discuss them together, divining their meaning and taking from them what grains of truth and
wisdom they might have to offer.^34 The shared text, particularly if it is a profound one, can provide
the necessary starting point for the discussion between teacher and student, provided it is read with
care and attention. Yet, according to Dewey,
every advance in the influence of the experimental method is sure to aid inoutlawing the
literary,dialectic, and authoritative methods of forming beliefs which have governed the
schools of the past, and to transfer their prestige to methods which will procure an active
concern with things and persons, directed by aims of increasing temporal reach and deploying
greater range of things in space.^35And
adherence to the culture of the past:::generates a reminiscent social spirit, for this makes an
individual feel more at home in the life of other days than in his own. A professedly cultural
education is peculiarly exposed to this danger.Dewey’s approach, by contrast, is intended to embed the student thoroughly in the current,
changing social world in which they happen to find themselves, not to put them in a position where
pesky authors and books from the past might raise uncomfortable questions in the reader’s mind
about the wisdom (or lack of wisdom) of the emergent and the present. Dewey’s goal is to socialize
the learner so they can conform to the present. The point is to produce not a thinker in the Socratic
mode but“a character which not only does the particular deed socially necessary but one which is
interested in that continuous readjustment which is essential to [continuous] growth.”^36
As far as Neatby is concerned, this will not develop the attributes long understood as essential in
the souls of a self-governingand free citizen.“Booklearningreminds [Dewey] of the‘aristocrat’who
did not work with their hands; and instruction directly imparted from teacher to pupil is, it seems, a
denial of democratic equalitarianism.”The result, Neatby argues, is that Dewey and his disciples
who advocate“discovery-learning”in public school curricula are positively anti-intellectual.
They are spreading“education for democracy”at the expense of the best liberal traditions of
education. In their desire to“teach”democracy and social morality they have quite forgotten
that both must be founded on a true liberation of the mind.^37Dewey’s method–far from being either neutral or innocuous–is antithetical to the development of
the characteristics and knowledge required by citizens of a free society. And to repeat, Dewey’s
methods are generally acknowledged to be largely at the heart of both the K-12 and the higher
education reforms that go by the name of twenty-first-century education.
Of course the single biggest difference between the Socratic method and progressive reforms is
how they divide on the question of the status of truth and being.“Knowledge,”Socrates claims in
theRepublic,“is presumably dependent on what is, to know of what is, that it is and how it is.”
Whereas“Opinion is a different power and must rest on something different.”Opinion cannot rest
on non-being, not entirely at any rate, for, as Socrates observes, the one who opines opines
something.Opinion is situated between knowledge (resting on stable being) and ignorance (resting
on non-being). Opinion is dependent upon what is between these two: the realm of becoming
(Republic, 477c–478d). The pragmatists, insofar as they insist that students must be engaged with
real-world problems, and who assume that there is no stable knowledge–only ever-changing
socially constructed knowledge–would confine the learner’s attention to the realm of opinion.
Socrates also argues that political society“in its education and want of education”can aptly be
compared to a cave in which prisoners are shown shadows that are believed by the cave’s denizens
to represent the truth of things. In fact, these changing, flickering shadows are merely the basis of
86 David W. Livingstone