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Democracy, Education, and Value Creation

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Larry A. Hickman

I’D like to begin by thanking my hosts at the Institute of Oriental Philosophy for the opportunity to speak to you today. It is with great
pleasure that I recall my visit to Japan just last year. Highlights of thattrip included visits to the Soka High School, Soka University, and theInstitute of Oriental Philosophy.
I am especially grateful to SGI President Ikeda, who invited me tomeet with him during that trip. During our conversation, he generously
agreed to serve as honorary chair of several events during April, May,and June of 2002 that were organized to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the passing of John Dewey, on June 1, 1952.
Those events were held at the Boston Research Center for the 21stCentury, the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and the SGI Community Center in New York City.
My visit to Tokyo on this occasion coincides with events organized tocelebrate 30 years of dialogue between the leadership of SGI International and the leadership of China. During the next two weeks I will bevisiting China, where I will present lectures at universities in Shanghai
and Beijing on the life and work of John Dewey.
Many people in China know that Dewey spent two years, from 1919
to 1921, lecturing on democracy and education in their country. Now, as
the people of China move toward more democratic forms of association,
it is especially important to recall Dewey’s visit there, and to discuss theways in which his ideas about democracy can be relevant to that developing situation.
Especially at this time-a time during which religious and other cultural divisions are tearing apart the fabric of social life in many parts of theworld—especially now it is important that we re-affirm the importanceof humanistic education and the role that it can play in healing such conflict and creating a better future.
Connection between Dewey and Makiguchi
It is in this connection that the life and work of educators such as
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Tsunesaburo Makiguchi and John Dewey continue to be important.
They have demonstrated to us the importance of creating value during
each moment of our lives.
Dewey visited Japan in 1919, but we do not know whether he andMakiguchi met. Since research on the life of Makiguchi is not yet complete, we can only speculate about such a meeting. There is one thing,
however, about which we can be certain: the two great educators hadmuch in common.
Both Dewey and Makiguchi gained deep insights into the processesof education as a result of their early experiences as teachers in oneroom school houses. What they learned in those settings awakened inthem a deep understanding of the delicate balance between the needs ofthe child and the importance of a well-designed curriculum.
As a result of their experiences as educators, both Dewey and
Makiguchi understood that education must extend beyond school rooms
and school yards into ever wider communities, creating and fostering
perspectives that are global in nature. Both men urged the creation of an
educational system built on a partnership of school, home, and community in which each of those partners would be responsible for a specificaspect of the larger educational task.
Both Dewey and Makiguchi were committed to a type of experimentalism that honors the ability of humanistic education to generate the
new ideas and the new values that are required for the growth of individuals and communities. They taught us that ideas must be judged in termsof their implications for human life, not in terms of their source asdogma or a priori belief. This commitment led one of Makiguchi’sbiographers to describe him as an advocate of an “indigenous Japanese
pragmatism.” And it has led SGI President Daisaku Ikeda to observethat “Science is based on tested proof or empirical evidence. You conduct a test or experiment and then observe the results.” Nothing beats
actual proof.
And even on the difficult and often divisive issue of the nature andfunction of religious experience, Dewey and Makiguchi held remarkably
similar views. As President Ikeda has written in an essay that is now
available on the Website of the Center for Dewey Studies,“[Makiguchi’s] refusal to acknowledge ‘the sacred’ as a self-sufficientvalue and his insistence that religion has value only to the degree that it
concretely advances the human condition is deeply resonant with
Dewey’s rejection of the supernatural and his understanding of ‘the religious’ as that which can ‘unify interests and energies [that are] now dispersed...’”2

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Perhaps most significantly, however, Dewey and Makiguchi came tosimilar conclusions about the nature of value and the means by which it
can be created. Both men rejected the tradition of European philosophy
that treats facts and values as independent of one another. Both men
held the view that facts are richly endowed with values, and that values
are therefore able to be factually based. Put in Dewey’s terms, what ismerely valued is merely immediate and uninformed. But what is valuable has become so as a result of experimentation and refinement. Put in
Makiguchi’s terms, what has been determined to be valuable is the resultof an act of creation.
The list of what is common to the intellectual legacies of these two
great men is far too long to recite in the time available to me today. But I
must not fail to note that both men regarded their ideas as open ended,
as works in progress, and as the basis for further development by those
who would follow them and continue their work.
Dewey’s Democracy
Since June 1 of 2002 marked the 50th anniversary of Dewey’s death, I’dlike to honor his memory by taking a few minutes to discuss some of his
main ideas. Born in 1859 in Burlington, Vermont, Dewey was one ofAmerica’s greatest philosophers, educators, and public intellectuals.
Inside the classroom he trained several generations of public school
teachers and administrators. Outside the classroom he worked for social
reform in the areas of economic justice, war and peace, racial relations,civil liberties, and perhaps most importantly, the function and politics ofthe public school.
Dewey was by any measure a global citizen. In addition to his numerous trips to Europe, he spent two years (1919–1921) lecturing in Japanand China. As his reputation as an educator grew, he accepted invitations to visit schools in the U.S.S.R., Turkey, Mexico, and South Africa.
In 1937 he traveled to Mexico City as chair of a commission of inquiry
into the charges brought by Stalin against Leon Trotsky.
Despite a heavy schedule of teaching and public lectures, Dewey continued to publish books and articles, both professional and popular, at aremarkable pace. The critical edition of his Collected Works, edited at
the Center for Dewey Studies at Southern Illinois University Carbondale
between 1961 and 1990, contains 37 volumes—some 8,000,000 words.
In 1949, on the occasion of his 90th birthday, the New York Times hailed
Dewey as “America’s Philosopher.” Given his commitment to the ideals
of democracy and education, however, and given the dozens of languages into which his works have been translated, it might have been

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even more appropriate to have honored Dewey as “the philosopher ofglobal citizenship.”
When Dewey was asked to characterize his own work, he invariably
located education at its very center. He described his 1916 work Democracy and Education, for example, as one of his most important books.
Nevertheless, his relation to public school education in the United States
is best described as paradoxical. On one side, it can be said that he wasprobably the single most important American educational theorist of the20th century. On the other side, it is a notorious fact that many of his
ideas have been massively distorted by admirers and critics alike, andthat American educators in general have yet to come to terms with his
work, in the sense of putting it to rigorous test. Now, as we gain a toehold in our new century, his ideas continue to be controversial and tend
to be applied only sporadically. It remains to be seen whether his work
will have an important influence on the education of the boys and girls
who will become the global citizens of our new century.
As a philosopher, Dewey was one of the founders of American pragmatism. One of the central ideas of pragmatism is that a true idea is atool for action, and not something complete in itself in the absence of a
specific context. He thought that his philosophical predecessors had not
fully appreciated this idea, and therefore that philosophy needed to bereformed. He wanted to find a way of inviting philosophers to make a
fresh start. He wanted them to recognize that true ideas are neverabsolute. Ideas are true only relative to a context, and they are true only
as they continue to work. Put another way, true ideas do not work bythemselves. It is we who must put them to work.
Dewey’s novel view of ideas as tools had important consequences for
Dewey’s vision of democratic life. It led him to conclude, for example,
that democracy cannot be exported. Economic and other conditions
favorable to the growth of democracy can be fostered, but as a form ofassociated living democracy is always unique to its cultural context.
Democracy is not a specific form or system of government, but a way ofliving. If it is to flourish, it must grow out of the concrete practices ofboys and girls, men and women, as they go about their daily affairs.
Dewey’s Pedagogy
In the field of pedagogy, Dewey wanted to minimize the role of memorization, inflexible standardized curricula, and norm-based tests as primary pedagogical tools. He argued that the stimulus to learning is notexternal to the student, but an organic state of the student in his or her
lived context. The interface between child and curriculum must conse-

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quently be designed in ways that take into account the social context inwhich learning occurs, as well as the talents, needs, and interests of theindividual learners.
In other words, Dewey thought that the talents, needs, and interests of
the individual child must be balanced against a curriculum that is sufficiently rigorous that it can ensure that the child is socialized into a community. But the curriculum must also be sufficiently plastic that it canadapt itself to novel and unforeseen circumstances.
Dewey thus rejected the 19th-century idea (an idea that is unfortunately still widely held) that the sole or primary function of a school is
to serve as a conduit for the transmission of traditions or received values. He thought that the new men and women of his century, the 20th
century, would need more than mere training, and certainly more thansimple indoctrination. They would need to be educated in schools thatwere also laboratories: their schools would need to be places where received ideas were taught, to be sure. But they would also need to be places
where such ideas were examined for continuing relevance and where newideas were tested by means of their application to real-life situations.
In all of this Dewey rejected the outmoded authoritarian and totalitarian educational systems that had limped into the 20th century after having failed so miserably during the 19th—and that are still in evidence inmany places around the globe. He was not particularly interested inteaching his children what to think, since he had great faith in the openended possibilities of experience. He was interested in teaching them
how to think. He realized that the content of knowledge changes throughtime, sometimes even radically so. But a good method of learning—learning how to learn—is a tool that endures because it is self-corrective.
Democratic Faith
It is perhaps in the field of social and political thought that Dewey’s
ideas shine most brightly. His rich notion of democracy as both the root
and the flower of successful social inquiry; his profound concern withthe ways in which learning is a form of growth and adaptation to novel
circumstances; and his commitment to social amelioration through cooperative ventures—these ideas are summed up in what is perhaps his mostevocative characterization of democracy. In 1939, a year in which democratic ideals were under attack all around the globe by Fascism, Nazism,
and totalitarian forms of Marxism, Dewey chose democratic faith
as the topic of a speech presented on the occasion of his 80th birthday.

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He began by saying that democratic faith:
is belief in the ability of human experience to generate the aims andmethods by which further experience will grow in ordered richness.
Every other form of moral and social faith rests upon the idea that experience must be subjected at some point or other to some form of external control; to some “authority” alleged to exist outside the processes ofexperience. (LW.14.229)3

This idea issues a clear and unequivocal call for humanistic education, Dewey rejects the notion that ideals must, or even can, be imposedon experience from a source outside of experience itself. Authoritarianism and supernaturalism are ruled out as tools for knowledge-getting,for personal growth, and for associated living. Dewey rejects the notionthat democracy is a one-size-fits-all form of government that can beimported or exported. He refuses to identify democracy with a particularsystem or a particular content.
He characterizes democracy instead as a process of evaluating our
experiences, individual and communal alike. In his view, democracy is atool or method by means of which our ideas about ourselves and ourcommunities can be continually reformed and reconstructed in the lightof emerging needs and opportunities. He denies that tools for action aredelivered from transcendent or supernatural sources, outside of experience itself. Instead, they evolve out of a rich blend of theory of practiceas they are tested against real-world conditions. And perhaps mostimportant, faith in democracy is more or less equivalent with faithin education. In short, Dewey tells us that democracy and education
are the methods of value-creation, or what he called, quite simply,“growth.”As I said, Dewey thought that democracy does not name any particular institution or set of institutions, nor does it name any particular formof government. Japan, for example, has institutions that are quite different from those of the United States. Our two educational systems aredifferent, for example, as are our legislative structures. Even though our
two countries have different forms of government, we nevertheless callboth countries “democratic.”
Nor is democracy simply the will of the majority: we all know fromthe study of history that majorities can be wrong. When majorities mistreat minorities, or in the extreme case when a majority subjects aminority to “ethnic cleansing,” we speak not of democracy, but of thetyranny of a majority. The Bill of Rights of the United States Constitu-

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tion enshrines the concept that the majority is not always right.
If the term “democracy” does not name any one existing thing or setof things, then what does it name? In Dewey’s view, it is a kind ofbelief, or faith, in certain possibilities.
Here are the key ideas that Dewey wishes to put into play:a) Since democracy is a matter of belief or faith, and not any particular existing state of affairs, the task of securing democratic ideals isnever finished. Why is this so? Because a faith in democracy is a faith in
the ability of experience—your and my experience, and ours together as
we continue to communicate—to generate the tools, methods, and ideals
that will be required for its own growth and enrichment. This includes
the experience of past cultures and present ones as they are interpreted
to us by historians, anthropologists, sociologists, and so on.
b) Other forms of association—the non-democratic ones—rest on
the notion that something has to be brought to experience from the outside—that a priori or authoritarian methods are necessary if humanassociation is to be orderly. What is wrong with non-democratic forms
of association is precisely that they discount the power of individual andcommunal experience to generate its own tools and aims. They attempt
to take a short-cut to some predefined or prepackaged goals that are foreign to our experience and simply imposed on it.
c) Like science, democracy is a method and a process. Its success or
failure does not rest on any particular result. The fate of science asmethod does not rest on the success or failure of any one particularphysical experiment, and the fate of democracy as a method and an ideal
does not rest on the success or failure of any particular social experiment. Science and democracy are fallible—they are always open tocorrection and they are self-correcting. They constitute the only selfcorrecting methods we know of.
d) Perhaps most important, democracy is education. This is becausea faith that experience can generate the aims and methods by which further experience can grow in ordered richness is also faith in education. It
is the faith that we can grow individually and as communities.
But what is meant by experience in this context? Dewey’s answer isthat “[experience] is that free interaction of individual human beings
with surrounding conditions, especially the human surroundings, whichdevelops and satisfies need and desire by increasing knowledge ofthings as they are.” (LW.14.229) It is this “knowledge of conditions as
they are” that is the only solid basis for communication. Every alternative involves the subjection of some persons to the personal opinion ofother persons.

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Development of Dewey’s Thought
Given the idea that democracy is faith in the ability of experience togenerate the aims and methods by which further experience is able togrow in ordered richness, then, how can education be structured so as tohonor that faith? I offer the following suggestions.
First, we must recognize that we are now living in a new technological milieu. Japan, the United States, and other countries are rapidly
evolving from industrial societies to societies dominated by information
technology. Our schools must reflect this change. Schools devoted
entirely to the transmission of skills or to the development of discipline
are no longer adequate to this new milieu.
The new schools must be places of interaction with the life of the newtechnological culture. To this end, the actual interests of the students
must be nurtured and developed: these include interests in communication, in finding out about things, in making things, and in artistic expression. There must be a reciprocal relation between the school and thewider society. What goes on outside the school must be the subject ofeducation, and what goes on inside the school must be applicable within
the society beyond its walls.
Second, education is evolutionary in that it is an ongoing experimentin which the teacher leads the student to discover ways in which he or
she can actively adjust to novel circumstances. Consequently, there canbe no set rules for education. There are, however, sound methods foreducational experimentation and those methods themselves evolve as
they are applied in an intelligent fashion.
Third, human life, like all other forms of life, is concerned withgrowth. Education is just the most efficient means of effecting growth.
Its goal is the enrichment of the capacity for continuing renewal. We
must reject the view that education is only preparation for some futureoccupation. And we must deny that its proper concern is only theabsorption of accumulated knowledge or only the unfolding of capacities that already lie dormant in the student.
Fourth, Education is both a tool and an outcome of democratic practice. Education equips individuals for full participation in social life, andin its finest form it is the result of free and open social interaction. It isby means of education that individuals come to have a stake in society,and it is by means of the strengthened democratic institutions that result
from education that the tools and techniques of education are improved.
In his book Democracy and Education, Dewey joined the controversy
regarding the place of “values” in education. It is the business of educa-

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tion, Dewey wrote, to teach the student to appraise what is just “valued”
with a view to determining what may prove to be “valuable.” These
terms are analogous to “eaten” and “edible.” Just as it is the case thatsome things that have been eaten do not prove to be edible, some things
that are valued do not prove to be valuable. What is merely “valued”
remains private and personal. As such it tends to cut short interchange
between individuals. On the other hand, what is “valuable” is what has
been experimentally tested and proven to be of value. Since the very
notion of experimental proof depends on communication within a democratic community of inquiry, what proves to be “valuable” will havebeen worked over, debated, refined, and reconstructed in a public forum.
One of the most important issues in education is the relation ofknowledge to conduct. Knowledge that does not affect conduct is of little or no value. Education is thus a training of character and a training
for citizenship. Character is built up as the individual comes to understand and appreciate the consequences of his or her conduct and therelationships that such conduct involves. The school, as a miniaturecommunity, serves as a laboratory in which relations and connections
can be explored. Good citizenship is one of the expressions of character.
Because of his belief that education develops the capacities of the student to share effectively in social life, Dewey argued that all meaningfuleducation is moral education, and moral education is what prepares us
to take our place in a democratic society.
Education for the New Global Citizens
Even before his death in 1952, Dewey’s ideas had already begun to be
eclipsed by events within his own country. In the field of politics there
were the anti-democratic effects of the Cold War. Exacerbating this situation was the launching of Sputnik by the Soviet Union in 1957, whichshifted public sentiment toward a more strictly curriculum-driven educational system.
Dewey’s pedagogy continues to be controversial. It continues to be
attacked from both the right and the left wings of the political spectrum.
Conservatives object to his idea that education should involve what weknow as “value creation,” arguing instead that schools should be places
where traditional values, especially those that involve fixed and absolutist religious content, should be transmitted without question. Particularly unsettling to Dewey’s conservative critics was his support of “secular humanism,” which they view as a retreat to radical relativism withrespect to moral values. But as I have already indicated, Dewey did not
reject the idea that we must have norms. He merely rejected the idea that

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norms do not change through time as a result of increased understandingof novel possibilities and contexts.
Despite continuing criticism from both left and right, however,Dewey’s ideas are now, at the beginning of the 21st century, enjoying amajor revival of interest. This is due in no small measure to the relevance of Dewey’s thought to the many problems faced by those whose
task it is to educate the new global citizens of the 21st century. Deweyrecognized that the men and women of the 21st century will have global
involvements, in any case. But what will be the quality of their global
citizenship? What kind of men and women will our new global citizens
be? Will they be productive or unproductive? Will they honor the olddivisions of race, religion, tribe, and culture, encouraging division andfostering strife, or will they seek new ways of compromise, of value creation, of associated living?
Whether or not our new century will see the growth of democraticideas and institutions will depend to a great extent on the manner inwhich our new global citizens are educated. Perhaps now would be agood time, at last, to put Dewey’s ideas to the test.
In this troubled time, then, when religious and cultural conflict seems
to be on the increase, it is highly appropriate that we remember both
Makiguchi and Dewey for the contributions they made to the creation ofvalue. It is also appropriate that we remember Makiguchi’s successor,
SGI President Daisaku Ikeda, for his efforts in the promotion of holisticand humanistic education. We know that Mr. Ikeda has contributed
greatly to the values of peace, culture, and education. He has actively
promoted understanding between peoples and nations through meetings
with the world’s political leaders, as well as with leaders in the fields ofeducation, environmentalism, and the arts. His message, like that ofother great humanists such as Mahatma Ghandi and Martin Luther King,is that education and culture are the prerequisites for peace.
In these and many other ways, Mr. Ikeda carries on the rich traditionof Dewey and Makiguchi. Thank you very much for the opportunity
speak to you today.
Notes
An earlier version of this lecture was published in John Dewey: Half-Century
Memorial Seminar and Lecture Series (Cambridge, MA: Boston Research Center for the
21st Century, 2002), pp. 99–116.
2
This essay can also be found in Daisaku Ikeda, Soka Education (Santa Monica, CA:
Middleway Press, 2001), pp. 1–32.
3
In this article, references to John Dewey’s published works are to the critical (print)
edition, The Collected Works of John Dewey, 1882–1953, edited by Jo Ann Boydston
1

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DEMOCRACY, EDUCATION, AND VALUE CREATION(Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967–1991), andpublished in three series as The Early Works: 1882–1898, The Middle Works: 1898–
1924, and The Later Works: 1925–1953. These designations are followed by volume
and page number. “Later Works 1.14,” for example, refers to The Later Works, volume
1, page 14. In order to insure uniform citations of the standard edition, the pagination of
the print edition has been preserved in The Collected Works of John Dewey, 1882–
1953: The Electronic Edition, edited by Larry A. Hickman (Charlottesville, Virginia:
InteLex Corp., 1996). A commonly used alternative form of reference to The Collected
Works, used here, abbreviates The Early Works as EW, The Middle Works as MW and
The Later Works as LW.