nections with past and future but, equally important, means something now. In Experience and Education, Dewey affirmed the notion he had set out much earlier: "... amid all uncertainties there is one permanent frame of reference: namely, the organic connection between education and personal experience ..." (1963/ 1938, p. 25). Any interest that contributes to the growth of individuals and their society may legitimately be encouraged by education, and we should not elevate particular forms of study over others.

Thus Dewey would be doubly pained

It is impossible to read the later works of John Dewey without appreciating

his overriding concern for the survival of democracy. But his perceptive analysis of the crisis facing our twentieth-century civilization, and the direction in which he saw our only hope, have been little understood—much less acted upon. It might be helpful to begin once more, where he did, with a recognition of the interdependence of democracy, science, and education.

Democracy, for Dewey, was never simply equated with the universal vote and secret ballot, nor with an elected and effective legislature and an opposition ready and able to govern, nor even with the rule of law. All these he considered the necessary institutional features of democracy, but, in his view, they were not, in themselves, sufficient. He was convinced that the prerequisite for any successfully functioning democracy is a voter with the reflective habits of the disciplined scientific inquirer, and he believed that the goal of education must

Pat Duffy Hutcheon is a sociologist and former education professor and the author of A Sociology of Canadian Education.

by the conditions described in Savage Inequalities (Kozol, 1991). We should not argue that "children cannot learn" in conditions that are unsafe, unhygienic, ugly, and coercive. We should argue, rather, that no child should live in such conditions. The remedy is not to force all children into college preparatory courses for their own good but to provide all children with the social conditions we would choose for our own. In such an environment, with steady adult support, listening, and advice, children may safely be entrusted to make well-informed choices that will guide their own edu-

be to develop just such habits of thought. He was referring not merely to the need to be well informed about the techniques and findings of the physical sciences, but to something much broader.

Dewey saw science as a universal approach to solving problems—all human problems: a method proven to be a powerful tool for controlling the

"Dewey was convinced that sci-ence and democracy spring from the same soil. Both require free-dom of inquiry and communica-tion, the welcoming of diverse ideas, respect for logic and evi-dence, and awareness of the tenta-tive nature of all knowledge."

future, ever since the first cave man built the first fire. This led to his conclusion that the cultural requirements of science and those of democracy are so similar that one cannot survive without the other. Neither will long endure, he said, without people educated to doubt, inquire, observe, and evaluate evi-dence—to visualize future probabilities based on accurate readings of the past and present, and to test these by precisely defined and controlled experimentation.

cational and social futures. Is this what the best and wisest parents want for their children? It is certainly what I wanted for mine, and I think it is what Dewey wanted for all our children.

References

Dewey, John. 1956/ 1900. The School and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1963/ 1938. Experience and Education.

New York: Collier Books. . 1966/1916. Democracy and Education.

New York: Free Press. Kozol, Jonathan. 1991. Savage Inequalities. New

York: Crown. •

Dewey explained that this process would have to be applied to social matters no less than to the physical.

What brought John Dewey to the field of education was the question of how to encourage the development of habits of scientific inquiry. He was aware that much of what occurs in school has the opposite effect. Then as now children were being taught to value and demand the type of answers that bring closure to the process of inquiry rather than those that empower the questioner and whet the appetite for deeper understand-ing. He suspected that people socialized throughout childhood into a desire for certainty would never function respon-

Dewey on Humanism

What Humanism means to me is an expansion, not a contraction, of human life, an expansion in which nature and the science of nature are made the willing ser-vants of human good.

—John Dewey, "What Humanism Means to Me"

Dewey's Commitment to Science and Democracy

Pat Duffy Hutcheon

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sibly in a democratic society, no matter how much freedom was available to them. In fact, he thought that freedom might even be counterproductive for such people, for, without intelligent and informed assessment of the probable fruits of action, widespread moral confusion and social chaos would be almost sure to result. Freedom was no more an absolute with Dewey than was any other principle, for, earlier than most, he foresaw the dangers inherent in a removal of external discipline from individuals who lack the inner con-straints of a reflective morality grounded in objective knowledge and values.

Dewey was convinced that science and democracy spring from the same soil. Both require freedom of inquiry and communication, the welcoming of diverse ideas, respect for logic and evidence, and awareness of the tentative nature of all knowledge. Both are instruments for the empowerment of ordinary people. Both enable individuals to participate in the control of a collective future: science through its self-corrective mechanism of rigorous public testing, and democracy by its require-ment of shared decision-making.

The glory of democracy, he said, is its ability to admit to the existence of

problems, coupled with an institution-alized means for dealing with them. And the glory of science is the power of the method it can offer for this democratic task. Dewey concluded that the scientific way of knowing is the only reliable instrument ever invented for solving the problems posed by experience—and the most democratic. Our continuing failure to understand and act on this insight is a tragedy of monumental proportions. There is no better way to honor the memory of this great man than to recognize the problem as he so pre-sciently defined it, and to begin the long and arduous approach to a solution. •

Dewey's Contribution to the Theory of Valuation

Bohdan Dziemidok

John Dewey's theory of valuation is cognitivist and anti-subjectivist.

Dewey held that valuations possess objective validity and cognitive contents and hence may be evaluated from the point of view of truth and falsity. The conviction as to the cognitive nature of valuation was shared by all pragmatists, and, therefore, Dewey's follower Charles Morris was right in his claim that cognitivism was the most relevant feature of pragmatist axiology.' Dewey's axiological cognitivism was radical, for it actually identified valuation and cognition, at the same time opposing emotivism and other forms of subjec-tivism that reduced valuation to the expression of the valuating subject's attitude or emotional experiences.2 He also criticized the conceptions that opposed value judgments and judgments of facts and questioned the tendency to eliminate evaluations from science in

Bohdan Dziemidok is a professor at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology at the University of Gdansk, Poland, and author of the book Contemporary American Philosophy of Art (1992).

general (neopositivism) or only from natural sciences (neo-Kantians). In one of his later works Dewey wrote: "There is nothing whatever that methodologi-cally (qua judgment) marks `value-judgments' from conclusions reached in astronomical, chemical, or biological inquiries."3

Dewey's conviction as to the unity and even identity of cognition and valuation resulted not only from his conceptions of values but also from the instru-mentalist interpretation of knowledge and cognition. Instrumentalism claimed that all knowledge serves and should serve the end of solving the life problems of individuals and the needs of the social life. Cognition and valuation make instruments of action and supply the acting agents with practical instruction. Second, Dewey's conception of valua-tion is clearly anti-irrational and intel-lectual. Consistently following the path of anti-subjectivism and anti-psychologism, Dewey rejected not only the view that values may be known exclusively (or also) by means of intuition but also negated the existence of direct emotional forms of valuation. Dewey had always distinguished

the "practical, non-intellectual attitude" of "prizing" or "esteeming" from the cognitive attitude of "appraising or esteemating" which implies a judgment. He criticized other forms of naturalist and empiricist conceptions of valuation (D. W. Prall and R. B. Perry) for constantly identifying the experience of value and the valuation in the strict sense which finds its expression in value-judgments. "I expressly drew a distinc-tion between the non-cognitive act of prizing, finding good or dear, and the cognitive act of valuation."4 In Dewey's opinion valuation is exclusively intellec-tual, in its character being an accomp-lishment of reason, a result of reflection and of rational analysis of a particular situation.

Such a position seems to me radical and controversial. Dewey was right when he stressed the necessity to draw a distinction between the emotional expe-rience of values and the intellectual valuation that finds expression in value-judgments, but went too far when he negated the existence of the emotional forms of valuation and refused to accept the cognitive functions of emotional experiences. His position here had to do with the rejection of the category of intrinsic value and with his deeply rooted conviction as to the intersubjective and cognitive nature of valuations, and the possibility of their empirical verification. The emotional experience of value could not satisfy these conditions because of its personal and subjective character.

Third, Dewey's conception of valua-

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