Dewey & Rorty on democracy and higher education

...The practice of instrumentalizing higher education, of justifying university study exclusively in terms of the advantages it brings to a consumer in the job market, comes as at a price: it narrows higher education as a training ground for economic prosperity, for getting ahead of others, killing off any love that might be attached to university life. Universities appeal to and encourage the egotism of students by offering them a product whose primary use is to help them climb the professional and social ladder. But if students can only relate to their university education this way, they will miss what is arguably the distinctive and most important thing about it.

Delighting in Growth

Universities, ideally speaking, can be places that cultivate the process of self-growth. As the pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty has put it, studying in universities allows students to undergo 'self-enlargement'. Self-enlargement is Rorty's take on what his fellow pragmatist and educationalist John Dewey called 'growth'. Growth as self-enlargement occurs in two main ways: through projects of self-creation and widening relations of solidarity. Self-creation involves the making of oneself anew and the adoption for oneself of a 'final vocabulary', or a language that expresses one's commitments, self-projects, and understanding and relationship with others and the world. Widening solidarity involves expanding the group to which one feels some belonging. At the heart of both are encounters with real or imaginary people, and these encounters reveal the limits and narrowness of one's previous sense of self. In taking knowingness and self-satisfaction as its enemies, a culture of self-enlargement is the opposite of a culture of egotism.

When serving the goal of self-enlargement, a university education will be one in which the love of learning—doing experiments, reading books, engaging in conversation, learning from the experiences of people unlike ourselves, discovering the life of other communities, and so on—finds full and inclusive expression. Going to university, understood as a place where projects of self-creation and unknown solidarities beckon, would be more like entering a romance that inspires and expands one's experience of life, rather than steeling oneself for success in a particular occupation.

Education for Democracy

It is also by realizing the goal of self-enlargement – by facilitating projects of self-creation and widening solidarities – that a university education contributes fundamentally to democracy. For democracy, understood not so much as a technique of government but as a way of living together, is precisely the form of collective life bound together by this ideal. The citizens of a democracy, in this expansive sense, are patriotic about the form of life in which individuals can recreate themselves within an ever-widening sense of community. As understood by Dewey and Rorty, democracy is fundamentally a growth-bringing, self-enlarging experiment in living – an education writ large in which everyone participates.

If this is right, then the problem with cultures of egotism is not just their epistemic arrogance and skill for romance-stopping: they are also a threat to democracy in the expansive sense. Egotism in universities is incompatible with their educative function in a democracy. Much of the misery of the contemporary university, its 'dark side', can be understood as a consequence of this self-absorbed culture. We should stand up to egotism, wherever it exists.

Note: This essay is based on the chapter "A Culture of Egotism: Rorty and Higher Education", The Promise of the University: Reclaiming Humanity, Humility, and Hope, ed. Áine Mahon, forthcoming with Springer.