Education: Time for a Truce

For 20 years one of the main battles of U.S. educators has been waged by the followers of John Dewey ("Learning by Doing") on one side, and the followers of Robert Hutchins ("The Great Books") on the other. Last week, in a crisp editorial, the editors of the Freeman sensibly suggested that it was about time for the two factions to get together:

"Why, indeed, should Dewey and Hutchins be opposed to each other? Isn't 'learning by doing' part of any good educational process? Isn't it the mark of the well-educated man, even of the well-educated 'doer,' that he have more than a nodding acquaintance with at least some of the 'great books'? Learning, it has always seemed to us, is a double process; it proceeds by a mixed recourse to both theory and practice . . .

"The Deweyite who concentrates solely on learning as a 'process' fails to comprehend that 'process' has no meaning apart from the question of direction ... To be of value, the repetition of any set of experiences must yield a body of pertinent generalizations . . .

"The 'great books' are, of course, the repositories of many funded generalizations. But, in justice to the Deweyite, certain 'great books' contain their own share of palpable nonsense . . . The ideas in the 'great books' most assuredly must be put to the test of historical experience, or of the market place . . .

"The end of education should be the discovery of truth—i.e., the discovery of the laws that govern action, including human action. If we are not subject to natural law, then there can be no guide-posts and no real reason to pursue knowledge. It does not require an education to live in a universe where all things go by chance or whim . ..

"What we would like to see is an end to the warfare over educational methods. All the methods are useful. The textbook should be supplemented with the field trip; the ukase from the platform should be tested by the experiment in the laboratory . . . But of what import are the various methods of learning if learning itself has no substance, no corpus of laws, no end? The business of American educators is to seek to establish the nature of man and the universe, and to make a valiant try at formulating the laws that govern each . . . Certainty may elude us, but if we do not try eternally for certainty, there is no point to education, and no need to spend money in sending our boys and girls to school."