Chapter 3: Education as Direction

In Chapter 3 of Democracy and Education, Dewey is mainly concerned with addressing how a school environment should be socially directed or guided rather than physically controlling. However, what caught my interest is his attention to the relationship between language and society's tools or artifacts. One risk in responding chapter-by-chapter is that in any given entry I may be missing the big picture. Nevertheless, here it strikes me that Dewey may be flipping the coin from Vygotsky when it comes to tool and sign.


My understanding is that for Vygotsky, sign, especially language, is a system by which we create meaning. We use language to access and manage our own thought and develop our intentions which we then carry out by directing tools. For Dewey, meaning seems already to reside in cultural artifacts. It has been placed there over time through the accumulated use of the tool in social practice. Language is then the tool of tools* in the sense that artifacts use language to efficiently commune with the user to operationalize their action (to bring the tool back to life in the context of new activity). Dewey states,

Since language represents the physical conditions that have been subjected to the maximum transformation in the interests of social life--physical things which have lost their original quality in becoming social tools--it is appropriate that social tools should play a large part compared with other appliances (p. 35, emphasis added).

It would seem that one thing (language) can only "represent" another thing (physical things) if that other thing takes precedence by virtue of being original. In the opening to 2001: A Space Odyssey, for example--when the ape takes up the bone as a weapon--for Vygotsky, it's as if the bone needs to be given the name of weapon before it can be used as such, whereas for Dewey, the intention to strike can be embodied in the club before the ape gives that intention a name.

Dewey goes on to say, "By it [language] we are led to share vicariously in past human experience, thus widening and enriching the experience of the present" (p. 35). This statement reminds me of Roy Pea's (1993) statement that "tools literally carry intelligence in them." It suggests to me that meaning is located in human artifacts. It's built up there by humans over time, and language is just what we use to articulate (not create) that meaning.

*NB: I am bringing this term in from Dewey's later work, Experience and Nature (1925/1971, p. 140), in a rather unexamined way.