Dewey and the Art of Cooking

How I explained the fallacy of reification (the philosophical fallacy for Dewey) to students in my Philosophy of Education course. We're currently reading Democracy and Education. Its a bit heady for a blog post, I know, but this fallacy lies at the heart of the majority of problems in our current education system. If you can get it, it will do a lot of work for you and it may change your life, as it did mine.


All: 

I mentioned in class that I was going to try and send a quote to illustrate the point further, but I thought I would send both an example and a quote. Don't worry if you're struggling to understand what Dewey means when he says we confuse ends with means. This is a very difficult concept to grasp,  in part because we have the weight of a culture which repeatedly makes this mistake bearing down on us. Yet, Dewey will argue that committing this mistake is one of the major problems pushing our schooling in the wrong direction. So, here is my attempt at an example, which popped into my head last night as I was cooking dinner (yes, this is what I think about while I'm cooking dinner).

Dewey will argue that traditional models of education commit a major fallacy when they confuse the recipe for Chicken Marsala (the formulaic outcome) for cooking the dish we call Chicken Marsala (the process). Dewey will argue that learning is not something which should focus on the recipe. Instead, it should focus on the cooking, even though the two are related.

The relationship between the two (means/ends) might be explained this way. I can go to my cookbook at home, open it and find a recipe for Chicken Marsala. Yet, that recipe was not given to me or anyone else in culture transcendentally, but was created through a historical process of transaction between individuals and the environment. This historical process was a bit like playing telephone and you can imagine it extending back as far as simply learning to put meat over a fire, to understanding how to mix ingredients, to developing a taste for the different ingredients, to throwing the ingredients together, and all the way to throwing all the ingredients together in certain portions for certain amounts of time, etc.... Each person tweaked it a bit, experimented a bit, threw in something new (e.g. "This chicken tastes good with some lemon juice," or "I think it should be cooked longer and at a lower temperature.") At the end of that process, viola, we had something that tastes pretty darn good, and we decided to call it Chicken Marsala! In fact, people in history have done us a huge favor not only by (a) naming the result of the process 'Chicken Marsala' to help us distinguish it from other dishes, but they also (b) put the steps they took during their process of cooking into written language, as a way to help guide and direct our own process of creating Chicken Marsala at home (in other words, so we could reproduce their process on our own). In the end, culture has passed down a basic experimental formula (recipe) for the process of cooking a dish.

Yet, having the recipe manifested in language confuses us in a number of ways. First, we often (falsely) think the recipe has always and will always exist in the same way. In other words, 'Chicken Marsala' has been the same thing in all places and times. Second, it confuses us into committing the fallacy of reification. In other words, we think that the literal process of creating fabulous dish on my plate is the same thing as the recipe written in my cookbook, when (in fact) the recipe is simply some crib sheets passed down to me. Further, the thing on my plate will really never be the same each time I go through the process because I am constantly involved in tweaking, adjusting, and putting my own spin on how that recipe is applied in practice. Third (and the major problem in education) is that traditional education is focused almost exclusively on forcing students to focus on the recipe, because it believes that the recipe will give you the skills to cook. In fact, the recipe is only a tiny fraction of what's involved in cooking. The learning is the cooking, itself, with a few helpful hints from the cookbook to help guide and direct the action in environment. We don't need to know the recipe divorced from the process, but how the recipe functions for us in our own cooking, based on our own taste, and with the ingredients we have in our kitchen. Further, we should never be fooled into belieiving the the recipe is anything more than a set of crib notes handed down to help us solve our own problems. When we focus on the crib notes exclusively, we never encounter the problem at-hand: the act of getting dinner on the table.

Dewey's definition of education goes this way: "[education] is the reconstruction or reorganization of experience which adds to the meaning of experience, and which increases the ability to direct the course of subsequent experience" (Democracy and Education, 74). Further, "the essential contrast of the idea of education as continuous reconstruction with the other one-sided conceptions which have been criticized in this and the previous chapter is that it identifies the end (the result) and the process" (Democracy and Education, 75).