and myths. Even when a Prohibition amendment passed in the early 1900s outlawing the sale of alcohol, criminal gangs themselves became organized like corporations to keep selling it, and again paying off the police to look the other way. Even today, an traditional educational model based on trivia knowledge maintains its monopoly in public education. Most parents even today are still too undereducated about liberal models of education to even think better schools can be built, much less focus on actually building them in their own neighborhoods! They often still believe their schools should continue teaching only reading, writing, and arithmetic. Today, that monopoly is still maintained with the help of state laws, and they keep hobbling the growth of more liberal democratic schools. Even in supposedly more liberal charter schools the same kind of subjects are still forced on the most vulnerable among us, children! Teacher unions often went to state capitols and convinced politicians to pass such laws, making education improvement more difficult and practically impossible. In effect such state laws removed school improvement from local control and gave it to state officials. In fact, to this day conservative Republicans often called themselves educational reforms, and yet the reforms they suggest often change the flow of public tax money from non-profit public schools to for-profit private hands! It’s like the US Constitution merely changed the flow of public money from the British government to local aristocratic pockets. And union pay rates don’t apply to Charter schools, so the profits are even greater! Thus, teachers are left with the choice to teach more academic trivia or find some other work. Even in most Charter schools children are made to learn more and more facts-facts-facts, so the private owners and investors can collect more public tax money from the government! Such events have made liberal educational improvement difficult, if not practically impossible. Still, liberal progress hasn’t been stopped. Thanks to the growth of more liberal families, democratic progress continues growing. They care about empowering their children with more intelligently kinds of character habits! And I might add, that includes respectful sexual character habits too! What young woman today in much of the Western world doesn’t know what respectful sexual behavior is, and how they too should have a part in saying what should happen and when? But on the public school and Charter school levels, it seems the goal is still to teach academic facts, facts, and more facts. The program was firmly established in the late 1950s when the so-called Space Race began. Undemocratic conservatives convinced President Eisenhower himself to speak out against Dewye’s education ideas, and he did! Ike said Dewey’s ideas were the main reason why Russia’s space program was more advanced than the US’s! In reality, however, it seems the Russians merely captured more German rocket scientists after World War 2 than the US did! As a result, today almost everyone still believes forcing children to learn what they have little desire or use for remains the definition of good education, even though many children keep telling their parents they don’t like school? These days I hear some conservative politicians still talk about how their new educational programs will teach children to reason critically, and thus become more intelligent adults. As we’ll see, however, early in the 1900s liberal educators at Columbia like Edward Thorndike proved experimentally children learn to reason just as well in a project-oriented school, and in many cases better, than students in book-oriented schools. In any case, today probably most people still don’t know what better schools can look like, and even if they did they would often be legally kept from creating them without state permission! In short, our own education laws keep hobbling social improvements themselves! In fact, most people today have only experienced a passive book-oriented education model, and so continue naively believing making children sit at desks day after day, year after year, and remain tied to their books is educational excellence. To us Deweyan liberals it certainly is not! What’s more, educational history in the first half of the 1950s tells us Dewey’s ideas are more useful for building a more equal and democratic life for everyone! A more project and professions-oriented educational model is much more naturalistic and effective. It’s holistic, rather than merely verbal. Such a liberal educational model is more like the way children actually learn anything, namely with active kinds of practice! In them learning becomes more enjoyable, constructive, and productive because it’s based firmly on children development itself! However, education debate is practically non-existent. It’s all dictated from the top down, so to speak, just like feudalistic morals were dictated from the pope down, or laws were dictated from the king! Be honest now, when is the last time you heard any kind of meaningful debate about different educational models? Without such debate how can anyone have any real choice about what kinds of schools their tax money should be used for? Why shouldn’t parents and students have the right to start learning about a profession or career while they’re in school, so life can become less stressful once they graduate? Why should young folks enter their adult years knowing almost nothing about how to make a honest buck and help others in the process? In fact today, more than 200 years after the US was founded, most of our states in the world's oldest democracy still have unjust and unfair laws against same-sex marriage. True, they might soon all be negated by Supreme Court rulings, but when schools ignore liberal character habits, the underlying feelings of bigotry remain in place, rather than joy and feelings of wishing people well. Aren’t those the feelings all civilized people should learn? At least we liberals say they are. More than 100 years after the Civil War millions of people were still taught to hate and hobble African equal rights as much as possible! Just like philosophy itself, there are conservative, moderate, and liberal models of education, but when they fail to teach our democratic ideals of character excellence, like sharing rights equally, and how to respect others and our just laws, then how excellent are they for making everyone's life better? Should democratic habit-arts of equality, respect, or lawfulness be ignored by our schools just because people don’t realize how important they are? One Personal Recollection One similarity between liberal and conservative educational models is they both agree the ultimate goal of education is teaching students how to intelligently solve their own problems. Where they often differ is how young folks should learn to solve their own problems. Years ago, after I had taken some philosophy courses and how to ask some meaningful questions, rather than just sit around like a dope, I called into a radio talk show one day and asked 2 education professors what the best goal of public education was. At first they sounded a little surprised at such a basic question, but after a few moments they both agreed the goal was teaching students how to solve their own problems. No doubt, to both liberals like Dewey and traditional educators that goal is important; who wants to have adults stay dependent on others for solving their own problems? No doubt, many disabled people need help from others, but most people can learn to intelligently solve their own problems; after all, most problems aren’t very serious at all. So, the goal is teaching young folks how to intelligently answer life's challenges is a worthwhile one. Such skills help make life more satisfying, and thus keep growing as people. However, the big question is how should we go about teaching those important skills, like how to make a plan of action, and then experimentally test the plan to see its results? Conservative kinds of educators in general say knowing more book-facts is the best way to learn how to solve our own problems. It’s an old and traditional system. In the Middle Ages, for example, people learned to say certain prayers to help solve their problems, like disease, having a safe journey, not offending god, and asking for forgiveness. In short, merely reading examples of character excellence should be enough to teach students how to best solve their problems. For liberals like Dewey, however, what's needed is a much more active and organic kind of experimental testing and learning how such actions actually feel, so those ideas don’t become quickly forgotten, like happens regularly with mere book-facts. How many of the book-facts do typical 25 and 30 year olds remember from their 12 years of public school? So, to make ideas and skills something other than Alexander’s empire, that is narrow and shallow, it’s better to use active kinds of learning projects, rather than merely reading about them. If children want to learn, say, more about Behavioral psychology, then they might actually perform scenes from The Taming of the Shrew, or any other play where such examples exist. To liberals like Dewey that active kind of education model will always produce better results than merely reading about such examples in, say, a psychology book. In fact, only actions can best build any new habit-art. Merely reading without performing some idea leaves learning on merely a narrow and shallow verbal level of awareness, rather than a body-mind level of feeling AND idea, or as we say a body-mind level of awareness. It's the difference between merely talking about ideas and actually practicing them. The common proverb is: Actions speak louder than words! In short, modern Behavioral psychology says young folks need active practice to best learn any new habit; it is a psychology Dewey helped build! Mere reading neglects the entire feeling side of a person's body-mind, and so is much less than excellent learning, as we've seen with Plato's and Aristotle's contemplative reasoning art. It's one thing to merely think spirit-objects or eternal Forms exist, but to actually know they actually exist are 2 very different things. As we’ve seen, Plato’s Parmenides bravely demonstrated with mathematical precision why such objects were not be known and might never be known! I didn't ask it at the time I called in, but I should have: If knowing how to solve our own problems is education's main goal, then why do students made to go through 12 years of public schooling without getting any active training about solving either their own or hateful social problems? Wouldn't knowing how improving a diet habit, for example, be much easier if students knew how to actively experiment with their eating habits? And if not, then isn't our present healthcare crisis one result of neglecting such experimental learning, and relying instead on the government's help to solve healthcare problems our own bad eating habits often create?! After all, some 50% of all health problems are now said to be diet related, and the heavier people become, the more health problems they'll probably have, once again paid for with everyone's socialized tax money. And of course the more money is needed for that, the less money is available for continuing to improve and enjoy life itself. So, this question too seems more than a little reasonable: Are our own conservative book-oriented public schools really helping create many of the government programs conservatives say we shouldn’t have? Almost certainly, such programs will continue being needed as long as our public schools remain obsessed with teaching only more and more book-facts, and remain outside the loop of working to make life better for everyone! Yet another little lame limerick is offered to make the point. At memorizing definitions Jones was a whiz. Reading more as he felt some dental fizz. As teeth came from his head, He sheepishly said, My schools never taught what dental health is. 17. EDUCATIONAL MODELS, 102 Traditional Educational Weaknesses For we liberal Deweyan perhaps the greatest weakness of traditional schools is their ignore of our strongest learning art, active experimental learning. It’s a much more effective and natural learning tool than merely answering someone else’s book-questions year after year, For Dewey mere book-learning is unnatural. Why? It separates and isolates thinking from actively testing ideas, thus keeping knowledge on a purely verbal and mental level. For example, lucky students may read about useful character habits like helping others less well of, but that idea takes on another deeper meaning when such ideas are experimentally tested! In that situation the entire body is involved with the learning process, rather than just the verbal awareness. To his great credit even conservative Plato realized how important active kinds of learning are, and recommended his future leaders spend 15 years actively learning about life before they became leaders. And, a standing joke for Mark Twain was his saying he never let school get in the way of his education; he too realized the best knowledge is learned in active experimentation. It’s what gave his writings so much human depth and warmth. But, it seems even Mark missed something very important, namely the character art of using his fortune to help those less well off. He kept using his money merely to make more money, and the more his investments went broke, the more he had to work to make more money. If he’d have gone to a more liberal school where such character habits are a normal part of the day he almost certainly would have made his life less stressful and more enjoyable. Surely, the ‘Robin Hoods’ around him had fun taking it away from him with money-draining investments! As Dewey saw, for 12 years in traditional schools students are tied mainly to their books, ‘spoon-fed’ merely academic facts, like George Washington crossed the Delaware River during the Revolutionary War. However, how many students are allowed to more feel that fact in some kind of experimental body-mind way? How many students are allowed to write a short scene and actually feel how cold it was at the time, and why he was crossing the river in the first place? Washington crossed the Delaware because the plan he made to attack the British in Trenton, New Jersey needed to be tested and verified in life; it was part of the process of experimentally testing a plan there and then. What's more, if a rather rotund and overweight General Knox would have rocked the boat a little more, Washington might never have made it into New Jersey! How much more fun would learning be if children were allowed and encouraged to create such active learning situations. In short, the more young folks don't feel how important intelligent experimental learning and testing is, the more they remain immature and childlike. Again, the art is not difficult to teach. It simply means writing a plan of action, assigning different tasks to different students, and then actively test the plan; some adjustments to the original plan may be necessary, but then again, what plan is always accurate the first time? The earlier children learn that art, the easier it becomes to start solving their own problems intelligently! Again, in traditional schools teachers are almost forced to cover so much material in so much time, so students can score well on the end-of-year standardized test, and teachers can keep their jobs. However, what standardized test ever asked students what’s the best way to solve any problem intelligently? The obsession with making such tests so academically focused not only leads students to believe that’s what education should be about, but it artificially pressures teachers to keep education that way. Recently some teachers who changed students test scores were even sentenced to a year in jail; that’s how obsessed the conservative educational bureaucracy is with keeping education merely on a verbal level, and all but ignoring not only deeper, more natural, and more enjoyable kinds of learning, but useful character training too. As a result, students get almost no feeling or idea either about WHAT character excellence means or how to experimentally build it. Many leave school psychically crippled in a sense; they have few useful skills for living life well in the real world. The more such habits are ignored, the more difficult it becomes to earn an honest living after schools days are over, if, that is, they can even find a job they're interested in and pays enough to live on. More About a Liberal Educational Model Today we see some wasteful results of such educational weaknesses. Because most schools remain book-centered and fact-based, rather than individually student-centered and experimental, many students simply drop out of school as soon as the law allows. In fact, their educational needs are not being met! Why stay in school and keep learning useless academic facts. When is the last time the reader needed to prove a geometric theorem in the real world? And yet all students are made to study that art for a year! Algebra is the same way. In fact, that criticism might be leveled against most school subjects! Most students simply don't have a need to keep learning such facts; what do they have to do with life in the real world, where the American dream awaits? Almost always it seems such high schools would rather teach students to know things like why Othello caused Desdemona to commit suicide, and how to solve quadratic equations. But for Dewey, without character habits like community work and improvement, school merely keeps diverting student attention away from perhaps THE most important subject of all, namely PHYSICAL AND MENTAL HUMAN HEALTH and its 2 important habit-arts -- intelligent diet and exercise! Wealthy folks can afford to send their children to psychologists to help them learn more useful habits, but why should our tax-paid public schools keep ignoring such important skills while we keep spending some $600 billion a years building more guns and bombs? In what sense are those events worth celebrating in other countries? One result of such schools makes it more difficult to start making some positive contributions to our society; drug-dealing and criminal actions are much more profitable. In fact, as we'll see in Book 5's Models of Educational Excellence, the sooner learning the arts of experimental testing and character helpfulness, the easier it becomes for most everyone to keep educating themselves, rather than depending on others. When students discover how important excellent diet and exercise habits are in whatever career they choose, then they'll want to learn how to build those habits, and thus be better prepared for life itself, instead of just for the next test! Not learning to talk confidently, intelligently, and constructively is often another weakness of traditional schools. How many young folks are deathly afraid to say anything in front of a group? It’s certainly not because young folks aren’t capable of learning such skills; it’s mainly because they’re not allowed to practice them on a regular basis in conservative book-obsessed schools. For how many teachers is a completely silent classroom the best? What is our conservative educational bureaucracy afraid of by teaching students to speak up forcefully and rationally about events in the real world? Is it because military units function best when no one questions or talks about what’s going on? And how much more tragic is the situation when most of the information people learn about the world comes from talking, not reading or writing? How else can young folks learn to feel the art of kind and sympathetic talking when students are conditioned from grade 1 to mostly sit quietly and work from books, and when sports remain the art of merely defeating someone else, rather than learning how to intelligently keep improving our own skills of helpfulness? I hasten to add: such educational systems exist not just at the public school level. How many college students and athletes leave school with absolutely no feeling for using some of their money to help those in need, rather than merely build a bank account? And equally regrettable, how can students want to keep educating themselves when their question-asking habit is largely neglected by book assignments? In them the questions are already given, so again, without the habit of asking intelligent questions, students leave school crippled in that way? It often leads to psychic doldrums, so to speak, in which boredom becomes a strong feeling. Again, bored people are boring people. As a result, many students finish school not only afraid to say anything in front of an audience, but of not knowing anything worthwhile to say either! Evidently, since the 1950s that’s the way conservatives want young folks to be. It make life in the corporate and military worlds that much easier! They don’t want students knowing about over-population and independent kinds of thinking; they want young folks to start having a family so they have to work for whatever the corporation pays them. Thus, the more students are discouraged from talking in class about what they're learning, either in school or outside it, the more abstract skills like solving quadratic equations become meaningful; such equations, by the way, are useful for, say, finding how big a garden area might be, or even designing a piece of furniture. They have a use, but when they’re separated from constructive kinds of projects, they remain merely another mental diversion. Also, intelligent kinds of talking in class on a regular basis can not only help build all-important feelings of self-confidence, but also organizational skills. The better organized their weekly talk become, the more interesting they can be made. Conservative educators often focus mainly on teaching facts, facts, and more facts from books, books, and more books, but that’s often not all. Business skills too are often included, like typing and learning how to use our ever-growing number of electronic toys and tools. But Dewey was bold enough to ask what the results of such an education are. A passive kind of obedience was one result. The more students obey their teachers and don’t have any different learning goals themselves, then the more vulnerable they remain to people who test them for their character excellence once they leave school or home. All during his public school and university years Albert Einstein was interested only in math and science; one of his teachers even told him he would never amount to anything. Imagine what physics would be like today if Albert hadn’t remained interested in his own questions, like what is light and what would life look like if we could travel that fast? Again, is a passive and non-questioning habit really the one most cherished by our corporate and military leaders? Are they really the ones behind the creation of our book-obsessed educational systems? Well, to cite merely one piece of evidence. Admiral Hyman Rickover who helped build America’s nuclear submarine fleet in the 1950s, said as much. To him schools should teach only facts, facts, and more facts, and then let the connecting of their facts be someone else's responsibility higher up in the bureaucratic system, whether it's either military or corporate. Only they know best about the 'big picture', and what’s going on in the world. We can well imagine Socrates and Plato talking about the same kinds of ideas. To them running a government should be left to the older men who have more knowledge and experience; only their judgments can be best. Young and inexperienced people shouldn’t be given any political power, or as little as possible! It’s understandable; experience often makes people wiser, and obviously military knowledge too is seasoned and ripened with experience. However, don't even foot soldiers need character excellence, to know what's best to do with the facts they have around them? Should they just keep killing innocent people simply because they’re ordered to? For us liberal democrats, that like saying people can’t even ask why we should use our tax money to pay for 20 or 30 nuclear submarines when merely 1 of their missiles can literally level any city on earth? Should we really keep allowing people to have such power? Wouldn’t we all be better off if all such weapons were dismantled? In truth, the more people are conditioned merely to obey orders, rather than evaluate the facts for themselves, the greater the chances for massive amounts of brutality, as we saw during the Vietnam War. Babies are still being deformed by the poisons we dropped on that country! Who needs to be a rocket scientist to feel such situations call for intelligently evaluating facts rather than merely obeying others no matter what the results are? Many ancient Greeks like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle felt the un-criticized life is not worth living, but if we don’t teach young folks how to evaluate facts by their possible results, the more dangerous life becomes for everyone. Of what educational use is merely collecting more and more book-facts, and not thinking about their possible results in the real world. In such schools where critical thinking habits are taught, they become a much more important part of the community, rather than remained isolated from it. As we've already seen, I learned many isolated biological facts in school, but because I never learned to put them to use for building a more intelligent diet, I continued wrecking my own health. And here's another example of allowing only a few to tell us what the facts mean. In 2001 US intelligence services had gathered many, many facts about the 9-11 airplane hijackers; they were already here in the US taking flying lessons in different parts of the country! But such facts were never shared with different organizations, so they could be put together into a coordinated picture, and for also questioning them on why anyone would want to learn merely to fly a passenger airplane, rather than also learn to take-off and land it! The art of coordinating and using facts intelligently is definitely a more important skill than merely learning more and more facts; what do the facts mean and how can they be used to keep making life safe and productive? The more people know how to practice that creative and intelligent art, the safer we all become! Aristotle collected tons of biological facts from around his world and even organized many of them into some useful categories, but he missed evolution’s big picture; had he lived 10 years longer he may have been able to better see such a picture. In short, his un-criticized assumption about their being some eternal constant forms creating eternally constant groups of animals and plants made an evolutionary model of nature almost impossible for him. Evidently even Plato's Academy some ideas were beyond criticism! In short, we Deweyan liberals celebrate knowing facts; accurate information is needed. But to merely demand all students obey their teachers and learn the same facts, whether they want to or not, is not democratic education. At best it’s a conservative model of education aimed at maintaining a feudalistic class-based status quo! In more liberal schools children are taught how to use their facts and skills intelligently, constructively, helpfully, and if possible kindly! In truth, as test-scores and drop-out rates teach us, many students simply don't need to know more and more book-facts. Also, some 70% of high school students don’t go on the keep learning more and more book facts in college. And what’s more, much less than 30% don’t get a degree in 4 years. Today many urban schools have a drop-out rate as high as 50%! In other words, in some neighborhoods over half the students are leaving the one place they could be using as an excellent preparation into the world outside of school. So, because what's important about facts is how they’re used, shouldn't that educational fact help concerned parents keep pressuring their local schools to start including more naturalistic kinds of learning projects all through the 12 years of public schooling? The less that happens, then more and more students will continue entering their adult years psychically immature and crippled for excellently answering many of life's challenges, like obeying just laws and making only honest money. We continue seeing those kinds of results daily in our media. As John Galbraith saw, too many people, both educators and corporate supervisors, have become content to keep the class-based economic status quo in place, and so rarely even think about the social results of a 50% drop-out rate for some schools. Who cares? Let someone else deal with it! Parents aren’t the only ones in such an improvement loop. Students are too. Students too can accept the challenge to improve that 50% drop-out rate, so as to better meet different student learning desires. For example, why shouldn’t students wanting to be business people be able to make some ‘school money’ with a student business, and then use it to help those less fortunate? In short, why not turn student creativity and experimentation loose in a safe and constructive manner, to help more students stay in school and keep improving themselves as well as their neighborhoods? Such learning not only gets students more feelingly involved with local challenges, but also with helping others to help themselves. In short, the more students are encouraged to ACTIVELY AND EXPERIMENTALLY solve their own problems, the more their own educational and character excellence grows stronger, the more mature students will become, and the more their own schools will continue being improved. Believe it or not folks, nature has no desire to leave manmade projects alone, and that’s been a challenge for only about 4 billion years, give or take a New York minute of 2! As many are seeing today, education dollars are becoming less available as income and taxes remain stagnant. Especially during recessions tax revenues become even less, and so intelligence tells us more community volunteers are needed, especially in the lower grades, to help students start learning about intelligent experimentation. That shouldn’t be a problem now that millions of ‘baby-boomer’ retirees are now available. Then, as children enter their constructive stage of development they will need more help building the many workshops students can use to start learning about the skills they will use as adults, everything from computer, doctor, and legal shops to carpentry and plumbing. No doubt, money will also be saved from not needing all the books used in traditional schools. And teacher roles will be changed from finding and grading book assignments to one of mainly guidance, encouragement, and problem solving. In any case, however, the traditional separation of intelligent work habits from helpful character habits will end. And the more young folks learn to enjoy such habits and respect just laws, the less vulnerable they’ll become to criminal behavior and drug abuse, to name just 2, as well as merely making war-weapons endangering innocent people. Life is sacred. That’s not to say sometimes violence is needed against those who aim at harming and killing anyone, but thankfully such people are still a small minority. What's more, the more students keep intelligently criticizing and improving their own schools, the easier it will be get needed public funding to build and equip all the practical workshops at liberal schools. No one can say for sure how many shops will be needed at every school; each school and district has its own needs and so should be built to serve community needs. Still, food, clothing, and health shops will probably be useful in all schools. Even if students learn nothing else besides what mental and physical health is, and how to practice it, it’ll be a great improvement over many of our traditional schools. And, it’ll also be easier for students to volunteer when they’re adults, and feel gratitude to the school that they will feel cared for and nurtured them so well. They’ll also learn what habits they need to keep strengthening our democracy, like staying in contact with their representatives, voting, and protesting all the attempts of those trying to weaken it, so they can keep using the system for their own personal gain. In that way they’ll start building a social consciousness, rather than just caring about themselves. We still have many serious problems, like dangerous atomic weapons, global warming, environment pollution, and equality issues. To keep children isolated from those issues merely helps keep them in place. Why shouldn’t students be included in those improvement loops, and be trained to constructively criticize and improve not only their own schools, but their nation and world as well? Such critical thinking and constructive actions are another important place to practice intelligent experimentation, and perhaps even produce some real improvements. In any case, they’ll learn more about our strongest learning art – intelligent experimentation. After all, isn’t it more intelligent to keep experimenting with constructively engaging an enemy instead of merely keeping them isolated or kill them? No doubt, new obstacles will be felt in all learning projects, but that’s where skill like creative thinking and intelligent negotiation become useful, right? Experimenting With A New Educational Model Such traditional educational weaknesses as were mentioned earlier, like not actively teaching excellent character habit-arts on an active level of learning, have helped keep far too many young folks grossly undereducated and often frustrated. Also, school boredom is often a serious problem, and a sign of educational needs not being met. Thus parents are also challenged more than ever to also help their children learn more about all the useful and rewarding work available in the real world, and help them start learning about their own strengths and weaknesses, so they might feel where they can best use their talents. How many young folks leave school with knowing little about themselves, and so have little feeling for what kind of work they want to do? Thomas Edison’s mother was a fine example of such a caring parent. America’s greatest inventor went to public school for only a few years, and then his smart and creative mother home-schooled him! She encouraged him to build habits of constructive curiosity and imaginative question-asking, 2 useful habits for intelligent experimentation. While still in his teens he invented a better telegraph system. His mother knew how important it was to teach creativity's habit-art and how it depended on a question-asking habit. Asking about how things work and also how they might be improved helped focus and strengthen his art of intuitively creative thinking and testing. Those kinds of habits were used all through his life at his New Jersey lab too; sometimes he’d even lock the doors so his workers couldn’t get out until they helped find solutions to creating another invention. It also took those workers over a year to invent a useful working light bulb. Too bad the element neon wasn’t discovered until 1898 or else the problem would have been solved much easier and our world would have become much more colorful. We Deweyans ask why shouldn’t any student learn to practice such creative skills in whatever class they take? Any subject can be adapted to any student’s talents and needs, and so that kind of experimental learning can be encouraged in any workshop with the help of intelligent questions. After all, aren’t all the products we have today the result of such thinking? For example, how might we begin making our traditional schools more student centered instead of book centered? No doubt one useful idea is a small step-by-step approach to improvement, as we’ve seen Part 1 with building better habit-arts. If true, then to try to convert all schools in a district to an experimental workshop system, or even all the grades in one school all at once, might be too much of an adjustment for both students and teachers to make. It might cause more frustration than satisfaction. And so to avoid such possible results, a ‘baby-step’ approach to improvement might be best, say, making a plan for the first 3 grades where students are mainly using the senses to learn more about themselves and their world. So, projects using that fact can be more intelligently designed. With such thinking the reader can begin feeling some of the new challenges faced when trying to convert a traditional book-centered school into a more liberal child-centered school. They aim to take advantage of childhood’s 3 main stages of development; they are sense-based until about 7 or 8, a constructive phase between 8 and 14, and then as their brains become more developed they enter an abstract thinking phase. Many book-centered schools tend to ignore those first 2 stages of development, and keep children working on book assignments, which for many children soon become boring. In most students there’s little natural ability and desire to learning such abstract facts. And for another thing, conservative book-and-teacher-centered schools keep students basically inactive and confined to passive class work almost all the time, writing the answers to their book questions, and then having teachers grade their work. No doubt it’s easy work for teachers, but what important and useful character habits are students not learning in such schools, and how deeply are they feeling their importance to making life less stressful and more enjoyable? As a result, many students learn the habits often practiced all through the Middle Ages, namely passive obedient to those in authority, and to do whatever they’re told, rather than learn to think and act constructively for themselves. Such schools explain why that era lasted for over a thousand years, and why democratic habits even in the world’s oldest democracy is still weak and neglected! Also, students don't get much practice focusing on either personal or community improvements, like demanding living wages, more of a voice in political decision-making, and equality for all law-abiding citizens. Teaching such passive and obedient habits were useful to the social ruling class; they helped keep a feudal social structure solidly in place with various forms of slavery. Even as late as the early 1800s George Hegel, Germany's archconservative philosopher, echoed such ideas when he said: "Thought, as much as will, must commence with obedience." And the more such habits were encouraged the German, Japanese, and Italian schools, the easier it was for people like Hitler, shoguns, and Mussolini to make people soldiers. In today’s much more democratic and industrial world such habits are simply counterproductive in many situations. Liberal kinds of creative and experimental habits are much more useful in today’s world, and they help build a person’s individuality, creativity, independence, and reliable knowledge. They are, in fact, the kind of habits that helped a few people build Western civilization's life-changing Industrial Revolution shortly after Hegel died in 1831. What’s more, such experimental habits encourage more reliable and organic kinds of ideas, rather than believing their own ideas are absolute Truth for all time. Besides such creative habits are the normal way people learn, as can be seen from watching a group of even young children. Who ever saw a child learn to ride a bike, cook a meal, fix a broken toy, build a new invention, and learn how dangerous alcohol can be just from reading about them in books? And it's why caring and thoughtful parents often encourage their kids to keep experimenting, but intelligently rather than merely routinely! Such parents will also teach them to help others with their skills, rather than merely think only about their own comfort. As a result, liberal schools will begin looking differently from traditional ones; liberal schools will have more shops, like metal, auto, wood, garden, health, and clothing shops for students to actively their creative and experimental habit-arts. For liberal Dewey, because we’re all individuals, with our own powers of independent thinking, the child should be encouraged to keep actively practicing such intelligent habits. What intelligent mechanic doesn't know how to read a repair manual, use mathematics to figure out another outrageous repair bill, or how to tell someone they need a new muffler bearing? When the emphasis is on learning character excellence, then young folks can begin feeling how such habits only increases the chances for making their own life better. Why keep practicing habits that keep making life less than what it might be? Shouldn’t we be honest with ourselves about such education? If capitalism and democracy both work best when people know what excellent habits feel like, and practice them, then not to teach them merely weakens both our economy and our political system. Even today we see the results of mean and unkind discrimination of law-abiding and helpful people. How intelligent is that? After all, how vibrant and healthy for everyone’s health can any political system be when peoples’ main habit-art is obedience to merely old traditional ideas that started growing long before our modern democracies began growing? In more liberal schools children will learn ideas should be practiced just because they’ve been practiced for centuries! How much more stressful and dangerous did life remain just because many people continued believing slavery had been practiced for centuries and was, therefore, natural and normal? Communist Russia and China, Nazi Germany, and many other countries including the US all have seen, at times, examples of how dangerous life can become when people refuse to see their habits and ideas as merely the result of their practice, rather than believing they’re nature’s eternal and unchanging truth? Even today, in the US, the reluctance to experiment with liberalizing drug and sex worker laws may be doing more harm than good to many young folks. Blind and unintelligent obedience to the social status quo in effect keeps encouraging people to practice their routine habits, keep things as they are, don’t rock any boats, and keep allowing power-hungry and greedy people to keep increasing their power, rather than using it to help others. If nothing else, much of our own history is mainly a record of such people and the sometimes painful results of their actions. In short, only as people become more educated about how all habits are learned experimentally, and how to enjoy experimenting with building better ones, can intelligent change and progress grow at a more progressive pace. If not, tribal and gang warfare will continue on. How many students never realize they have the option of helping improve their local libraries, health clinics, and homeless services? In short, the more parents, teachers, and students realize they have the freedom to build more intelligent character habits, like better diet and exercise habits, and more community-improvement projects, then the more students will become anchored to life outside of school, the world they will eventually inherit. Such schools have a much better chance of improving many of our own social problems, like intolerance and hateful bigotry, and in the process put our socialized taxes to better use than building more wasteful prisons and deadly weapons. We Deweyan liberals like to ask, why shouldn’t students be included with such an improvement loop? Not to include them is merely to keep them sheltered, immature, and naïve. In other words, life has become something each of us helps make, rather than merely accepting what others say it should be. Why shouldn’t that fact be applied to our schools as well as our government? Just because kids drop-out doesn’t mean they want to quit learning; it often means they just want to learn different things than what’s being taught, and whatever that is there are intelligent and unintelligent ways of using such knowledge. Crooks exist in every profession. How many kids are lured into drug-dealing just for the money, or because everyone else is doing it, and how much do our own schools and drug laws keep encouraging kids to keep endangering their own lives? Sex Education???? What other examples illustrate Dewey’s educational models of excellence? Sex education is definitely another good example. One fact many people choose not to think about is the variety of sexual habits and actions, and so many people feel they don’t want their children learning about them wither. But, how intelligent is that? Not to know such facts only keeps one’s psyche narrow, shallow, and worst of all intolerant! What good is being ignorant about human habits when those habits are practiced in today’s world? Doesn’t such ignorance just help increase anxiety about others, rather than a more intelligent well-wishing? In fact, sex is a perfectly normal human need, and so why not teach high schoolers what some intelligent and acceptable expressions are? Here, of course, I’m certainly not recommending experimentation in the public schools, even though it no doubt exists in many of them today. But shouldn’t just that fact be reason enough to help students begin feeling what sexual respect looks like, and how it can even be treated with some humor and laughter? In many schools even reading about different sexual expressions would go a long way to making young adults feel more comfortable in the adult world. In the native world children are often married when they’re sexually mature. Wouldn’t better facts about sex be justified if it helped prevent even one unwanted pregnancy, or even one expression of sexual immaturity, like satisfying one’s self as quickly as possible? Shouldn’t high schools begin seeing sex too can be a creatively joyous and happy event each time it’s practiced, rather than the same ol’ same ol’? Why shouldn’t more schools be allowed to experiment with such classes on a mental level? After all, we’re all just human and there are many ways of expressing one’s sexual feelings intelligently, joyfully, and respectfully. No doubt, such excellent sex habits of demanding respect from a partner would help reduce much sexual trauma, and unnecessary worry and anxiety. They could even practice such respectful behavior in class, and thus reduce many irrational sexual fantasies about men acting dominantly and women acting passively. As liberal Protagoras liked to remind people, mankind is the measure of all things, of things that are bad and good. Sex education to one may, thus, be moral corruption to another. However, if such classes were merely another educational option to choose, rather than a required course for everyone, then students and parents would be free to make an intelligent choice about what they want their child to learn. That way such ideas can be learned only by those who choose to learn them. In any case it should be obvious, the freedom to keep intelligently experimenting with what children can learn is a very important part of liberal educational excellence. The more legislators keep restricting how our schools might be improved, the less free students become to see what excellence means to different kinds of situations. To us Deweyan liberals that result is certain less than excellent. We live in a world where people are conditioned to build many different kinds of habits, and not to realize that only keeps isolating and separating people from that world. What’s more, as more than 20 sexually-transmitted diseases teach us, the less students can learn about them in sex class, the more vulnerable they stay to getting them, and the more tax money is needed to pay for their health bills! So, why shouldn’t students be free to make such intelligent class choices in high school, just as they should be free to start learning about excellent diet and exercise habits all through grade school? Who knows? It may even help create some more intelligent ways of managing prostitution practices. After all, it’s been legal in much of Nevada for decades and believe it or not some women haven’t been corrupted, but liberated! What Is Psychological Health? Psychological health is another very important subject for we Deweyan liberals. What do we mean by it? What is it? How do we go about achieving it? Such questions were talked about in Part 1, but they can also be talked about to students, as well as actively practiced all through grade school. After all, such habits are useful throughout life, and so the sooner they’re learned, the better life becomes! For us some of the basic ideas of Behavioral psychology can be taught to students even at the sense-based stage of development. As we’ve been seeing, accurate and reliable psychological information is another new modern educational challenge. As late as the 1800s very intelligent modern sophists like Robert Ingersoll complained about not having some real dependable psychological knowledge about ourselves taught in our public schools, like what excellent speaking and working habits feel like, and the best way for young folks to experimentally learn such useful habits. Since then, however, psychologists like Dewey have learned a lot about how best to build new habits and skills, so why not empower young folks with such knowledge? Joyful and encouraging speaking habits can be learned a little more each day. After all, all people must live with themselves all through life, and yet much about such healthy psychological actions can keep weakening any destructive habits they may be learning. What are habits, and why is it so difficult to stop abusing tobacco or alcohol; eating less than excellent foods now offered on just about every block in every city; what is an excellent diet for my body; what is humor and why is it so important to psychological health; what’s the best way to learn such habits and thus make life more satisfying; and why should anyone pay honestly-earned money to merely keep harming themselves with less than excellent food? If those results aren’t promoted with healthful psychological actions, then what would be? How can we expect our own nation to keep using limited money for diet-related health problems and yet not teach young folks what physical health means, and how to actively learn more about it? If not, then we continue living in a naïve psychic world where merely by passing a constitutional amendment will stop people from abusing alcohol. We've already seen how important psychologically excellent habits can be, like how to enjoy improving our own weak, excessive, and unhealthy habits one ‘baby-step’ at a time. But if more people are to learn them, then shouldn’t they too be offered as subjects even to primary-age students? They can at least begin feeling what they’re like. And if so, then why aren’t more useful psychological classes a real option to students who often want to know more about their own body-minds, and what health means? Where is the intelligence in restricting such knowledge about body-mind health itself in our public schools? What can it feel like to build a better diet or exercise habit; how can they be strengthened; and how important is enjoyable practice for learning such habits? What does it feel like to build an intelligent plan for improving an unhealthful and dangerous habit, and then how can we best test the plan to see its results? And of course there's physical health as well. What exercises and foods best help us stay in ship-shape shape, and when’s the best time to practice them? Not only are such habit-arts useful all through life, but they also help students solve another important educational challenge -- building the inner enjoyable and fun feelings of a healthy body-mind, as well as intelligently knowing how to best control our own growth. It’s certainly no absolute guarantee of a long and productive life, but then again what is? Education’s Important Social Results Are such liberal educational ideas really too radical, bazaar, idealistic, or communistic? Not at all. They just reflect some of the useful knowledge science has recently discovered. As our newspapers and media remind us daily, unintelligent habits help make everyone’s life more stressful and dangerous; who doesn’t remember the chaos caused by 19 9-11 hijackers? Thus, weak and unintelligent educational habits help produce less-than-excellent social results. As is widely known, even in democratic countries like the US young folks often finish 12 years of public schooling and have almost no feeling for what character excellence is or job skills! That’s a social result every liberal person should be outraged about; we all pay for the social results of such schools. Even good students are at a big disadvantage compared to those who already know how to respect the law, keep only honest money, practice equal rights, and help others help themselves. In short, book knowledge is far from an excellent education! Without learning something about character excellence young folks often become vulnerable to acting like morons, with no respect for any law or person. And worse, they have no questions about how they can become more intelligent character artists, build better habits, and keep contributing to our nation’s well-being. In fact, learning just one character excellence, like obeying just laws, makes our country that much more excellent and allows more tax money to be spent on building more liberal schools. Normally students learn almost nothing about how their book-knowledge can be best used to improve their schools or neighborhoods. That’s yet another weak social result of our public schools. Probably in every city in the world even primary students can learn more about creatively using their book-facts for thousands of different beautification and improvement projects. Merely growing flowers for a local park can help young students begin feeling how important chemical and conservation facts are. Such projects would also begin strengthening creative thinking’s habit-art. What better place and time is there to start learning such habits than in the primary grades? Why shouldn't even 1st graders learn to feel such excellent ideas and their constructive social results, like where to find useful book-facts about growing flowers, how easy it is to keep building their sense of humor, positive speaking habits, how celebrate democratic equal rights, and begin learning more about body-mind health? Shouldn’t more parents and students be asking themselves what social results are our book-centered public schools helping produce? Such educational weaknesses of traditional schools keep weakening both people and our nation! Our millions in prisons are all evidence of how our traditional book-obsessed public schools are still out of the improvement character loop. And again, to house, feed, and clothe all those people are paid by taxpayers. Why shouldn’t our schools be places where young folks can start learning how to respect someone’s else property, how to help those less well off, how to speak honestly, how to earn honest money, and how to report those who pose a serious threat to others? The more such character excellence is ignored, the more our San Quentin’s and Sing-Sings get a multiple-occupancy room ready, all at taxpayer expense of course! According to one report California taxpayers now pay about $50,000 a year per inmate! And how many millions more remain undereducated but haven't yet turned to major criminal actions, like welfare and insurance fraud? Because people reproduce faster than they reconstruct and improve their schools, it’s still easy for dangerous and unhealthful habits to be pasted from one generation to the next. Obviously most parents are much more caring about what their children learn, and so help them become of more conscious of dangerous habits. But how many poor folks don’t have such caring and helpful parents? We see the results of unwanted children in homeless numbers in all our cities. Why shouldn’t they have better schools to teach them more excellent habits? Even in upper middleclass neighborhoods how many young folks begin using illegal drugs even before they leave school, to relieve their stressful muscular tensions, and even turn to gangs to help support their drug habits? Isn’t that alone a good reason to at least begin experimenting with decriminalizing drug use? And if it works to reduce crime rates, then wouldn’t that free up even more tax monies for more constructive educational work, like teaching students how to live joyfully and constructively, rather than depressively and destructively? How many people out there still have such habits, and feel even murdering innocent people is justified, or other gang members? The more such habits are neglected, the more it seems war has remained almost inevitable, from ancient Greece, to the 1800s when the US government almost killed our entire Native American population, to 2 World Wars, Korea, and Vietnam! Are those the social results of any truly civilized nation? Of course not. But unless more caring people begin to speak up, and want to help those disadvantaged young folks, those social results will almost certainly continue happening. Won’t war become extinct when people feel everyone else is sacred, and when it ceases to be at all profitable? Am I being too romantic, utopian, idealistic, and even unscientific? After all, how can you possibly reason with someone like a Hitler or a Stalin? British PM Chamberlain tried reasoning with Hitler and failed miserably, but doesn’t that teach us such excellent character habits need to be taught to everyone as soon as possible, in Germany as well as Britain? It may sound too optimistic but we liberal say even if Hitler had had a kinder and more intelligent education, one that helped him fulfill his dream of being an architect, the world would be a different place today? He wanted to help build useful building, and yet people kept telling him he didn’t have the talent for it, or encouraged him to practice the excellent skills, knowledge, and character habits he needn’t to become an architect! Eventually after Germany’s defeat in World War 1 he found a ‘scapegoat’ for his hatful feelings -- the Jews. Today US jails are already terribly over-crowded with inmates needing more civilized and respectful training and education, and when they don’t get it they often remain socially dangerous. Doesn’t it make much more sense to teach such habits BEFORE they learn unintelligent habits, rather than after they’ve learned them? Afterwards just makes learning more intelligent habits that much more difficult. What’s more, prison guards keep demanding ever more money from tax payers, and when taxes shrink during recessions then political leaders have little choice but to release some still-undereducated prisoners to help balance budgets! In a healthy democracy people would have demanded such educational improvement decades ago! Isn’t it time we faced this fact? Even the US is still far from a healthy functioning democracy, and from building schools where dreams are fulfilled rather than frustrated. No doubt there are a great many positive learning events going on in our public schools every day. I certainly don’t mean to suggest doomsday is our democracy is on the verge of becoming another military dictatorship. However, the more we ignore teaching such excellent character habits in favor of teaching habits of obedience and acceptance, the closer we move to such a government. Obviously many more students could be taught more about building excellent character habits IF more parents and children were free to experimentally work at improving their own neighborhoods and schools. We Deweyan liberals aren’t asking all public schools become more liberal all at once. We are asking for more freedom at the local level for caring and concerned parents and students to create such schools in their own neighborhoods! Without that freedom at a local level educational experimentation will continue within the same book-obsessed system we now have. Today it’s called the Common Core system, but it’s essentially the same book-centered system already in place. It’s like experimenting with, say, only different kinds of tea. What we liberals need is the freedom to experiment with milk, coffee, sodas, and waters! In any case, however, people still have the ultimate power in a democracy, even though our own feudalistic political system makes an improvement process more difficult. Just as the aristocracy make improvement for the serfs almost impossible in the Middle Ages, so too state and national laws keep making improvements at the local level more difficult. Not impossible, just more difficult. School improvement is just one example among many, drugs and prostitution laws are 2 other examples. With such a political system the feudal Middle Ages lives on. The improvement door is open somewhat. But for real experimentation to begin happening, more parents, teachers, and students need to start demanding the freedom to start a process of public school improvement! How many parents and students today still don’t even realize they can help build better student-centered schools if they have a plan and demand the freedom to experiment? How many of tomorrow’s criminals would start building more helpful and sympathetic character habits if they were allowed to read to the elderly and disabled even one day a week? Much of the time undereducated parents simply don’t know such character-building options are available, or why they’re so important. Most people come home from work dog-tired and ready for dinner, a few beers, and little else. Most people don’t even ask themselves how many young frustrated drop-outs could be helped to make their dreams become reality in more liberal schools, where students are given more of a choice besides learning more book-facts or leaving school. These aren’t just abstract ideas; they’re a felt reality playing out throughout the US, and no doubt much of the world too. Like any good experimentalist Dewey’s constructive public school criticisms in the early 1900s began focusing on specifics, like job training. Vocational schools, for example, were one of his suggestions, and they’ve grown tremendously since then. Many of Los Angles’ schools too now teach useful job skills for a specific service, like health care, performing arts, and business skills, so they help children learn some practical habits. All well and good. But, how many such students still don't learn what excellent community-service habits feel like? How many never learn how to help others with some of their money? And the more such character habits are formally neglected, the more government monies will certainly be needed to keep the dangerous social results of such neglect controlled by more police, courts, and prisons. How many ‘inner’ cities around the country have already become social ‘sewers’ where homeless people live? No doubt, it's useful to learn practical job skills like carpentry, welding, auto and computer repair, and experimental lab skills, but why should equally useful charity and philanthropy training stay conveniently ignored? When they are is it the result of conservative teachers who want to maintain a feudalistic class or tribal structure as much as possible? The good news is we’re not facing an immediate doomsday implosion, at least not until too much atmospheric carbon makes life impossible in many places. The world may well end in a carbon whimper, rather than in atomic blasts! Students today are getting many more educational options for character development than ever before. They can volunteer, for example, for many trash-collecting programs on the weekends, and with helping people overcome local disasters, like earthquakes and floods. But, again, aren't there more intelligent and helpful activities to learn other than sweeping streets? What about using all their scientific facts about plants and animals to build community gardens with senior citizens? Wouldn’t they be more fun and educational than sitting in some classroom day after day, memorizing soon-forgotten book facts? Wouldn’t such active learning projects help make their book-work even more meaningful? Wouldn’t it be great exercise for seniors too? During this relatively peaceful time, isn’t it time people started experimenting more with getting students out into our neighborhoods in a safe and healthy way? How many poor communities could use a community fish tank, and how many high schools students would love to build one with the intelligent constructive skills they learned in their public schools? No doubt there would be new safety challenges to overcome first, but students could even help solve them too. People are facing new economic challenges on a daily basis too, as obscenely wealthy people keep creating and maintaining a system where only they keep becoming wealthy. But if economists are right, and capitalism really runs on consumer choices, then why can’t our schools begin weaning students away from their books and begin feeling what it’s like to start demanding huge concentrations of wealth be better circulated for everyone’s benefit, and not just a few? And if adults are free to make the purchases they want, then why shouldn’t students be free to choose the classes they want to attend? Why not let the student market decide what their classes should be, and how they should be taught, just like consumers stock purchases help decide what businesses to grow? Who knows? Some teachers might even like such work more than merely grading papers and making tests. Again, all such reconstructive changes needn’t be abrupt, total, and thus too disruptive! They can be slow, gradual, and always improving; slow and steady wins the educational race too, doesn’t it? That way it’s easy to correct and improve weaknesses. Some of the wasteful social results already mentioned tell us more people should be free to experiment with our public schools. Each year tens of billions of dollars are already being spent by our police, courts, and prisons to merely correct or confine unhealthful character weaknesses. Wouldn’t it have been better for tax payers to teach more intelligent habits in grade-school? What judge or cop wouldn’t like to play more golf or tennis, or have more time to visit our schools and speak more about what respectful habit-arts students are learning? Wouldn’t the same also apply to doctors, psychologists, and lawyers? The longer we ignore such character excellence, the more obnoxious and wasteful social results are produced. By the time they get to prison it’s almost impossible to teach young folks more intelligent habit-arts. For years many will remain just as reasonable as Herr Hitler, and some even suffer the same suicidal fate. Timothy McVey was so angry he built a car bomb and killed over 200 people with it; how many young McVey’s are now in our public schools? Shouldn’t our schools have more psychologists working to find out who has such feelings, and then help them build more constructive ones? Aren’t our public schools the nature work place for our psychologists? Bottom line: Educational change is not impossible. Difficult yes, impossible no! Drug abuse is one example. Our legal system is realizing drug abuse is more of an educational problem than anything else; many people simply never were encouraged to teach themselves to enjoy life without drugs. Many of their public schools were places where serious, silent work was practiced most of all. No doubt, illegal drug abuse is still not widespread, but legal drug abuse seems to be much more widespread than it once was. In any case, learning to work and play enjoyably while in school would help reduce the need for such abuse, wouldn’t it? After all, what else do drugs do but relax a person and promote confident feelings? Once again, experimentation with more liberal schools is the only way to find out for sure! In any case such problems continue sapping billions to stop, say, Columbian coca planters, and still haven’t solved the problem of cocaine abuse here in the US. People continue paying for the drug, when they could just as easily get a legal prescription and also start talking to a drug counselor about building more healthful habits. At any rate, isn’t it worth experimenting with teaching more enjoyable habits in our public schools? Who knows for sure what useful social results will be produced? Like so many other personally weak, excessive, and unhealthful habits, drug abuse too is an educational problem, not a criminal problem! Again, the more young folks teach themselves the excellent character art of enjoying and celebrating life without drugs, the less need they'll have for them later on, and what better place is there to start learning such character habits than in our homes, churches, and schools? One day our churches may stop controlling others by teaching religious spirit-myths and instead focus only on helping people become more independent and learn how to intelligently help themselves. Why shouldn’t parents start demanding our public schools teach more than the so-called 3 R’s -- reading, writing, and arithmetic? Why shouldn’t they teach students how to become more independent and how to use book facts to keep making life more satisfying? What might such schools and churches look like? They would be places where everyone could learn more intelligent habit-arts, like how to make an intelligent practice plan, and then carefully test it. When building a more healthful diet, for example, student teams can first read and get some facts about different foods -- learn more about some healthful diet options and what results they might produce in their own bodies. Who knows, some may even discover ways to even improve on the book-facts! Then they can make a plan to test their ideas. As we’ve already seen, such active experimental learning has become our strongest learning art, and such planning and testing would begin building their feelings for that most important habit-art. What's more, if their testing also helped feed some of those less fortunate, like with a garden or fish farm, it would also begin building the useful character art of helping others. In that way learning would be much more active, experimental, and natural, just as it is outside of school! Instead of getting in education’s way such schools can make it more excellent, helping more students become more confident they can intelligently become what they want to become. Here's a great example of how neglected excellent character habits still are, even for gifted students at one of our best universities. Merely learning more and more mathematical facts helped a ‘genius’ earn a doctorate degree at Harvard, but he eventually became a murdering Unabomber who the public now supports with their taxes? Well at least his bombs were all mathematically correct, weren’t they? It’s yet another reason why we Deweyan liberals say character excellence -- KNOWING HOW TO USE FACTS INTELLIGENTLY TO HELP OTHERS AND OUR SELF -- might be THE most important educational goal! And to get that point across with a little more humor, and impress the idea on all peoples’ minds forever and ever, or as least on one person’s mind, here's yet another laboriously lame limerick! To a thief who was caught with the brass He was asked why act like an ass? Why not look twice, To find a nice Little computer rip-off class? No doubt, even criminal actions too need new skills just to stay in business. 18. MORE ABOUT LIBERAL EDUCATION, 102 Esthetic Experience in Our Schools That sounds like a very sophisticated kind of experience, but once again, odd-sounding words are often used to describe very simple ordinary experiences. Case in point: for us Deweyan liberals esthetic experience merely calls our conscious attention to our feeling here and now. Feeling, say, sunlight is an esthetic experience. What could be simpler? When children build their first finger painting, for example, they have some new esthetic experience -- they feel what the paint looks and feels like, and thus keep expanding their old set of esthetic feelings. And when they use such feeling to help others become a little smarter, their socially esthetic feelings grow as well. However, the more our public schools allow such experience to remain on a non-verbal subconscious level of awareness, the more disconnected from esthetic experience students become. Luckily philosophic history often talks about such feelings when it talks about learning and art. Ancient Greeks, for example, called such feelings qualities, like hot and cold, wet and dry. Thus, for Dewey, new esthetic feelings are important; they're the natural result of any new body-mind learning experience. As anyone knows, one’s first sexual experience is full of new esthetic feelings! It’s why such constructive building projects became important in his educational model. They further educate the entire body-mind of feelings AND ideas. Such experiences not only produce new ideas but new feelings as well. For him, another great weakness of our public schools is to quickly downplay feelings’ importance in learning by confining student work to merely book ideas! Such a conservative learning model soon makes school something to be endured, rather than enjoyed; the feeling of enjoyment is so important to learning any kind of new habit. Why keep practicing something that’s not enjoyable and fun? How many parents today not only ask their children what they learned in school today, but also about how they felt about such ideas -- what their esthetic learning felt like? How many parents today ignore their child’s bored feelings, and tell them that’s the way school is, rather than demanding the schools start producing more enjoyable esthetic learning experiences. Centuries ago Ben Franklin realized how important esthetic feelings were in education, and so suggest students get out of the classroom and go on field trips to feel how other people are working. Today students still go to museums, but when it’s only once or twice a year it doesn’t overcome most boring feelings about school. What’s more, how many parents never teach their children how to CONSCIOUSLY make their lives more enjoyable with playful esthetic experience by simply talking about that art? How many parents in fact keep allowing their public schools to continue wasting so much of students’ time and efforts learning mere mental ideas, rather than demand a more holistic body-mind approach to learn with more active learning projects? Such active learning projects also makes learning character habits like respect and honesty that much easier when they’re felt and not just redd about! How many people today are still esthetic children, and don’t realize how important enjoyable feelings are in any new learning experience? Such esthetic feelings help make life and learning less stressful, more enjoyable, and more satisfying! More liberal models of educational excellence like Dewey’s encourage all the above-mentioned kinds of esthetic excellence; they promote democratic and individual development. They nurture individual development, rather than keep isolating students from each other as well as bodily feelings from mental ideas. Mere book work emphasizes just the thinking and reasoning half of the body-mind. More liberal educational models like Dewey’s ask how can we better guide and encourage more enjoyable, respectful, and helpful feelings to keep growing in students, and thus weaken disrespectful and selfish feelings? Active and practical workshops and projects for students was the best answer to that question. Within them learning all the traditional skills like reading, writing, and arithmetic are learned naturally, rather than boringly and repetitively! Such work job-based workshops can best promote the practice of enjoyable esthetic feelings, and thus make learning itself more fun. Just the act of building something, whether it’s a table or a relationship, is itself capable of generating a very large number of new esthetic meanings and feelings. In fact, enjoyable esthetic feelings can turn any unsatisfying routine habit into a more creative habit-art. How many people have felt golf was too frustrating while they were learning it, and yet continued improving those feelings with more enjoyable practice? In fact, such enjoyable esthetic feelings have often been used to build a person’s sexual habits as well, so it’s intelligent to first ask a person you’re interested in what their sexual training has been. It just might save a lot of wasted time and frustration later on. New and unfelt esthetic feelings always grow during new experiences, but like anything else it takes some practice to first consciously notice them, and then to make them as enjoyable and fun as possible! Otherwise, all constructive work is merely unintelligent routine. Here is where teachers can be so useful; good liberal teachers help students verbalize their feelings, and thus make it easier to make a conscious plan to make them more enjoyable and fun. If you feel tired and tense, for example, then why not take a little break and relax those un-enjoyable feelings and start feeling more enjoyable ones? In fact, the word ‘enjoyable’ means able to produce joyful and happy feelings! What Place Has Physical Punishment? In such loving, caring, and enjoyable schools and homes, what need would there be for physical punishment? In fact, over 90% of criminals supported with excessive amounts of public tax money have been excessively abused as children! No doubt as a learning tool punishment has a very long history and practice. For centuries many Western scholars claimed Aristotle was one of the most educated men of all time, and yet he too said students should sometimes be whacked merely for not paying attention! Such esthetic experiences promote feelings of fear and obedience, the 2 cardinal excellences of a feudalistic political and social system. They in fact help define the educational challenge for we liberal Deweyan democrats! To his day both religious and public school educators still use paddling and other painful feelings as educational tools, sometimes even on students who merely show their joy and happiness; I’ve seen it myself. Our prisons too tell us how dangerous excessive punishment is. The more defenseless children are physically punished, the more it tends to create excessively dreadful feelings of resentment, anxiety, hostility, and of course hatred -- all those feelings often getting in the way of civilized living. True civilization for us Deweyan liberals is all about peace and helpfulness to those in our human tribe, rather than merely our own religious, political, or sexual tribe. To me, if any action is truly obscene, then excessively punishing defenseless children is certainly one of them. Perhaps the best response is to quickly let local child welfare people know about it and ask them to help. When conservative public schools continue focusing on book facts, and ignore more enjoyably active experimental kinds of learning, then it’s normal to student attention to wander and sometimes even lead to disruptive actions; they become discipline problems and either must be punished or removed from class altogether. The other alternative is to remain passive and obedience, like in fact many young girls are conditioned to do. There’s also an equally harmful form of punishment many teachers might practice, and that parents should know about, namely, punishing students with school work itself! How many times have frustrated and disruptive students been punished with repetitive writing assignments, like writing ‘I will be good’ a 100 times? Is it any wonder why far too many of our young folks learn not to like school, and leave as soon as they legally can; up to 50% of the student population in some inner city schools? Who wants to keep practicing the skills they’re punished with? Why make it more difficult to enjoy, love, and nurture the important skills of intelligent learning by linking them to punishment and painful feelings? The mission of our public schools is, or should be, to nurture esthetically enjoyable feelings of intelligent learning, rather than frustrate them. Hopefully the educational use of physical punishment is lessening, but excessive physical punishment seems still a social tragedy in far too many homes, as the 90% statistic tells us! The more excessive it is, the more it can twist and pervert children’s constructive and helpful feeling into destructive and hateful ones, like resentment and anger, unless of course you’re raising children who’ll make their living being spanked! Believe it or not some do and will. No law against it, right? As we’ve seen, there are more intelligent alternatives to punishment as an educational tool. Many people were lucky enough to have a warm, loving, and nurturing home life, where esthetically enjoyable feelings were encouraged. Their parents were their friends rather than their jail keeper. For such parents merely withdrawing their love and affection, until a child promises not to act selfishly or disrespectfully, is punishment enough. The late Senator Ted Kennedy described how his mother Rose sometimes withdrew her warm and enjoyable affection to encourage good habits in her children; that way they learned what actions were unacceptable and which weren’t. The problem was her husband Joseph practiced some disrespectful actions, especially against women, and so her son John Kennedy, for example, continued disrespectful actions, even to the point of becoming morally unfit to remain president. And of course guilt feelings have often been a part of Jewish education for centuries, often produced with both physical and psychic punishment. Humorist Woody Allen gives a classic example of it when he says he doesn’t believe in god, but still feels guilty about it! Is it possible to raise a child without any physical punishment? Why not? As a learned early in my teaching career, the more young folks are rewarded and praised for their constructive work, for respecting people, just laws, and helping others, then the less need there'll be for any negative kinds of punishment; they’ll feel good about doing what’s excellent, rather than what’s mean and unkind. Besides, merely hitting or isolating a child for misbehaving is not educational excellence; it still leaves a child ignorant about what actions ARE excellent. Punishment often teaches a child what not to do, rather than what to do later on, like how to help those with their problems. Thus rewarding children for their intelligent, kind, and sympathetic actions, and telling them why they're being rewarded, best helps them strengthen such habit-arts! It may even help increase memory power too. Is there an easier way to remember to bring home that octopus sushi and frog’s-leg ice cream? Obviously most parents already do great work raising their children; if not our world would certainly be much worse than it is now. But that certainly doesn’t mean millions of more people can become more active and assertive both politically and socially. Of course some conservatives may want to play around with our people-in-prison numbers to make it sound like it’s not really so outrageously wasteful. Someone might say two million is only about .6 % of our entire population, so forget about making our schools more enjoyable places of learning; they’re not that much of a problem! It’s just more ‘bleeding heart’ liberal scare tactics! But, aside from such statistical playing, the ever-increasing cost to taxpayers remains a very serious growing problem! The more precious tax money must be used to house, clothe, and feel people for their criminal actions, the less money will be available for learning to enjoy more intelligent kinds of actions in our public schools! If nothing else it’s still an example of unnecessary waste! Mere prison housing, feeding, and medical care runs into the tens of billions EACH YEAR! That result to me is certainly wasteful, as it no doubt is to many others, especially when our public schools could be using that money to build much more civilized habits before criminal feelings start growing. Imagine, just for a few moments, how many more psychologists, workshops, and useful community projects could become a part of public education if those billions were available to them. Imagine, just for a few moments, all the potentially great human resources and talents that could be liberated in our schools, instead of being spent on prisons year after year after year with little or no real benefit to society. How many folks get out of prison with the very same feelings and skills they went into prison with? In fact, many come of prison knowing even more about criminal activity! In truth, no one really knows how much stronger, more vibrant, more democratic, and more intolerant our nation would be of any form of feudalism, especially economic feudalism, if those 2 million had been better educated in their homes and public schools. Adult Education? Here’s yet another important liberal education question you might want to think about: Wouldn't it be a good idea to require parents spend a year learning about intelligent child care skills when they enroll their first child in school? No doubt, parents should have the freedom to raise their children as they see fit, as long as they’re lawful and not abusive, but shouldn't they also KNOW what excellent character habits are and how best to teach them? What better place is there to teach such important habit-arts than in our schools? Why keep naively assuming all young folks already know how to intelligently raise children, when in fact they don’t. Because we all pay taxes to house and feed in jail those with weak character habits and excessive criminal habits, don't we all have a right to demand everyone know something about one of our most important skills, namely intelligently raising a child? As it is now, we demand young folks know some important facts about driving a car before getting a license, so why should it be any different with raising a child to live intelligently in a democratic republic? No doubt, conservatives would argue against it. Since Plato conservatives have worked against teaching young folks any kind of democratic skills or intelligent scientific habits; for thousands of years experimental learning and democracy have been conservatives’ sworn enemies! They both weaken the power to control people, and keep them obedient. With such questions and facts it should be clear why controlling liberal education philosophy was so important to conservatives like Plato and even moderates like Aristotle. Real democrats work to end all aristocratic feudalistic social forms and give everyone the same equal rights and opportunity as everyone else! Such reforms are sign of democratic health and power, and public schools are where such habits should be taught. We Deweyan liberals aren't calling for an educational revolution all at once, overnight; that idea belongs to magical fantasies about how life works. But to completely ignore intelligent experimentation, or restrict it legally, is just as dangerous to democratic health. So we say it's best to merely take one baby-step at a time, to the next evolutionary step or plateau, and then keep building from there! Thus, our own neighborhood schools become the battle ground for we Deweyan liberals. If one can be improved with the ideas talked about here, then that’s what’s most important for us. One can lead to 2, and 3, and so on. Furthermore, for such progress we can all play a part, teachers, students, and parents. Even African religious leaders joined the loop to help build intelligent civil disobedient protest habits, rather than their own public schools. That to me is a classic example of how really important and useful our churches can be if they so choose, and how mean and vicious social habits can be improved with their help. History again shows even ol’ Tom Jefferson himself would probably have benefited from better lessons in democratic character excellence. Even though African Sally Hemmings bore him children he continued feeling Africans were generally incapable to reasoning intelligently. In that way he too needed more education. He also never seemed to learn how to intelligently control his own money! He died deeply in debt. Those conservatives who want to keep the educational status quo just like it is, and keep children ignorant about any ideas of excellence, can criticize these liberal educational ideas in a thousand different ways: it'll cost too much; it'll raise taxes; it'll weaken our society in other ways; it won't work; it's communistic and socialistic. For most of US history Native Americans, Africans and Asians were society's most hated people, followed closely behind by Jews, Irish, Catholics, and women. For such conservatives the status quo must be maintained at all costs, even if it means denying people their democratic rights to even vote, and our schools must be places where such habits are passed on! In other words, our schools must continue ignoring democratic ideals, even after more than 200 years of democratic evolution! That’s how important are public schools are to we Deweyan liberals. Selfish and unkind people may not realize an important fact of life; such habits often merely hurt themselves more than anyone else. Without good character training they may never realize ‘what goes around often comes around’; if they deny equal rights to others, then they too deserve to have their civil rights denied! As a result they end up hurting themselves by not treating all people with respect, honor, and equally! My own childhood definitely had many weaknesses, but such bigotry it didn’t have; my lawyer-father even helped integrate Chicago neighborhoods in the 1950s one house at a time. As a result, it’s easy for me to talk and act more liberally about equal rights for everyone! Along with Dewey I just honor and celebrate the democratic principles upon which our liberal tradition and country was founded; we’re all humans and so all deserve the same rights as anyone else. Obviously, democracy is a growth process, like any other habit-art, but the more our public schools are kept out of that growth loop, the more difficult improvement becomes. What liberal didn’t laugh when conservative President Bush 2 told us we could quickly build a cooperative democracy in Iraq when over 200 years we haven’t built one at home yet! And what hypocrisy it is to criticize China and Russia for human rights violations when many people in our own country still have hateful unintelligent feelings and ideas! Another Sign of Democratic Health: Educational Choice? Dewey criticized how book-obsessed public schools teach their prized factual textbook knowledge -- slave-like to an entire group, rather than as a free choice. As most adults already know, for 12 years students read about what someone else tells them is important to know. However, isn't that like going into an aerobics studio and allowing the instructor to tell us what kind of a body we should have? And on top of it, then college professors sometimes complain about students not having strong independent critical thinking skills! How on earth can children learn independent, creative, and critical question-asking skills when, for 12 years, they're made to merely find the book's 'right answers'? So naturally liberal educators like Dewey said such traditional schools really teach mostly habits of intellectual passivity and academic laziness! How can students become curious and want to keep learning when their own question-asking skills have been largely neglected for 12 years? As a result, how many students are happy to be done with school after high school, or even drop-out earlier? In short, when many students finish 12 years of traditional schooling not only are their own character habits not the best, but their all-important curiosity and question-asking skills are weak and greatly undeveloped! In that kind of educational situation is it any wonder many young folks turn to drugs and crime in response to a world they often feel psychically isolated from? Not encouraging all students to intelligently practice excellent learning habits like question-asking, and start learning what they themselves want to learn more about, in effect KEEPS children emotionally and intellectually immature! Is it any wonder young folks often are glad to go to war to relieve their frustrations; killing is easy, just pull the trigger? I’m innocent; I was just following orders. As a result, they often remain vulnerable to those promising quick money and happy times! Thus, Dewey criticized WHAT our schools teach -- their subjects. Traditional school subjects often ignore the practical side of education's coin, namely, how to use such knowledge and facts to keep improving life and building more helpful character habits. That, to him, was certainly less than educational excellence. In fact, such subjects are often used to find the most verbally advanced students; after all, brains are important for improving the species. So when some schools have a drop-out rates of nearly 50% how much objective evidence should people need? Their own school’s educational habits are plainly not satisfying important student needs. The answer is not to simply keep building more conservative book-obsessed schools, but to build schools where student have more educational choices to make. One promising educational option today is called Community Service work, or at least was an option before yet another serious economic recession once again began reducing tax funds for public schools. If one didn’t know better, one might believe our obscenely wealthy upper class would like nothing better than to end all non-profit public schools, so for-profit schools could more easily grow. In any case, a great challenge today is to keep such community service classes growing for students at all levels, from primary to the college level! Such learning is more vibrant, holistic, naturalistic, and more enjoyable than mere book-learning. Such classes give students a greater chance for some real practical community-improving work experience, and so we ask parents to support such programs as much as possible. No doubt, to us such classes are best if they are offered at the primary level, but any level is better than no level! After all, the last I heard seven year old kids were definitely people too! Another challenge is to make them something more than just street sweeping or trash collection. The challenge is to encourage students to see what improvements are possible in an area, make a plan to achieve them, and then test their plan. Such a plan might even include talking to people who could help fund such projects as a neighborhood park or a recycling center for all old electronic gadgets , or even how students could raise the needed money itself. Another liberal educational challenge is to help build a practical psychology workshop, where students could actually practice the healthful ideas they’re learning about, like working humorously and joyfully. Ideally, such classes would start at the primary level, help young sense-based learners learn what respectful and helpful ideas feel like. Almost certainly, only a few lucky students really know what habits are psychologically healthful, and which are dangerous. Once again, such Behavioral studies are easiest to teach at the primary level, and remain useful all through life, so why not start teaching them to children? Why should anyone naively expect anyone to practice psychological health when they’ve never been taught what it feels like? No doubt, many people who know little about Behavioral psychology might feel it’s somehow undermining all their values, but what is so dangerous about teaching students the useful, life-long art of intelligent SELF-TEACHING, or how to use rewards and a 'baby-step' method to slowly teach themselves what they want to learn? Aren't truly educated people those who know HOW to intelligently solve their own problems? If so, then wouldn't such classes easier to see peoples' own ACTIONS AND RESULTS are what're most important, not how they look and who they talk to? Wouldn't just that one idea make it much easier to feel more tolerant to those people who look differently than others, and who are labeled gays and lesbians? And more importantly, wouldn’t we ALL benefit if people learned intelligent habits are simply respectful to all law-abiding people? If you’re really another one of those ‘radical’ democratic educators, then it might be something even worth experimenting with. How many times in history have today’s 'radical' ideas, like equal rights, become tomorrow's democratic status quo? That certainly seems to be the trend, doesn’t it? Educational Results Beyond the Classroom Perhaps more than any other philosopher of the 1900s, Dewey also saw the possibilities such educational ideas create beyond the classroom for building a healthier democracy, where wealth-power is easily controlled with democratic power. Is it just coincidence our obscenely wealthy class has become even wealthier since our schools have become more book-obsessed since the late 1950s, and our universities have become less affordable to all but the wealthiest families. Only they can easily afford the huge costs of college, and so keep being lectured by conservative professors, many of whom want nothing more than to maintain our feudalistic status quo. In more liberal democratic schools children would have a choice about learning not only useful job skills, but also about useful character habits as well! He saw clearly how our public schools can be used not to build a healthier democracy, where equal rights are demanded for all, but rather merely maintain the political and economic status quo. If our public schools don’t teach such intelligent experimental habits on a formal basis, even to primary age students, then their entire character growth will remain stunted, immature, and even medieval. The recent explosion of business arts and skills need young folks who know how to experiment intelligently and creatively, how to learn new skills quickly, and how to use extra monies to help those less well off. No doubt, sometimes it takes some trial-and-error experimentation for students to discover what job skills they like best, and also learn how to enjoy experimentally learning more about them. It even took very intelligent Ben Franklin years to learn how important science was, and also begin experimentally learning how to build useful objects, like a lightning rod so as to better protect buildings and people from becoming cinders. Until then people continued using religious skills like prayer and worship to avoid lightning’s dangers. And even after the lightning rod was invented some religious conservatives condemned him for taking away some of god’s power to punish sinners! Such is the power of conservative habits to maintain the social status quo, even though the outside world around them is continually changing and evolving! More liberal democratic schools will make it easier for more people to start learning how to intelligently control constructive kinds of growth, rather than merely reject all such ideas. What better skill can there be in an always changing world? Without the help of our tax-supported public schools, real progress educating young folks about practicing or democratic ideals has been difficult. Good liberal schools are still relatively rare, even in the US, and population growth rates make the challenge even more difficult. Teachers must be trained themselves, new curriculums designed for more liberal schools, and then even allowed to grow in places where un-democratic habits are firmly in place. In those places conservatives and many moderates choose to block any such useful educational reforms; they want students to remain educated only about the habits they feel are best. Recently I even heard a high government Democratic education official flatly say character habits will never be formally taught in public schools, as if there was some eternal and unchanging natural law against it! Such un-democratic statements continue telling us true liberals should first focus on improving their own neighborhood schools, and thus increase the educational freedom for everyone! Conservatives know full well, the more young folks are liberated from their old routine educational habits of obedience to their teachers and books, and encouraged to more clearly see how political propaganda is used to maintain an economic, political, and educational status quo, the more vulnerable that feudalistic status quo becomes! That’s exactly what most conservatives and moderates have not wanted, do not now want, and almost certainly will never want! They want to keep making it easier for them to keep taking more of the public’s money, even if it’s used to build more useless and unneeded weapons, or give it to wealthy corporations and farmers who don’t need it. With more liberal public schools, more people will find it easier to elect more liberal politicians who aren’t afraid to tax the already obscenely wealthy at a much fairer rate than they now pay, and also work to restrict their putting millions of dollars into off-shore bank accounts, and thus avoid paying taxes at all! If there’s any kind of natural human law, it might be this: those with power will keep working to maintain, conserve, and increase it as much as possible! Western history is literally brimming with examples of that idea, and it’s still brimming to this day! This also seems rather safe to say. Without more liberal democratic-oriented public schools, our so-called cultural wars between conservatives and liberals will continue being won by a small class of very wealthy people. Thus, stress and frustration will continue being felt by most everyone; stressful economic recessions seem to be happening even more frequently these days. People should thus know: true conservatives want children to continue learning habits of obedience and meek acceptance of the ideas and feelings they're given to learn. Such habits grow stronger every time a child works on another academically trivial book assignment, and is made to feel they are the most important things to know. As we’ve seen in these pages, from Plato on, what’s been most important for conservatives is maintaining their feudalistic status quo, whether its based on secular or religious assumptions! The more such conservative and moderate aristocratic assumptions were challenged, the more room became available to build more liberal democratic habits and skills. Also worth thinking about is this idea too. Our conservative book-oriented public schools make it easier for students to join some kind of military service where obedience to those with authority is not just expected, but demanded. From the 1890s on US military outfits have often been forcing people in other countries to accept US goods and services, and thus, with the help of obedient soldiers, enslaving them with perpetual debt to US banks and the wealthy upper class! Such obedient soldiers have been making it easy to enforce those goals by even cold-bloodedly killing and murdering anyone who might rebel against them; Vietnam was merely one brutal and vicious example among hundreds occurring throughout the 1900s while building a US economic and military empire. As we've seen, after he retired Marine General Smedley Butler said flatly he acted as just a high class muscleman obeying orders from Wall Street and wealthy financiers! No doubt, these days that empire is maintained more with economic power than military force, with orgs. like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, but they continue working to maintain a feudalistic economic status quo. To his credit, Aristotle said to use money merely to make more money should not be allowed, and he also saw how it was often used to buy more political and economic power. But without also suggesting democratic ways to better control that power for everyone’s benefit, they remain merely 2 ideas. While some corporations were making millions of dollars during World War 1selling guns and weapons, the US government passed a law forbidding people to even speak against the war; the First Amendment be damned, there was money to be made. It's yet another example of how money will distort any democratic freedom in its path. For us Deweyan liberals such military and economic reality both rest on young folks obeying for most of 12 years what they’re told to do by their teachers, without any practical freedom or encouragement to even question the usefulness of any such assignments. Again, in the corporate world such unquestioning habits of obedience are useful; corporate leaders don’t want anyone questioning the pay they get, the working conditions they have, or the work they do. All such freedoms would merely endanger their own profits and salaries. As a result, many corporations have been fighting for decades against union worker power! To this day women are often paid less than men for the same work, mostly because they haven’t learned to organize themselves and thus increase their economic power. They haven’t yet learned healthy democratic habits! In fact, union membership is at an all-time low these days while corporate profits are at an all-time high! We Deweyan liberals say this situation is a direct result of conservative educational practices in our own public schools, and until they change it’s naïve to believe life will change in any meaningful way! The addiction to money can be just as dangerous as the addiction to any dangerous drug. Many religious conservatives too still believe, with Plato, it’s absolutely necessary to keep others and our nation as free as possible from sin and irreligious habits; the current fight against same-sex marriage is merely one example. In short, for all such reasons the battle to build more liberal democratic public schools continues to this day! For us liberals the main reason is fairly easy to see: the more people are conditioned to feel some of their ideas reflect absolute truth, the more likely they are to resist any challenges to them. The more people feel as Aristotle did, that some people are natural slaves, and should be treated that way, the easier it was for mean, violent, and vicious racial and sexual hatreds to continue on, and thus making our democracy much less healthy than it might be. Liberals like Dewey, on the other hand, not only recognized such a reality, but also began challenging it by helping build more liberal democratic schools where child development stages were more respected. Even many ancient conservatives have said children should be allowed to play and learn with games until they’re almost teenagers. For Dewey such liberal ideas would make it easier to keep educating youngsters about actually building a more peaceful and productive world for everyone, and not just a small class of obscenely wealthy folks. Teaching creatively experimental habits and skills while learning useful employment skills is basically how liberal schools differ from conservative ones. Too many young folks still haven’t been allowed or encouraged to learn such important skills, and thus make life less difficult for themselves and our nation more democratic with equal rights and opportunities for all. Naturally, such liberal democratic schools would rest on all of the ideas mentioned so far, like the experimental learning of practical and useful knowledge and skills, the freedom to choose and learn more about a career path while still in school, and how to use our creative ideas as helpful tools, rather than merely building a bank account. No doubt, today we face many of the same social challenges mankind has faced for thousands of years, and have been frustrated by conservatives for thousands of years too! Without such a practical and useful democratic educational model, we continue facing serious social and personal problems, like economic slavery, drug addiction, gang violence, social disrespect, forced prostitution, and juvenile and adult crime to name just 6 obnoxious results. They continue telling us our traditional book-centered educational models need improving. Those results are not the result of corrupt liberal ideas and feelings, much less an evil human nature, as conservatives even today tell us. They’re the result of conservative educational models of education kept in practice for thousands of years first with religious ideas, and today also with secular ideas about conservative values being the best values of all. It’s an old sophist debate trick; when something is your fault blame the other person as much and as often as you can! In truth, however, much of our modern world today is the direct result of conservative institutions. For example, today conservative ideas about the value of a small minority having vast amounts of economic wealth and power are useful for a few conservative politicians to stay in power and keep working to maintain such a feudal economic system. Those few thousand people have more wealth and political power than 50% of the population combined!? Is that in fact the best kind of social model to make life better for everyone? Real life conditions emphatically tell us it is not! No doubt, much has been accomplished and improved for many people in our modern world in merely the past 200 years. Millions of people are now being fed, clothed, housed, and better educated than ever before, thanks to experimental science and more liberal political improvements. However, as many also know, life has also remained very brutal for many as well. For far too many young folks today, not having useful job skills when they leave high school continues making them vulnerable to some of the most dehumanizing habits ever practiced, like addicting young women to drugs and forcing them into prostitution merely to feed their pimp’s drug habit! The more people are educated to look the other way, the easier it becomes to continue such actions. So, isn’t it natural to ask if our own public schools are partly to blame for such results? Why shouldn’t students be educated to not only quickly report such events, but also to learn useful job skill so it would be easier to resist such actions? Don’t young women have the right to learn such skills? Thanks in part to our book-obsessed schools, hundreds of thousands of young women runaways will begin leading such a life, and living with the psychic scars for the rest of their lives unless they get some expert professional help. Such events can be reduced with the help of fully staffed caring public schools helping learn how to demand respect from others while they enjoyable learn useful job skills. Often such young women attended schools where building more helpful and practical skills was thought to be beyond education’s scope, and thus be unprofessional! Conservatives have been arguing like that for centuries. If we’re to build more useful skills for our modern democratic world, then a willingness to experiment with new ideas is another useful habit-art. Not feeling some ideas shouldn’t be experimented with even for a short time, like with equal marriage rights, prevents people from seeing the actual results from such actions, and thus have some objective evidence one way or another! Have such results made life any different, and if so in what way? Such an intelligent experimental habit-art is the natural result of seeing ideas as merely mental tools, not absolute truth. When students are better educated about our experimental Behavioral psychology, it becomes easier to feel some ideas should be experimented with, just to see their results. How would my life change if I allowed gay and lesbian couples to marry? What would be the social results if more students were allowed to learn the job skills they want to learn, and had more democratic freedom to choose school rules and student representatives? As it is now, many young folks leave school with weak feelings for those important skills, and thus keep allowing others to build the kind of world we now have. In fact, as many as 500,000 young folks become vulnerable runaways every year who often get forced into prostitution by brutal males already addicted to drugs. Thus, it becomes practically impossible to even think about how their own neighborhood schools could be helping improve that situation by enjoyably teaching more useful job skills to young folks. Also, what‘s wrong with experimentally testing for a short time the idea of legalizing prostitution and drug use, just to see what results might be produced? Sex is a human need, and so learning to express it in socially healthy ways is an important habit-art. How can life possibly keep becoming better and more satisfying for everyone unless more people treat their ideas experimentally, and see what results are actually produced? Without such feelings for experimental learning we simply remain in the same old routine ruts of paying to feed and house drug users and sellers in prison at about $50,000 each a year! Then, when they get out they’re back on the streets within days luring more young teenage women into the same actions. How useful for social health is it to keep ignoring how young folks want to start learning some useful job skills even while they’re in elementary school? Why shouldn’t our schools help students build practical clothing, law enforcement, medical and legal skills so they can begin serving community needs even while in school? Dewey’s new liberal models of educational excellence are saying this is OUR world to experiment with intelligently, and the more we do, the easier it becomes to find better ways of living and judging any idea or action. In fact, with freedom from believing any routine idea or ritual reflects nature’s absolute truth has come the freedom to keep experimenting with all intelligent kinds of growth, rather than keep obeying a status quo producing such obnoxious results. If some students want to learn how be bus drivers, then why not also teach them how to be creative and intelligent drivers who know how to enjoy their needed public service work? No institution stays the same forever. Perhaps the best example of that is some of our religious organizations; many are working to make their followers more humane and humanistic, and focused on helping those who still have many old conservative ideas about life and nature. What better goal could any organization possibly have? Many liberals today say such liberal humanistic goals are religion’s oldest and most worthwhile. For example, many fundamental Christian sects now regularly use Behavioral psychology methods to help those addicted to old conservative ideas, and thus teach the art of intelligently growing better habits one step at a time and one day at a time. The more they do, the more they improve life in this world -- the only people-friendly world for many billions of miles around! Is there any better way for religious folks to express their love than encouraging people to intelligently enjoy the art of guiding their own excellent growth? Isn't that the best goal of a truly liberated religion, as it is with a truly liberal education? To us Deweyan liberals, the more people feel all of life should be a self-directed educational growth, and stay focused on improving life for everyone, the more sensitive they’ll become to controlling those who want to keep enslaving as many as possible for their own comfort! Teaching others to enjoy guiding their growth intelligently and experimentally embodies the new modern liberal model of ideas as mental tools and democratic equal rights as the best political system. To us Deweyan liberals, all those social organizations treating only their ideas as absolute Truth are more psychically enslaving than liberating, and more controlling than loving and respectful. After all, nature never has had only one model of truth, and almost certainly never will have. Many liberal people today have dedicated their lives to teaching their new models of ideas as experimental mental tools. Indeed, with such humanistic ideas there are as many different 'roads to heaven', feelings about being born again, and becoming saved as there are people on earth! The popular saying is there are more ways than 1 to skin a cat. Such tolerant feelings are yet another new naturalistic result of seeing all ideas as experimental. With its help we can also more deeply celebrate some new modern heroes who actively worked for democracy's ideal of equal rights, like Susan Anthony, Ben Franklin, Jane Addams, Martin Luther King Jr., and John Dewey, as well as millions of other liberals who're working for the same result each and every day. For example, the more Susan Anthony sensed women were mainly taught how to be obedient second-class citizens, the more deeply she felt the idea of inequality as merely another social weakness, and thus as something to keep experimentally improving. Voting rights for women became his mission! Why should anyone tolerate half the population not having an equal right to vote, or not having reproductive freedom? Isn’t expanding such equal rights what all humane organizations do? Such a modern democratic world continues unfolding. In fact, just a few hundred years ago, in the 1700s, many Christians routinely believed this idea was absolute truth: some women and children become possessed by devils and evil spirits, and so should be burned as witches to save their souls. One more example may be useful. About 30,000 years ago Neandertals failed to improve their routine habits of living while the newly evolved sapien peoples continued spreading out around the globe. Thus, within a few thousand years they became extinct. The more Neandertals practiced their old routine hunting habits, the more difficult it was to experiment with new ones, and thus continue feeling life’s enjoyments. It’s not just prehistoric history either; such a reality continues on even today. Recently secular totalitarian leaders have shown how dangerous routine habits of obedience can be. Stalin, Hitler, and Pol Pot all demanded obedience to their models of truth, while killing millions of people who allowed them the power to do so. To us Deweyan liberals, even these examples from human history are enlightening. They help teach us we the people have the power to build a more satisfying world for everyone, and unless we focus that democratic power we will be responsible for whatever else happens; unless the people act together and more democratically, our world will remain feudalistic. If liberals like Dewey are right, if all our ideas depend on HUMAN habit-arts, then more liberal democratic schools will build such a world more quickly, a kinder, more respectful, and helpful world where children’s helpful dreams are fulfilled rather than frustrated. Who knows, maybe even one day peace may break out all over the world! Imagine that, aye?? Stranger things have happened, haven't they? However, almost certainly it'll never happen unless we ourselves start looking at more intelligent and humane models of education, economics, nature, and politics. The more that happens, the easier it’ll become for such a world to keep evolving. Little feisty Jonathan went to school in May, Mother had roused him from bed where he lay. While studying an octagonal cask, He raised his hand and asked, Hey, am I gonna learn anything useful today? 16. EDUCATION: CONSERVATIVE AND DEWEYAN, 101 In this and the following 2 sections we take Book 1's longest look at Dewey's liberal educational models of excellence. Usually the philosophy of education is treated as a minor philosophic subject, if it’s treated at all. As in so many ways, Plato was an exception to that rule; his most famous book Republic is essentially a book on educational philosophy. For Dewey, however, and many other liberals, education was one of philosophy's most important subjects, if not the most important! Only with better education can people begin seeing more intelligent ways of acting and guiding their lives, and thus build better habits. Luckily Dewey lived at a time when many Americans wanted to keep improving their lives and governments -- the Progressive Era -- and so in many places around the country many of his educational ideas were experimented with, tested, and continued on into the 1950s! At such schools young folks were helped to learn useful job skills as well as important character habits, like helping others and respecting just laws, as well as learn how to intelligently change unjust ones. For example, for a while Gary, Indiana's entire school district began using many of his ideas in the 1910s, as did the Chicago Vocational School system, and of course later in life entire country’s like Turkey, China, and Japan asked him for educational advice about making their own schools more excellent. They all wanted to keep improving their schools so their young folks would learn more intelligent habit-arts and thus lessen many of their social problems, like crime, unemployment, and helping their economies become more industrial and competitive. Even though he went to China decades before the Communists took over, today China produces more engineers than anyone else and their economy is rapidly becoming world-class, second only to the US. In any case, however, these 3 sections are not just for new teachers, but also for parents and students of education; after all, parents are the most important teachers for any child! Our Main Criticisms For we liberal Deweyans, for too long US education has been out of the progressive improvement loop, so to speak. Its basic education philosophy has been too conservative and even medieval. For us, educational excellence is the best and ONLY way for people AND societies to keep growing and evolving more peaceful and intelligent habit arts, but the more traditional schools remain, the more difficult that goal becomes. Such book-obsessed schools make it more difficult to learn all the democratic and experimental habits making life all it can be. To Dewey liberal education was the best key for teaching young folks how best to keep improving all their habit-arts, like healthcare, charity, exercise, lawfulness, and respect for equal rights. Again, without such a liberal educational system, many social problems remain an economic drag, like fighting crime, underemployment, unemployment, crippling social discrimination, drug abuse, health problems, democratic weaknesses, not to mention global warming and war itself. For Dewey all such modern social challenges can most rapidly be improved only with effective and practical educational ideas and practices, ones in which students make an emotional commitment to learning what feels best to them, rather than being regimented and made to learn what they often have no desire or need to learn. The less young folks make that emotional commitment, the sooner they forget what they spent years being made to learn. And so for us Deweyan liberals children should be free to choose a career path as soon as possible, even in elementary school! Such an emotional commitment makes it much easier to then teach students the valuable character habits they’ll need to become successful lawyers, doctors, engineers, police people, carpenters, plumbers, or whatever, and also the writing, reading, and calculating skills schools now try to teach. So, if Dewey's right, if the emotional commitment to learn practical employment skills is the best educational model for any kind of learning, then child psychology becomes one of the most important subjects of all. Without knowing something about the 3 main stages of child development, it’s almost impossible to build such schools, as Plato himself saw thousands of years ago. In general those stages are a playfully sense-based stage until about 7, a constructive stage until about 11 or 12, and then, as the brain matures, a more intellectual stage capable of grasping more abstract ideas. Thus, without accepting such a child psychology, and instead yoking students to book-work for 12 years, it will take much longer for almost anyone to learn any kind of excellence! And the more that doesn’t happen, the more vulnerable millions of young folks will remain to all of society’s unintelligent temptations and vices. On the other hand, the more schools are based on that psychology, the more naturalistic and less stressful school becoming, and the more children will want to be there. After helping found the American Association of University Professors, and becoming its first president, Dewey published his best educational book, Democracy and Education. Also The School and Society is a good little introductory book about elementary education. More About Dewey After he moved to the newly opened University of Chicago in 1894 Dewey opened its famous Lab School; there he began testing his liberal ideas. It’s still operating today, helping students learn valuable computer skills. After his undergraduate studies he taught briefly at the high school level in Pennsylvania, and there he began feeling how artificial conservative educational models were; without emotionally committing themselves to learn all the book facts they were being asked to learn, school for most students became a place merely to go to until the law said they could leave. For how many students is that the reality even today? In fact, even today most students just don’t need to know all those book facts college professors of education said they should learn. Also, they often justified their book-based models on producing so-called well-rounded students who learn a little of many different subjects. Again, at such schools students quickly forgot the ideas they learned merely to pass the next test. Thus, education for most everyone remained shallow, superficial, and worst of all, useless for much of life outside the school room! Greatly undereducated parents didn’t know enough about education to challenge such an educational model. Thus, often students weren’t prepared for the new jobs being created as science and technology continued creating them. In short, Dewey realized the whole feeling-side of education was largely missing in traditional classrooms; it was mostly just telling students to learn academic subjects at merely a mechanically verbal level of learning, rather than a holistic level of feeling AND verbal learning. So, like Alexander’s empire, conservative public education covered a lot of ground but it was only a few inches deep. And the work was easy; teachers just needed to stay a day or 2 ahead of the students’ book assignments. But again, such facts were all but useless in the real world outside of school. Another result was to ignore the far more useful subject of character development. Thus, again, many students remained vulnerable to all the anti-social actions going on in their own neighborhoods. Police brutality thus became intensified as more people broke the law mainly for economic reasons. They didn’t have the skills to work at better paying jobs, and thus racial segregation and discrimination continued making life needlessly stressful. In Chicago Dewey got the chance to test some of his more holistic and naturalistic ideas of learning, based on a sounder model of child psychology. There he saw the results of making learning an active, sense-based, enjoyable, and natural as learning outside of school. He wanted children to learn about history, chemistry, physics, but he also wanted such subjects taught not just from books in the higher grades, but from active and holistic learning experience! That way, a child’s bodily feelings would be just as educational as talking about ideas. In short, Dewey saw how knowledge should be located in one’s muscles as much as one’s brain. For example, having young students at the sense-based stage of development build a garden would also begin teaching them some elementary chemistry, biology, and mathematical facts. Also, it would make those ideas more meaningful because the experience was active, rather than a passive desk-centered model where student muscles are kept out of the educational loop, so to speak. After all, such children learn best with active practice. He also began experimenting with building projects for students at the constructive stage of development. He saw how even his own children learned best when they actively experimented intelligently to build what they wanted, and when teachers helped them feel what intelligent actions felt like. Students were to first make a detailed plan for their projects, and then actually test it themselves to see its results. Such holistic and organic learning experiences made learning important intelligent and experimental ideas easier and more enjoyable, and it also increased their carpentry, electrical, and plumbing skills. What kind of fertilizer, for example, was best for a garden, and how much of it was best? What is fertilizer? Are there different kinds? How is it made? Such questions begin opening up for young children the entire world of experimental research, and not just for a few, but for all students. Then, after moving to Columbia University in New York in 1904, he continued writing about education and convincing more people how our traditional public schools could be even better with the addition of constructive or project kinds of learning. If children wanted to learn more about politics, then they would make a list of questions, plan a trip to city hall, and talk with politicians who could answer their questions. Such learning projects would be much more meaningful to students than merely passively reading about politics. Then, when students’ body-minds are ready to study abstract ideas, the last 2 years of high school could be devoted to those studies, especially for students going on to college. Such a learning model was also useful for promoting democratic feelings of equality; each student played some part in such projects. Some Ancient Education History As with so many other philosophic ideas, liberal and active models of education go back not only to ancient Greek Sophists and Atomists, but they were used by our native ancestors for millions of years! All useful tools and habits were actively built experimentally, since the first stone tool was built over 2 million years ago! Normally, native children are taught to build their own useful skills, tools, and weapons during their constructive stage of childhood. And often it was the only way women were educated until the 1800! In ancient Greece, many Sophists like Protagoras became the college professors of the time, traveling from city to city and giving lectures about what students should practice. Sometimes they sold their books too! In fact, Dewey says how their new liberal questions about learning helped build the classic model of philosophy which lasted thousands of years! What is learning? Can character excellence be taught, or was it just a random gift from the gods? What is the best political, ethical, and educational system? Is there one or many? Such questions helped define philosophy’s 6 main topics, namely nature, learning, ethics, politics, education, and art. As they went from city to city they gave lectures for which they charged a fee; hey, sophists gotta eat too, right? What’s more, the lectures were aimed at teaching young folks practical skills for living more intelligently in the new democratic systems evolving around Greece. For example, learning how to speak well in public and in the law courts, where juries were sometimes 500 people; many people were afraid to speak in front of such large groups. They also lectured about important skills like estate management. Books were expensive and thus almost non-existent, and so lecturing gave young folks a chance to hear about new ideas they could practice for themselves. Thus, the new skills useful in a democratic society were learned. Such skills made it easier to take advantage of opportunities growing at the time. We've already seen one example of it when Thales made a lot of money selling olive oil presses one year. Needless to say, many of those ancient liberal democratic Sophists were secular-minded. To them, learning useful skills made living here and now more secure and worthwhile. Unlike conservative, Plato many liberal Sophists didn’t bother about any other realm except our natural one; Protagoras frankly admitted his not knowing about any other world besides our natural one. After all, with centuries of practical colony building in back of them, and many smashed fingers along the way, many Sophists were confident their own practical experimental learning model would be useful to many people. Aesop's practical little stories written at that time were about what practical skills might be useful, and they’re still popular reading today. With Socrates’ (d. 399) help ethical questions became another part of classical philosophy. So, is it any wonder one of the most prominent 4th century BCE sophists, a man named Antiphon wrote (Fr. 60) “Primary among human concerns is education” And of course one of the founders of Western liberalism, Democritus, himself realized its importance too; he tells us he would rather discover one law of nature than be a king in any entire country! In China too Confucius said with education all class divisions fad. In short, education helps us see all people are related and deserve the same rights as everyone else. The business-oriented democratic world of the 400s BCE was challenging Greek men like they had never been challenged before; women and slaves were pretty much out of the public loop. Sophist teachers helped fill those new educational needs. Men needed to get better at building businesses, talking respectfully with people, and also at guiding their government as well as defending themselves in court. Thus debate and reasoning skills were needed. Even slaves were welcomed to attend, as long as they paid the fee. As a result, old Greek political institutions continued being reconstructed along democratic lines, as is our modern world, and those with more intelligent thinking and acting habits had a big advantage in that world. It became easier to make an honest drachma or two. Socrates, of course, Democritus, Plato, Aristotle, and many others soon began painting their philosophic answers to such challenging questions, and within a few decades Western civilization had liberal, moderate, and conservative educational models of excellence, although Aristotle’s wasn’t very detailed. Just as today, where they differed was in what they thought was excellent to know, and how they could best learn it. Thus, different models of nature and learning began growing. Greeks being Greeks, it wasn't soon before conservatives like Plato began challenging Democritus’s liberal naturalistic models of excellence. His religious habits were very strong; in fact his Republic rested on knowing Spirit-Objects; he felt they were the best objects to know, much like Christians would say for many centuries during the Middle Ages. Naturally, Plato educational model was far from democratic. Instead it focused mainly on how to educate a few elite students rather than everyone; many conservatives cherish such feelings to this day. In the Republic he described his youthful conservative spirit-feelings about life and education, like how only future philosopher-kings should be educated for some 50 years before they were given power. After that time they would continue enforcing a very conservative model of life on everyone, limiting both democratic and religious freedoms for everyone. As mentioned earlier, no agnostics or atheists would be allowed. However, even he saw how some liberal ideas were useful. For example, his future rulers were to spend some 15 years in practical work between the ages of 35 and 50. They would then learn something about the problems and potentials of life. After that, then while ruling their city-state, they would return to more abstract subjects, like contemplating nature's eternal and unchanging spirit-objects -- the Spirit-Objects he thought governed all of nature. Because our natural world was merely a reflection of that spirit-world, only its objects could teach people what the best knowledge was all about, and thus make their actions most excellent. Sadly, however, we’ve seen how Plato eventually realized such objects could not be known entirely, or even with any degree of certainty. So, on a logical level they remained merely an assumption with no real evidence for them. Conservatives like Socrates and Plato, and moderates like Aristotle, thought like many traditional educators still think today: Mere thinking and reasoning is the most excellent learning art. That idea lives today in many of our public schools when they emphasis book-study for 12 years as the best form of education. Some, like Socrates, preferred a conversational style of reasoning. He would talk with whomever he could and ask them to define the eternal nature of some familiar abstract idea -- friendship, beauty, justice, and courage. Conservatives like him and Plato simply assumed such objects existed; again, mathematical facts seemed to imply such eternal knowledge existed. Others, like Democritus, Plato, and Aristotle preferred a written and lecture style of reasoning; Plato and Aristotle both started their own schools in Athens and no doubt lectured in them. Thus, we can begin seeing how important education was to the Greeks; they too sensed it was the key to building a better world. Where they differed from each other was the definition of ‘better.’ For Plato better meant more controlled, less diverse, more closed, and more feudalistic. For Democritus and Protagoras better meant more freedom, equality, democracy, and variety. A Case for Character Training Like them, Dewey too saw how important education was to the health of any political system, especially democracy. After all, for almost all of civilization people had lived in feudal societies where the rights they had depended on the social power they had, whether it was military, monetary, or religious. But he also noticed how modern tax-supported public schools also aimed at keeping a status quo in place. In fact, throughout much of history students were regimented, taught to obey their teachers, and kept that way with physical punishment. In the late ancient period Augustine too was often wacked by his teachers, and even in the 1960s I too saw how Catholic education was based on physical punishment, almost on a daily basis. The school disciplinarian would daily walk around the lunchroom and bang together the heads of students laughing and enjoying themselves. In fact, it’s not too much to say the present state of our nation as largely disconnected from our political and economic systems is a direct result of our educational practices. Those 2 important systems are all but ignored in our public schools, as is the subject of character excellence. To say the least, the more those character habits are ignored, the easier it becomes for those in power to stay in power and keep increasing it too, as we’ve seen in the last few sections. In truth, CHARACTER development and skills were as important to many ancient liberal sophists as they were to modern liberals like Dewey; character habits like good speaking, honesty, helpfulness, lawfulness, and how to make an honest drachma or 2. Such habits can help keep one's freedom and knowledge growing all through life, and thus help make life more satisfying and rewarding. Without them life remains much like we see on our local news shows, full of violence and disrespect. Even some teachers were recently sentenced to prison terms for changing test score grades. For us liberal Deweyans, however, character excellence is a life-long practice and skill beginning in our public schools. It's the same way with medical or legal skills; no doctor or lawyer knows everything about their art, and so they merely KEEP PRACTICING those habit-arts all through life! It's the same way with character excellence; it's an always growing practice rather than a static skill; it challenges people to practice joyful and respectful actions all through life, in thousands of little different ways here and now. In truth, there are an infinite number of ways to practice kindness, sympathy, and helpfulness. Down through time such useful and practical character skills not only helped people keep learning more easily, but also live safer and more intelligent lives in democratic systems. For example, Protagoras said part of character excellence was the habit of respecting the law, no matter what country you were in, and so knowing what the law is became an important part of liberal excellence on a daily basis. Sadly, that skill too has been all but ignored in many, if not most, of our tax-supported public schools! How many young folks today would act more excellently if their schools focused on teaching our laws, rather than just more and more trivial academic facts about history and literature while remain largely useless for all but future teachers? Can't you just imagine Protagoras looking for a parking sign every time he parked his chariot, if parking signs existed at the time? In short practical-minded Protagoras celebrated useful character knowledge and skills; they helped make life less stressful and more enjoyable. After all, if you’re going to learn some habit-art, why not learn not only some useful habit, but how best to use it wisely and intelligently, rather than ignorantly and illegally? More often than not, such important character habits like knowing what the law says about many different actions helps preserve a person's freedom, rather than remaining a slave to their own unintelligent ideas and habits. No doubt, seeing even slaves as deserving of equal rights was another bit of liberal audacity Plato and Aristotle both could not accept. For them a feudal model of life and nature was firmly implanted! Plato once complained about slaves who were too well dressed; it made them more difficult to see. That was part of the world they lived in. It was a common feeling; many imagined everyone's Fate was all arranged at birth by 3 spirit-goddesses. No doubt, Plato and Aristotle didn't believe that, but moderate Aristotle believed some people should even be forced into slavery, even though if they were smart enough, many slaves were often given more freedom; some even became bank managers! Hundreds of years later Julius Caesar too felt justified in killing many thousands of Celts in France. Why? How else could such barbarians become truly civilized? Sounds like he definitely had more gall than kind and sympathetic feelings while in Gaul! So even in ancient Greece practical character habits became the liberal key to excellence in all things, especially in education. The more we practice such habits, and make them part of our will power, the easier it becomes to practice ethical excellence in our own democratic age. If practiced enough it becomes what many conservative and moderate psychologists call instinct! However, what that means in school is allowing students to first learn about the many different skills being practiced in the real world, and then allowing them to choose which one they would like to learn more about. No doubt, such liberal, practical, democratic actions will make it much easier to also teach the democratic character habits too, like tolerance and respect for all law-abiding people. Without such schools, feudalistic habits of intolerance and hate will continue on, as we can see daily in our media and newspapers. To this day in many places conservatives work to keep such democratic habits weak and hobbled in their growth. What’s more, religious ideas are still often used to defend such conservative actions; they might offend some god somewhere, or bring on some catastrophe. In fact, many religions continue practicing those ideas, and the more they do, the more intolerant people feel. Using Useful Ideas Before Plato was born, liberal Protagoras probably discovered a rather interesting educational question. Some practical person may’ve asked him: If whatever we experience is true for us, then why pay high fees to teachers like you to teach us about excellence? In short, if excellence is relative from city to city, nation to nation, and even from person to person, then why do we need Sophists telling us what they think excellence is? His answer, however, shows how really practical and pragmatic he was. In effect he said even though everyone is the measure of their own truth, not everyone’s truth works equally well in different social situations! Excellence in irrigating crop fields in one country, for example, may not be acceptable in another country, perhaps for religious reasons. For example, lying and thievery may be allowed in some places, but in a more civilized place neither one may work equally well. Thus knowing conditions here and now becomes another part of liberal character excellence. What is happening out there? If you visit and start talking about crop irrigation in one place, you can understand why people might think it less than excellent when they have laws against it. So Protagoras suggested an intelligent person will learn to respect the country’s laws they’re in, so life’s stresses would be reduced. It was just another example of practical reasoning. Why risk the chance of being thrown into jail, or worse, just for not respecting a country’s laws? Why try to fricassee a camel when it’s against the law? In short, for the well-traveled Protagoras, because excellence always varies from place to place, and from person to person, why not learn to respect all law-abiding people? It’s another example of how intelligent respect is one liberal democratic character habit useful in many different places! Is it all just ancient history! Even in the US, the world's oldest democracy, many conservative secular and religious folks today still feel some peaceful habits should be outlawed and forbidden, rather than tolerated; gay and lesbian equal marriage rights are merely one current example of that idea; a few decades ago it was equal rights for Africans, and in the 1800s it was equal rights for Irish immigrants. In fact, one liberal democratic character skill Protagoras taught remains excellent today: respect and obey any country's laws, as long as they're just and apply to everyone! And, even if they are unjust, work intelligently to change them if you work at all. That way you keep your freedom to keep making life better for everyone. How can education get more practical than that, and yet in many of our public schools today such ideas are only mentioned in books, if they’re mentioned at all, and rarely practiced if they’re practiced at all. If you're a real social pioneer you can challenge unfair and unjust laws in court, just to test them and maybe get them overturned, but such skills are rarely allowed to be practiced by students themselves! To us Deweyan liberals it’s another great weakness of our public schools. Most all of the learning remains confined to a merely boo-idea level of consciousness, rather than a deeper body-mind level. Protagoras’ liberal practical educational ideas, like teaching yourself useful kinds of respectful habit-arts, and of course testing them in the real world, no doubt inspired Aristotle, Dewey, and many other educators as well. For nature-loving Aristotle, founding a school became an intelligent way to build his own aristocratic models of philosophic excellence, and in it more than mere facts were to be taught. For him excellent ethical habits were those of a moderate aristocratic Greek gentleman, loaded with all its undemocratic feelings about equal rights and opportunities for anyone not a member of his aristocratic class. For the liberal and democratic Dewey, however, teaching useful and practical CHARACTER habits to all students in our public schools was the best way to keep strengthening our democracy and its liberal values of equality. If not, then such skills can even be eliminated merely within 1 generation! After all, everyone learns the habits they’re taught. If no one were taught intolerant habits they wouldn’t be practiced. Hopefully now the reader will see why Dewey based his liberal model of education on 3 pillars: fact, skills, and character development. Part of that character development depends a great deal on knowing what the law is, and the results of not respecting it. Thus, the following question: Why shouldn't young folks learn more about our laws every year they’re in school, as well as practicing such respect both in school and out? Why shouldn’t they also learn how to judge whether a law is fair and just, and helps make everyone’s life safer and more enjoyable? After all, what good is knowing a million facts if you didn't know how to wisely use them to make everyone’s life more enjoyable? Some German Nazis acted like real bastards because they used their scientific facts and skills destructively, rather than constructively and kindly. Dewey’s 3 Pillars of Educational Excellence. At the University of Chicago Dewey became friends with a woman who was helping immigrants learn more about character excellence and how to live best in their new urban and democratic surroundings. At her Hull House school Jane Addams taught poor undereducated immigrants how to use their government wisely, rather than let it merely use them and their tax money. Eventually she invited Dewey to lecture at Hull House; such lectures not only helped the immigrants, but also helped him explain his ideas of excellence with plain language, and thus help make his writing simpler and less technical. While in Chicago he also began seeing some more serious social problems immigrants were facing, and how they might be solved with some new, more useful, educational habits. With Addams’ help Dewey saw how character habits were more useful than even. Eventually they became one of Dewey's 3 liberal pillars of excellent education: factual knowledge, useful skills, and character habits. To this day, however, conservative educators continue ignoring character habits as a worthwhile educational goal! Again, they’re taken themselves out of the social improvement loop, so to speak. The more such habits are ignored in our schools, the more unintelligent actions keep happening outside of school, and the more taxpayer money must be used to keep shielding the public from such actions! In some places it now costs about $50,000 of tax money to keep just one prisoner from society! Multiply that by 2 million prisoners now jailed in the US, and you can get some idea of how taxpayer money continues being wasted unnecessarily! Just imagine how many more psychologists and student mentors could be hired by our public schools if that 100 billion dollars was spent there! Today, many of our state prisons are terribly overcrowded with young, able-bodied people who have been merely undereducated! They never were taught to enjoy working honestly and joyfully to build skills useful in the real world. They were often made to learn in a largely unnatural situation, namely to sit still and merely keep reading. And economically they were often treated as just another body useful for getting more state money! No doubt, to us Deweyan liberals, ignoring character development on a formal teaching level is one of the greatest weaknesses of US public education. It fosters and encourages many of the serious tragic life-wrecking social events we see every day around us. All criminal actions, and all the publicly paid systems to keep arresting, trying, and jailing millions of people would be greatly reduced if our public schools regularly taught the kinds of liberal character habits I’ve been talking about. To us liberals, trivial knowledge facts merely helps build trivial people. It’s another sad result of what happens when monopoly educational power stays in place, as it has in our public schools. To this day it remains controlled by a few educational bureaucrats who want to change nothing in the system. After all, they’re making good tax money for not much strenuous work. Only when enough people say enough, we want more liberal schools built in our own neighborhoods, will such schools begin to be built. As far as I can see, today the public continues being distracted from learning more about liberal education models with such issues like whether teachers should have tenure, or how many charter schools should be allow in our system? For us liberal Deweyans these are all side issues! The educational debate should be about what children are being taught in school, rather than continue to allowing trivial book knowledge to remain the main educational goal. In fact, these are anything but new educational ideas. Going all the back to ancient Greece, personal tutors taught the current character habits to their aristocratic students. Only such wealthy people could afford to hire such one-on-one tutors, and thus easily pass on to young folks the ideas parents wanted them to have. Even some Roman educators like Marcus Quintilianus (35-100 CE) pointed to their usefulness. But again, only a small class of wealthy aristocrats could afford such private tutors to home-school children. Even though the Roman Republic had recently become ruled by an all-powerful emperor, Marcus was liberal enough to realize the benefit of teaching all students such habits, whether rich or poor. In fact, for us Deweyan liberals, for thousands of years that had been education's main challenge! Dewey saw, the more young folks weren't taught such liberal democratic habit-arts in their schools, homes, and churches, the more intolerant students would become with their conservative ideas and habits. Thus, we got such atrocious and vicious actions in the Middle Ages like burning heretics alive in public, as well as helpless women and children condemned as anti-Christian and evil witches. In medieval Germany alone as many as 10,000 people were killed in one year! For him it was obvious: Democratic excellence creating a more peaceful and enjoyable world for everyone would more easily grow if excellent liberal character habits were taught to students every year they’re in school. The US founders simply weren’t very democratic. They built a central government to best help grow a wealthy upper class of businesspeople, rather than a more democratic social life for everyone, so they gave no educational powers to the central powers. Only with the recent growth of a more active federal government has it gained more power to shape public education. After 1954 it began sending troops to integrate the public schools. Dewey moved to Columbia in 1904. We can imagine, for a few moments, what life was like at the time. Dewey continued seeing many educational challenges as Africans continued being lynched in many southern states, and the racist KKK even marched in large numbers down Pennsylvania Ave. in 1920! Poor and uneducated foreigners were flooding into New York by the millions every year, including all of my grandparents; they just passed through on their way to Ohio. But many thousands stayed in New York and helped create the need for more housing, clothing, food, and schools. The entire social network was overloaded. To many of those foreigners, just having a bed to sleep in and a stove to cook on was a luxury, even if five people slept in a bed and only potatoes and vegetables were cooked. What’s more, the rather conservative public schools weren’t much help; mainly they helped immigrants learn some English and enough political facts to become citizens. However, many never learned the skills or creative habits useful in their new industrial democracy, and thus couldn’t teach them to their children. Neighborhood gangs roamed the streets stealing what they could just to stay alive. A wonderful movie showing what life was like around that time is Somebody Up There Likes Me. The schools didn’t teach children how to become honest cops or carpenters or even teach basic lawyer and doctor skills. Mainly, their goal was to just keep the kids busy with a series of passive book assignments for a few hours. By nature, however, kids and most adults are active experimental learners, as any parent soon learns. Naturally, caring liberals like Dewey asked how can the public schools help make their lives more rewarding, enjoyable, and less stressful? Like many Asian workers today, US immigrants made pennies a day while a few factory owners made fortunes. They simply weren’t interested in teaching their workers more intelligent skills like limiting their families to one or two kinds, what foods help build healthy bodies, and what laws should be respected. Many immigrant families thus turned to organize their criminal actions. Liberals like Dewey, for example, asked why merely keep giving children more book assignments if it didn't help build more useful skills and intelligent character habits. How could mere book assignments ever teach immigrants how to use the new government to make life safer for everyone, keep making life better? Why demand children keep memorizing trivial facts about American presidents, English novelists, and chemical formulas they didn’t want to learn and would probably never use in the real world? If such facts were to be learned, why not at least make them game-oriented and fun , like writing and performing their own presidential scenes, acting out the truths novelists were describing, learning their math, chemistry, and scientific facts while actually helping beautify and improve their own neighborhoods, and helping others learn more intelligent habit-arts? In short, how to stay intelligently connected with their surroundings in positive and constructive ways? Wouldn't such important skills help young folks not only find better kinds of work, and perhaps also start their own business and also use some of the profits to keep helping others? Aren’t those kinds of habits really what true civilization is all about? In short, what was educationally more important: teaching young folks trivial skills like how to work fractions and decimals year after year, or help them learn excellent character skills like honesty, creativity, helpfulness, and of course feeling what democratic tolerance feels like? No doubt, many conservative educators at first simply ignored such liberal ideas like vocational education courses; to them teaching excellent character habits was the parents' job, not theirs. But by 'passing that educational buck' to others they, in effect, helped keep their own neighborhoods degraded, encourage criminal activities for economic reasons, drug-habits of social withdrawal, and make life more stressful for taxpayers who paid for all those services to better control such actions. Again, everyone's taxes are used to keep funding schools, courts, prisons, and other remedial social services. For Dewey is just wasn’t’ very intelligent to keep our public school out of the life-improving loop, so to speak. It only kept hobbling the growth of a more democratic world. The more excellent character habits like health, lawfulness, and helpful business skills are ignored, the easier it is for young folks to fulfill the American fantasy of getting rich quickly with less than excellent actions! To this day, far too many young folks are quickly pressured to join a neighborhood gang, start demanding 'protection' money from neighborhood businesses, start abusing alcohol, drugs, vulnerable young women, and even thievery to solve boredom and money problems. Why not? It's all part of life in the big city, isn't it? Life’s a rat-race and a jungle isn’t it? And even if they do get caught committing such actions many quickly learn how to pay off the police, or go to jail and learn more criminal actions from those already there! Police corruption in the early 1900s was probably rampant in all major US cities. The movie Serpico showed how rampant the problem was in New York in the 1970s! Given the state of public awareness about education, creating more liberal schools, even in New York, was about as easy as walking on water. Many professional-minded parents naturally wanted their sons and daughters to become lawyers and doctors, and so any kind of industrial education was a step backward for them, not forward. In fact, when voters got a chance to start making their schools more liberal, like many other cities had done already, they rejected the idea during the first World War. Thus, except for creating more vocational options in some schools, the obsession with learning more and more academic trivia stayed pretty much the same. As a result, character habits continued being ignored. Poorly educated people continued living in poor neighborhoods and allowing their kids to practice more criminal kinds of habits. It seemed to be tribal warfare between conservatives and liberals with kids caught in between! Remember, both radio and television hadn't yet been invented, and even when they were they were used mainly for advertising and entertainment purposes, thus making people more eager to keep buying the goods corporations were making, like washing machines and expensive cars, jewelry, and don’t forget stocks and bonds. And because respectful character excellence wasn't taught, such cars often gave young men a place to force vulnerable women to give in sexually or get out and walk! When women weren’t taught about respectful and caring sex, or men about running an honest, lawful, and helpful repair shop, clothing factory, restaurant, or appliance store, then life remains the ‘rat-race’ it’s pretty much been for thousands of years, full of superstitions and myths. Even when a Prohibition amendment passed in the early 1900s outlawing the sale of alcohol, criminal gangs themselves became organized like corporations to keep selling it, and again paying off the police to look the other way. Even today, an traditional educational model based on trivia knowledge maintains its monopoly in public education. Most parents even today are still too undereducated about liberal models of education to even think better schools can be built, much less focus on actually building them in their own neighborhoods! They often still believe their schools should continue teaching only reading, writing, and arithmetic. Today, that monopoly is still maintained with the help of state laws, and they keep hobbling the growth of more liberal democratic schools. Even in supposedly more liberal charter schools the same kind of subjects are still forced on the most vulnerable among us, children! Teacher unions often went to state capitols and convinced politicians to pass such laws, making education improvement more difficult and practically impossible. In effect such state laws removed school improvement from local control and gave it to state officials. In fact, to this day conservative Republicans often called themselves educational reforms, and yet the reforms they suggest often change the flow of public tax money from non-profit public schools to for-profit private hands! It’s like the US Constitution merely changed the flow of public money from the British government to local aristocratic pockets. And union pay rates don’t apply to Charter schools, so the profits are even greater! Thus, teachers are left with the choice to teach more academic trivia or find some other work. Even in most Charter schools children are made to learn more and more facts-facts-facts, so the private owners and investors can collect more public tax money from the government! Such events have made liberal educational improvement difficult, if not practically impossible. Still, liberal progress hasn’t been stopped. Thanks to the growth of more liberal families, democratic progress continues growing. They care about empowering their children with more intelligently kinds of character habits! And I might add, that includes respectful sexual character habits too! What young woman today in much of the Western world doesn’t know what respectful sexual behavior is, and how they too should have a part in saying what should happen and when? But on the public school and Charter school levels, it seems the goal is still to teach academic facts, facts, and more facts. The program was firmly established in the late 1950s when the so-called Space Race began. Undemocratic conservatives convinced President Eisenhower himself to speak out against Dewye’s education ideas, and he did! Ike said Dewey’s ideas were the main reason why Russia’s space program was more advanced than the US’s! In reality, however, it seems the Russians merely captured more German rocket scientists after World War 2 than the US did! As a result, today almost everyone still believes forcing children to learn what they have little desire or use for remains the definition of good education, even though many children keep telling their parents they don’t like school? These days I hear some conservative politicians still talk about how their new educational programs will teach children to reason critically, and thus become more intelligent adults. As we’ll see, however, early in the 1900s liberal educators at Columbia like Edward Thorndike proved experimentally children learn to reason just as well in a project-oriented school, and in many cases better, than students in book-oriented schools. In any case, today probably most people still don’t know what better schools can look like, and even if they did they would often be legally kept from creating them without state permission! In short, our own education laws keep hobbling social improvements themselves! In fact, most people today have only experienced a passive book-oriented education model, and so continue naively believing making children sit at desks day after day, year after year, and remain tied to their books is educational excellence. To us Deweyan liberals it certainly is not! What’s more, educational history in the first half of the 1950s tells us Dewey’s ideas are more useful for building a more equal and democratic life for everyone! A more project and professions-oriented educational model is much more naturalistic and effective. It’s holistic, rather than merely verbal. Such a liberal educational model is more like the way children actually learn anything, namely with active kinds of practice! In them learning becomes more enjoyable, constructive, and productive because it’s based firmly on children development itself! However, education debate is practically non-existent. It’s all dictated from the top down, so to speak, just like feudalistic morals were dictated from the pope down, or laws were dictated from the king! Be honest now, when is the last time you heard any kind of meaningful debate about different educational models? Without such debate how can anyone have any real choice about what kinds of schools their tax money should be used for? Why shouldn’t parents and students have the right to start learning about a profession or career while they’re in school, so life can become less stressful once they graduate? Why should young folks enter their adult years knowing almost nothing about how to make a honest buck and help others in the process? In fact today, more than 200 years after the US was founded, most of our states in the world's oldest democracy still have unjust and unfair laws against same-sex marriage. True, they might soon all be negated by Supreme Court rulings, but when schools ignore liberal character habits, the underlying feelings of bigotry remain in place, rather than joy and feelings of wishing people well. Aren’t those the feelings all civilized people should learn? At least we liberals say they are. More than 100 years after the Civil War millions of people were still taught to hate and hobble African equal rights as much as possible! Just like philosophy itself, there are conservative, moderate, and liberal models of education, but when they fail to teach our democratic ideals of character excellence, like sharing rights equally, and how to respect others and our just laws, then how excellent are they for making everyone's life better? Should democratic habit-arts of equality, respect, or lawfulness be ignored by our schools just because people don’t realize how important they are? One Personal Recollection One similarity between liberal and conservative educational models is they both agree the ultimate goal of education is teaching students how to intelligently solve their own problems. Where they often differ is how young folks should learn to solve their own problems. Years ago, after I had taken some philosophy courses and how to ask some meaningful questions, rather than just sit around like a dope, I called into a radio talk show one day and asked 2 education professors what the best goal of public education was. At first they sounded a little surprised at such a basic question, but after a few moments they both agreed the goal was teaching students how to solve their own problems. No doubt, to both liberals like Dewey and traditional educators that goal is important; who wants to have adults stay dependent on others for solving their own problems? No doubt, many disabled people need help from others, but most people can learn to intelligently solve their own problems; after all, most problems aren’t very serious at all. So, the goal is teaching young folks how to intelligently answer life's challenges is a worthwhile one. Such skills help make life more satisfying, and thus keep growing as people. However, the big question is how should we go about teaching those important skills, like how to make a plan of action, and then experimentally test the plan to see its results? Conservative kinds of educators in general say knowing more book-facts is the best way to learn how to solve our own problems. It’s an old and traditional system. In the Middle Ages, for example, people learned to say certain prayers to help solve their problems, like disease, having a safe journey, not offending god, and asking for forgiveness. In short, merely reading examples of character excellence should be enough to teach students how to best solve their problems. For liberals like Dewey, however, what's needed is a much more active and organic kind of experimental testing and learning how such actions actually feel, so those ideas don’t become quickly forgotten, like happens regularly with mere book-facts. How many of the book-facts do typical 25 and 30 year olds remember from their 12 years of public school? So, to make ideas and skills something other than Alexander’s empire, that is narrow and shallow, it’s better to use active kinds of learning projects, rather than merely reading about them. If children want to learn, say, more about Behavioral psychology, then they might actually perform scenes from The Taming of the Shrew, or any other play where such examples exist. To liberals like Dewey that active kind of education model will always produce better results than merely reading about such examples in, say, a psychology book. In fact, only actions can best build any new habit-art. Merely reading without performing some idea leaves learning on merely a narrow and shallow verbal level of awareness, rather than a body-mind level of feeling AND idea, or as we say a body-mind level of awareness. It's the difference between merely talking about ideas and actually practicing them. The common proverb is: Actions speak louder than words! In short, modern Behavioral psychology says young folks need active practice to best learn any new habit; it is a psychology Dewey helped build! Mere reading neglects the entire feeling side of a person's body-mind, and so is much less than excellent learning, as we've seen with Plato's and Aristotle's contemplative reasoning art. It's one thing to merely think spirit-objects or eternal Forms exist, but to actually know they actually exist are 2 very different things. As we’ve seen, Plato’s Parmenides bravely demonstrated with mathematical precision why such objects were not be known and might never be known! I didn't ask it at the time I called in, but I should have: If knowing how to solve our own problems is education's main goal, then why do students made to go through 12 years of public schooling without getting any active training about solving either their own or hateful social problems? Wouldn't knowing how improving a diet habit, for example, be much easier if students knew how to actively experiment with their eating habits? And if not, then isn't our present healthcare crisis one result of neglecting such experimental learning, and relying instead on the government's help to solve healthcare problems our own bad eating habits often create?! After all, some 50% of all health problems are now said to be diet related, and the heavier people become, the more health problems they'll probably have, once again paid for with everyone's socialized tax money. And of course the more money is needed for that, the less money is available for continuing to improve and enjoy life itself. So, this question too seems more than a little reasonable: Are our own conservative book-oriented public schools really helping create many of the government programs conservatives say we shouldn’t have? Almost certainly, such programs will continue being needed as long as our public schools remain obsessed with teaching only more and more book-facts, and remain outside the loop of working to make life better for everyone! Yet another little lame limerick is offered to make the point. At memorizing definitions Jones was a whiz. Reading more as he felt some dental fizz. As teeth came from his head, He sheepishly said, My schools never taught what dental health is. |