Book Review

Thomas D. Fallace. Dewey and the Dilemma of Race: An Intellectual History,1895–1922. New York: Teachers College Press, 2010. 224 pp. Cloth$68.00. Paperback $31.95.

It’s not often that a scholarly book elicits a deeply satisfied “wow!” fromits readers, but this is the effect that Thomas D. Fallace’s Dewey and theDilemma of Race: An Intellectual History, 1895–1922 had on me. More awork of history than intellectual biography, education, or critical phi-losophy of race, yet deftly combining the strengths of all four fields,this book persuasively argues that Dewey’s views on race evolved fromthe often-ignored ethnocentrism of his early and middle work to thewell-known and much-celebrated cultural pluralism of his later work. Inthe book’s seven chapters, Fallace demonstrates that Dewey’s pre-1916thought, including his work at the University of Chicago (1894–1904)developing his laboratory school, operated with a linear historicism anda genetic psychology that privileged white over non-white and “off-white” people. Dewey’s pedagogy and philosophy of this era aligned anaccount of child development with the development of the race, bothfrom savagery to the civilized. This alignment resulted in the treatmentof African Americans and Native Americans as childlike races who hadbeen left behind in humanity’s evolution toward Western civilization,and the need to forcibly assimilate allegedly socially deficient immi-grants such as the Polish, who were seen as resistant to, but salvageableby America’s scientific democracy.

Dewey’s linear historicism placed history and the development ofthe human race on a single trajectory that progressed from the primi-tive to the civilized. As Fallace carefully explains, Dewey rejected viewsof his day that posited any racial group as inherently inferior to an-other. He also rejected forms of neo-Lamarckianism that held whitepeople to be biologically superior to people of color. For Dewey, allhumans develop in and through transaction with their environments.But some groups of humans have more sophisticated, scientific, anddemocratic environments with which to transact, and those groups be-come civilized while others inevitably are stuck in earlier stages of therace’s progression. The “stuck” groups are all non-white, on Dewey’saccount. Quoting from Dewey’s 1908 co-authored ethics textbook, Fal-lace demonstrates that Dewey explicitly held the primitive races to be“‘the so-called totem group, which is found among North AmericanIndians, Africans and Australians, and was perhaps the early form ofSemitic groups’” (p. 7).

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The ethnocentrism of Dewey’s linear historicism combined withthe genetic psychology of his account of child development produceparticularly racist results. Dewey understood children to be like theprimitive and adults to be like the civilized person into which the prim-itive develops. Just as the human race has progressed from savage tocivilized, so too does each individual human in the course of his orher growth into a mature person. The task of the nation’s educationalsystem, then, is to reenact the experience of the human race for itspupils, to have each child “reliv[e] the social experience of the race”(p.33). For example, students might “reinvent” the spear to accomplisha needed task, and in that way they would engage in the process ofreflective problem solving that later would develop into full-blown sci-entific inquiry. These statements need to be qualified, however, for itis not all children who can mature into civilized adults. While Deweynever explicitly admits this, an implication of his position is that onlywhite children can mature culturally (vs. physically) because only theyhave the social and other environments that allow their race to progress.Dewey’s curriculum thus is implicitly modeled on and designed to fur-ther the development of white children, not children of all races. Onlywhite children can progress from savagery to civilization in the courseof their education into adulthood. As Fallace suggests, the combinationof Dewey’s linear historicism with his genetic psychology means thatwhite children might be like primitives, but non-white children are andalways will be primitives, and so at the individual level as well as thegroup level, non-white people, including adults, are forever stuck inchildlike primitivism.

One of the provocative claims of Fallace’s book is that Dewey’s ma-jor works on education—The School and Society (1900), The Child and theCurriculum (1902), and Democracy and Education (1916)—were writtenduring a period when Dewey’s thought was thoroughly steeped in linearhistoricism and genetic psychology. As Fallace claims, “ethnocentrismwas built right into Dewey’s early pedagogy and philosophy; it was partof its weight bearing structure” (p. 4). Dewey scholars therefore cannotjust sidestep or ignore terms such as “savage,” “barbarian,” and “prim-itive” when they read them in these and other works. These are notmere words that can be excised neatly from Dewey’s text. They rep-resent significant concepts in Dewey’s early to middle thinking abouthow learning takes place, how a democratic society should be consti-tuted, and what human development and progress mean. For educatorstoday, this means that Dewey’s major works on education generallyare not a source for culturally pluralist ideas that promote a genuinedemocracy, as they often are taken to be. In fact, just the opposite: theyoften are a source for educational ideas and practices that underminecultural pluralism and democratic communities. For this reason, Fallace

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“question[s] whether educators of the present can or should rip Dewey’searly and middle ideas from the context that engendered them and ap-ply them to current educational problems, issues, and agendas withoutexplicitly recognizing that they are doing so” (p. 9). In addition to cau-tioning against an anachronistic usage of Dewey’s work on education,an implication of Fallace’s position is that contemporary scholars ofeducation should read more of Dewey’s later works, beginning perhapswith the transitional Human Nature and Conduct (1922) but certainlywith Experience and Nature (1925). It is these later works, as Fallaceexplains, in which Dewey abandoned his earlier linear historicism andgenetic psychology for an appreciation of multiple, diverse cultures andenvironments.

And yet, discarding Dewey’s pre-1916 work is not the answer tothe problem of Dewey’s early ethnocentrism. For one reason, as Fal-lace points out, it is the pre-1916 work that concentrates not just oneducational issues and practices, but on children rather than adults. Asphilosophers in particular go about examining metaphysical, political,epistemological, ethical, and other questions, they are notorious forwriting and thinking as if human beings are born as fully formed adults.In my view, more philosophical work is needed on how human beingsand their various habits initially are constituted, which means turningto infancy and childhood. Dewey is one of the few major philosophersin the canon who offers a philosophical focus on childhood, problem-atic though it may be, and it would be a shame to discard his example,even if we also would be misguided by following it too closely. An-other reason that discarding Dewey’s pre-1916 work on education isnot a satisfactory solution is that Dewey himself never rejected it, evenas he transitioned to his later cultural pluralism in which, in Fallace’swords, “it [is] almost as if the University Chicago laboratory schoolhad never existed” (p. 145). “Dewey never explicitly denounced any ofhis earlier writings on education,” as Fallace explains, and as late as1934 Dewey wrote an introduction to a book on the Dewey school inwhich “he essentially defended the linear historicist curriculum he de-veloped” in Chicago (p. 168). Fallace argues that instead of discardingDewey’s early to middle work or, alternatively, attempting to ignoreits ethnocentrism, educators, philosophers, and other scholars shouldacknowledge a gradual and meaningful shift in Dewey’s thinking overthe course of his career. This shift is one of growth, which means thatlater stages build beyond earlier stages without completely discardingthe earlier ones. In a Hegelian-sounding conclusion, Fallace claimsthat “Dewey’s later position did not negate the previous one; rather,it incorporated it,” with the understanding that “incorporate” means“incorporate (through contradiction)” (p. 169).

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My only quibble with Fallace’s book is that he closes it by charac-terizing his way of reading Dewey as a “genetic psychological approach”that, unlike the genetic psychology of Dewey’s day, does not “ascribeinherent superiority to those who are at a higher stage” (p. 169). I do notthink this approach satisfactorily answers the question of how to readDewey’s pre-1916 work and, in particular, how to respond to its eth-nocentrism. Fallace’s invocation of psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg’swork on moral stages as part of a “Deweyan tradition” that shows how“humans develop through universal, sequential stages of mental de-velopment” only adds to my concern. For all the problems of CarolGilligan’s In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Devel-opment (1982), for example, its criticism of the male-privileging indi-vidualism in Kohlberg’s moral stages of development is right on target.Gilligan’s work also implicitly raises questions about the application ofKohlberg’s “moral developmental scheme . . . to non-Western individ-uals and cultures” and contributes to my skepticism of Fallace’s claimthat Kohlberg’s theory is a model for eliminating the cultural bias foundin Dewey’s earlier thought (p.169). Fallace is right that Dewey’s viewsevolved over the course of his career and that the continuity of theirevolution was neither inevitable nor seamlessly smooth. He does notneed the baggage of a Kohlbergian genetic hermeneutics in his finalfew pages to successfully make that argument.

And successfully make it, he does. One of the reasons Dewey andthe Dilemma of Race is such a powerful book is that it appreciates thecomplexity, originality, and historical context of Dewey’s ideas on ed-ucation, even as it questions their applicability in the present. This isnot a book filled with Dewey bashing even though it honestly confrontssome of the most distasteful and disappointing ideas in Dewey’s phi-losophy and pedagogy. For this reason, Dewey and the Dilemma of Raceis a must-read for educators, philosophers, historians, and anyone elseinterested in how a towering figure in American philosophy and educa-tion grappled with his age’s views on race, democracy, pedagogy, andevolution. In particular, it is a must-read for educators who might betempted to peruse only “the education books” in Dewey’s corpus anduncomplicatedly apply them to current educational practices and schol-arship. And it also is a must-read for American philosophers and criticalphilosophers of race who often concentrate exclusively on Dewey’s laterwork and do not fully understand what was involved in the shift fromDewey’s early and middle to later period. Dewey still has much to teachus today, philosophers and educators alike, but only if we approach hisideas with the brilliant and detailed care that Fallace has done.

Pennsylvania State University Shannon Sullivan