Beyond the "Pragmatic Acquiescence" Controversy: Reconciling the Educational Thought of Lewis...

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Beyond the “PragmaticAcquiescence” Controversy:Reconciling the EducationalThought of Lewis Mumford andJohn DeweyKurt Stemhagen a & David Waddington ba Virginia Commonwealth Universityb Concordia UniversityPublished online: 20 Sep 2011.

To cite this article: Kurt Stemhagen & David Waddington (2011) Beyond the“Pragmatic Acquiescence” Controversy: Reconciling the Educational Thought of LewisMumford and John Dewey, Educational Studies: A Journal of the American EducationalStudies Association, 47:5, 469-489, DOI: 10.1080/00131946.2011.602150

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EDUCATIONAL STUDIES, 47: 469–489, 2011Copyright C© American Educational Studies AssociationISSN: 0013-1946 print / 1532-6993 onlineDOI: 10.1080/00131946.2011.602150

Beyond the “Pragmatic Acquiescence”Controversy: Reconciling the

Educational Thought of Lewis Mumfordand John Dewey

Kurt Stemhagen

Virginia Commonwealth University

David Waddington

Concordia University

This article provides a reconsideration of the intellectual altercation between JohnDewey and Lewis Mumford in the 1920s, and a sketch of some educational im-plications that follow this reconsideration. Although past scholarship has tended tofocus on ways in which the altercation obscured similarities in their thought, weconsider whether important differences were also obscured, particularly regardingtheir outlook on science and technology, their potential place in society, and theirideas about the best means to positive social change. We also consider how thesedifferences might play out in philosophy of education/educational practice, conclud-ing that Mumford’s commitment to regionalism can augment Dewey’s philosophicalvision while also helping deal with pressing contemporary social and educationalneeds.

Although John Dewey needs no introduction to most readers of this journal, it ispossible that the same cannot be said about Lewis Mumford, because educationalthemes were not often prominent in Mumford’s work. A public intellectual andself-proclaimed “anti-expert,” Mumford wrote in many areas and made a name for

Correspondence should be addressed to Kurt Stemhagen, Virginia Commonwealth University,School of Education, 1015 W. Main Street, PO Box 842020, Richmond, VA 23284. E-mail:[email protected]

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470 STEMHAGEN AND WADDINGTON

himself as an historian of cities and science; as an architectural, urban planning, andtechnology commentator; and even as a literary critic. Born in 1895, Mumfordlived until 1990 and he produced over thirty books and countless articles andcommentaries. Although covering quite a bit of intellectual terrain, the thematicunity in his work was an effort to draw attention to the often hidden tendency ofmodern life—be it in the form of technological progress, urbanization, bureaucraticorganization, raw capitalism, or some combination of these forms—to dehumanizeus.

This article starts with a reconsideration of the intellectual altercation betweenDewey and Mumford that took place primarily in the 1920s. It then provides asketch of some educational implications that follow this reconsideration, as wellas some insights generated by scrutinizing this controversy from an educationalpoint of view. Robert Westbrook’s (1990) treatment of the controversy, detailedin “Lewis Mumford, John Dewey, and the ‘Pragmatic Acquiescence’“ providesthe foundation for this exploration. Westbrook describes the events in questionand concludes that the dust-up obscured the variety of ways in which the thoughtof the two men were actually quite well aligned. Both men did a great deal ofwriting in the 1920s and 1930s, and both lived in New York City for much oftheir lives. Furthermore, politically, both were often described as espousing a rarenon-Marxist radical perspective. Westbrook (1990) goes so far as to state that wereit not for this public disagreement, reading their respective works could lead oneto “imagine the two men to be intellectual brothers-in-arms” (309–310).

We take Westbrook’s initial thesis as sound, then move on to consider whether,in addition to obscuring important similarities, perhaps the bombastic acrimony ofthe Dewey–Mumford confrontation also obscured some important but productivedifferences in the thought of the two men. In this article, we consider Dewey andMumford’s respective outlooks on science and technology, as well as their ideasregarding the best means of effecting positive social change. We also considerwhat the similarities and differences in Dewey and Mumford’s thought might of-fer contemporary philosophy of education and educational practice. We concludewith some remarks regarding how Mumford’s notion of regional survey has po-tential to aid in the realization of Dewey’s vision of education’s place in a trulydemocratic society and also how it might serve to problemetize some of Dewey’smost foundational beliefs.

THE DEWEY–MUMFORD DUST UP

The famous conflict between John Dewey and Lewis Mumford began in 1927,with the publication of Mumford’s second book, The Golden Day (1957), anambitious work that aimed to chart the course of American thought from itsEuropean origins to its current state. When he set out to write The Golden Day,

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EDUCATIONAL STUDIES 471

Mumford had originally intended to call it Running Streams to signal that the“running stream” of American thought had “come clear” over time (1957, xv).However, as he entered into the analysis in earnest, he revised this optimistic thesissignificantly. Contemporary thought, far from being a triumph, actually paled incomparison to the greatness of what he considered the Golden Day of Americanletters, which he located between 1830 and 1860 and in the persons of Emerson,Thoreau, Whitman, Hawthorne, and Melville.

According to Mumford, the Golden Day had been a time of intellectual rich-ness akin to fifth-century Athens or Elizabethan England. Men like Emerson andWhitman had a “heroic conception of life” that contained transformative possibil-ities (Mumford 1957, xvii).1 Unfortunately, after the Civil War, things had takena turn for the worse, and the subsequent years were, in Mumford’s view, markedby the rise of a grasping industrialism. He argued that the leading writers andintellectuals of the time—Mark Twain, William James, and John Dewey—werea part of a “pragmatic acquiescence” (1957, 157) that gave up on the idealism ofthe Golden Day and was instead content to venerate the real.

One way to understand Mumford’s interest in the Golden Day thinkers is aspart of a broader effort to contend with the profound changes in American societybrought on by urbanization. Although the pragmatist response to these changeswas to craft an unapologetically forward-looking philosophy, Mumford took adifferent tack by attempting to inject new life into older ideas. Mumford wasnot alone in this way of thinking, as early twentieth-century urban planners andarchitects were similarly moved to look to the previous century for inspiration inefforts to temper urbanization with respect for nature and a spirit of community(Bender 1982). Still, a question that quickly becomes apparent in The Golden Dayis whether Mumford (1957) was right to position Dewey as contra nature andcommunity.

The Golden Day is filled with stinging criticism, but Mumford’s critique ofDewey is especially pointed. Mumford lobs some famous one-liners—Dewey’sstyle, he maintained, was “as fuzzy and formless as lint,” and his books were “asdepressing as a subway ride—they take one to one’s destination, but a little theworse for wear” (1957, 131). However, Mumford also had some more substantivecriticisms of Dewey to offer. He suggested that Dewey was a naive exponent ofthe mass society—specifically, he alleged that Dewey believed that there was ademocratic wisdom that was necessarily present in majority decisions. In Dewey’scommitment to democracy, Mumford (1957) said, one could see the “faith in thecurrent go of things” that lay at the heart of his philosophy (131).

Mumford also held that Dewey’s instrumentalism, although a useful antidoteto overly abstract thinking, had caused him to venerate science and technologyexcessively. This was, Mumford felt, problematic in itself, but, as a corollary, it hadcaused Dewey to undervalue artistic achievements. Mumford noted that Deweyhad spoken of artistic achievements in instrumental terms, and suggested that, as a

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consequence, this meant that he regarded a rubber raincoat as being a more worthyachievement than Tolstoy’s War and Peace. This indiscriminacy was, Mumfordfelt, entirely in keeping with what Dewey’s utilitarian sympathies—he remarked,“I recollected eulogies of Bacon in Mr. Dewey’s works, but none of Shakespeare;appreciations of Locke, but not of Milton” (Mumford 1957, 261).

Mumford’s most insulting criticism by far, however, is a comparison that hedraws between Dewey’s thinking and that of George Babbitt, the famous SinclairLewis character of the eponymous novel. Mumford (1957) comments, “[Dewey’s]preoccupation has been with science and technology, with instrumentalism in thenarrow sense, the sense in which it occurs to Mr. Babbitt” (135). Although onewould need to read the novel to see just how insulting this comparison is, sufficeit to say that Babbitt is a calculating, technology and progress-worshipping, anti-intellectual real estate agent. In a speech to the citizens of the fictional Midwesterncity of Zenith, Babbitt offers the following remark:

The American business man is generous to a fault, but one thing he does demandof all teachers and lecturers and journalists: If we’re going to pay them our goodmoney, they’ve got to help us by selling efficiency and whooping it up for rationalprosperity! (Lewis 1922, 187–188)

Evidently, Mumford felt that Dewey was fulfilling his “duty” in this regard; hewas selling the gains enabled by science and technology, and whooping it up forthe status quo.

As one might guess, Dewey was not particularly pleased by Mumford’s criti-cism in The Golden Day. However, given the vehemence of Mumford’s broadside,Dewey’s (1981b) response, published as “The Pragmatic Acquiescence,” was fairlymild. Although he did accuse Mumford of being “the prophet of the Slogan Ageof the 1920s,” (146) he actually spent a large part of the essay defending WilliamJames from the accusation that he was complicit in a “pragmatic acquiescence”(Dewey 1981b, 145–146). As far as his own defense was concerned, he pointed outthat Mumford had quoted him out of context so as to make it appear as though heviewed art as a mere instrument. Although Dewey had argued that art did indeedmake an instrumental contribution to the renewal of spirit, he had never claimedthat that was all that it did.

Dewey also offered a vigorous defense of his commitment to science andtechnology. He admitted that there were critical questions surrounding scienceand technology that needed to be addressed, but he held that a return to the“Golden Day” of Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman, although illuminating to someextent, would not suffice to address these questions. He remarked, “Without anunderstanding of natural science and technology in their own terms, understandingis external, arbitrary, and criticism is ‘transcendent’ and ultimately of one’s ownprivate conceit” (Dewey 1981b, 150). Dewey, evidently, felt that Mumford had

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exhibited precisely this kind of lack of willingness to come to grips with scienceand technology.

In the January 19th, 1927 issue of The New Republic, Mumford fired the finalsalvo in the engagement.2 After defending himself at some length against theaccusation of having quoted Dewey out of context and having taken a few morepotshots at William James, Mumford took care to point out that he was not, infact, a naive idealist who was unwilling to face up to the current state of scienceand technology. Mumford noted that he was interested in regional developmentand architecture, and that a certain level of scientific and technical knowledgewas necessary to pursue these interests intelligently. The difficulty with Dewey’sapproach to science and technology, suggested Mumford, was that it focused toomuch on means and limited ends rather than ultimate ends. What was needed,Mumford concluded, was a new vision, “a less provincial interpretation of Lifeand Nature than [Dewey] has given us” (Mumford 1950, 56).

After the conflict, Dewey regarded Mumford as his enemy. The further mentionsof Mumford in Dewey’s correspondence are derisory—for example, in a March21, 1941 letter to John Flynn, Dewey (2008) noted that he considered Mumfordan apologist for Stalin. Mumford, for his part, clearly did not regret the remarkshe made about Dewey. In a new introduction written for the 1957 edition of TheGolden Day, he offers a lengthy discussion of the oversights he felt he made inthe book. Notably, there is no mention of either Dewey or James.

A SKETCH OF DEWEY ON SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY,EDUCATION AND SOCIAL CHANGE

If Mumford was wrong, and Dewey was not, in fact, a naive cheerleader for scienceand technology, then this raises the question as to what Dewey’s views on scienceand technology actually were. Although the scope of this article does not permit afull examination of this question, it is, at least, possible to offer an overview of thesignificance of science and technology in Dewey’s thought3 and to discuss, briefly,some of the implications that this had for his educational vision. To do this, it maybe helpful to break the analysis into two segments: (a) science as way of thinkingand (b) scientific and technological innovations. Dewey is deeply committed to abroad version of the former, but he is often ambivalent about the latter.

In terms of science as a way of thinking, Dewey’s commitment to science isvisible in his earliest work. During his Hegelian period of the 1880s and the early1890s, Dewey saw scientific inquiry as revealing a latent unity.4 The depth ofthis commitment is particularly visible in a comment he offers in “Christianityand Democracy,” an essay written in 1892. Here, he speaks of the discovery of“the presence of one continuous and living force, the conspiring and vital unityof all the world” and notes that this “revelation” comes to us through science

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(1971, 6). Notably, when Dewey is discussing science here, he is not merelytalking about science as practiced in the laboratory. Rather, he is suggesting that itis science, construed broadly as systematic inquiry, which is needed to move us inthe direction of a better society. In an essay published a few months later, “Renan’sLoss of Faith in Science,” Dewey was still thinking in this vein. He approvinglyparaphrased Renan’s5 expansive definition of science, given in 1848: “[Science]is to know from the standpoint of humanity; its goal is such a sense of life as willenable man to direct his conduct in relation to his fellows by intelligence and notby chance” (Dewey 1971, 12).

Although these essays were written during Dewey’s early years, and althoughDewey retreated from both Christianity and Hegel, science, construed in this broadfashion, remained a cornerstone of his thought. In “The Development of AmericanPragmatism,” an essay written shortly before The Golden Day was published hedescribed the standpoint of instrumentalism. He commented, “Instrumentalism. . . maintains that action should be intelligent and reflective, and that thoughtshould occupy a central position in life” (Dewey 1981a, 19). Notably, the pointof engaging in this kind of inquiry was not merely to recover truth (as the con-ventional view of the scientific method would have it), but rather to transformthe world—Dewey spoke of “reconstituting the present stage of things insteadof merely knowing it” (1981a, 18). Dewey noted that critics had interpreted in-strumentalism as either signifying crass instrumentalities (e.g. “How can I sellmore real estate?”), or, somewhat more high-mindedly, as making reason into a“machine for the production of beliefs useful to morals and society” (1981a, 21).He suggested, however, that it was significantly more than this. Instrumentalism,he maintained, was fundamentally about faith in intelligent inquiry. Obviously,adherence to this faith would be bound to have practical results, but the intrinsicvalue of the practice was more important. Dewey thus closed the essay with thefollowing remark:

The more one takes into account what intelligence itself adds to the joy and dignityof life, the more one should feel grieved at a situation in which the exercise and joyof reason are limited to a narrow, closed, and technical social group and the moreone should ask how it is possible to make all men participators in this inestimablewealth. (1981a, 21)

Thirty years earlier, Dewey had chided Renan for losing his youthful 1848 faithin the socialization of science, but he himself had not fallen prey to Renan’s error.Instead, he had deepened and strengthened his faith in science over the course ofhis career.

Clearly, there is abundant evidence that science as a way of thinking was centralto Dewey’s thought. However, there remains the question of the nature of Dewey’srelationship with science and technology as understood in everyday terms, i.e.,

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scientific and technological innovations. In principle, Dewey was quite enthusiasticabout the possibilities of science and technology in this sense. However, when itcame to the question about how these tools had actually been used, he was lesssanguine.

In The Public and its Problems, Dewey (1927) pointed out that advances inscience in technology had made the functioning of society much more complex.The public had an interest in controlling the course of technology, but it was toobewildered by the rapid pace of change and the complex webs of cause and effect,spread over time and space, that modern technology implied. Dewey commented,“Who is sufficient unto these things? Men feel that they are caught in the sweepof forces too vast to understand or master. Thought is brought to a standstill andaction paralyzed” (135). Bamboozled by deliberate efforts to manipulate it andbewildered by the scope of the changes brought about by advances in science andtechnology, Dewey felt that the public had lost consciousness of itself—it wasblundering about hopelessly.

As Dewey (1981c) later pointed out in Individualism: Old and New, one wayin which this confusion manifested itself was in a mismatch between the world,as transformed by science and technology, and our ideals. The dominant ideologyin America, suggested Dewey, was something called “Old Individualism” (56).For Dewey, this term signified a particular archetype that is still familiar today:the rugged, pioneering, independent, entrepreneurial man. The trouble with thisarchetype, suggested Dewey, was that it corresponded to a bygone age. The mod-ern, industrial world was characterized by interdependence and cooperation, butthe ideology of old individualism was constantly putting us on the wrong track.

Dewey was also concerned about democratic questions regarding science andtechnology. The innovations that had come about, he noted, were not applied bythe whole public to society, but rather were inflicted on working people by therich. He remarked, “At present, the application of physical science is rather tohuman concerns than in them. That is, it is external, made in the interests of itsconsequences for a possessing and acquisitive class” (1927, 174).

He hoped that the public might one day be able to reappropriate scientific andtechnological knowledge and exert its will self-consciously upon the scientificand technological apparatus. Although he was not terribly specific about how thiswould be accomplished, he did say that a better public understanding of scienceand technology would allow the public to “use and control its manifestations”rather than simply “undergo the consequences” (1927, 165).

Clearly, this emphasis on developing a public understanding of science andtechnology puts the question of education front and center. By the time that hehad his conflict with Mumford, Dewey was no longer preoccupied with educa-tional questions, but he had offered some thoughts on scientific and technologicaleducation some years before. In School and Society (1990), he made a numberof important commitments to scientific and technological understanding—these

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commitments were important aspects of his overall system of education throughoccupations.

As far as students’ engagement with technology is concerned, Dewey wantedstudents to achieve a high level of understanding of the technologies they em-ployed. The term technological transparency, borrowed from Lave and Wenger(1991), is a useful shorthand term for this idea (Waddington 2010). Dewey sug-gested that in the nineteenth century, people had a strong understanding of howthe technology that underpinned their society worked. He commented:

The supply of flour, of lumber, of foods, of building materials, of household furniture,even of metal ware, of nails, hinges, hammers, etc. was produced in the immediateneighborhood, in shops which were constantly open to inspection and often centersof neighborhood congregation. The entire industrial process stood revealed (Dewey1990, 152).

This insight into the nature of production, however, had disappeared. Productionnow occurred at remote locations on a mass scale and was, as a consequence, lesswell understood.

The solution to this problem was to bring the process of production into theschool. Among other technologies, the students at the Dewey School investigatedtextile manufacturing.6 The students began by familiarizing themselves with theraw material (e.g., a cotton plant or wool). Teachers then guided the childrenthrough the process of reinventing and rediscovering the steps necessary to turnthe raw materials into cloth (e.g., carding wool, ginning cotton, spinning, the loom,etc.). The reasoning behind the focus on textiles is that they were a paradigmaticcase of industrial development; if one understood the trajectory of technologicalchange in textiles, one would be able to apply this understanding to other similarcases.

Naturally, in addition to cultivating an understanding of technology, Dewey’scurriculum also emphasized the application of a scientific approach to a broadrange of problems. In his discussion of the occupations, Dewey noted that he doesnot conceive of the occupations as mere vehicles with which to gain “better techni-cal skill,” but that they are instead “active centers of scientific insight” (1990, 19).He remarked, “True, reflective attention . . . involves judging, reasoning, deliber-ation; it means that the child has a question of his own and is actively engaged inseeking and selecting relevant material with which to answer it” (1990, 148–149).The general point is clear: Reflective attention involves considering a particularproblem in a systematic manner. Children will investigate the problem, formulatepossible solutions, and then test them until apparently successful solutions emerge.

Clearly, students at the Dewey School received a robust training in scientificthinking and technological change, and the large, integrative projects that they

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frequently worked on taught them the value of cooperation and gave them op-portunities to connect school and society. But what was the ultimate aim of thisinnovative new type of education? Mayhew and Edwards, who were former teach-ers at Dewey’s laboratory school in Chicago, offer some illuminating commentaryon the cloth-making activities at the school:

[The student] followed the wool from the sheep to the rug, patiently contriving hisown spindle, his own dye. . . . He saw, that while successive inventions of machineshave led to the eventual betterment of social life, the immediate results have oftenbeen at the bitter cost of the discarded hand-worker whose plight illustrates an ever-present social problem caused by technological advance. . . . For the children of thisschool, [industrial history] carried many social and moral implications of unsolvedproblems of human relationships. Thus taught, the history of work becomes therecord of how man learned to think . . . to transform the conditions of life so thatlife itself became a different and less tortured thing and gradually took on, for someat least, comfort and beauty. Here, for all thinking and socially minded persons,logically follows the goading query—Why not comfort and beauty for all? (Mayhewand Edwards 1936, 314)

Thus, at the Dewey School, one learned about technologies not only to under-stand how they worked, but also to develop insight about the social consequencesof technological change and the future possibilities for social transformation. Onecan make a similar argument regarding Dewey’s approach to science education;the ability to think scientifically is something that future citizens will need if theyare to be effective agents of social change in a milieu saturated by science andtechnology. To adapt a phrase from Marx, the teachers of the Dewey school werenot merely interested in having the students understand the world; rather, theywanted the students to be prepared to change it.

MUMFORD ON SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

Like Dewey, Mumford’s notions of science, technology, and social change wereinterrelated. In fact, it does not seem a stretch to claim that to Mumford, the historyof science, technology, and social change were largely the same. Mumford’smethods of inquiry were primarily historical—he often attempted to contendwith contemporary issues by trying to identify the multifarious historical roots ofthe problem. As such, this section proceeds—after a short explanation of somekey Mumfordian terms—by sketching Mumford’s understanding of the historicalunderpinnings of the crisis he saw as present in his time; the very same crisis inwhich he implicated Dewey’s thought as at least tacitly supporting and possiblyeven exacerbating.

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A very brief primer on Mumford’s use of a few key terms is provided toaid in understanding his thought. Mumford generally preferred the term technicsover technology in an attempt to be more holistic and broad in thinking abouttechnological artifacts. As Stunkel (2004) explains, Mumford’s technics “is takento include all the artifacts and tools that have served humans from beginnings of thespecies . . . thus processes, like basket making, distilling, brewing, and tanning . . .

are technics as well as more familiar artifacts like microscope, telescope, printingpress, clock, sailing ship, steam engine, telephone and computer” (125). Mumfordalso differentiated between tools and machines: “The essential distinction betweena machine and a tool lies in the degree of independence in the operation from theskill and motive power of the operator: the tool lends itself to manipulation,the machine to automatic action” (1934, 10). Tools, according to Mumford, aremore flexible with regard to use, whereas machines tend to perform only a specificfunction well. Finally, as mentioned earlier, Mumford makes a distinction betweenmachines (as described) and the machine. According to Mumford, the machineis “shorthand reference to the entire technological complex . . . embrac(ing) theknowledge and skills and arts derived from industry or implicated in the newtechnics, and will include various forms of tool, instrument, apparatus and utility,as well as machines proper” (1934, 12).

Contrary to his contemporaries, Mumford identified the origins of moderntechno-rational existence not in any of the major inventions that immediatelypreceded the industrial revolution but in some of the less concrete socio-culturaldevelopments that came about in the centuries prior to these more-heralded inven-tions:

Men had become mechanical before they perfected complicated machines to expressnew bent and interest. . . . Behind all the great material inventions of the last centuryand a half was not merely a long internal development of technics: There was alsoa change of mind. Before the new industrial processes could take hold on a greatscale, a reorientation of wishes, habits, ideas, goals was necessary (1934, 3).

Thus, to Mumford, Western culture adopted a certain worldview that was con-ducive to the development of the technologies that followed. Mumford identifiesthe development of the mechanical clock as a seminal point in this history and hisstudy, “The Monastery and the Clock,” in Technics and Civilization (1934), is stillconsidered an important contribution to the history and philosophy of technology.In it, he explains how sometime between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries, themechanical clock came into existence in European monasteries. Bells needed tosound at regular intervals for prayer and other regulative purposes and, as Mum-ford puts it, the development of the clock was “an almost inevitable product ofthis life” (1934, 13). This invention marked a turning point because it allowedfor a quantification of daily life in a way that had not previously been possible.

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Mumford claims, “So it is not straining the facts when one suggests that the monas-teries . . . helped to give human enterprise the regular collective beat and rhythmof the machine; for the clock is not merely a means of keeping track of the hours,but of synchronizing the actions of men” (1934, 13–14). The clock, accordingto Mumford, did more than just regulate the “actions of men,” it paved the wayfor what can be referred to as the modern techno-rational worldview: “The clock,moreover, is a piece of power-machinery whose product is seconds and minutes;by its essential nature it dissociated time from human events and helped createthe belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences; thespecial world of science” (1934, 15).

Mumford’s recognition of the importance of the development of the clock leadsto his description of the “crime of Galileo” (1970, 57). These crimes operate asa metaphor for Mumford’s understanding of how science has contributed to alessening of the quality of human life. Contrary to the Roman Catholic Church’saccusation of the crime of heresy, Mumford saw Galileo’s actual transgression as:

that of trading the totality of human experience, not merely the accumulated dogmaand doctrines of the church, for that minute portion which can be observed withina limited time-span and interpreted in terms of mass and motion, while denying theimportance of unmediated realities of human experience itself, from which scienceitself is only a refined ideological derivative (Mumford 1970, 57).

In comparing Galileo’s new subjective–objective dualism to the previous Chris-tian heaven–earth split, Mumford explained that with this new arrangement it was“the organic world, not least, man himself, that demanded redemption” (1970,58). Perhaps most significantly, Mumford saw Galileo’s distinction as a false onein that the objective, quantitative, mathematical, and knowable side of the splitis a product of, and hence a part of, subjective, qualitative, and mercurial humanexperience. The primary damage wrought by this split is, according to Mumford,that this objective realm, by design, is fundamentally decontextualized: “Existen-tially, the scientific world picture is still under-dimensioned; because at the outsetit eliminated the living observer and the long history recorded in his genes and hisculture” (1970, 59). Mumford posits that this worldview is largely responsible forour continued inability to find a way to live with machines without becoming partof the machine.

REGIONALISM AND REGIONAL SURVEY AS EDUCATIONAND CATALYST FOR SOCIAL CHANGE

Mumford grew up in a rapidly growing and modernizing New York City, comingof age as the city’s famous skyline took shape in the early part of the twentiethcentury. Mumford remarked about his upbringing and formative experiences:

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“I was a child of the city. . . . New York City exerted a greater and more constantinfluence on me than did my family” (1982, 25). Indeed, from early on—in the formof walks with his grandfather, then later by himself or with friends—Mumfordrepeatedly covered all of New York City on foot, often making extensive notes inhis journal.

The connection with New York City that he felt early on was probably the initialseed of Mumford’s regional outlook. His study of the work of Scottish biologist-cum-urban planner Patrick Geddes, fostered the growth of this seed. Geddes’swork sought to use sociological and geographical methods to understand and,eventually, to reshape regional existences. Geddes saw social organization as anextension of the natural world, and he chose to analyze it at the level of what hetermed the natural region.7 Mumford actively sought to overcome the divide oftenposited between the social and the natural worlds. The entire body of Mumford’swork, from fields as disparate as architecture and literary criticism, was infusedwith this spirit of reintegration. These sociographic methods derived from Geddeswere a cornerstone of Mumford’s regional thought, facilitating an approach toplanning that was thoroughly humanistic, drawing on sociology and recognizingthe importance of a sense of place for the health of any community: “Regionalismthen, grows out of an immediate fondness for a soil and a way of life: for thelanguage and the cultural products of a group of people, intimately connectedwith a particular landscape. As it develops, regionalism embraces more and morethe political and economic aspects of a community” (Mumford 1940, 266).

In keeping with his burgeoning interest in planning, Mumford’s first book, TheStory of Utopias ([1922] 1959), analyzed, in broad strokes, utopian visions of thecommunity, In it, he coined terms that captured two broad approaches: “utopiasof escape” and “utopias of reconstruction” (15). Mumford sought to capture thehope and promise of utopia while still cautioning against the problems endemicto dreaming about (and not acting toward) an ideal life and world. He saw the es-capist utopian’s tendency to plan in the abstract (the search for utopian perfection)as nothing short of disastrous. Mumford’s utopias of escape were created whenindividuals’ or groups’ visions of the future did not take into consideration thesocial and physical/geographic realities present. Mumford was keenly aware ofthe dire implications of escapist utopian planning. Neglecting the ways in whichour social lives and possible futures were inextricably connected to the land wasa sure path to social pathology, as well as environmental degradation. Utopiasof reconstruction, on the other hand, always started with existent social and ge-ographical particulars and their connections. Acknowledgement of these links inplanning was, to Mumford, a path toward the creation of social arrangements ableto account not only for a healthy natural environment, but also for a robust anddynamic social environment.

His interest in regionalism led to Mumford’s involvement in the founding of theRegional Planning Association of America (RPAA). The RPAA started out as a

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small group interested primarily in urban architecture and planning. One member,Benton MacKaye, a forester who worked to revitalize the Appalachian Trail, hada profound influence on the direction of both the RPAA and Mumford’s thinking.MacKaye (1962) saw the cities of his day as putting pressure on surroundingareas, depleting resources and obliterating regional cultures. He likened the city toa glacier: “It is spreading, unthinking, ruthless” (160). His plan for remedying thissituation involved better planning, but not planning of the traditional top-downkind. MacKaye saw exploration as the root of effective planning. Whereas, inpast times, exploration involved following North America’s waterways deep intothe continent, the new exploration called for study of the flow of raw materialsand populations. MacKaye’s concern with exploration of topography and popu-lations over regions, coupled with Geddes’s (1915) sociographic method, met inMumford’s unique brand of regionalism.

Over the twenty or so years that Mumford wrote about regional survey, ashift in its purpose took place. Early on, he wrote of it primarily as a methodfor ensuring that urban/regional planning was undertaken in as holistic a manneras possible, but, gradually, he increasingly began to write of regional survey asan educational method. Although he saw it as a method that would help enrichstudents’ educational experiences, Mumford also viewed it as a catalyst for socio-cultural reformation. In what follows, we touch upon a few of Mumford’s worksto describe his general idea of regional survey as well as its development as anidea over time.

Toward the end of The Story of Utopias, Mumford ([1922] 1959) introducesregional survey as a means to mediate the science–values split that he sees as sodamaging to society. In articulating the problems caused by this schism, Mumfordnotes, “Scientific knowledge has not merely heightened the possibilities of life inthe modern world: it has lowered the depths. When science is not touched by a senseof value it works—as it fairly consistently has during the past century—towards acomplete dehumanization of the social order” ([1922] 1959, 276). Foreshadowinghis argument against the excesses of disciplinary provincialism, he states, “Theplea that each of the sciences must be permitted to go its own way without controlshould be immediately rebutted by pointing out that they obviously need a littleguidance when their applications in war and industry are so plainly disastrous”(276–277). At this early stage, Mumford described regional survey as follows:

The aim of Regional Survey is to take a geographic region and explore it fromevery aspect. It is . . . a survey of the existing conditions in all their aspects; and itemphasizes . . . the natural characteristics of the environment, as they are discoveredby the geologist, the zoologist, the ecologist—in addition to the development ofnatural and human conditions in the historic past as presented by the anthropologist,the archaeologist, and the historian. In short, the regional survey attempts a localsynthesis of all the specialist ‘knowledges.’ ([1922] 1959, 279)

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For Mumford, overcoming the barrier separating science and values was in-tegrally related to overcoming the barriers between the disciplines. In The Storyof Utopias, Mumford positions the regional survey as a way to make localities(regional ones) matter in an effort to use place to facilitate the breakdown of thevarious barriers mentioned above.

As early as The Story of Utopias, Mumford ([1922] 1959) was already thinkingof regional survey as more than a better way to gather information or to planfor the future. As his thought matured, Mumford began to consider the possibil-ities for regional survey to serve as an educational method. By the time he waswriting Values for Survival (1946) in the late thirties and early forties, Mumfordhad become explicit about the connections between regionalism, regional survey,education, and social reconstruction. In terms of historical context, it is interestingto note that the part of Values for Survival under scrutiny here was written in 1939,a decidedly dark and pessimistic time during which the specter of totalitarianismhung heavy over intellectual discourse. And although Mumford was rarely labeledan optimist even in happier times, Mumford, in Values for Survival, writes of thepromise of this new form of education to remake our society in fundamental ways:“Regional survey itself is a program of acting and doing, as well as knowing.. . . [It] carries with it, as part of its method, the habit of thinking interrelatedlyan acting co-operatively: It makes the fact of society real in practice as well asconstant in thought” (153). As this passage continues, Mumford weaves togethermany of the threads he spun in earlier writings on the topic, optimistically notinghow interrelational thinking and cooperative action:

breaks down the disabling breach between past conditions and future possibilities.Rational co-ordination and purposive planning with widespread participation atevery stage of the process, constitute the only alternative to arbitrary compulsion. . . .

Because regional survey is a study of social processes and activities, it leads inevitablyto critical revaluations, and finally to the formation of policies, plans, and projectsthat will alter the existing situation. A generation that had really grasped its regionand its community would know what to do about them. It is ignorance—ignoranceof goals and purposes as well as ignorance of conditions—that handicaps desire.(1946, 153–154)

Finally, in Values for Survival (1946), Mumford details how regional surveycould fit in to the enterprise of schooling and of schooling’s potential place inwider social realms:

Regional survey is not something to be added to an already crowded curriculum.It is rather (potentially) the backbone of a drastically revised method of study inwhich every aspect of the sciences and the arts is ecologically related from thebottom up, in which they connect directly and constantly in the student’s experienceof his region and his community. Regional survey must begin with the infant’s first

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exploration of his dooryard and his neighborhood; it must continue to expand anddeepen, at every successive stage of growth, until the student is capable of seeingand experiencing, above all, of relating and integrating and directing the separateparts of his environment, hitherto unnoticed or dispersed. Social action, in a balancedsociety, rests upon this sort of balanced understanding. (152)

EDUCATIONAL IMPLICATIONS OF THEDEWEY–MUMFORD COMPARISON

In what follows, we consider what scrutiny of Dewey and Mumford’s ideas to-gether might have to offer the educational realm. First, we argue that Mumford’svision of social change becomes clearer when his educational ideas are included.Next, we discuss implications of the differences in Dewey and Mumford’s ideasabout the appropriate location of schooling. Finally, we suggest Mumford’s re-gional survey-based education as a suitable means toward Dewey’s vision of ademocratized science.

Recovering Mumfordian Regionalism as a Path to Social Changeand as a Form of Education

Although Westbrook (1990) rightly points out that the two men had very dif-ferent ideas about where best to focus efforts toward social reconstruction, hedoes not address Mumford’s regionalism, which was clearly a cornerstone of histhought. This lacuna can be detected in the claims that Westbrook makes aboutMumford—he suggests that Mumford “believed that a reorientation of Americanvalues could take place without (widespread political effort) though he did notindicate how this would occur” (Westbrook 1990, 313). He also cites, as evidencesupporting this charge against Mumford, Dewey’s comments about Mumford’s in-ability to provide means to accomplish his desired ends: “Not all who say Ideals,Ideals, shall enter the kingdom of the ideal, but those who know and who respectthe roads that conduct to the kingdom” (313).

We grant Westbrook’s (1990) point that Dewey’s comments were wrapped upin the “inconclusive debate over The Golden Day (that) generated long-lastingbitterness” and got in the way of any possible intellectual interchange (313). Weargue that, although it is true that Mumford was not as clear as he might have been,scrutiny of his body of work shows that he did propose a specific route toward socialimprovement in the form of his notion of regionalism. Furthermore, education andschooling served a crucial function in his explanation of how regionalism couldbecome embedded in the American mindset. It is likely that our perspective asphilosophers of education is helpful here in providing a useful alternative, as it wasMumford’s increasingly nuanced thinking about the potential for regional survey

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to serve as an education that would lead to broad and meaningful social change.Although, in contrast to Dewey, Mumford did not focus on political engagement, hedid propose a means to his end of social improvement and, like Dewey, educationwas at its center. Just as Dewey saw the possibilities for the schools to help fosterthe development of better civic participants, Mumford saw a radically remadeeducation as the way to social change. The key point that Westbrook ultimatelyfails to acknowledge is that Mumford saw schooling through regional surveyas a means by which democracy could reach its potential in the United States.Mumford’s regional survey, although having much in common with certain tenetsof Dewey’s educational philosophy and practice also possessed some pronouncedand fundamental differences, one of which is where schooling ought to primarilytake place.

An Obscured Difference: The Proper Location for Education

Dewey, although a staunch defender of the idea that a fundamental problem ofschooling was that it had become too abstracted from life, also tended to seethe solution as an infusion of relevance into the school,8 whereas Mumford’ssolution to the problem of abstraction was to get students out of the school andinto their region. Dewey wrote enough on education that it isn’t hard to find somesuggestions that students should actually leave the physical structure of school,(see for example the third chapter of School and Society, 1990, where he touts thebenefits of museum education). That said, his overriding conception of school wasthat it was a necessary social organ, given the increasing complexity of society.School necessarily organized and packaged much of what needed to be learned.

Mumford, like Dewey, saw social pathologies emerging from the abstractionof school from life. Both thinkers saw an overly bookish and abstract schooling asleading to many problems, from students’ lacking interest in their studies, to a lackof connection between schooling and daily life. Both men also saw the abstractionof knowledge from the rest of life as leading to the rise of a technocratic classand the sharp separation between science-technology and morality. Mumford’ssolution, similar to Dewey’s, called for a reintegration of life and schooling. Thekey difference was one of place. That is, Mumford wanted to locate school in thecommunity (in the geographic region, to be exact). Recall that Mumford’s regionalsurvey was expressly intended to contextualize the specialist’s expert and abstractknowledge in the context of student’s physical and social region. Thus, studentswould first learn in and about the region, and only later would they generalize thisknowledge.

Deweyans could certainly learn from looking at Mumford’s regional survey-based education. It is very easy to see Mumford’s regional survey as a strongphilosophical base for a place-based environmental education that would seek

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to overcome some of the excess of globalization and might lead us down a moresustainable path. Because Mumford called for overt focus on the interplay betweenthe regional environment and our social arrangements, Mumford’s regional surveyseems a more promising philosophical base for contemporary environmentally-conscious education than does Dewey’s philosophy of education.

That said, it is also true that the Deweyan proviso against unduly fixed endsmight add some humility to Mumford’s project. Dewey’s detractors are oftentroubled by his lack of specificity regarding his educational ideas. His talk aboutorganism and environment is one example of this. Yet, although it might be truethat a regional boundary might be best in some contexts and for some ends, it isalso true that rigidly adhering to such boundaries would likely lead to its own setof problems in other contexts. For example, it is easy to see how regional surveycould lead to a very provincial outlook; a more cosmopolitan approach mightoccasionally be needed. Dewey’s seeming indecision about the proper boundariesof education do not preclude Mumfordian regionalism—they just don’t anoint it asthe one true proper framework for education. In this way, Dewey’s flexibility canbe used to help overcome the rigidity in many educational agendas and Mumford’sprogram is no different.

Dewey and Mumford’s Commitment to a Humbleand Humanized Science

The ways in which Mumford’s notion of regional survey-based education aresympathetic and often even complementary to Dewey’s educational prescriptionsare striking. The fact that their educational ideas and work are rarely connectedis evidence that the pragmatic acquiescence controversy stifled any potential col-laboration or recognition of the ways in which the two men’s thought was well-aligned. Mumford’s regional survey provides the means to Mumford’s socialreconstruction—the “roads that conduct to the kingdom” (as cited in Westbrook1990, 313)—that Dewey claims are lacking in Mumford’s thought. Although spacedoes not permit extended treatment of how this regional outlook and regional sur-vey in its educational manifestation can help realize the Deweyan aims of relevant,dynamic, and democratic schools, take a moment to consider some of the paral-lels. First, recall that Dewey lamented the general public’s loss of scientific andtechnological knowledge and that he hoped that a more relevant curriculum mighthelp reconnect people to the land, to scientific inquiry and to the origins of techno-logical developments. He hoped that the public could “use and control” scientificand technological change rather than simply “undergo the consequences” (1927,165).

Although Mumford did not often use this kind of rhetoric, regional survey was,in effect, an attempt to democratize science. It was designed to do more than make

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people aware or competent in scientific thinking—with this new tool, Mumfordsought to foster agency among all community members so that they could usescience to increase their understanding of and develop a love for their regionalcommunities. Mumford sketches an educational method with some very similaraims to that of Dewey, and he sketches it at least as clearly as Dewey ever did.

There is at least some evidence that Mumford recognized this overlap in methodand aims. Although Dewey and Mumford were never able, publicly, to get past thepragmatic acquiescence debacle, Mumford wrote some approving words aboutDewey’s educational ideas in 1966 while reflecting on his mentor Patrick Geddes’first and only trip to the United States in 1923. Mumford (1995) recounted:

To show how closely Dewey’s educational influence had paralleled (Geddes’) doc-trines, I took him one day to my dear friend Caroline Pratt’s City and CountrySchool in West Twelfth Street. I had expected him to be enthusiastic about a plan ofeducation that shied away from abstraction and verbalisms . . . and that sent groupsof children out to various parts of the city to explore its daily life and recapture itin paintings, blocks, and stories. Was this not Geddes’ Regional Survey realized ineducation? (347–348; italics added)

CONCLUSION: REGIONAL SURVEY AND DEWEYANDEMOCRATIC EDUCATION

Clearly, Mumford misinterpreted Dewey both in The Golden Day (Mumford 1957)and in the subsequent conflict between the two thinkers. This does not mean, how-ever, that Mumford did not have something to contribute to education or to Deweyscholarship. The recklessness and vitriol of much of the pragmatic acquiescencedebate simply made it less likely that those in the Dewey-influenced sphere ofphilosophy of education would ever get access to or be able to recognize whatMumford could contribute. This exchange follows a familiar pattern: Mumfordgets some facet of Dewey’s thought wrong yet still comes up with something in-teresting in its own right, but the ideas never get to interact meaningfully becauseof the unfortunate barrier between the men.

It seems that the biggest problem that came out of the dust up is not that the twomen are seen as enemies. Rather, the greatest problem is that Mumford’s educa-tional ideas weren’t given enough credit, nor was the educational potential of theseideas ever sufficiently explored. It is likely that progressive education is weaker fornot having Mumford’s ideas to react to, borrow from, and otherwise interact with.Bracketing the vitriol and anger endemic to the two men’s interactions, it becomeseasy to see that Mumford’s educational ideas might serve as a worthwhile friendlyamendment to Dewey’s vision of relevant, meaningful schooling. We believe thatMumford’s regional survey provides a promising place to start in the effort to

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reconcile Dewey’s (and the contemporary Deweyan) ambition for social changewith current educational practices and the particular needs of our contemporarycontext. In the end, we are arguing for infusing Deweyan democratic educationwith the spirit and practices of Mumford’s regional survey as a way to invigoratecurrent ideas about possibilities of progressive education. The ongoing need forcontemporary efforts to bring the ideas of Dewey and Mumford together suggeststhat we are still feeling the effects of the “pragmatic acquiescence” controversy.

Notes

1. Mumford memorably maintained that, for the unfortunate denizens of the pragmatic andutilitarian twentieth century, the thinkers of the Golden Day were “like citrus fruits offeredto a crew suffering from scurvy” (Mumford 1957, xvii).2. The entire Dewey–Mumford exchange, complete with relevant passages from The GoldenDay and all replies, was reprinted in Pragmatism in American Culture (Kennedy 1950), anedited volume of essays critical of pragmatism.3. For a full account of Dewey’s engagement with science and technology, readers wouldbe well advised to refer to John Dewey’s Pragmatic Technology (Hickman 1990).4. There are a number of worthwhile sources that shed light on Dewey’s early writings. Someuseful books are A Search for Unity in Diversity (Good 2005), Young John Dewey (Coughlan1975), Becoming John Dewey (Dalton 2002), and John Dewey’s Empirical Theory ofKnowledge and Reality (Shook 2000). Helpful articles regarding Dewey and Hegel include“The ‘Permanent Deposit’ of Hegelian Thought in Dewey’s Theory of Inquiry” (Garrison2006), “Dewey between Hegel and Darwin” (Rorty 1995), and “Uncovering HegelianConnections” (Waddington 2010).5. Ernest Renan was a nineteenth-century French thinker. Dewey is particularly interestedin one of his early (1848) works, The Future of Science.6. Aside from The Dewey School (Mayhew and Edwards 1936), there are several other booksand articles that shed light on education at the Dewey School. These include Educationin the Technological Society (Wirth 1972), John Dewey as Educator (Wirth 1966), JohnDewey’s Laboratory School: Lessons for Today (Tanner 1997), and “The Plural Worlds ofEducational Research” (Condliffe-Lagemann 1989).7. Geddes and Mumford built on the work of the French sociologist Frederic LePlay. Infact, the term natural region comes directly from LePlay’s work in the combined disciplineof sociography.8. Although this worry about abstraction is a nearly constant theme in Dewey’s work, theearly pages of Democracy and Education provide perhaps his clearest description of thisposition.

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