nihilism.”After all, why the will should have as its goal the emancipation of slaves as opposed to the
enslavement of free peoples cannot be given an answer by historicism because it has dispensed with
any rationally apprehensible idea of the good. And so, Strauss concludes,“The attempt to make
man absolutely at home in this world ended in man’s becoming absolutely homeless.”^44
Pragmatism like Dewey’s is premised on a rather truncated view of human beings and the
education best suited for them. This is what worried earlier critics like Neatby, as she argues,
In practice, however, the [progressive] teacher and the curriculum are instruments in the hands
of the administrator for conditioning children in an approved manner according to the listed
“value”of“democracy”or occasionally of“social living”or of“effective living”. Progressive
education in Canada is not liberation; it is indoctrination both intellectual and moral.^45Dewey’s over-emphasis upon social integration and practical problem-solving to the neglect of
individual appreciation of knowledge for its own sake has the perverse but entirely predictable
consequence of rendering students less fit for self-government.
Brann, reviewing Nussbaum’s bookNot for Profit,notes that Nussbaum appreciatively quotes
from Dewey: Nussbaum“quotes him [Dewey] as saying that‘ideas:::devolve for the sake of the
better control of action.’This is a pragmatist’s view,”Brann observes,
which is surely the opposite of Socrates’, for whom dialectic first leads out of the world to a
transcendent realm of ideas. And although knowledge of these ideas then leads back to good
human action, it is, in the first instance, for the soul’s health that we engage in inquiry; right
action is the indirect, one might almost say, the unintended, consequence of thinking things
through. Indeed, the old understanding of liberal education is that its very liberality consists in
its being pursued for its own sake, free from practical purposes–and that this way also
happens, blessedly, to make for the most prudent practicality.^46By removing objective truth from the equation, as progressive and constructivist or twenty-first-
century education apparently asks us to do, we fall back on that from which Socrates sought always
to distance his own activity: theeristicaldiscussions and the rhetorical techniques of the sophists.
Eristicaldiscussion seeks only to win an argument, to carry the day. It is an assertion of will for the
sake of scoring a victory rather than a shared pursuit of knowledge. As Steel reminds us about the
Socratic tradition:
Both Schall and Thomas help us to see that there is a necessary spiritual structure to teaching
and learning. This means that education, contrary to what is most often said today among
reformers, cannot properly be“student-,”“child-,”or“learner-centered”; it must be truth-
centered. Consequently, its center must lie somewhere between the teacher and the learner:::.
There can be no genuine dialog between teacher and student where the center is not somewhere
betweenthe discussants–iftruthrather than either of the participants is not the central concern
of both parties.^47When the truth drops out of the relation, sophistry emerges, and a speaker or a student has no
concern for the truth of what is said.
I do not believe that the Socratic approach necessarily commits those who would adopt it to a
particular set of detailed metaphysical or cosmological claims. By questioning Dewey’s method-
ologies from a Socratic perspective, we do not have to feel compelled to adopt something about
which we, and Socrates, are not entirely certain.^48 Rejecting relativism does not compel us to
become dogmatists. But it is clear that Socrates consistently strove to discern the truth, and so he
acted in accordance with the expectation that it existed independently of our making and could be
The Socratic Method and John Dewey 89