dewey is all we need

I own 3 books by John Dewey: Experience & Education, How We Think, and Democracy & Education. Because I find myself referring to those fairly often, and enjoy assigning the thinner volumes for classes, I trick myself into believing that I have a pretty good handle on him. Other writers who quote Dewey will sometimes cite him, not by using one of these key texts, but from within the compilation of his writing as in "Middle Works." Just because I have some grant dollars I could expend, I have thought about buying a CD of the entire collection. But that would mean I would be admitting there is more to read and know than is contained within the three books I now own.

In discussing the role of "tension" within powerful professional exchanges, we have begun to wonder whether we ought to write something about the rewards of wrestling with ideas rather than perpetuate the civil and flat conversations that are all too common at typical conferences. I stumbled across a piece in Teachers College Record by David Wong. It's title is "Beyond Control and Rationality: Dewey, Aesthetics, Motivation, and Educative Experiences." While it is more of a rambling philosophical essay, it has become a gateway into some of the very issues with which we have been struggling. One is that anticipation can be a better way to explain why people do certain things than motivational theory. Another is that aesthetics is all about tensions: fear vs. desire, worry vs. relief, excitement vs. serenity. Who lead Wong to this and also expands my understandings? Yep, John Dewey.

According to John Lennon, all we need is love to fix everything. Within our academic work, I am wondering whether John Dewey is all we need. It seems that when I get stuck on some notion, it is John Dewey's writing that rescues me. In this case, the Crossroads experience offers a way for people to find a type of completeness that is all but disallowed in other professional settings. There seems to be some underlying beauty or wholeness that occurs ... but knowing how to capture that, even though it seems evident within the photographs of the event, has been elusive. As revealed in the following passage, I need to obtain a copy of Dewey's Art and Experience:

Since the artists cares in a peculiar way for the phase of experience in which union is achieved, he does not shun moments of resistance and tension. He rather cultivates them, not for their own sake but because of their potentialities, bringing to living consciousness an experiences that is unified and total.

If I ever have a sabbatical again (note to self: stay in one spot for at least six years and do so when financial exigencies don't preclude paid leaves) I suspect I could be quite content writing essays that each incorporate a Dewey nugget. What I would write would be a contemporary re-interpretation of Dewey in the spirit of "standing on the shoulders of giants." Whether anyone else reads that stuff would be less important. I wonder if anyone has devoted most of a sabbatical simply to generating blogs. Or pitching books to editors that spin-off into possibilities that were only dreamed about late at night in a conference hotel bar.