Facing Today’s “Economic Situation”: Reconsidering Dewey’s Depression-Era Insights in an Era of Neoliberalism and the Great Recession

• In Event: Equity-Oriented Public Knowledge Formation: Lessons From Dewey Toward Social and Institutional Transformation

Abstract

“Since the present economic collapse is a challenge to every institution in our present civilization, it surely is also a challenge to our schools. … The important thing is to know how the schools might and should meet this challenge. … I believe that if we, in common with others, can honestly and courageously face the situation, our combined wisdom, if it holds the problem steadily in view over a long time, can accomplish what overwhelms the mind of any one individual.”
-- John Dewey, “The Economic Situation: A Challenge to Education,” 1932

This paper draws on John Dewey’s 1930s writing to explore the role of education and participatory social inquiry in a period of economic crisis. The paper unfolds in two parts. In the first part, I illuminate Dewey’s argument in the context of the Depression. In the second part, I highlight the differences between the economic situation in the 1930s and today, and tease out what these differences imply for a reconstructionist project in a period dominated by neoliberalism.

During the Depression, John Dewey moved (in the words of the New York World Telegram) “out of the classroom” and into the “hurly-burly” of politics (Dewey, 1931). He was a leading public intellectual, speaking and writing about education’s role in revitalizing and remaking economic and political life. Many of Dewey’s columns from the reconstructionist journal, The Social Frontier, address issues highly relevant to our own time: high rates of unemployment creating social pain inside and outside of schools; weak tax revenues leading to state budget deficits that threaten the public sector and public education; right-wing ideologues, emboldened by the crisis, developing sophisticated campaigns to undercut the power of teachers and unions. Dewey also offers insight on how to engage a broad, cross-class constituency—progressive educators, factory workers, farmers, artists, and other intellectuals—in an educative politics aimed at revitalizing democratic participation and institutionalizing a more planful and egalitarian social welfare state (Dewey, 1932, 1933, 1934, 1935a, 1935b, 1935c, 1936, 1937).

While the issues Dewey confronted in the 1930s resemble many problems that have arisen in our current economic crisis, there are important differences between Dewey’s economic situation and our own. The scope of the crisis in the 1930s—dramatic declines in economic production, massive unemployment, widespread hunger and homelessness—opened political space for a serious reconsideration of “free market” ideology that led to a revitalized labor movement and expanded state action. Today, the mainstream political conversation has shifted dramatically in the wake of more than three decades of neoliberal policies that lift up competition, choice, deregulation as drivers of “reform” (Harvey, 2005). Public confidence in the public sector has eroded, the strength of the labor movement has withered, and grassroots organizations have become increasingly reliant for support on philanthropic organizations with neoliberal agendas.

Referencing Dewey’s 1930s writing and drawing on recent examples from the work of UCLA’s Institute for Democracy, Education, and Access, I consider what a reconstructionist agenda looks like in this new economic situation.

Author

• John S. Rogers, University of California - Los Angeles