The social end of education

“We don’t need no education...” sang Pink Floyd.  Knowing what I know about the band and their beliefs, this quote cannot be taken at face value, i.e. that education, per se, is bad or undesirable.  Perhaps the quote begs the question: what is education?  Rather, I think the more apt question is: what is not education? 

John Dewey’s pragmatic pedagogy realizes that, first and foremost, students cannot escape the “social consciousness of the race.”  For Dewey, it seems like the process of education must conform to this context in order to prove fruitful; this is how the child learns to mold language out of babbling.  I think this circumstance leads Dewey away from what education could be, optimally.  Dewey uses society as the context in which students’ “interests and powers” are interpreted and understood. He is therefore inextricably tying the pragmatic process of education to the necessarily pragmatic end of education, i.e. what the student becomes.  In effect, this turns the student into a piece of a whole, a dependent, or to put it in more vulgar terms, a mere cog; passive, dutiful, obedient.  There seems to be two things wrong with this result.

First, it appears that Dewey’s pragmatism is rooted in the instinctual development needed for species wide growth and self-perpetuation.  Just because the transmission of, say hunting techniques or language development are facilitated in a social context does not necessarily imply that knowledge of mathematics will thus also require a social context.  Put another way, the context in which some aspect of consciousness develop, is not necessarily the same context in which other aspects will; how one learns to speak and feel emotion is vastly different than how one learns to abstract and philosophize.  Thus, I feel Dewey’s pragmatism has led him to the logical fallacy of composition, i.e. that something true of a part of the whole is true for the whole part.

Secondly, an entire society constituted of these types of former students would not be able to sustain itself just due to the fact that a society needs to be dynamic and thus made up of actors and movers; therefore the pragmatic end of Dewey’s students would create an unpragmatic society- an illogical result.  Furthermore, Dewey leaves no growth for personal ingenuity or revolutionary advancements because, for Dewey, the context is society as it is now.  Thus, we return to the Pink Floyd quote.  Maybe we don’t need the education which is geared at precise socialization; that which hinders dreaming and unfettered development and growth, not only because the process is unnecessary, but because its result is undesirable.  To contextualize education into the guise of Dewey’s pragmatism is to redirect thought, and as such, “…we don’t need no thought control.”