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The Forward View: A Free Teacher in a Free Society, by

John Dewey and Goodwin Watson»»
This book ends as it began, with the teacher and the
American dream. The American dream has been not of a golden
age in the past, but of a better life possible of attainment in the
not too distant future. In the first days of this nation, the fathers
envisioned the establishment of democracy, liberty, equality, and
ever better conditions of life for the people. Expectations of a°
future which should surpass anything the past could show brought
the ambitious, the avaricious, the conscientious, and the°
adventurous to our shores. The public school was brought into our°
national life in order to further the hope for increased opportunity,
increased equality, and more enlightened citizens. Trains of°
covered wagons moved across western prairies toward the fulfilment
of dreams for a fresh start on new lands. The rise of industry
nourished other hopes: hope of great wealth—for the few—and
hope of a rising standard of living for every one. Hope might
clash with hope, but the school was a part of all. Through the
school technology advanced. For the individual the school was
the ladder of hope upon which children might rise from the°
overalls job to the white collar position, and perhaps eventually to
independent wealth.

American dreams still look toward the future, but in terms of

substantial progress already made. Opportunity for every one to
secure a good education has not yet been achieved, but°
increasing numbers of children are able to attend school for increasing
periods of time. Not all citizens are permitted to participate in
the affairs of government which concern them, but the franchise
has been greatly extended since the early days of the republic.

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The problems of social integration require high levels of ability,
but democracy has shown itself capable of securing many good
leaders and a few great ones. The right of all to work has not yet

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been achieved, but society shows an increasing disposition to°

assume the responsibility of providing this basic opportunity. The
plenty which our present resources make possible has never yet
been produced, but the advance of industry brings to the masses
as well as to the few more goods and more services at lower
prices. Communities have not yet undertaken to plan°
cooperatively for the greatest possible enhancement of living of all their
citizens, but communities do commonly provide hard-surface
roads, drinking water, sewage disposal, some health services,
libraries, parks, playgrounds, festivals, gymnasiums, assembly
halls, buses, and fairly well-equipped schools.

The Imminent Struggle

While national resources, technical progress and social

ideals all encourage high hope for the future, there are other°
factors which make it far from certain that the rate of advance will
continue. Some of these economic and political obstacles have
been described in previous chapters. Today contradictory trends
promise, on the one hand, tremendous advance toward the°
realization of the American dream, and threaten, on the other hand,
the long-time suppression of that dream. We stand almost on the
threshold of plenty, but we experiment with the enforcement of
artificial scarcity. We are educating more citizens than ever°
before for participation in democratic processes of control, but
there are influential forces ready to abandon even political°
democracy in order to prevent the extension of democracy into°
industry and finance. Americans, when they look at some of the
totalitarian states, prize highly the greater freedom of this°
country, but in spite of this violations of civil liberties and assaults
upon educational freedom seem to be increasing. In earlier°
chapters we have seen how classroom methods, teacher attitudes,
community activities, school administration, and teacher°
organizations can play a part in the struggle to advance the democratic
ideal in defiance of any threat of fascism. But there can be no°

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certainty of victory. We remember that fifteen years ago there was

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only one fascist government, while today there are ten or more.»1
Moreover fascist movements have increased in vigor in France,
Belgium, Poland, Roumania, Jugo-Slavia, Esthonia, Latvia,°
Lithuania, and even in England during the last decade. Is it in the
stars that we alone shall escape? The teacher must be deeply and
passionately concerned with this great historic choice.

The years immediately ahead will be characterized by struggle.

It will require struggle to find the essential facts about the°
present waste of human, natural, and mechanical resources. It will
require struggle to teach the facts about unrealized human°
potentialities and possible abundance for living. It will require
struggle to secure the necessary freedom to think about the°
meaning of these facts. The most bitter struggles will come when°
teachers begin to act in the light of these essential facts and meanings.
History indicates that usually in the past when rulers felt their
power and privilege slipping away, they attempted by violence to
stop the process (whether it had been slow or swift) and to°
reestablish their rulership. If there be any teachers who chose their
profession because they imagined that in it they might stand°
securely aside from the turmoil of battle for power, they will°
probably find the next decade or several decades very dismaying. If
education advances along the lines laid out in this volume, the
power of undemocratic rule in industry, as in government, will
wane. A free education is incompatible with fascism. Education
is likely to be one of the great battlegrounds upon which is waged
an intense and desperate struggle for power.

It may give both guidance and courage to teachers who must

participate in the imminent struggle, if we turn in imagination to
the period after the smoke of battle has lifted. Let us suppose
that the forces of education, cooperative labor, and the common
people have been successful not only in preserving but also in°
extending democracy. What kind of society can we anticipate and
what kind of teacher will be needed?

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All Life Educative

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The ideal of democracy demands the fullest possible°

development of personality in all—irrespective of birth, wealth,
creed, or race—through cooperative association with others,
and mutual understanding and consent. The ideal further°
demands that all the institutions, customs, and arrangements of°
social life shall contribute to these ends, that is, that they shall be
educative.

While this is an ideal, it is not something injected from°

without; every genuine ideal rests upon appreciation of the meaning
of what is actual. But the ideal selects and upholds that actual
meaning as a guide to further action; it frees it from the°
impurities that attend what is already actual; it conceives meaning
freed from conflicts and discrepancies in a unified way.

In all existing human relations there is already present°

inevitable educative power, though frequently distorted and°
oppressed. Government, laws, legislation, and administration°
educate. Even present political campaigns, with all their evasions
and insincerities, in registering public opinion serve also to°
create it. The social order in which laws are expressed and which
administration maintains and develops is, as Plato pointed out
long ago, an immense educative—and mis-educative—force.
The family is most definitely an educative institution, for parents
as well as for children. The means of public communication—
press, radio, and theater—are powerful instruments of°
instruction and influence. In the industries an individual has at least to
learn his trade, and in the materials and processes there are°
immense educative possibilities with respect to both science and°
social ends. The practice of any vocation sets up a corresponding
understanding of the way in which social ends are served,°
although this aspect of work is at present mainly incidental and
casual because subordinated to other and more external ends.
Occupations are perhaps the chief instruments which form°
intellectual as well as practical habits. The professions—ministry,
law, and medicine—not merely require education in those who
practise them but help to form the attitudes and understanding

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of those who consult their practitioners. Scientific inquirers are

engaged continuously in educating one another, as are the°
engineers who use their methods and results; and as far as science is

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humanized, it educates also the laymen. Artists, painters,°
musicians, architects, and writers are an immense educative force,
though they are at the present time far from having an organic
place in the existing social order.

The idea of the educative function in a genuine democracy is

not then a fantasy imported from without. But under present
conditions the expression of this educative function is hampered
and distorted. In the free society we envisage, it will be released
and made dominant. For only as all institutions and relations
contribute to development of personality in a cooperative society
is democracy effective.

There is perhaps no deeper defect in present society than the

fact that for most persons their life work is not secure, not very
enjoyable, and not desirably educative. In the democracy of the
future goods will be made not primarily as a means to private
profit, but because of their service to enriched living. Not only
the value of the product for those who use it, but the process of
production itself will be appraised in terms of its contribution to
human welfare.

We are assured by engineers and economists that work need no

longer be so strenuous as to preclude time for understanding and
appreciating what is being done. Automatic machinery can do
the monotonous and back-straining work. There will be time
enough, in connection with every kind of work, to demonstrate it
to children who are interested and to induct into it youths who
need to develop proficiency under careful supervision. Some have
pictured the society of the future in terms of three or four hours
of work, with the remainder of the day available for leisure. We of
this book think of change in the quality of the work experience
rather than of simple reduction in the number of hours worked.
If work were made a more effective part of the democratic social
life, were made to enrich the personality of the worker and to

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serve mutually satisfying processes of social relationship, the°

demand for shorter hours would be far less insistent.

In the free society of the future, some of the existing°

professional barriers may be expected to break down. Factories and
offices will take over some of the functions of the school. When
the educative function of all callings, occupations, and human°
relations is realized, the teacher will not have, or be thought to
have, a monopoly of education. When magazines, newspapers,

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radio programs, plays, and movies are produced not primarily to
make money for investors and officers, but frankly, directly, and
unreservedly to serve human welfare, these too will become vastly
more desirable agencies of education. When all forms of°
recreation and health service have been freed from commercialism
and operate only in such ways as to invigorate human living, then
most of the "health education" and "education for the worthy
use of leisure" will pass over from the school curriculum to the
normal activities of community life. If public questions were°
frequently being discussed by a local community forum, with°
widespread democratic participation by adults and youth, then a good
share of citizenship education could be brought about by°
participation in these councils.

The Specialized Work of the Teacher

If all institutions and social relations contribute°

consciously to the development of personality, will the specialized
vocation of the teacher be needed less and less, and eventually
not at all? Teaching as a special calling will, we believe, continue
to function. A division of labor characterizes all organized life.
The present distribution of functions is patterned too much after
the factory model. The coordination relating the various°
divisions of work is now itself largely a special and external division,
carried on from above and not through the conscious ideas and
emotions of those engaged in special occupations; and the°
isolation means that the division results in mechanical, uninterested
activity.

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The teacher, along with the parent, is in closest relation to°

individuals with respect to direction of their growth. His division
of labor should be that of mediator and interpreter of what other
vocations may contribute to the development of personality. He
does not monopolize the educative function, nor is it his°
privilege to hand out knowledge or to lay down the law. What science
reveals concerning the nature of the world and of the individual
must be related to the needs and interests of the growing child.
But the scientist himself is not always well fitted to make this°
adaptation. Political action, law and administration, art, and°
industry require likewise to be mediated to the growing experience

! 541 !
of the learner. Sometimes events in the ordinary course of living
are adequate to initiate and to guide appropriate growth in the
personality of the child. Often, however, the special expertness of
the teacher is needed to improve the educative influence of the
social event or institution.

Classrooms may also continue to serve a free society as places

where experience can be profitably organized and analyzed. Both
children and adults need at times to come apart from the busy
round of participation to think over their activity. At times the
classroom may serve as a laboratory in which life is tried out
along lines that cannot yet be made actual in the large and°
complicated world of affairs. In such cases the classroom is a kind of
test-tube for social living.

In no case is the teacher or the classroom to serve as a°

substitute for educative activity by other persons and institutions. It
will not do to let the teacher alone be responsible for seeing°
relationships between various functions of the social order. Those
who participate primarily in the social functions should°
themselves assume responsibility for coordination and integration on
many fronts. It will not do to let the classroom be the only or
even the major place of reflection upon the criticism of the on-
going activities of society. Research and experiment are properly
functions not only of schools but of all who are concerned with
the production of any useful goods or services.

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Apparently there will be, in the coming more democratic and

more fully socialized society, two kinds of teaching. One will be
an important aspect of the many diverse functions of the°
community. Good teaching of this kind will be done in doctors'°
offices, in museums, newspaper plants, farms, forests, steamboats,
buses, art studios, factories, stores, government offices, civic°
concerts, theaters, public discussions, and in the thousand other
enterprises of living. The community itself, no longer simply a
centre of competitive struggle for financial gain, can become°
cooperative and educative. All of the agencies which investigate,°
invent, produce, distribute, inform, cure, build, entertain, or govern
will have the additional function of helping every one directly°
involved and all of the youth of the community to understand how
their work is done and why it is done as it is. In our present°
economy there is no time for such incidental concerns. Yet it may well
prove that, far from being an interference and a diversion of°

! 542 !
energy, the teaching function will greatly improve the way in which
the other specialized work is done. Attention to the meaning of
labor and scrutiny of the techniques employed would seem to be
a promising approach to continuous improvement of that°
occupation and its social service. The questions and criticisms of
alert young people under the leadership of resourceful teachers
will be no negligible contribution to the year-after-year°
improvement of every institution.

But however educative the many social agencies may become,

the second kind of teaching will also be needed. Some one will
have to be particularly concerned with the integration of these
varied educative experiences in the developing personality. The
professional teacher, like the parent, will keep the individual
child at the centre of his attention in order to know whether the
various institutions are as educative as the child needs them to
be. The teacher will be a student of child development, a friendly
guide to individual children, an organizer of harmonious group
activities, and a "generalist" in thinking about the effects of the
social order upon personal growth. It is possible that he may be

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able to do good teaching with less pretentious school plants than

we provide today, but he will require a degree of expertness in
understanding people which is rarely achieved by teachers today.

Education of Persons at All Ages

There is no good reason for restricting the service of a

teacher, who is concerned with adaptation, interpretation,°
guidance, and integration, to any limited period of years, as for°
example, pupils aged six to sixteen. The research of the last ten
years upon the learning of children during the first five years of
life indicates that there are enormous advantages in the proper
guidance of experience during this early period. Some°
adjustments, if not made during these preschool years, can be made
later only with great difficulty, if at all. Only the scarcity which
our present economic system imposes upon all forms of service
to consumers prevents the extension of nursery-school°
opportunities to the millions of children not now given such°
advantages. Once the barriers to abundance have been broken down, it
will follow that a very large number of teachers will be needed to

! 543 !
serve the fourteen million children under six years of age. These
teachers may be home visitors. They may conduct excursions or
play groups or studios or clinics. We are not to think of them as
necessarily operating a classroom of the conventional°
kindergarten or nursery-school pattern from nine in the morning until
three in the afternoon. They will undoubtedly devise new and
better ways of assisting in the introduction of young children to
the experiences which the contemporary society will provide.

The development of mental hygiene has made it clear that a

little counsel at the right time is immensely valuable to children
and young people in learning to adjust to advantages and°
handicaps, hopes and fears, failures and successes. But there is no°
indication that the need for this counseling service stops with°
adolescence. The adjustment problems of adults are just as likely to
be bungled because of lack of appropriate information, insight,
and experience. The mistakes of adult life may be just as costly to

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the individual and to society as are those of childhood. The°

complicated functions of organized society and the changing pattern
within each activity result in a need for continuous learning. No
one can ever reach the point where he has learned all that it will
be valuable to him and to society for him to know. Just as truly as
the boy or girl during the 'teen years needs guidance in choosing
an occupation, the adult needs guidance in keeping up with his
vocation and, in many cases, in changing his occupation. The
counselor of adolescents recognizes the educational possibilities
and guidance responsibilities of the maturing sex impulse, but
the complications which arise during the middle and later years
of married life may cause just as much strain and unhappiness
unless they also are met with intelligence. Wise adjustment to
waxing powers and increasing opportunities during the years°
before maturity requires expert educational guidance, but so also
does wise adjustment to waning powers and to changing°
opportunities after the individual has passed fifty years of age. Many
persons can testify that no conflict of childhood or adolescence
ever shook their lives to the foundations and disintegrated the
whole organization of living, as did, during adult years, the death
of a loved one. Then guidance was needed, if ever upon this
earth. There is for every life the further problem of adjusting to
the ever-approaching shadow of the inevitable end, and there are
few who are well enough educated for the final great°

! 544 !
achievement of noble death. The education of adults, however, will not
centre exclusively about these great climax-points in living, but
will be just as much concerned with the better use of the ordinary
and everyday opportunities.

The High Standard of Good Teaching

Teachers who are to be mediators of experience in°

relation to the personality growth of children or adults, must°
themselves be exceptionally well educated. It will not suffice to°
understand one age level, for every period of life must be understood
in terms of what the individual has experienced previously, and
every decision must be made in the light of its consequences at

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later times of life. It will not suffice to understand one subject, for
the teacher of the future, as outlined in this chapter, is to°
introduce perspective into the whole broad scheme of experience. The
teachers of a free society will be continuous curriculum-builders,
using the stuff and forms of community life and relating all of
this to the developing needs of a group of learners who are°
thoroughly understood.

It is hard not to be dismayed by this almost superhuman°

assignment. How pitifully inadequate seems the ordinary°
preparation of the ordinary public-school teacher today! Only rarely has
he been equipped to realize the meaning of everyday experiences
in the lives of individual pupils. With this limited knowledge of
his human material, almost anything that he teaches is a shot in
the dark which may do good or harm or, as a rule, nothing very
much to the learner. In the organization of group activities the
teacher again works usually by a kind of rule-of-thumb. There
are teachers who integrate the activities of a busy classroom or
extramural project with the skill of a great orchestral conductor,
and the resulting harmony is a wonderful experience, but these
teachers are rare, and we know very little about how they can be
trained. Seldom is a teacher today familiar with more than a few
of the arts, sciences, philosophies, occupations, recreations, and
social institutions out of which a curriculum might be built. The
leap is tremendous from present limitations to a teacher who
is equipped to be an understanding guide for youth or adults
through the varied complex of life potentialities. Yet it is no more

! 545 !
staggering than would have seemed the demand in the days of
Horace Mann that a typical teacher should know as much about
books, machines, works of art, health, sport, and world affairs as
is familiar to a typical high-school graduate today. Fortunately a
better society will not only demand but will provide better°
teachers. As life itself becomes more educative, the additional years of
special preparation given to teachers can assume better and°
better foundation. Pupils taught by better social institutions and by
better teachers can become teachers who will enable society and
education to surpass the levels upon which they themselves were

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nourished. The teachers for a new society are not envisioned as

springing full blown out of the current scene, but as products of a
year-by-year advance toward a more adequate, first-hand,°
balanced, and integrated understanding of life. The very struggles in
which this generation is engaged, the struggles for the°
preservation and extension of democracy, are doing much to make it
impossible for teachers to enter the profession with the ivory-
towerism of the old academic culture.

The Release of the Teacher

The teacher in the free society of the future can surpass

the typical teacher today in part because the teacher of tomorrow
will not be beset by so many hindrances to proper professional
performance. Teachers today are worried by financial burdens,
anxious lest they lose their positions because of disagreement
with some overseer, fettered to curricula often remote from the
immediate concerns of child and community, and forced to°
participate in administrative routines of attendance-taking, marking,
classification, testing, reporting, etc., which may be not merely
irrelevant but actually injurious to the best educative°
relationships. It would be Utopian to suppose that all of these°
annoyances will vanish at some date in the near future, but possibilities
of great improvement are bound up with the reconstruction of
our economy and social organization. When our economy is°
organized to consume the output of our present productive plant, it
seems likely that none in the society will have to worry again
about having enough to eat, enough to wear, and a more than
passable place in which to live. The necessities and a fair°

! 546 !
proportion of the comforts and luxuries of life can be provided for every
one who does his share of the work of the world. When industry
ceases to be run as a kind of autocracy or petty tyranny in which
every one is supposed to act in a subservient fashion toward his
superiors, when the principle of cooperation in a democratic and
man-to-man relationship characterizes mines and factories and
stores and offices, we may reasonably expect a modification of
the administrator-teacher relationship which has been built, as

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suggested in Chapter 6, too much along the lines of analogy with

private business. As communities become more conscious of the
contribution which every activity and institution can make to
the development of desirable personality in its workers, citizens
will become increasingly intolerant of practices which irk,°
confine, humiliate, and breed hypocrisy in teachers.

We may look forward, therefore, to a society in which teachers

are fairly secure and truly free. We can hope that they will be°
encouraged to attack professional problems in a creative spirit. We
foresee the kind of administration which exalts the free and°
intelligent personality and does not depend upon rules, regulations,
formal procedures, and prescriptions. Under these conditions
teaching can become the high art that it rarely is today. Teachers
individually and in their organizations can develop standards for
professional work and can work in accord with those standards
without being hampered by external worries, limited economic
resources, impossible working conditions, military-minded°
executives, and popular misunderstanding of the function and work
of the schools.

Continuous Growth

This volume is not based upon the assumption that in

any future ideal state all problems will have been solved, nor
upon the hope that a new society will suddenly appear when the
old one has grown too bad. The free society is being made—or
defeated—by present practices. We have described a possible
education of tomorrow, not with the desire to have teachers
yearn for that bright day but rather with the hope that this°
picture may serve as a criterion in the evaluation of present°
activities. What we do today in revising a curriculum, studying°

! 547 !
psychology, preparing a lesson, educating a teacher, addressing a
group of parents, or passing a resolution in our organization of
teachers will take us a little nearer to, or remove us farther from,
the practices which have here been envisioned for a free teacher
in a free society. What teachers do as citizens in supporting or

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failing to support the movements which endeavor to protect or

to extend democracy may also contribute, even more than usual
classroom practices, to the realization of a better society and a
consequently better education. Teachers may, however, play a
more understanding and more enthusiastic part in the°
contemporary social struggle if they appreciate the kind of education
which may result from the victory of democracy.

When a society enters upon socio-economic planning by°

democratic and cooperative methods, that society will not have solved
its problems but will, in a larger measure than today, have°
provided its teachers and other citizens with the necessary social
machinery for creative action. The processes of change will°
therefore be more amenable to intelligence and more likely to°
eventuate in significant improvement. Our democratic ideals require
that the people of that society shall, so far as possible,°
understand and will the developments which take place. The work of
the teacher remains thus, forever, a frontier task. Always the
teacher must deal with life at its point of becoming. What has
been and what is are the raw materials out of which students and
teachers must create what is to be. Teaching will continue to be
an adventure on the social frontier, where each new generation
presses its advance toward an ever-growing American dream.

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