Content area
Full Text
One of the most difficult areas of Dewey's thought to understand is that which deals with individual responsibility and development. As one of the leaders of the Progressive Movement in education, he was heavily identified, sometimes incorrectly, with the doctrines of individualism at the root of this movement. As Lawrence Cremin pointed out in The Transformation of the School, he was also attacked by critics who saw his stress on social morality as a threat to the concept of individualism as it was then understood (Cremin 1964, 126). This paper will attempt to understand why Dewey's view of individualism could be viewed in both a positive and negative manner. In order to do this, it is important to consider why his view of individualism was "new" in the first part of the 20th century in the United States and how it impacted educational thought.
In Democracy and Education, Dewey wrote that "In both the Greek and medieval periods, the rule was to regard the individual as a channel through which a universal and divine intelligence operated. The individual was in no true sense the knower; the knower was the 'Reason' which operated through him" (Dewey 1916, 292). He went on to explain the religious individualism of the medieval period "where the deepest concern of life was the salvation of the individual soul" (Ibid.). Dewey believed, however, that this view of individualism began to change "with the rise of economic and political individualism after the sixteenth century, and, with the development of Protestantism, the times were ripe for an emphasis upon the rights and duties of the individual in achieving knowledge for himself" (Ibid.).
While he fully supported these developments in the understanding of the individual's role in the world, he felt that this "intellectual individualism, the attitude of critical revision of former beliefs which is indispensable to progress, was explicitly formulated as a moral and social individualism," and that "when knowledge is regarded as originating and developing within an individual, the ties which bind the mental life of one to that of his fellows are ignored and denied" (Ibid., 297). Thus, he was committed to a new definition of individualism that recognized that it was "through social intercourse, through sharing in the activities embodying...