A volume in Research in Curriculum and Instruction Series Editor: O. L.
Davis, Jr. The University of Texas at Austin Matthew Arnold, 19th
century English poet, literary critic and school inspector, felt that
each age had to determine that philosophy that was most adequate to its
own concerns and contexts. This study looks at the influence that
Matthew Arnold had on John Dewey and attempts to fashion a philosophy of
education that is adequate for our own peculiarly awkward age. Today,
Arnold and Dewey are embraced by opposing political positions. Arnold,
as the apostle of culture, is often advocated by conservative educators
who see in him a support for an education founded on great books and
Victorian values, while Dewey still has a notably liberal coloring and
is not too infrequently tarred for the excesses of progressive
education, even those for which he bears no responsibility at all. Both,
no doubt, are misread by those who rather carelessly use them as idols
for their own politics of education. This study proposes a pluralistic
approach to education in which pluralism means not only plurality of
voices, but also plurality of processes. Using a model built out of a
study of rhetoric and hermeneutics, four aspects of mind are indentified
that draw Arnold and Dewey into close correspondence. These aspects are
the tentacle mind (using Dewey's favorite metaphor for breaking down the
barrier between mind and body), the critical mind (which builds on the
concepts of criticism that animated both Arnold and Dewey's approach to
experience), the intentional mind (which attempts a long overdue
rehabilitation of the concept of authority and an expansion upon the
increasingly apparent limitations of reader-response theory) and the
reflective-response mind (in which the contemplative mind is treated to
that active quality that makes it more a true instrumentality and less
an obscuring mechanism of isolation). Dewey echoed Matthew Arnold who
himself echoed so many of the voices that preceded and were contemporary
with his own. Theirs were awkward echoes, as all such echoes invariably
are. They caught at the intentionality of those voices they echoed,
trying for nearness, but hoping, at least, for adequacy. Awkward, but
adequate, is what this study offers, but it may well be what we most
need right now.
