TOWARDS INQUIRY BASED EDUCATION 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
by 
 
VERNON ANTHONY CARTER 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
A THESIS 
 
Presented to the Department of Philosophy 
and the Graduate School of the University of Oregon 
in partial fulfillment of the requirements 
for the degree of 
Master of Arts  
June 2011 
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THESIS APPROVAL PAGE 
 
Student: Vernon Anthony Carter 
 
Title: Towards Inquiry Based Education 
 
This thesis has been accepted and approved in partial fulfillment of the requirements for 
the Master of Arts degree in the Department of Philosophy by: 
 
Scott L. Pratt Chairperson  
 
and 
 
Richard Linton Vice President for Research and Graduate Studies/Dean of 
the Graduate School  
 
Original approval signatures are on file with the University of Oregon Graduate School. 
 
Degree awarded June 2011 
 iii 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
 
 
 
 
© 2011 Vernon Anthony Carter  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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THESIS ABSTRACT 
 
Vernon Anthony Carter 
 
Master of Arts 
 
Department of Philosophy 
 
June 2011 
 
Title: Towards Inquiry Based Education 
Approved:  _______________________________________________ 
Scott L. Pratt 
 
While John Dewey‟s work on the philosophy of education provides a robust 
descriptive account of educational experience, it does not provide anything like a critical 
system for the analysis of particular educational curricula. This lack has led to a common 
confusion with regard to the nature of an inquiry based education: inquiry too often 
becomes the content, rather than the method, of education. In this thesis, I will show how 
Dewey‟s analysis of educational experience can provide grounds for a critical apparatus 
that might be applied to any curriculum, though especially those founded upon the process 
of inquiry. This critical approach will be applied to an example case, the “ice hands” 
activity from Douglass Llewellyn‟s Inquire Within, demonstrating the gap that often exists 
between the process of inquiry as a description of the process of learning and the process of 
inquiry as the content of a lesson plan. 
 
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CURRICULUM VITAE 
 
NAME OF AUTHOR:  Vernon Anthony Carter 
 
 
 
   
 
 
GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE SCHOOLS ATTENDED: 
 
 University of Oregon, Eugene 
 University of Northern Colorado, Greeley 
  
 
DEGREES AWARDED: 
 
 Master of Arts, 2011, University of Oregon 
 Bachelor of Arts, 2007, University of Northern Colorado 
  
  
AREAS OF SPECIAL INTEREST: 
 
American Pragmatism 
French Post-Structuralism 
German Idealism 
 
 
PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE: 
 
 GTF, English Department, University of Oregon, 2010-2011 
 TA, Philosophy Department, University of Northern Colorado, 2005-2007  
 
 
PUBLICATIONS: 
 
Carter, Vernon, Review of Luce Irigaray‟s Sharing the World, International 
Journal of Philosophic Studies, 2010, Vol. 18, No. 5, pp. 687-690 
 
 
  
 
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 
 
I wish to express sincere appreciation to Professor Pratt for his assistance in the 
preparation of this manuscript. In addition, special thanks are due to Professors Johnson 
and Koopman, who have both contributed substantially to my understanding of American 
Pragmatism and my reading of John Dewey, Professor Gage, who provided me with an 
opportunity to study education first hand, and Professors Toadvine, Zack and Stoller, each 
of whom provided the right sort of interruption of my habits at the right time. I also thank 
Jher for all of his input and help along the way, both of my parents and all of my siblings 
for their love and support, and Maggie, without whom this would have been inconceivable. 
The multitude of teachers, friends and peers that have shaped my journey in profoundly 
positive ways is both astonishing, and entirely impossible to enumerate. 
 vii 
 
 
 
 
 
for my mother, who was my first school 
for my father, who taught me I was free 
and for Maggie, who shares the world with me 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 viii 
 
 
 
 
TABLE OF CONTENTS 
Chapter Page 
 
 
I. INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................... 1 
II. GROWTH AS THE KEY CRITERION OF EDUCATIONAL EXPERIENCE....      5 
 Educative Experience Produces Growth ................................................................ 5 
 Growth Is the Outcome of Inquiry ......................................................................... 11 
 
 Inquiry Is a Result of the Nature of Experience .................................................... 16  
 
 Growth of Growth Is the Aim of Education .......................................................... 24 
 
III. HABIT ANALYSIS............................................................................................... 27 
 The Environment and the Organism ...................................................................... 27 
 Education Is Always Happening ............................................................................ 32 
 Products — Flows — Interruptions ....................................................................... 40 
 New Paths — New Products .................................................................................. 47 
IV. INQUIRE WITHIN ............................................................................................... 51  
 
 Limits and Choice .................................................................................................. 51 
 
 The Ice Hands, Llewellyn‟s Account..................................................................... 55 
 
 Interruption Breakdown ......................................................................................... 60 
 
 Foreseeable Problems ............................................................................................ 66 
 
 Changes .................................................................................................................. 69 
 
V. CONCLUDING REMARKS .................................................................................. 73  
 
 But…Why? ............................................................................................................ 73 
 
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Chapter Page 
 
 Test Strategies ........................................................................................................ 78 
 
 The Silent Generation ............................................................................................ 81 
 
 Another Way .......................................................................................................... 86 
 
 Coda ....................................................................................................................... 89 
 
REFERENCES CITED ................................................................................................ 93 
 x 
 
LIST OF FIGURES 
 
Figure Page 
 
 
1. The Constructivist Inquiry Cycle ........................................................................... 56 
 
2. The Concept Map for Ice ....................................................................................... 58 
  
 
CHAPTER I 
INTRODUCTION 
 
Contemporary calls for educational reform have good reason to draw on the resources of 
John Dewey‟s philosophy of education as one part of a comprehensive re-evaluation of 
pedagogical practice.  However, while Dewey provides a robust descriptive account of 
educational experience, he does not provide anything like a critical system for the 
analysis of particular educational organizations. This lack has led to a common confusion 
with regard to the nature of an inquiry-based education: inquiry too often becomes the 
content, rather than the method, of the education. In this thesis, I will show how Dewey‟s 
analysis of educational experience can provide the ground for a critical apparatus that 
might be applied to any curriculum, though especially those that aim to found themselves 
on the process of inquiry. This critical approach will be applied to an example case, the 
ice hands activity from Douglass Llewllyn‟s Inquire Within, demonstrating the gap the 
often exists between the process of inquiry as a description of the process of learning and 
the process of inquiry as the content of a lesson plan.. 
 
The first chapter consists mainly of an analysis of the key concepts that make up 
Dewey‟s notion of educational experience as an experience that produces growth. Dewey 
tells a robust story of just how learning takes place, but that story is spread through a 
number of Dewey‟s works, including Human Nature and Conduct, Experience and 
Nature, Democracy and Education, Experience and Education, How We Think, Art as 
Experience, et al. The first chapter brings together pieces of this puzzle to provide a 
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coherent picture of just what a Deweyan picture of educational experience amounts to 
through an analysis of the necessary components of growth. While continuity and 
interaction make up Dewey‟s sparse explanation of experience in Education and 
Experience, the full picture of educational experience, as an experience, must include an 
account of the organism/environment system, the relationship between impulse and habit, 
ends-in-view, the occurrence of problematic situations, the pattern of inquiry in response 
to problems, and finally growth as the outcome of a problem resolved. The tight 
connections between these notions makes a simple explication of any one of them alone 
impossible, though the ongoing debates surrounding Dewey‟s notion of growth suggest 
that an analysis that centers on that concept would be of great value. 
 
With this picture sketched out, the second chapter consists of the construction of the 
critical apparatus itself, in this case a set of concepts used to look for the interruptive 
moments that take place within educational practice, thereby initiating the inquiry that 
leads towards growth. Dewey‟s theory of education is purposefully open ended: there is 
much that cannot be specified in advance as a result of the concern for the particular 
environmental and personal circumstances that make up the educational experience. 
However, it is possible to use Dewey‟s concepts as a lens to help us make judgments of a 
given approach to education based on whether that approach will produce beneficial 
growth. The work here will be to turn Dewey‟s descriptive analysis of educational 
experience into a tool for analyzing particular educational practices. This will necessarily 
make heavy use of the concepts outlined in the first part, particularly with regard to the 
intimate connections between ends-in-view and problematic situations. 
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In the third chapter, the critical apparatus will be applied to the example case: the ice 
hands activity from Douglass Llewellyn‟s Inquire Within. Llewellyn‟s work has been 
chosen for its innocuousness before anything else. The ice hands activity that he uses as a 
paradigm example in his book intended to introduce teachers to the inquiry-based method 
of education is not in any obvious way unusual for the field. This chapter consists first of 
an account of that activity broken down into the steps that Llewellyn sets up as the 
schema for any inquiry based activity, and then secondly the application of the critical 
apparatus built in chapter two. With the completion of this chapter, the demonstration of 
the thesis is itself complete: the apparatus built from the foundation of Dewey‟s account 
of educational experience uncovers a gap separating the intended consequences of the ice 
hands activity from potential unintended consequences, and suggests ways in which that 
activity could be improved to further avoid such consequences. 
 
The final chapter then aims to examine to what extent the work accomplished in the 
previous chapters is applicable to other cases, to what degree the results obtained might 
be generalized, as it were. This requires a probing into the level of abstraction made use 
of to accomplish that work, as well as a brief look at a secondary example that is shown 
to parallel Llewellyn‟s ice hands in key ways. It is only there then that we might examine 
the gravity of the current indeterminate situations facing educators today and the relation 
our work here might bear to those problems. 
 
As a final note, it must be said that this work in its current form would not have been 
possible without the use of the Intelex Past Masters digital edition of the 2nd release of 
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Dewey‟s collected works. While many other resources, be they pulp, silicone or flesh and 
blood, made vital contributions, the impact of the technological intervention that is the 
Past Masters series has left a visible mark on the style of the first and final chapters, and 
has transformed the entire process of the work into a cybernetic affair. What follows is 
not the result of human effort, neither singular nor plural, nor the automated result of pure 
machinery, but a cyborg product that announces itself as such. The tools that were 
utilized in the creation of the piece are of such a kind as to have made something that 
could not have been made without them. 
 
Within the body of the text, the numerous references to The Collected Works of John 
Dewey make use of a simple three part system:  ([M for Middle or L for Later]W, Vol. 
[x], pp.[y]).  
 
Whatever the cyborg process has produced though, it remains to be seen in just what way 
the world is shaking, and in what way the seismic waves will reshape the educational 
institutions that now stand, how they will bend or wrinkle, whether they will hold firm or 
collapse and be swept away. One cannot know in advance, and one can only prepare so 
much. Earth shakes, we must respond. 
 
 
 
 
 
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CHAPTER II 
GROWTH AS THE KEY CRITERION OF EDUCATIONAL EXPERIENCE 
Educative Experience Produces Growth 
A philosophy of education, like any theory, has to be stated in words, in symbols. 
But so far as it is more than verbal it is a plan for conducting education. Like any 
plan, it must be framed with reference to what is to be done and how it is to be 
done. The more definitely and sincerely it is held that education is a development 
within, by, and for experience, the more important it is that there shall be clear 
conceptions of what experience is. (LW Vol.13 pp.13)  
 
John Dewey‟s call to bring the philosophy of education into harmony with the clearest 
conceptions of experience brings along with it a demand for a clear conception of just 
what makes a given experience educational. What is it that makes any given experience, 
in the first place, an experience where learning takes place, and then, in addition, an 
experience that makes future experiences more likely to be educational? 
 
While there are, and will remain, difficulties inherent in constructing anything like a 
complete theory of experience, there is at least some degree of consensus among those 
who follow Dewey about the criteria that will class some experiences as educational and 
mark others as being distinctively outside of that category: educational experiences result 
in growth, particularly growth that encourages future growth. Dewey himself was clear 
enough about this in Democracy and Education: “It is a commonplace to say that 
education should not cease when one leaves school. The point of this commonplace is 
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that the purpose of school education is to insure the continuance of education by 
organizing the powers that insure growth.” (MW Vol.9 pp.56)  So far as growth is 
insured, it will continue its process; the school education should promote growth in such 
a way as to allow that growth to continue outside of the school. 
 
If educational experiences are merely those that result in some degree of growth, without 
Dewey‟s further caveat that such growth should make possible further growth, there is 
some worry that growth will lead down the wrong sorts of paths, that education and mis-
education will be impossible to disentangle. “Any experience is mis-educative that has 
the effect of arresting or distorting the growth of further experience.” (LW Vol.13 pp.11) 
This is the importance of the repetition of growth: educational experience results in 
growth that results in growth, mis-educational experience results in growth that block off 
further growth. Dewey elaborates, in an oft-cited passage: 
That a man may grow in efficiency as a burglar, as a gangster, or as a corrupt 
politician, cannot be doubted. But from the standpoint of growth as education and 
education as growth the question is whether growth in this direction promotes or 
retards growth in general. Does this form of growth create conditions for further 
growth, or does it set up conditions that shut off the person who has grown in this 
particular direction from the occasions, stimuli, and opportunities for continuing 
growth in new directions? What is the effect of growth in a special direction upon 
the attitudes and habits which alone open up avenues for development in other 
lines? (LW Vol.13 pp.19) 
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This notion of recursive, self-sustaining growth that is the mark of educational experience 
has survived Dewey well. While it may not always retain its complete structure, we find 
the concept of growth near the center of thought on education throughout the discourse. 
The general sentiment seems to be that, “We know, fundamentally, that education is 
about change and growth” (Allsup 2007). It is used, for example, to argue for the 
inclusion of art in the curriculum, “The individual's growth results in the assimilation of 
new meanings; this factor enriches the individual personality. Aesthetics is one aspect of 
this growth” (Spitzer 1965). The notion of growth as an intrinsic good, something akin to 
(but not to be identified with) an end-in-itself is intuitively agreeable; it is difficult to 
imagine an argument against the proposition, “that which promotes growth is good.” 
 
Often it seems that Dewey‟s notion of growth is so self-sufficient that one need only 
repeat Dewey in order to make use of it, 
Democracy and education, more over, serve to reinforce the same self-renewing 
ethos: “The object and reward of learning is the continued capacity for growth.” 
The object and reward of freedom and self-governance is also the continued 
capacity for growth. This “continued capacity for growth” underlies and sustains 
the relationship between education and experience and democracy. (Garrison 
2003) 
Growth serves here as a kind of foundational concept, one that remains largely analyzed. 
The almost tautological relationship between growth and goodness means that once a 
connection can be made to growth, we can rest assured that we are on the right trail. So 
long, of course, as the growth we are headed towards will also lead us to more growth.  
 8 
 
Breault writes “Dewey warned that it is not sufficient to talk simply of growth as the 
result of activity. We must, instead, „specify the direction in which growth takes place‟” 
(Breault 2005) Perhaps the recursive structure of growth is enough of a guarantee of its 
goodness, though some authors have worried otherwise. Naoto Saito, for example, 
maintains “Growth for more growth is the end of education.” (Saito 2000), but points out 
that growth towards growth may not yet be enough to make sense of the concept of 
growth: the common form of critique seems to be, “growth towards what?” Saito 
observes that Dewey‟s contemporaries Ivan Kandel and Boyd Bode challenged the idea 
of growth. Kandel would argue that Dewey‟s child-centered model of education 
promoted, “the development of individualistic children without any sense of direction, 
responsibility, or ideals, and in the end its fostering of nihilism and anti-intellectualism in 
America” (Saito 2000). In a similar vein, Boyd would argue that there was an internal 
tension in Dewey‟s though between, “as the social and external direction given by the 
adult, and the Rousseauian concept of „self-directing from within‟ the child” (Saito 
2000).   
 
This vagueness about the directionality of growth means that while many have been 
quick to appropriate Dewey‟s growth and put it to use thanks to its intuitive value, there 
have at the same time been many calls reconsider growth as a problematic concept in 
Dewey‟s work that lacks a coherent interpretation. The consensus that growth is the 
prime criterion of educational experience is of little use if the concept of growth itself is 
so open as to make it undecidable whether we have, in any particular instance, a case of 
growth or not. 
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Those who are committed to the notion of growth as the primary criterion of educational 
experience may nod along when Saito says, “In face of this deep-rooted skepticism 
related to the question, „growth towards what?‟ a persuasive defense of Dewey‟s 
alternative idea of growth is urgently needed.” (Saito 2000), but they will likely still 
agree with Pekarsky‟s contention that “although there are many references in the 
literature to the vagueness and untenability of Dewey's views on growth, there have been 
few attempts to examine these views systematically; and those attempts that have been 
made are inadequate" (Pekarsky 1990) 
 
There have, of course, been many attempts to give a more robust account of growth, 
though the range of results is almost astounding: somewhere between Dorothy 
Newbury‟s “Search for the meaning of discipline in Dewey‟s theory of growth” 
(Newbury 1956), which equates discipline with inquiry, to David Cavallo‟s examination 
of a plurality of models of growth (Cavallo 2004) we find Saito‟s account of growth as 
reconstruction of habits, Jerome Popp‟s Darwinian reading of Dewey‟s growth (Popp 
2007), Hickman‟s Hegelian account (Hickman 2009), and more. James Campbell‟s 
argument that, “continuity of growth is the 'end' or purpose of life. Life itself is the 
process." (Campbell 1995) which, if read as in agreement with Sydney Hook‟s earlier 
contention that “human growth cannot be understood without going beyond biology and 
psychology whose terms are abstracted from the inclusive social and cultural matrix. The 
organism grows not only in and with its natural environment; it grows with other 
 10 
 
organisms in society" (Hook 1959) creates problems for anything along the lines of 
Popp's more biological reading of growth.  
 
With such a plurality of perspectives, filled as it is with conflicts not easily resolved, we 
can only return to Dewey‟s demand that “so far as [a theory of educational experience] is 
more than verbal it is a plan for conducting education. Like any plan, it must be framed 
with reference to what is to be done and how it is to be done.” Unless our account of 
growth is such that it might generate a plan for conducting education, it is only so much 
clamor and noise. Our concept must be formed such that it is a tool that might direct our 
future actions; as the case stands, we find ourselves in an indeterminate situation, unable 
to proceed without clarification of meaning. 
 
What follows then is a kind of schematic of the concept of growth in relation to a 
network of other concepts in Dewey‟s work. It is the case that using Dewey‟s notion of 
growth, and growth of growth, to delineate educational experience is only worthwhile so 
long as Dewey‟s account of experience holds water: if our understanding of experience is 
radically different from Dewey‟s, say if we accept Cartesian dualism, there will be no 
sense in pursuing growth as the aim of education. This is important to note because a 
complete account of Dewey‟s concept of experience is beyond the scope of this work. It 
is inevitable that there will remain threads that cannot be pursued down to their ultimately 
grounding premises because, Dewey maintains, no such ultimate grounds exist at all.. We 
can take solace then in the work of those who continue to draw parallels between 
Dewey‟s „experience‟ and more contemporary developments in neuroscience, 
 11 
 
cybernetics, art and so on. (c.f. Johnson 2007, Godfry-Smith 1994, Higgens 2002, 
Fairfield 2010) 
 
Here then growth will be situated within Dewey‟s analysis of experience, but in such a 
way as to make it possible to generate a plan for conducting education. The difficulty of 
this task is something Dewey himself noted: 
I admit gladly that the new education is simpler in principle than the old. It is in 
harmony with principles of growth, while there is very much which is artificial in 
the old selection and arrangement of subjects and methods, and artificiality 
always leads to unnecessary complexity. But the easy and the simple are not 
identical. To discover what is really simple and to act upon the discovery is an 
exceedingly difficult task (LW Vol.13 pp.14) 
 
Growth Is the Outcome of Inquiry 
The view to be developed here and in the following section might be summarized as 
follows: growth is the inevitable result of successful inquiry. Having met some difficulty 
pursuing an end-in-view, an organism must adapt to, or with, its environment by way of 
new habits to overcome the difficulty in question. As we will see in the following, such 
growth is not necessarily good in and of itself: growth is merely the acquiring of new 
habits that overcome some particular problem, and is not yet guaranteed to be growth that 
makes further growth possible, it might even close off such possibilities. For human 
beings, the acquisition of new habits takes the form of enriched meaning of our ongoing 
experience. We will begin then by examining ends-in-view, for it is only as a result of 
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their pursuit that there is ever any need for growth at all, and because it is growth itself 
that is to become the end-in-view of education. 
 
In Democracy and Education, Dewey introduces the notion of end with an example of 
bees, 
Consider for example the activities of bees in contrast with the changes in the 
sands when the wind blows them about. The results of the bees' actions may be 
called ends not because they are designed or consciously intended, but because 
they are true terminations or completions of what has preceded. When the bees 
gather pollen and make wax and build cells, each step prepares the way for the 
next. When cells are built, the queen lays eggs in them; when eggs are laid, they 
are sealed and bees brood them and keep them at a temperature required to hatch 
them. When they are hatched, bees feed the young till they can take care of 
themselves. (MW Vol.9 pp.109) 
It is the temporal sequence, the meaningful order of events, that transforms what would 
otherwise be no different from sands blowing in the wind into action directed towards 
ends. Life then pursues meaningful ends in so far as there are sequences of action that 
regularly occur in a given situation; the „end‟ is that which marks the transition from one 
type of action to another. The completion of a cell means that the queen can lay eggs. 
When a bee‟s legs are thoroughly coated in pollen, it can return to the hive, and so on. 
The end then is both an end in the sense of the ending of a certain kind of action, as well 
as the aim of the action that leads to that end; the action will continue until it reaches its 
end. 
 13 
 
 
To say that people pursue ends then is just to say that human beings engage in 
meaningful action, action that has patterns that suggest what will be done in a given 
situation. But human beings are aware of their ends. This awareness gives us several 
more important features of ends-in-view: 
[T]he aim as a foreseen end gives direction to the activity; it is not an idle view of 
a mere spectator, but influences the steps taken to reach the end. The foresight 
functions in three ways. In the first place, it involves careful observation of the 
given conditions to see what are the means available for reaching the end, and to 
discover the hindrances in the way. In the second place, it suggests the proper 
order or sequence in the use of means. It facilitates an economical selection and 
arrangement. In the third place, it makes choice of alternatives possible. (MW 
Vol.9 pp.109) 
Ends-in-view then organize human experience by orienting us towards objects in our 
environment as potential means for accomplishing our ends or obstacles against it, setting 
up in advance sequences of action that will bring us closer to our goal, and alerting us to 
the various possible sequences that might lead to the same end. This makes it possible for 
people to engage in what Dewey will call a „wide‟ use of reason, where bees might only 
be capable of a much more narrow sort. Narrow reason, “holds a fixed end in view and 
deliberates only upon means of reaching it. [Wide reason] regards the end-in-view in 
deliberation as tentative and permits, nay encourages the coming into view of 
consequences which will transform it and create a new purpose and plan.” (MW Vol.14 
pp.149) 
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Dewey will further maintain that whether wide or narrow, it is not the action that serves 
to accomplish the end-in-view, but instead the end itself that directs the impulse at the 
heart of action: 
Having an end or aim is thus a characteristic of present activity. It is the means by 
which an activity becomes adapted when otherwise it would be blind and 
disorderly, or by which it gets meaning when otherwise it would be mechanical. 
In a strict sense an end-in-view is a means in present action; present action is not a 
means to a remote end. (MW Vol.14 pp.156) 
An end is not then something that we lack and pursue in order to finally possess it, but 
something we have that drives us onward. An end-in-view is thus productive; it is the 
source of meaning that organizes activity into meaningful sequence. Dewey insists that 
ends-in-view, unlike the classical ends-in-themselves, the Good, the Beautiful and the 
True, are not objects of pure contemplation, but instead, 
are intellectual and regulative means, degenerating into reminiscences or dreams 
unless they are employed as plans within the state of affairs. And when they are 
attained, the objects which they inform are conclusions and fulfillments; only as 
these objects are the consequence of prior reflection, deliberate choice and 
directed effort are they fulfillments, conclusions, completions, perfections. (LW 
Vol.1 pp. 85) 
Ends are tools we use to direct our action in the world. So far so good, but we are still a 
few steps from growth. In mundane circumstances, our pursuit of ends-in-view will not 
entail any kind of growth: so long as we do not encounter any unfamiliar obstacle along 
our way, we need not grow to accomplish our tasks. When things run smoothly, we are 
 15 
 
not altogether different from the bees who collect their pollen and produce their honey 
without anything that could be called “education” going on. 
 
It is then, when we encounter problematic situations, that an opportunity for growth 
arises. When we cannot readily accomplish our ends-in-view, when we are unprepared to 
handle the situation at hand, our only choices may be growth or death. Inquiry then is the 
process by which we negotiate a problematic situation in order to grow in such a way as 
to continue our action in the world. This is necessary consequence of the organization of 
life: 
The structure and course of life-behavior has a definite pattern, spatial and 
temporal. This pattern definitely foreshadows the general pattern of inquiry. For 
inquiry grows out of an earlier state of settled adjustment, which, because of 
disturbance, is indeterminate or problematic (corresponding to the first phase of 
tensional activity), and then passes into inquiry proper, (corresponding to the 
searching and exploring activities of an organism); when the search is successful, 
belief or assertion is the counterpart, upon this level, of reintegration upon the 
organic level. (LW Vol.12 pp. 40) 
Because ends-in-view are pursued by organic life, and because those ends are sometimes 
frustrated, life that does not have the capability to adjust, through inquiry that results in 
growth, to new circumstances will pass out of being. Non-human life obviously does 
adjust to new circumstances, though at the far end of the spectrum, say for single celled 
bacteria, it can only do so over the course of generations by way of evolution. 
Somewhere between evolutionary problem solving and full-blown culturally established 
 16 
 
and institutionalized inquiry, we find animals that can by trial and error overcome 
obstacles that stand in the way of ends-in-view. The payoff here is that the most general 
pattern of inquiry is a result of the organization of life generally: where there is life, there 
are problems that must be solved, or life would cease to be.  
 
The general pattern is that an organism, pursuing an end, encounters a problem, engages 
in inquiry, adjusts to the previously indeterminate situation, and resumes pursuit of the 
original end-in-view. Growth is that adjustment that makes it possible to resume pursuit 
of the end-in-view, and it will be in the form of a new habit. The following section will 
consider in some detail the mechanics of habit and their relation to growth. 
 
Inquiry Is a Result of the Nature of Experience 
If growth then is the necessary outcome of successful inquiry, then we must understand 
inquiry as a process of change and look within it for the sort of change that will constitute 
growth. What is it that changes, and how does it change? 
 
As we have shown that inquiry is a pattern that we will find wherever we find life 
pursuing ends and encountering problems. Inquiry, which has a well-marked beginning in 
the encounter with a problem, and a well-marked end in the solution that allows for 
continued action, is then an experience. 
[W]e have an experience when the material experienced runs its course to 
fulfillment. Then and then only is it integrated within and demarcated in the 
general stream of experience from other experiences. A piece of work is finished 
 17 
 
in a way that is satisfactory; a problem receives its solution; a game is played 
through; a situation, whether that of eating a meal, playing a game of chess, 
carrying on a conversation, writing a book, or taking part in a political campaign, 
is so rounded out that its close is a consummation and not a cessation. Such an 
experience is a whole and carries with it its own individualizing quality and self-
sufficiency. It is an experience. (LW Vol.14 pp.42) 
Pursuit and accomplishment of an end constitutes an experience. When a problematic 
situation occurs, when our pursuit is arrested, a new end comes into being: overcome the 
difficulty. The pursuit of this new end-in-view is then what will be called inquiry. As an 
experience, it will be governed by the properties of experience as such. So far as 
educational experience is possible, so long as inquiry that results in growth occurs, 
experience must at least be characterized by continuity and interaction. It is here perhaps 
that our picture of growth will begin to come into focus.   
So I come back to the principle of continuity. At bottom, this principle rests upon 
the fact of habit, when habit is interpreted biologically. The basic characteristic of 
habit is that every experience enacted and undergone modifies the one who acts 
and undergoes, while this modification affects, whether we wish it or not, the 
quality of subsequent experiences. For it is a somewhat different person who 
enters into them…From this point of view, the principle of continuity that every 
experience both takes up something from those which have gone before and 
modifies in some way the quality of those which come after. (LW Vol.13 pp.18) 
The principle of continuity then must be explained in terms of habit. The grounding fact 
of habit is just that organisms are capable of adapting their behavior, whether consciously 
 18 
 
or not. Insofar as organisms are capable of adapting, it must be the case that what they do 
and what they experience must change them. What is important here then is that there is 
no way of differentiating what will create some change from what will not. Dewey then 
makes of the fact of habit that every experience must involve some change in the 
organism so experiencing. The changes and modifications though, if they occur in 
relation to ends pursued, result in changes in the patterns of action that a particular end 
inspires. The temporal sequence of actions that a given end-in-view demands may be 
rearranged or otherwise altered. A habit then is then just that sequence of actions called 
forth by a given end. It is, Dewey will say, a kind of function, 
Habits may be profitably compared to physiological functions, like breathing, 
digesting. The latter are, to be sure, involuntary, while habits are acquired. But 
important as is this difference for many purposes it should not conceal the fact 
that habits are like functions in many respects, and especially in requiring the 
cooperation of organism and environment. (MW Vol.14 pp.15) 
Much like a mathematical function, a habit takes as an input a given situation that 
inspires some particular end-in-view, and by way of a given sequence results in that end. 
Of course the end is not always reached. We must be careful, Dewey cautions, not to 
conflate habit with simple repetition, 
Tendency to repeat acts is an incident of many habits but not of all. A man with 
the habit of giving way to anger may show his habit by a murderous attack upon 
someone who has offended. His act is nonetheless due to habit because it occurs 
only once in his life. The essence of habit is an acquired predisposition to ways or 
 19 
 
modes of response, not to particular acts except as, under special conditions, these 
express a way of behaving. (MW Vol.14 pp.32) 
Pure repetition is not possible because the same situation will never repeat itself exactly, 
though there is much that is repetitive about habits. In the normal course of things, our 
habits allow us to accomplish those ends that regularly occur. The world though is a 
complex place and the typical sequence of actions that would normally result in some 
particular end-in-view will not always and in every case run so smoothly. We encounter 
problems just when the usual sequence of actions is interrupted. It is the case then that 
many of our ends, again like the bees, will be pursued without any need for thought, 
without the ends coming into view, as it were. It is in the breakdown of a habit that an end 
of ours becomes apparent, 
The habit denied overt expression asserts itself in idea. It sets up the thought, the 
ideal, of food. This thought is not what is sometimes called thought, a pale 
bloodless abstraction, but is charged with the motor urgent force of habit. Food as 
a good is now subjective, personal. But it has its source in objective conditions 
and it moves forward to new objective conditions. For it works to secure a change 
of environment so that food will again be present in fact. Food is a "subjective" 
good during a temporary transitional stage from one object to another. (MW 
Vol.14 pp.39) 
Inquiry begins when the interruption of a habit comes into view. Inquiry itself is an 
organization of a set of interpenetrating habits that set about dealing with the problematic 
situation in question, and the change that an inquirer undergoes due to the process of 
inquiry, in so far as the end of inquiry is reached, is growth. If we ask then what this 
 20 
 
process changes, the answer must be that it is the habits themselves. And it is by way of 
habits that the habits are changed: habits interpenetrate and communicate. Habits are 
systems of habits, systems of sequences of action, never found in isolation from a whole 
set of other habits, 
Apart from communication, habit-forming wears grooves; behavior is confined to 
channels established by prior behavior. In so far the tendency is toward 
monotonous regularity. The very operation of learning sets a limit to itself, and 
makes subsequent learning more difficult. But this holds only of a habit, a habit in 
isolation, a non-communicating habit. Communication not only increases the 
number and variety of habits, but tends to link them subtly together, and 
eventually to subject habit-forming in a particular case to the habit of recognizing 
that new modes of association will exact a new use of it. (LW Vol.1 pp.214) 
Habits, as sequences of actions that bring us towards some end-in-view, proliferate, 
generate new habits, by way of the breakdown of problems and the reconstructive process 
of inquiry. We are in most cases engaged in many active processes at any given time, and 
the various habits that direct our behavior may come into conflict or reinforce one 
another. The living organism, following Dewey, might be conceived as a system of 
interacting habits, each habit working its way towards some end, some product to be 
produced. Growth is the acquisition of new habits as a result of old habits encountering 
blockage. Educative growth, growth that promotes growth, is the growth of habits that 
increase the ability to produce new habits, new meaningful sequences of action. This then 
is what is given by the principle of continuity.  
 
 21 
 
It is just as important to consider the second principle that makes an educational 
experience possible: interaction. 
The word "interaction," which has just been used, expresses the second chief 
principle for interpreting an experience in its educational function and force. It 
assigns equal rights to both factors in experience—objective and internal 
conditions. Any normal experience is an interplay of these two sets of conditions. 
Taken together, or in their interaction, they form what we call a situation. (LW 
Vol.13 pp.24) 
We must then be careful not to locate habit or growth in the organism alone, in its 
internal conditions. The situation is always an organism situated in an environment, and 
the principle of continuity operates smoothly across both domains. A new habit is the 
result of a change in the environment just as much as a change in the acting organism, 
and a change of habit in the organism is bound to induce changes in the environment. 
 
This relation between the acting organism and its surrounding environment produces new 
habits by ways of modification of the organism and its environment respectively and 
becomes an intricately modulated system once it is recognized that the environment is, 
for human beings, a cultural one 
Experience is a matter of the interaction of organism with its environment, an 
environment that is human as well as physical, that includes the materials of 
tradition and institutions as well as local surroundings. The organism brings with 
it through its own structure, native and acquired, forces that play a part in the 
interaction. (LW Vol.14 pp.251) 
 22 
 
This means that we must take into account the myriad of tools available and the ends to 
which they are put. Tools, as means to ends, are already the stuff out of which habits are 
made. A given habit is a complex of the motivations that drive an individual and the 
means by which they might realize their ends. Growth then need not be located solely in 
the learning student, but is also just as much a change in the surrounding world. Growth 
is the opening up of new possible ends, as a necessary result of old ends becoming 
blocked. It grants new meaning to old things, as they become means to new ends. 
This is the origin and nature of "goals" of action. They are ways of defining and 
deepening the meaning of activity. Having an end or aim is thus a characteristic of 
present activity. It is the means by which an activity becomes adapted when 
otherwise it would be blind and disorderly, or by which it gets meaning when 
otherwise it would be mechanical. In a strict sense an end-in-view is a means in 
present action; present action is not a means to a remote end. (MW Vol.14 
pp.156) 
This change of meaning is a change in the environment. It is the addition of new tools, 
new machines, new patterns of organized sequential activity. What is new does not issue 
forth from nothing, does not enter into being from nothingness fully formed, but must be 
a recombination and rearrangement of what is already there. The growth of a new habit is 
the establishment of a new sequence of actions, a new pattern. This change necessarily 
involves the organism and its environment in so far as the organism acts upon and is 
acted upon by and in the environment. Habits make use of the environment, they 
rearrange and recombine the materials of the world, and they leave behind products that 
then constitute a part of the environment moving forward. 
 23 
 
The end is then an end-in-view and is in constant and cumulative reenactment at 
each stage of forward movement. It is no longer a terminal point, external to the 
conditions that have led up to it; it is the continually developing meaning of 
present tendencies—the very things which as directed we call "means." The 
process is art and its product, no matter at what stage it be taken, is a work of art. 
(LW Vol.1 pp. 280) 
The products produced by habits, as their ends, are then the stuff of future habits. A 
whole complex of habits must already be in place to make possible the habit of 
hammering nails: that habit comes into being only in the context of the end-in-view of the 
nail-to-be-hammered, which is itself a small step in a larger project of the-thing-to-be-
constructed, and such projects are supported by the processes of making plans, selecting 
materials, manufacturing hammers and nails, organizing workers and so on, each of 
which is itself a complex set of patterns of activity. As habit involves, or makes use of, 
the environment, it cannot be thought of as a pure „idea‟ locked away in a hypothetical 
mind. The habit just is the organization of activity in the world, and so involves organism 
and environment to equal degree. 
The world seems mad in preoccupation with what is specific, particular, 
disconnected in medicine, politics, science, industry, education. In terms of a 
conscious control of inclusive wholes, search for those links which occupy key 
positions and which effect critical connections is indispensable. But recovery of 
sanity depends upon seeing and using these specifiable things as links 
functionally significant in a process. To see the organism in nature, the nervous 
 24 
 
system in the organism, the brain in the nervous system, the cortex in the brain is 
the answer to the problems which haunt philosophy. (LW Vol.1 pp. 224) 
This then is the principle of interaction. Combined with the principle of continuity and an 
understanding of ends as ends in view, we have a network of interrelated concepts that 
form the skeleton of the narrative whose end is growth. An organism moves through its 
environment towards its ends by way of habits. These habits are the organized sequences 
of action that make use of the environment to produce ends. Under mundane 
circumstances, the ends are pursued and produced without interruption. When this is the 
case, the principle of continuity implies that the habits so made use of become more 
deeply ingrained, just as a trail is carved through a field by the repetition of footsteps 
over the same path, or the way that the proliferation of a manufactured tool makes every 
more likely the use of that tool as the means to its own end. Habits do not always run so 
smoothly though, and they are not always in harmony with one another. When some 
conflict arises, when some habit cannot reach its end, the process of inquiry begins. The 
breakdown of some habit or sets of habits either results in growth, in the form of changes 
in the environment and the organism that make possible a new sequence of actions, or in 
the destruction of the organism and death. Growth is the production of new habits, the 
opening up of new possibilities of action. The aim of an educational experience then is to 
produce that sort of growth that is conducive to future growth. 
 
Growth of Growth Is the Aim of Education 
In a complex and continuously changing world, it is not possible that all problems will be 
solved once and for all. Whatever set of habits make up the whole of human civilization 
 25 
 
— if such a category is sensible at all — it is inevitable that some of those habits will 
come into conflict, either with the world or with each other. The life of an individual 
human being would have to be restricted to a point of near torture for it to be imaginable 
that no habit would ever encounter some breakdown, that every end would be reached 
without need for thought. Not even purely mechanical things can boast of such an 
existence: entropy theoretically guarantees the eventual breakdown of any mechanical 
process, but in most cases the examples of breakdown will be easy enough to find. 
 
It is for this reason that it is not some particular growth that is called for in education, but 
a growth of the very possibility of future growth. There is no full and final set of habits 
that will carry a person through life without the need for any further learning. Instead, it 
is habits that operate in and through breakdowns that are of utmost importance: inquiry is 
the set of those habits that are brought to bear on the breakdowns of other habits, and so it 
is towards inquiry that an education that seeks to insure continued growth must turn. 
 
Without a theory of experience to generate its structure, a theory of education can only be 
of the conservative sort: repeating what has been done in the past because it is what has 
worked in the past. In so far as the concept of growth remains without a coherent 
interpretation, any theory of education that aims to create growth will be operating in the 
dark, without any way to decide whether this growth or that is to be desired. 
 
It is of course not yet the case that this account of growth is enough. If it is to be useful 
with regard to its intended purpose, creating a central pillar for a philosophy of education, 
 26 
 
it must generate some plan, and, “Like any plan, it must be framed with reference to what 
is to be done and how it is to be done.” (LW Vol.13 pp.13) In the following chapter then 
we will turn to this project: if this is the meaning of growth, how can we construct 
educational experiences from it? How will we generate a plan? If there are any truths in 
this work, they will only be truth of the pragmatic kind, to be measured by the, “degree to 
which the consequences they produce coincide with what they promise or predict. When 
they work well and produce useful consequences, they are true; otherwise they are false.” 
(MW Vol.12 pp.219) 
 27 
 
 
CHAPTER III 
HABIT ANALYSIS 
The Environment and the Organism 
Education may be conceived either retrospectively or prospectively. That is to 
say, it may be treated as process of accommodating the future to the past, or as an 
utilization of the past for a resource in a developing future...The idea of education 
advanced in these chapters is formally summed up in the idea of continuous 
reconstruction of experience, an idea which is marked off from education as 
preparation for a remote future, as unfolding, as external formation, and as 
recapitulation of the past. (MW Vol.9 pp.85) 
 
From the very start, if we are to go about making some use of the model of educational 
experience that Dewey has crafted for us, we must be aware that it will not be possible to 
construct anything like a global system. No single curriculum running from enrollment to 
graduation will be adequate to the particularities and variations of every place and time. 
While this might seem a commonplace, it is in stark contrast with contemporary efforts to 
standardize education, whether by creating a common „core‟ that will unite students 
across state boundaries, or merely by subjecting all students to an identical final exam. 
This is the difference between what Dewey will call a conservative, or traditional, 
education and a progressive one. 
 
 28 
 
Within the confines of a traditional education, one is free to create a program with a 
design based entirely on idealistic principles. This is because 
The subject-matter of education consists of bodies of information and of skills 
that have been worked out in the past; therefore, the chief business of the school is 
to transmit them to the new generation. In the past, there have also been 
developed standards and rules of conduct; moral training consists in forming 
habits of action in conformity with these rules and standards. Finally, the general 
pattern of school organization (by which I mean the relations of pupils to one 
another and to the teachers) constitutes the school a kind of institution sharply 
marked off from other social institutions. (LW Vol.13 pp.5) 
A new school then might be planned out entirely in advance with little regard to anything 
apart from the structures of previously successful institutions of learning. Following what 
Paulo Freire criticized as the „banking theory‟ of education (Freire 1970), the traditional 
school aims to create in each student a copy of a kind of encyclopedia of facts and skills. 
The central problematic of such a design is the method of transmission: how is it that 
skills, values and knowledge mastered by a teacher might become in turn mastered by a 
student? 
 
One should note that if Dewey‟s model of educational experience holds water, it should 
be useful in an attempt to solve just that problem, and given the complex politics of 
educational policy, it is likely that this has been the primary use to which Dewey‟s 
thought has been put. 
 
 29 
 
A program, however, that only makes that limited use of Dewey‟s analysis of experience 
will fall far short of a truly progressive education: having decided in advance what is to 
be learned leaves only the techniques of teaching to be decided. The end goal, or 
reproducing a new copy of the past mastery in the new generation, remains. The 
traditional educator has no particular need for a model of experience, and will only turn 
to it insofar as the traditional techniques of transmission begin to break down. 
 
In contrast, a progressive education must begin with a model of experience, in order to 
confront a local situation in which education is already going on. The fundamental unity 
of progressive education is “found in the idea that there is an intimate and necessary 
relation between the processes of actual experience and education. If this be true, then a 
positive and constructive development of its own basic idea depends upon having a 
correct idea of experience.” (LW Vol.13 pp.7) The „correct idea of experience‟ here must 
take into account a particular organism in a particular environment, located in a unique 
place in space and time. Whereas in the traditional education the idea of experience might 
remain implicit, buried deep within the content that makes up the bulk of the 
transmission, a progressive education has need for an explicit understanding of human 
experience, and educational experience in particular, to guide its decision process as it 
makes its way from the present given to the future built. 
 
The necessary relation between actual experience and education first necessitates that an 
educational program be intimately related to the unique place and time in which it occurs. 
The problems faced and habits acquired to overcome them in medieval Europe bear little 
 30 
 
relation to the problems and habits one might discover in 21st Century New York, and in 
turn, though the jump is smaller, those habits and problems will differ from those found 
in 21st Century Alaska. The profound differences in the patterns of human life that are 
successful in particular locations create opportunities for great differences in experience, 
and thus differences in education. 
 
Without a universal ideal of a complete education then, a progressive education can only 
make its progress by way of experiment and the use it makes of the model of experience 
is in its decision of what experiments to engage in. Instead of a complete plan for a 
curriculum then, the progressive educator has need of a critical apparatus that can be used 
to generate new experiments from the educational paradigm currently employed. 
 
Such an apparatus would be a tool for taking what is currently going on as education and 
improving it. While Dewey has laid the groundwork for such a tool, his failure to provide 
one might be another symptom of what Colin Koopman has recently pointed out as 
Dewey‟s avoidance of problematization (Koopman 2009). Without a critical apparatus to 
problematize a standing educational system, it is all the more likely that Dewey‟s work 
on educational experience will be put to work only in the area that is inherently 
problematic for the traditional educator: the method of transmission.  
 
Here we are contending that from Dewey‟s How We Think to his Logic, what we find is a 
descriptive account of the processes that make learning possible, something like the 
necessary conditions for the possibility of human education. What we do not find is 
 31 
 
anything like a general method for analyzing a particular, situated pedagogical practice, 
though we may find, as in Experience and Education, critical accounts of some practices 
or, as in How We Think, general prescriptions such as “Work should not be drudgery”, 
“Recitation should stimulate intellectual eagerness” and “Play should not be fooling”. 
While such critiques and prescriptions are useful in their own right, they still fall short of 
anything like a method for examining any given particular pedagogical practice in detail. 
We are however convinced that the descriptive account is robust enough to give us the 
ground upon which we may construct such a tool. 
 
We will here suggest then a method of problematization based on Dewey‟s analysis of 
experience that can then make use of inquiry to suggest new experiments that might 
move education forward. 
 
The production of new experiments may be broken into two phases. In the first, a current 
educational paradigm or method is brought under critical scrutiny in the light of our 
model of educational experience. A system of education is then made the subject of an 
assessment with regard to its fit with our theory. A whole range of factors with regard to 
the specifics of the concrete situation in which the educational paradigm is employed 
must be taken into consideration in order to assess the kind of growth produced by the 
educational method in practice. That growth itself must be considered in light of the 
recursive nature of beneficial growth: how will the new habits play out in their 
environment? Will they promote further growth or discourage it? What obstacles will the 
newly acquired patterns of activity encounter going forward? 
 32 
 
 
In the second phase, after the descriptive model of educational experience has brought to 
light potentially problematic outcomes of current practice, or once the gaps between 
theory and practice have been made clear, the current paradigm can be altered in such a 
way as to avoid problems created by habitual conflicts set up by the current paradigm. 
 
The following three sections then build out the critical apparatus itself. Section II 
prepares an analytic field as the ground or site where in the educational practice to be put 
into question might come into view. Section III provides concepts that can be then used 
for the actual analysis thereof, and Section IV outlines a way for inquiry to provide new 
paths for educational experience. 
 
Education Is Always Happening 
The continuity of experience places demands on the scope of a critical approach to a 
progressive pedagogy: growth, for better or worse, is the product of an organism in 
interaction with the environment, but there are no explicit boundaries about which to say 
where the environment begins and where it ends. This is inherently problematic, as even 
celestial events, such as eclipses, meteors, supernova and the like, can be said to have a 
direct impact on the goings on of day to day living. The „environment‟ extends to an 
indefinite degree, and Dewey‟s notion of the situation, while it may not be intended to 
imply absolutely everything in the universe, has a fuzzy boundary at best, determined, as 
it is, by the problem at hand (see, for example, though it can be found in many places 
throughout Dewey‟s work, his response to Russell in “Experience and Empirical Method 
 33 
 
in Philosophy” LW vol.14 pp.14ff). To attempt to account for as complete environment 
as the cosmos is beyond absurd, but it just as impossible to create totally separated 
environments: the walls of a school, no matter how thick, are themselves necessarily a 
product of forces outside their border. 
 
We cannot then take our start from the whole, but instead must take our start from the 
part, but with the explicit caveat to treat the part as a part, and to aim to increase our 
scope just as the narrow picture comes in to focus. 
 
We must start then, on the small scale, at the level of the organism: the individual 
student. One could, of course, begin an investigation at an even smaller scale, taking the 
human body as an environment unto itself, but to do so is to enter the realm of medicine. 
While such a cellular revolution might someday come to pass in education, until it does 
our critique of educational practice need only begin at the level of a functioning human 
being. Our position here is that education is a practice whose central problematic is the 
growth of students, and that such a problematic is best understood as relating to 
individual students, who as human beings can best be understood as organisms in an 
environment. We should also caution though against taking such an approach to be 
individualistic: students, as students, are always already deeply entangled in social 
situations and communities both inside and outside the school, and the focus on 
individual students should never be allowed to obscure the complex relations between 
those individuals and the wider community. The habits of an individual student, 
 34 
 
problematized and worked upon by educational practice, form the center of a problematic 
situation which is always embedded in a social, cultural, and natural environment 
 
At the level of the individual student, we find immediately a movement through a number 
of sub-environments, in the simplest instance of public schooling we have at least the 
home and the school. The rhythm of such movement, and its degree of complexity, must 
be taken into account in a fashion that in unnecessary for a traditional education. The 
habits that students develop and the ends that they pursue cannot, let alone should not, be 
restricted to the school alone. 
 
But then we must, remaining still at the level of the individual student, pay careful 
attention to the complexity of these rhythms of movement between this location and that: 
the micro-rhythms of the activities engaged in and their patterns of repetition will make 
up the subject matter of our investigation. It is in the irregularities amongst those patterns 
that we will find the breakdowns of habit that constitute problems, and hence will be the 
site where we might discover new habits in formation. 
 
The immediately experienced world of the individual student, here reduced to home and 
school as an abstract minimum, must then be recognized as indirectly affected by the 
surrounding world. The school as an institution is a product of public policy and the 
home nestled in a community, must, in the end, become objects of critique as well. For no 
matter how isolated an educational process might be, it will retain its windows onto the 
 35 
 
exterior world. What begins at the small scale is in constant play with the surrounding 
environment. 
 
Thankfully, one need not completely re-structure the world in order to re-structure a piece 
of it, but a small start, perhaps only covering the span of a single activity in a single 
classroom, is just that, a small start. The critique that might lead to a truly progressive 
education is necessarily always unfinished, always seeking to broaden its scope, to take 
into account further consequences, for the full set of consequences, and hence the 
potential for problematic conflicts of every action is infinite. 
 
We begin then from the patterns of activity of a particular individual as they move 
between the various environments of their immediately experienced world, and then by 
successive iterations of the same process of investigation, seek to widen our view. 
 
The emphasis places here on patterns of activity shapes the perspective we will be taking: 
at each level of zoom, from the smallest to the largest, what we are looking at and 
looking for are patterns of activity, or what are broadly called habits. 
 
It may be of some use to introduce here a small but important distinction that is only 
implicit in Dewey‟s work but that will clarify some of the inherent ambiguity in the word 
„habit‟; the difference between a habit pure and simple, and a habit of habits. The first, 
the habit pure and simple, or perhaps the micro-habit, is the simplest form of a habit, the 
repetition of a particular function of the body.  At this level one finds the beating of the 
 36 
 
heart, the intake and outburst of air through the lungs, as well as nervous tics, the 
movement of the leg in the course of walking or running and the like.  While these micro 
habits will be seen to have ends, in the sense of moments where the sequence of action 
has reached its conclusion, they may not be said to have ends-in-view. 
 
As a premise, all organized activity of living things must at bottom be composed of these 
micro-habits. But such micro habits are themselves organized into habits-of-habits, and 
without such organization not even bees could get along. Habits-of-habits are 
organizations of habits towards some end-in-view, that which gives sense and purpose to 
the micro-habits so organized. This level of organization and the possibility of combining 
habits-of-habits into habits-of-habits-of-habits and so on make possible the vast 
complexity of human behavior. For this reason, what might be considered a „problem‟ if 
there were only micro-habits is already accounted for within the complex of habit and 
need not involve any creation of new habit in order to be resolved. 
 
Dewey makes it clear that once we move beyond the automatic functions of the body that 
habits take on a life of their own, proliferating themselves throughout those communities 
they arise in. One might even see something of a precursor to Dawkin‟s notion of the 
meme in passages such as this: 
The nature of habit is to be assertive, insistent, self-perpetuating. There is no 
miracle in the fact that if a child learns any language he learns the language that 
those about him speak and teach, especially since his ability to speak that 
language is a pre-condition of his entering into effective connection with them, 
 37 
 
making wants known and getting them satisfied. Fond parents and relatives 
frequently pick up a few of the child's spontaneous modes of speech and for a 
time at least they are portions of the speech of the group. But the ratio which such 
words bear to the total vocabulary in use gives a fair measure of habit in forming 
custom in comparison with the part played by custom in forming individual 
habits. (MW Vol.14 pp.43) 
We can see here that Dewey considers the individual words to be habits, and that then the 
complex habit of speaking must be made up of a multitude of such little habits, the habits 
of individual words linking up with habits of sentence formation and so on. 
 
We will illustrate with a small example: navigation from one part of a campus to another 
is not a micro-habit, but a macro-habit organized by ends-in-view and composed of many 
habits of lower level. If some event, such as construction, blocks the normal path by 
which one habitually makes way from point A to point B, a new path is found and taken 
by making use of the complexes of habit that make possible the general navigation of that 
particular campus. Crucial to our thesis here is that learning only really takes place when 
this whole complex of habit breaks down: when one is truly lost, one must learn 
something in order to get back along one‟s way. In the case of campus navigation, the 
problems of understanding maps, reading street signs, making sense of directions 
provided by strangers and so on are, under normal circumstances for the majority of 
campus-navigators, problems that have already been solved, lessons already learned, and 
so what seems to be a „problematic situation‟ in the case of a blocked path is already 
accounted for in the macro-habit that will lead one to point B with a minimum of trouble. 
 38 
 
 
In this case, the habit-parts that make up the macro habit are themselves also macro-
habits composed of parts themselves, and each of them must have been acquired at some 
point through confrontation of a problem that had not yet been solved: human beings do 
not read maps innately, but must learn to use them through a confrontation with actual 
maps of some sort. It can also be seen here that „flexible habits‟ must by necessity be of 
the macro-habit sort. In general, when we use the word habit in this text, we refer to the 
macro-habit sort. 
 
With this in mind then the patterns of activity, the habits discovered in the immediate 
experience of some particular student, are to be thought of as products, as productions of 
the surrounding environment in interaction with the human actor. This production of 
habit will be broken into two kinds: production of techniques, and production of 
technologies. While the first corresponds in a fairly obvious way to the discussion of 
habit that we have covered so far, technique here being synonymous with purposefully 
ordered human action, the second bears some need of explanation. 
 
„Technologies‟ is used here in the broad sense of those material products of human effort 
that are left behind when the humans move on to something else. They need not be 
intentionally created, though the organization of human life is often centered on their 
intentional production. What separates a technology from, say, a waste product, is the 
future use to which the technology can be put: technologies, like techniques, open up the 
possibility of new patterns of activity. This is perhaps best illustrated with an example: a 
 39 
 
trail develops along the path habitually taken between two locations. Such a trail may be 
the unintended product of a pattern of human activity, a habit, and still opens up the 
possibility of new organization of that activity. A technology, in this sense, is the useful 
material outcome of a habit, while a technique is the useful pattern of activity, a useful 
habit. 
 
This distinction is my own, derived from, though not directly found in Dewey‟s work. It 
is also not in any way an absolute distinction, as we could perhaps find boarder cases, or 
cases where the material produced and the method of production were so intertwined that 
they could not be separated. The intent here is to provide a useful heuristic for 
discovering the interruptions that must be a part of any pedagogical practice that induces 
change in the habits of students: if Dewey‟s model of educational experience holds water, 
then every practice of education must interrupt the flow of student‟s habits in order to 
inspire change.  
 
Keeping an eye on the intersection of techniques and technologies is useful in our study 
of patterns of activity within an environment. New technologies imported from the 
exterior world will change the efficacy of old techniques, just as new techniques brought 
to bear on old technologies open up new consequences of their use. It is important to 
remember that the technological products of some set of habits go on to make possible 
new habits. Technologies, as ends of meaningful activity, make possible new ends-in-
view and new patterns of activity.  
 
 40 
 
Hoeing, to take one vivid example, is a technique that makes use of technology. One 
cannot hoe without a hoe, though hoeing is not the only technique that might make use of 
hoes. One might build a sculpture out of farming equipment just as easily as one puts that 
equipment to use on the farm. There is no inherent connection between any technology 
and any one technique, though many techniques are only possible in connection with 
some particular technology. Hammering cannot be done without hammers, but 
hammering is not the only thing one can do with a hammer. 
 
An educational system produces both techniques and technologies, and makes use of 
both, and it is conflict among the multiplicity thereof that may bring growth to an 
immature end. 
 
Products — Flows — Interruptions 
We have now a sort of schematic field, centered on the student found within the 
environment of the current stage of investigation, populated by patterns of activity 
divided into techniques and technologies, both views as productions of habit. Our goal, 
from the outset, is to examine a given educational practice in terms of the growth it 
produces, in order to determine whether that growth encourages or discourages future 
growth. This problem can only be approached by an analysis of the products of the 
growth in question in relation to the environment that they are situated in: we must ask in 
what way will those techniques and technologies come into conflict with the techniques 
and technologies already in play in the wider world. It is for this reason that the task is an 
 41 
 
infinite one, as the full set of consequences of a set of habits it itself infinitely propagated 
outwards into the environment. 
 
It has been taken for granted up to this point that education, even of the individual, takes 
place within a community, within a society. While we center our attention on an 
individual, the patterns of activity that the individual engages in will inevitably often 
involve other people just as much as it involves other things within the environment. 
Conflicts that crop up between the ends-in-view of one individual, or group, and another 
may be prevented in so far as those conflicts are determined by the habits involved. The 
social ends of education are thereby accounted for: an individual whose habits are bound 
to come into conflict with the wider community has grown into a blind alley; 
pickpocketing is a technique that may be produced by certain patterns of activity and so 
considered growth, but one who pickpockets runs the risk of having further opportunities 
for growth shut down by the wider community. 
 
This particular example can be expanded upon to make sense of the concepts we wish to 
deploy here. Pickpocketing is a technique, and as such is the product of certain patterns 
of activity within some given environment. It does not spring into being all on its own, 
but requires a whole host of conditions in order to make its appearance on the scene. 
Once it does appear, as a technique employed by some particular individual, the habit 
becomes a flow: the end-in-view of the pocket picked is habitually pursued, achieved and 
repeated. The flow of habit can be interrupted, once a target is decided upon, some 
problem may stop the normal sequence of action shy of the end, perhaps the wallet 
 42 
 
sought is attached to a wallet chain, a heretofore unencountered problem. When this 
happens, inquiry starts up; if it is successful, it will be successful insofar as a new 
technique is produced such that the problem here encountered is overcome, and may be 
overcome in similar fashion in the future. 
 
The successful overcoming of the problem and the production of a new pattern of 
activity, a new habit, is growth. But the whole art of pickpocketing itself interrupts the 
ends pursued by other individuals. Those who are pickpocketed now encounter an 
interruption of their own habits. The pickpocket in turn becomes a factor in a problem to 
be solved, a hidden indeterminacy to be clarified by a process of inquiry. The growth that 
makes the pickpocket a better pickpocket leads, once the surrounding community 
becomes involved, to the production of techniques for catching and detaining 
pickpockets. Such growth is a dead end road: it produces its own termination. 
 
Examining the production, flow and interruption of techniques and technologies in search 
of conflicts that will stop the continuity of growth will be the primary method of our 
critique. If it were possible to peer into the minds of human individuals to discover their 
ends-in-view, such an elaboration might not be necessary; we could then set up a chart of 
the ends-in-view of all those in the community and compare them in order to discover 
potential conflicts to head off future problems in advance. Ends-in-view though are only 
apparent to those pursuing them, and even our own ends may remain wholly 
unconscious. 
 
 43 
 
Without direct access to ends-in-view then, we must discover them indirectly by way of 
their tangible results as production of techniques and technologies. Given an educational 
practice, we must discover in what way it interrupts the usual flow of habitual action, the 
background pattern of activity, and what will be produced when that interruption is 
overcome. We have then a simple matrix of possibilities of minimal situations which may 
be investigated in this way, each to be illustrated below: either a technique or a 
technology is interrupted by either a technique or a technology, resulting in each case in 
environmental change and the production of new patterns of activity, new habits, new 
growth. A given educational practice, in so far as it is capable of producing growth at all, 
will for us fall into one of the following four patterns, or some complex thereof. 
 
Technique & Technique 
In the first case we find a pattern of human action interrupted by another pattern of 
human action intended to change the first. The lecture can stand as a classic example. 
Intervening in the habits that relate to the subject matter covered in the lecture, the 
speaker seeks to create changes in the listener. The background pattern of activity is the 
listener‟s habit with regard to the subject matter, and a successful lecture will create 
changes in those habits by way of communication. 
 
The lecture is similar in structure to another common instance of this corner of our matrix 
that is familiar to any parent: scolding. When a child‟s activity calls for an intervention, it 
often manifests in the form of a mini-lecture given on the subject of the activity in 
question. Scolding is of course intended to bring about a global change in behavior, but it 
 44 
 
can do so only insofar as it succeeds in blocking off the troubling activity or directing the 
impulse that inspired it through another route. 
 
Technique & Technology 
A technological intervention into a particular technique will involve the introduction of a 
new technology into the immediate environment of some actor in order to change the 
activity that takes place in that environment. The addition of a computer to the classroom 
provides a kind of billboard example here: merely by bringing in a piece of equipment, a 
whole new set of activities becomes possible. The background techniques that are 
interrupted change as they interact with the newly augmented environment. While it may 
not be advisable, merely allowing students to interact with a new devise without any kind 
of instruction will invariably produce new kinds of activity that could not take place in 
the absence of the device, precisely because it was not present before. The indeterminacy 
of old habits acting on new technology initiates the process of inquiry by way of the 
consequences of those established patterns of activity acting on the new equipment. 
 
This quarter of our matrix is then also where we will find the ongoing flow of new 
technologies into the global environment of the immediately experienced world. From 
staplers to cell-phones and from automobiles to inter-state highways, the addition of a 
new technology into an environment alters the course of the old patterns of activity that it 
interrupts. 
 
 
 45 
 
Technology & Technique 
The intervention of a new technique into the ongoing function of an old technology may 
be given an example case in the creation of new kinds of content by way of an old 
medium. The innovations of expressionist painting in the 20th century should give a vivid 
idea as to what is meant here: the technologies that were made use of had been in 
existence for quite some time, but with a change in the techniques associated with them, a 
broad range of new effects was created. 
 
The ongoing development of new software, and new kinds of software for computers may 
provide an example that might be more readily seen to relate directly to the classroom: 
the material tools remain the same, but by a change of technique, new styles of 
programming for example, the old technology creates new changes within the patterns of 
activity within the environment where it is found. 
 
Technology & Technology 
In our final instance, a new technology comes to change the global effect of some old 
technology. In recent years, motion-sensing controls have come into combination with 
interactive computers in such a way as to produce completely new sorts of activity. Often 
the results of such interventions are new complexes of technology: the personal computer 
is made up of a rather large number of independent technologies that have come together 
as a coherent whole. 
 
 46 
 
Frequently enough, a new technology will obsolesce an old technology: the DVD player 
has largely eliminated the VHS, cloud-computing and networked storage is slowly 
eliminating the need for physical portable media, automobiles replaced the horse and 
carriage and so on. While it might almost never be the case that an obsolete technology 
disappears entirely, it is that its role in the complex interaction of patterns of activity has 
changed, and in normal cases diminished dramatically that qualifies it as obsolete. 
 
We should be careful not to think that any particular technology or technique has any 
kind of independent existence: technologies are produces by human beings engaged in 
projects great and small and so are intimately related to human techniques. Techniques in 
turn are very often, if not nearly always, related to technologies that make them possible. 
The key here, for the purposes of investigating pedagogical practice, is to look for 
changes in the educational environment: to that end, we have built a kind of lens to look 
for two particular sorts of changes, to highlight them, as it were. 
 
We will then in the course of our investigations mark out particular interventions in 
relation to what old patterns of activity they come to interrupt. Having done so, we may 
begin to analyze the consequences of such an interruption: how will the old patterns 
change? How will those changes interact with the other patterns of activity already 
present in the environment? What foreseeable conflicts might arise? We may then, if such 
conflicts are discovered, begin to think about changes that might be made to the 
intervention, or perhaps further interventions that might be made in order to avoid such 
conflicts. 
 47 
 
New Paths — New Products 
Our technique here then involves the use of intelligence to look ahead towards the 
foreseeable consequences of our present course of action, the current state of our 
environment and the patterns of activity that go along with it. We find ourselves in the 
midst of an environment that undergoes continuous change, bringing about new and 
changing the meaning of old complexes of habit. In the course of education, we 
intentionally introduce new techniques and new technologies into the experience of 
students with the intent of bringing about changes in their own habits. As the 
environment the encompassing the school evolves, the patterns of activity inside the 
schools walls must either adapt or risk producing students whose habits come into serious 
conflict with the patterns of activity prevalent in the wider world. 
 
This on its own should not be news to anyone, but a truly progressive education has need 
for a truly systematic approach to the continuous change that makes up the world at large, 
and ongoing investigation into the consequences of the interventions it employs to instill 
useful habits in its students. 
 
It is then the cycle that produces new habits, as a cycle, that we must focus our attention 
on: an interruption of old patterns of activity gives rise to student inquiry that leads to the 
production of new techniques and technologies. These productions in turn are eventually 
interrupted by some problematic situation in the world that is a result of conflicts between 
that pattern‟s normal course of operation and the continual flux of the situation at hand. 
In the case of conflicts that we can foresee, we would do well to nip them in the bud, in 
 48 
 
so far as those conflicts would cut short further growth. In the inevitable case of conflicts 
that we cannot foresee, the macro-habit of inquiry itself will stand as of central 
importance, and it is the habits that make up that habit complex that must be paid special 
attention if the continuity of growth is to be maintained. 
 
A number of caveats must be kept in mind: it is not the case, to begin with, that only the 
intended consequences of a given intervention will come to pass. We must be on the 
lookout for the possibility of ongoing patterns of activity, bad habits as it were, that will 
nullify the effects of a given intervention. We must also pay special attention to the social 
reality of every educational situation: no student exists in a world all their own, with need 
only for survivalist habits of self-preservation. The complex web of social interaction 
made up of both techniques and technologies must be taken into account: habits of 
interaction with other people must not be ignored in favor of only technological interests, 
and the plurality of differing sets of habits within a given community must be taken into 
account when considering the consequences of the development of some new skill set. 
 
The real possibility of conflicts of ends within a community necessitates ongoing work to 
ensure the continuity of growth. The social aspect of inquiry, the need to have techniques 
for resolving problems that crop up as a result of conflicts between people, should not be 
overlooked. The environment is always already social, just as much as it is always 
already technological, and so patterns of activity can only in the rarest of cases be 
reduced to the activity of a single individual.  
 
 49 
 
Educators furthermore, whether progressive or conservative, find themselves always in 
the midst of education that does not begin or end within their view. The students within 
their care are, thanks to the continuity of experience, always already engaged in pursuing 
ends and working out the solutions to problems that stand in the way of their ends-in-
view. Those progressive educators who have championed the central importance of 
teaching the habits of self-reflective inquiry are right to do so, for while the ability 
overcome problems through inquiry is the natural inheritance of the human race (as an 
elaboration of an ability that even simple creatures must possess), it is the ongoing 
improvement of one‟s own habits of problems solving, the ability to problematize one‟s 
own process of inquiry that makes growth possible when otherwise a dead end might be 
reached. That self-reflection might ideally in the end include an account of the new habits 
produced by the solution of old problems, and a continual investigation into their 
probable interactions with the other patterns of activity that occur in the social, 
technological world. 
 
Finally it should be recalled that this process of critique is an iterative one, starting from 
even just a single practice of intervention, working out its consequences, improving upon 
its technique, and then enlarging our scope to include still more. Because the single 
intervention we focus on is embedded in a broader context, we cannot get anywhere 
without taking elements of the environment into consideration as our investigation 
proceeds. The thematized intervention is the problem at the center of the situation which 
we investigate. Each step in the process, each iteration, can be carried out only so far as 
consequences can be foreseen, but should be widened to the full extent of our ability, and 
 50 
 
then, when we can proceed no further, we may take up the new, reconstructed situation 
and begin again. 
 
For now we must content ourselves with a single, small example of the mechanics of this 
apparatus. We will approach an example from Douglas Llewellyn‟s Inquire Within, 
working out the nature of a particular intervention into the ongoing experience of a 
student. Due to the nature and scope of this particular project, it must remain a kind of 
thought experiment, but we intend that these procedures may be implemented in the wild 
of the lived world just as much as they might be imagined in the laboratory of the mind. 
 
 51 
 
CHAPTER IV 
INQUIRE WITHIN 
Limits and Choice 
Given the limits of this current project, it is impossible to go through the full process of 
the analysis outlined above as it might be carried out in the wild; there is no live process 
of education with which to experiment, the consequences of changes cannot be observed, 
there is not even a specific environment to base any analysis on. Without a concrete 
laboratory, we are left to operate in an ideal space, much of the work to be accomplished 
must take part primarily in the imagination. 
 
While this will set off the demonstration to follow from any concrete analysis that might 
be based on it, it will not prevent us from being able to perform such a demonstration. 
For our purposes here, a complete lesson plan and some information about how that 
lesson plan was in fact enacted on at least one occasion should be enough to show the 
methodology in action. It will though restrict that demonstration to the first stage of 
analysis, in which we break down a process of education into the interruptions that make 
it up, and the second, in which we examine those interruptions in order to discover what 
it is that they interrupt and what changes we might expect to be brought about. This will 
allow us to begin the third stage, which must remain incomplete: we will be able to 
propose possible changes that might avoid foreseen conflicts that would develop out of 
the new habits produced by the interruptions of old habits, but we will not be able 
experiment with these changes, and we will then be closed off from broadening our 
perspective from the small scope it must begin with. 
 52 
 
 
We are left then to examine on the micro-scale events that transpire within one 
classroom, following one lesson plan. We are unable to include any but the most general 
assumptions about the life of students outside the classroom, and we are furthermore 
unable to even examine in great detail the actual products that students create in the 
process of the experience in question. This leaves us with only the bare beginnings of a 
proper analysis. 
 
These bare beginnings though should still serve as enough of an introduction to make 
clear just was is involved in applying the apparatus we have here constructed, and will 
then hopefully be strongly suggestive of just how the analysis would proceed thereafter. 
The iterative nature of our procedure should facilitate this vision: this chapter will make 
up one repetition, while each successive repetition, each broadening the scope and 
becoming ever more inclusive of the borderless environment will be an application of the 
same methods on a larger scale. 
 
The recursive nature of our apparatus, taking its own output as its next input, makes it 
possible for us to demonstrate here on the very small scale what would in the wild 
become a vast project. This should be seen to be a consequence of our recursive 
understanding of growth: it is not growth-itself that is to be sought, but the continuity of 
growth, growth that facilitates further growth. Such a goal, in a world that continually 
changes and evolves over time, necessarily brings with it an endless task, though not a 
task without ends. Each iteration, while never completing the project and always 
 53 
 
demanding further investigation of the consequences of any new development, should 
still, at the local level at the very least, bring about changes that avoid conflicts that 
would have otherwise been confronted accidentally and haphazardly. This first turn of the 
crank should then serve as enough to allow us to see that the crank could be turned once 
more and then once more, each repetition allowing us to widen our view, without any 
need for an expectation that some total view will ever be reached. 
 
With these limits in mind then, there is some need for us to justify the choice of our 
example here, a single lesson plan, though one that involves several days of ongoing 
activity, given as an introductory example in Douglas Llewellyn‟s Inquire Within. It may 
seem a counter-intuitive, or even counter-productive choice: wouldn‟t it make more sense 
to examine a more widely practiced pedagogy? We can imagine, for example, bringing 
our analysis to bear on the practice of standardized testing, or on the introduction of new 
media into the classroom; any number of flashy, trendy examples could be obtained from 
recent articles and debates within the education community. Choosing an example that 
was obviously a product of a conservative approach to education would make an easy 
target for criticism, opting for an example that is currently creating controversy would 
perhaps allow us to see how this approach might help us find our way in those debates. 
We will, in the end, once we have established the function of our apparatus, return to the 
topic of testing, but at the moment, we must answer the question, of why we have chosen 
an example that is unapologetically progressive, that cites Dewey as an influence, and 
that already aims to encourage inquiry based learning? 
 
 54 
 
We have selected Llewellyn‟s work not in spite of, but because of these characteristics. 
Our motivation is the drive to perform something of an internal critique: a critique of 
what is ostensibly a contemporary Deweyan approach to education should show the 
robustness of our technique. It is easy to have a critical eye when you are faced with an 
opponent, but it is far more difficult to bring that same critical eye to a look in the mirror. 
If our apparatus is capable of opening up possibilities for improvement of a process of 
education that already is attempting to implement inquiry as the central model of 
educational experience, then we will have good reason to believe that it should also be 
able to do its work on educational practices that are far and away from a Deweyan 
paradigm. 
 
Of the many possible choices that then fit the above criteria (an example that is 
unapologetically progressive, that cites Dewey as an influence, and that already aims to 
encourage inquiry based learning), we have chosen Llewellyn for his typicality and 
banality, rather than anything that makes his approach stand out. Inquire Within is, in 
many ways, an unremarkable text. For its intended audience, those unacquainted with 
inquiry based education, it may serve as a good general introduction, and it has received 
little or no critical attention, though it gets cited somewhat regularly, occasionally 
alongside a range of other texts that also encourage inquiry based education.
1
 If there is a 
particular feature that attracted us specifically to Inquire Within, it is Llewellyn‟s rich 
                                                 
1(Marchell, et al 2007, gives the following list: Bransford et al., 1999; Bybee et al., 2006; 
Donovan & Bransford, 2005; Llewellyn, 2002; National Commission on Excellence in 
Education, 1983; National Commission on Mathematics and Science Teaching, 2000; 
NCTM, 2000).   
 55 
 
descriptive account of the goings on in the classroom that serves to aid our imagination in 
the process of reconstructing the situation that we intend to examine. 
 
These caveats in mind, we will then turn to Llewellyn‟s account of what serves as the 
primary, that is, first example of Inquire Within: the Ice Hands. 
 
The Ice Hands, Llewellyn’s Account 
Real classroom stories often show how inquiry-based lessons progress. This is the 
story of a fourth-grade teacher who introduces an exploration to her class that (a) 
allows them to investigate the properties of ice and (b) provides them with 
opportunities to generate more questions to investigate. (Llewellyn 17) 
The second chapter of Inquire Within is dedicated to the telling of the above-mentioned 
story. Having given a general introduction to the concept of inquiry as well as a smaller 
example story in his first chapter, Llewellyn gives us a vivid portrait of his notion of 
inquiry-based education in practice as it takes place in a single fourth-grade classroom. 
The experience in question is a week-long activity developing out of an initial encounter 
with ice hands, “„I hope they‟re ready,‟ Ms. Camille Perlo thought as she opened the 
freezer door. There, she saw seven frozen hands. Actually, they were ice hands she had 
made the night before by filling latex surgical gloves with water and tying the ends with 
twist ties.” (17) The introduction of these ice hands into the classroom is then the 
inauguration of a weeklong investigation into the properties of ice. 
 
 56 
 
The ice hands activity broadly follows Llewellyn‟s outline of the process of inquiry, as 
adapted for classroom use. The outline itself (c.f. fig 1) may be broken into two phases, 
the introductory phase, which is primarily teacher driven, and then the recursive, circular 
inquiry cycle, which is primarily student driven. 
 
fig. 1. The Constructivist Inquiry Cycle (pg. 47 in Llewellyn) 
 57 
 
We can see here the way in which the process breaks down into two parts, the first 
serving to get the second started, as it were, and the second looping back into itself, 
presumably allowing for an indefinite number of repetitions, each allowing for further 
investigation by way of another go around the loop. 
 
The first day of the ice hands project deals with the first phase of inquiry in its entirety. It 
begins with the introduction of the ice hands into the classroom as a way of introducing 
the topic, the properties of ice. 
“Today,” Ms. Perlo said, “we are going to start a special science unit. We are 
going to investigate ice hands and see what we can discover about ice. This is 
going to be a very special unit because all of you are going to become real 
scientists and do the things scientists do. To start us off, let‟s first think about 
what we already know about ice. Take out your science journals and write down 
five things you know about ice.” (17) 
The introduction then segues directly into the second step of assessing prior knowledge. 
After the children have been given sufficient time to write down their ideas, the Ms. Perlo 
asks individual students to share what they have written with the class. As they share, the 
teacher constructs a concept map of their ideas (c.f. fig 2) 
 
Once the students have shared their ideas about ice and the concept map has been 
constructed, the students are allowed a period of exploration as the third step of the 
introductory phase. The students are encouraged write down observations and to use 
rulers and magnifying glasses to make measurements or closer observations. The students 
 58 
 
are further encouraged to think about, and write down, questions that they may be 
interested in investigating, thus the fourth step coincides in this instance with the third. 
 
 
fig. 2. The Concept Map for Ice (pg.18 in Llewellyn) 
At the end of the time designated for free exploration, Ms. Perlo allows the class to share 
their observations and questions with the rest of the class, writing down the questions on 
the chalkboard. Thus begins the fifth step of this first phase: “After all the questions were 
recorded on the board, she reviewed each question and with the students‟ help, sorted 
them into categories that (a) were ready to be investigated, (b) needed further revision, 
and (c) could not be answered without assistance from an outside expert.” (20) Once the 
questions had been properly sorted, the final step of the first phase, and the transition into 
 59 
 
the cycle of inquiry could take place, “The class formed groups consisting of three or four 
students for each of the questions to be investigated” (21). With the introductory phase 
complete, the students were bid adieu until their return the following day. 
 
The second day of the ice hands activity is dedicated to the planning of the investigation, 
which makes up the next three steps of the Llewellyn‟s inquiry cycle: brainstorming 
possible solutions, selecting a statement to test, and designing a plan. While the groups 
are allowed to operate independently for the most part, Ms. Perlo circulates through the 
room, checking in on the student‟s progress and coaching them along the way, 
encouraging them, for example, to think about the sort of data they are going to collect, 
reminding them to, “think about how you are going to organize your results in a data 
table or chart” (21). 
 
The third step of the inquiry cycle, design and carry out a plan, carries over into the third 
day, which is dedicated to carrying out the plan devised on the second day. The third day 
is devoted entirely to just this step and the next, the collection of data, which differs 
according to the experiments carried out by each group. 
 
The following two steps, organizing the data and drawing conclusions make up the 
activity of the fourth day, which takes the form of creating display boards intended for 
the purpose of communicating the results to the rest of the class. The presentation is 
expected to be organized by a three-fold division, 
 60 
 
“The left of your display boards should state the question you were investigating 
and your hypothesis,” [Ms. Perlo] explained. “The middle section lists the 
materials used and the steps of the investigation. The right side of the board lists 
the data table and the results. Don‟t forget to write a concluding statement about 
your hypothesis,” she added. “Be ready to give your presentation tomorrow.” (24) 
The fifth and final day is then dedicated to the last three steps of Llewellyn‟s outline, 
communicating results, comparing new knowledge to prior knowledge, and applying 
knowledge to new situations. The first of these is just the presentation the students have 
prepared. The second consists, in this example, of going back to the original concept map 
and adding to it the new discoveries created by the experiments, and finally the new 
information opens up a whole series of new questions that the new knowledge might be 
applied to. 
 
With this summery of the ice hands activity in place, we may now proceed to break down 
this series of activities into a series of interruptions of old patterns of activity. This 
breakdown will differ somewhat from Llewellyn‟s own account as it comes from a 
different viewpoint, along with different ends-in-view. 
 
Interruption Breakdown 
In actual practice, the ice hands activity consists of an ongoing string of interruptions into 
the patterns of activity engaged in by the students, though the vast majority of those 
interruptions are not included in Llewellyn‟s account: during those periods where the 
students are engaged in their own self-driven investigation, the teacher circulates between 
 61 
 
groups and intervenes when it makes sense to. We can imagine a pair of students playing 
with rulers as if they were swords or a group having trouble coming up with ideas for an 
experiment, an individual having difficulties communicating with their group members, 
or any number of other situations that would call for the teacher to step in and break the 
current pattern in order to alter the patterns of activity of the students thus interrupted. 
 
This active, ongoing process of intervention is safely assumed to be a normal part of any 
teacher‟s repertoire. It would almost seem strange for Llewellyn to go into much detail 
about such things, so we should not be surprised that we find no account of such routine 
teaching. Despite the lack of such fine grain detail however, Llewellyn‟s account does 
allow us to pick out several macro-interventions, directed not at individual students, but 
at the class as a whole. We will focus on a small set of these, each illustrating different 
types of interruptions: the introduction of the ice hands into the classroom, the 
construction of the concept map and the categorization of student‟s questions, and finally 
the tri-fold display and the event of the presentation. 
 
We will in this section focus exclusively on the way in which each of these interruptions 
can be seen as either falling into one of the four types we outlined in the previous chapter, 
or else how they might be understood as a complex thereof. Once this has been taken care 
of, we will then turn to an analysis of the kinds of new habits we might expect to come 
about as a result of the overcoming of the indeterminate situations induced by the 
interruption of old habits in the following section, and finally look to changes that might 
 62 
 
help to head off problematic situations that we might expect to develop as a result of 
those habits. 
 
In the first instance then, the ice hands themselves are introduced into the classroom 
environment. This is what we would consider a new technology being introduced that 
interrupts old techniques. The ice hands themselves are distributed throughout the 
classroom and the students are allowed to explore them by way of whatever habits they 
already have in place. 
 
We must note here that the ice hands will only stand as an interruption in so far as they 
strike the students as something strange. Having presumably encountered ice cubes and 
other forms of ice before, there would be little reason for the ice hands to create any sort 
of disturbance of the students‟ old patterns of activity if it were not for the unusual form 
of the ice. While the format of presentation and the entire complex situation of the 
introduction of the ice as an object of investigation might be enough to transform, say, 
regular old ice cubes into something unusual that will cause new patterns of activity to 
emerge out of the old, it is with good sense that Ms. Perlo has transformed what would 
otherwise be mundane into something bizarre. The emphasis here is on the strangeness of 
the ice hands. The goal is to introduce something that will be of indeterminate nature for 
the class, such that it will inspire inquiry. The bizarreness of the ice hands is an aid to that 
goal, as the meaning of the ice is transformed by its shape. Again, simple ice cubes, or 
even icicles merely collected from the outside world could serve such a purpose, but it is 
 63 
 
more likely in those cases that students will operate on familiar objects by way of old 
habits, treating them as already fully determined and in no need of inquiry.  
 
The introduction of this new product into the classroom environment then stands as a 
technological interruption of old techniques only insofar as the students bring their 
attention to the ice hands as something fundamentally new. Ms. Perlo‟s announcement 
that they will now have the opportunity to be „real scientists‟ and the focus on the hands 
as objects of investigation aid to create a situation that is fundamentally unlike other 
situations that the children have experienced, changing the effect of their old patterns of 
activity by bringing them to bear on something unlike their normal field of operation. 
 
As a second example, we consider two similar interruptions: the construction of the 
concept map and the categorization of the students‟ questions. Each of these we will 
consider as a new technique brought to bear on a particular technology produced by the 
students: statements in the first case and questions in the second. In both of these 
instances the student‟s current habits, their old techniques, are allowed to create products 
in a mostly free manner. It is readily assumed that the students have written statements 
and asked questions before. These products, as things that are left behind by the students‟ 
activity, are then acted upon by the teacher‟s technique. 
 
In the case of the concept map, the statements of knowledge the students have written are 
brought into relation with one another: this is then a technique which takes technological 
products from the students, their statements, and produces a new technology from them, 
 64 
 
the concept map itself. Without the teacher‟s intervention, no such map would form of its 
own accord: the statements produced by the students would remain dead on the page, 
each in their own journal, unrelated to any others. This technique then alters what would 
be the effects of the student‟s productions, transforming one sort of technological product 
into another. 
 
The situation is similar to the questions which are set into categories: taking up the 
products that the students have produced, the teacher transforms them into a new product, 
an organized whole. This transforms the relations of the questions to one another just as 
much as it changes the students‟ relation to their own questions. A new technology is 
produced by the technique of running old technological products through a system of 
categorization. New possibilities for action on the part of the students are thus opened up. 
 
In both the case of the concept map and the categorization, we can see how the 
interruption in the form of a technique in turn becomes an interruption in the form of a 
new technology: the technique creates a new product with which the students are then in 
interaction. We have then a complex of interruptions that are intimately related; our third 
example will further show the sort of complexity that is here possible. 
 
The presentation of the tri-fold boards on the fifth day is itself only a part of Ms. Perlo‟s 
technique of orienting the students towards the presentation as their end-in-view 
throughout the week-long activity. It is itself a complex made up of both the introduction 
of technologies, such as the tri-fold boards, and techniques, the smaller interventions into 
 65 
 
the activities of individual groups as they progress towards the end of a presentation. The 
introduction of the idea of the presentation then, and all the mini-interruptions that bring 
the class towards that goal make up an overarching interruption into the students old 
patterns of activity, their old techniques. 
 
This interruption then also produces technological products, the finished presentation 
boards themselves; as well as techniques, the presentations that each group performs. We 
might note that the boards, as technologies, need not be accompanied by any act of 
presentation, though the presentations themselves rely on the technology of the boards. 
Within the structure outlined by Llewellyn for inquiry based learning, these new products 
should, at the very least potentially, form the basis for a new round of investigation. The 
plurality of different results produced by the individual groups is intended to inspire 
further questioning, and indeed we can see that this fits well with our account of the ice 
hands experience in terms of technical interruptions: the presentations, each created 
separately by the individual groups are interruptions in their own right. The apparent 
effect on the regular patterns of activity will become apparent if inquiry is allowed, as 
Llewellyn suggests it may, to continue from the basis of the discourse that results from 
the students‟ public performances. 
 
We might now turn to each of these interruptions with a more critical eye, to imagine just 
what sorts of new habits they might produce. 
\ 
 
 66 
 
Foreseeable Problems 
At this stage we are required to utilize more imagination than previously for the 
following reason: we are neither familiar with Ms. Perlo‟s students nor the community 
where their school is located. Llewellyn does not dwell in any serious way on such 
matters. It is the activity that draws his eye, that which can be borrowed and used by 
another teacher in another context. That which is most readily imagined to be context-
less. In order to proceed, however, we must think about the old patterns of activity that 
our example interruptions come to interrupt. For it is the changes they produce in 
ongoing behavior, rather than, say, the knowledge they create in the mind of some 
subject, that we are interested in and change must change something. 
 
This should not be a terrifically dangerous obstacle; we must only keep in mind that we 
are operating behind a veil of abstraction. So long as our imaginings are not excessively 
wild, the example should serve its purposes with little ill effect. 
 
We begin then with the introduction of the ice hands themselves. The intended 
transformation of behavior here is, explicitly, to get students to think of themselves as 
“real scientists and do the things scientists do.” This end-in-view orients the whole of the 
ice hands activity. Individual students will, by virtue of their differences, each approach 
this common goal from a variety of starting points; the transformation of old patterns is 
not here decided by what the old patterns themselves are, but by the ideal of the scientist. 
 
 67 
 
The particular introduction of the ice hands and the period of free exploration allowed is 
an alteration of the students‟ environment that changes the meaning of their old patterns 
of activity. However, this relies in part, as we observed above, on the strange form of the 
ice hands: the object of investigation is intended to strike students as out of the ordinary, 
to encourage curiosity. So long as it does, things may proceed wonderfully. But an 
incredulous student, unimpressed with ice or uninterested in the project of being a „real 
scientist‟ will be faced with an indeterminate situation of a different sort: while the initial 
question intended to be investigated is „what are the properties of ice?‟ the resistant 
student is faced with the activity itself as a problematic situation that stands between the 
student and their own ends-in-view. 
 
Inquiry may of course be used in solving this problem just as much as the intended 
question of the activity. The habits that will result from such an inquiry though are likely 
to themselves be problematic: the student may participate minimally, engage in unrelated 
activities (playing with rulers as swords perhaps), or even actively attempt to disrupt the 
rest of the class. These results of the process of inquiry taken to the activity itself as a 
problem may go one to build up a habit-complex of opposition. 
 
Many of these habits of resistance would, in the normal run of things, be observed and 
further interrupted by a good teacher; this is a safely unspoken assumption of Llewellyn‟s 
account. However, we should see that in so far as these patterns of activity come into 
being as a result of the ice hands as interruption, they are techniques as products of that 
pedagogical strategy. The ice hands themselves are intended to organize student activity 
 68 
 
by inspiring a particular end-in-view, being scientists by discovering the properties of ice. 
But the ice hands cannot force students to take up that end-in-view as their own. Their 
strange form is already a gesture towards the necessity of indeterminacy for any change 
of habit: it would otherwise be sufficient to use ice in a form already familiar to students. 
 
This disconnect between the intended end-in-view and what may in fact be the end-in-
view of some particular student, or group of students (whole communities of resistance 
may spring up readily enough depending on the broader environment...) can be seen to 
cascade through the rest of the ice hands activity. The concept map and question-
categorization are both wonderfully useful tools for those students who are engaged in 
the project of discovering the properties of ice. But for those who have, for any of a 
multitude of possible reasons, not taken up that project, the time for building these 
pedagogical technologies will be spent developing a habit of internal resistance to 
communal activity. 
 
The culminating presentation, itself an end-in-view that organizes many of the patterns of 
activity into the habit-complex of what is called a „real scientist‟, creates a whole set of 
problems that students must overcome to reach the goal and those who set out to achieve 
that goal will undoubtedly acquire a whole range of new techniques of social interaction, 
cooperation, reflective inquiry, and so on. But group work is just as amenable to 
communal resistance as it is to communal cooperation, and it would be quite the mistake 
to forget that while some students develop their skills as scientific investigators and 
 69 
 
presenters, others may be building up habits that discourage communal inquiry all 
together. 
 
It is, admittedly, a virtue of inquiry-based education, just as Llewellyn‟s Ms. Perlo 
performs it, that students are all the more likely to take up the intended ends-in-view as 
their own, as they are allowed to actively participate, asking their own questions and 
creating their own experiments and all the rest. It is however for just this reason that the 
still present possibility of student resistance is assumed to be a minor detail that will be 
taken care of by the teacher‟s proactive intervention. We may, however, by keeping this 
possibility before us, suggest changes to the activity that might avoid some occurrences 
of this problem. 
 
Changes 
The problem of just how to get students‟ ends-in-view to harmonize with the ends-in-
view of their community, whether at the level of the project group or the classroom, the 
village or the state, might in the end be one of the central problematics of a progressive, 
or for that matter any, education. The success or failure of an educational system is in 
many ways gauged just by its ability to bring students‟ aims into line with the goals of the 
community at large. Dewey, responding to the ancient Greek concerns regarding the new 
practice of sophistry near the end of Democracy and Education reminds us in a string of 
questions that this problem is not in the least new, “Was not the only true, because the 
only moral, life gained through obedient habituation to the customary practices of the 
 70 
 
community? And was not the new education an enemy to good citizenship, because it set 
up a rival standard to the established traditions of the community?” (MW Vol.9 pp.340). 
 
It would be over-zealous at the very least then to presume that we might solve this 
problem once and for all. However, it is possible to see ways in which the situation at 
hand might be improved, if not entirely repaired. The question of the moment is the 
relation of the students to the entire ice hands activity: there are a confluence of 
environmental factors that encourage the students to take up the community ends as their 
own, but there remain wide cracks through which a resistant student might slip. 
 
To patch just one of these cracks then, we would do well to think about the unusual need 
for the bizarre quality of the object of investigation: aside from the pre-existing 
institutional environment, it is all that Ms. Perlo has to rely on to capture her students‟ 
curiosity. This is the case for a reason that breaks the activity in question quite a bit away 
from its goal of allowing students to become „real scientists‟: there is no broad communal 
end-in-view that has come up against a problem that requires an inquiry into the 
properties of ice. 
 
That the classroom community does not have an already complete understanding of ice, 
as established by the concept-map and the categorized questions, may be a step in the 
right direction, but does not yet establish any need for the inquiry that follows. Real 
scientists engage in inquiry to solve problems, if there is anything that we might learn 
 71 
 
from Dewey at all, that we face in the real world, above and beyond mere holes in some 
ideal total system of knowledge. 
 
The ice hands project then might be seen to be an absolutely ideal activity for a classroom 
in Banff Alberta, a community whose very existence depends directly on the element in 
question: ice. A community whose water source and economic centerpiece consists of 
great masses of ice will have a much more direct reason to investigate the properties of 
ice. The inquiry will there appear as the result of a real problem faced by the community 
at large: the ice is melting, what can be done? The old habits face an imminent threat of 
interruption unless something can be done about the disappearing glaciers. While we 
cannot reasonably expect that even this community would not include some degree of 
resistance to the transition of students‟ ends-in-view to the inquiry into ice, the 
connection of the activity in the classroom to a real problem that calls for that particular 
inquiry would overwhelm the need for the object of investigation to simply be strange 
enough to peak students‟ interest. 
 
What is required then, in this case as in any other, is an account of the students‟ ongoing 
life, their movement to and from the school to the home and back again, the broad scope 
of patterns of activity that make up their lives such that the activity in the school might 
make use of those ends-in-view that are already a part of the student‟s life. This first 
small change may reasonably be expected to encourage students to engage more intently 
in their inquiries, as it will allow them to work towards solutions to problems that they 
already face in the wider world. The artificial disconnect of the classroom from the 
 72 
 
surrounding environment is itself a break that will create distance between the intended 
effects of the ice hands interruption and its eventual products. It is only when the 
students‟ old patterns of activity already lead them towards the inquiry that takes center 
stage in a school activity that they can be expected to take part without risk of resistance. 
 
 73 
 
CHAPTER V 
CONCLUDING REMARKS 
But…Why? 
That there is a disconnection between the wider environment and the classroom in the ice 
hands project may not come as an incredible surprise. Truth be told, it is common enough 
for classroom experience to have little or no obvious connection to the lives of students 
beyond the structured time spent sitting at a desk, to say nothing of the complex 
communities and ongoing endeavors that students may be engaged in outside the walls of 
the school. 
 
The time honored cliché of the student who pesters the teacher with questions as to why 
this particular material is necessary right this minute might act as a kind of symbol for the 
problematic situation that has here been brought into view: in so far as students do not 
take up the ends-in-view that motivate the organization of classroom projects, 
assignments inside the classroom or out will stand as problematic situations for students 
to overcome on their way towards their own projects, whatever those might be and in 
whatever way is most successful in overcoming those obstacles. 
 
We have suggested that the ice hands project might make more sense situated in a 
community where ice itself is already an element of an ongoing inquiry into an 
indeterminate situation. We do not in any way expect this to fully resolve the problem at 
hand, but only wish to show that once such a problem has been brought into view, we can 
begin the work of inquiry to produce improved pedagogical strategies. We must be clear 
 74 
 
though that we do believe that the ever-present possibility of student resistance to the 
programs put forth by their teachers is a problematic situation that is not in any way 
restricted to the ice hands experiment, nor only to Llewellyn‟s Inquire Within. 
 
In fact, it should be said that Llewellyn‟s project gets much correct with regard to this 
particular problem: the ice hands project includes within itself a variety of techniques 
employed to encourage students to take up their assignment as their own project, and 
aims in the end to create an ongoing discourse within the classroom as to what questions 
will be of interest to that little community going forward. The teacher driven stem of 
Llewellyn‟s chart of the inquiry cycle (fig 1) would then, ideally, fall off, leaving the 
community within the cycle of inquiry such that further projects emerge organically out 
of those already completed. This is a lofty goal, but a noble one, and it would be a shame 
to miss what is done so well by focusing only on what cracks we have discovered in the 
facade. 
 
However, the goal of ongoing community based inquiry in the case of the ice hands 
driven by the results of previous inquiries is a lofty one precisely because it takes its start 
from an origin that is foreign to any concrete interests whatsoever, however many 
connections to possible real-world applications we might discover afterwards. A primary 
goal of the ice hands activity is to introduce students to the process of inquiry itself, and 
in so far as it does that it may be a wonderful success. But the plan for the ice hands lacks 
any motivating problematic situation that calls for inquiry in the first place, and so is one 
step further removed from the world than need be. Educators would be well advised then, 
 75 
 
as Dewey suggests, to inquire into the actual conditions of the community in which they 
will be educating, to better ground their teaching in the concrete projects and problems 
that face the community as a whole. 
 
We have then suggested a move that would connect the ice hands in all their strangeness 
back up with a real world indeterminate situation that would give call for an inquiry into 
the properties of ice. This is only a small change, but it is intended to bring out just what 
is at stake in the gap between the projects that students engage in while they are inside 
the school‟s walls and their lives outside its well-defined boundaries. 
 
The lives students live outside of the school however are not nearly so simple as to be 
resolvable into a single line drawn between a classroom activity and an indeterminate 
situation faced by the community. The terrifically complex interconnections between a 
student who passes in and out of the school‟s front doors several times a week and their 
own horizon-bound environment, both cultural and natural, are cause of an enormous 
multitude of large scale habit-complexes, each organized by their very own ends-in-view. 
These organized sets of habits are in no way destined or guaranteed to intersect at any 
grand unifying end-in-view, so while a great number of pressures might be exerted by a 
given classroom‟s organization of technologies and a given teacher‟s skillful techniques 
of intervention to reconnect a student‟s habits with the larger scale projects of the wider 
community, there are an unlimited number of ways in which that effort might itself break 
down. 
 
 76 
 
We might also note here that the tools that students are encouraged to use to investigate 
their ice hands are themselves a reminder that Ms. Perlo‟s classroom is itself a space cut 
off from the exterior world: rulers and magnifying glasses are technologies which might 
strike us as quaint in a world where, “As of September 2009, 58% of 12 year-olds have a 
cell phone, compared with 73% of 13 year-olds.” (Pew 2010) While Ms. Perlo is dealing 
with 9 and 10 year olds, it can be well expected that at least a few of them would, today 
anyhow (smaller percentages for 2001 of course!), have on their person a personal 
computer that fits in the palm of their hand. It is irresponsible, at the least, to engage in 
any sort of educational practice that does not take into account the influx of new 
technologies into the lives of students. Artificial limitations of the tools available for 
inquiry further removes classroom activity from the environment it is situated within, 
creating breaks through which students will slip. The computer that is not a tool becomes 
instead a toy, a distraction, an addiction, or any other manner of „bad‟ habit. 
 
Those bad habits that are born out of the breakages between the classroom and the rest of 
a student‟s experienced world are especially problematic because they may in some cases 
make no appearance within the classroom, given that at least some of the strategies that 
students develop to overcome what stand as problematic situations within their current set 
of projects will involve avoiding the teacher‟s notice all together: an ongoing conflict 
between the ideal ends-in-view of the teacher and the ends-in-view of the student can 
result in a sort of technological arms race.
2
 This conflict will, in so far as it is not resolved 
in such a way as to bring about true cooperation between the student and the teacher 
                                                 
2
 Dewey discusses the problems of ideal ends-in-view in some detail, c.f. “Ends and Values” in Theory of 
Valuation (LW Vol.13 pp.220-226) 
 77 
 
towards a collaborative end, result in the production on both sides of techniques and 
technologies, each responding in kind to the new developments that they are opposed to. 
 
As a result, it is apparent that the amount of attention that a teacher can devote to 
individual students is crucial to the quality of the education those students receive. It is 
only by careful observation and interaction that a teacher might discover the relationship 
between assigned projects and students‟ ends. As class sizes swell, teachers are left only 
with the option of performing a kind of triage, focusing their attention on those students 
who have already taken up the ends-in-view of the educational program whatever it may 
be, without any way of dealing with those students who are disconnected with such 
projects. 
 
While this may not be apparent from the single example we have here examined in detail, 
it can be brought into high relief if we examine a parallel case, one that has become an 
integral part of the contemporary educational paradigm, and which poses this very same 
problem of an educational project that is only somewhat likely to be taken up in any 
authentic way by students whom are required to take it up. We will turn here briefly then 
to the issue of standardized testing, to see in what way, and to what extent the specific 
indeterminate situation that has come into focus through the application of our apparatus 
might be usefully generalized. 
 
 
 
 78 
 
Test Strategies 
We will begin here by noting that the standardized test will show up beneath the lens of 
our apparatus as primarily a technological intervention, a technology introduced into the 
classroom upon which students bring to bear the habits that they have built up prior to its 
appearance within their environment. In normal situations, a test is meant to specifically 
target the detailed articulation of some set of habits. Performing addition, completing 
analogies, answering questions with respect to a text; each variety of test structure is 
intended to produce a record of student activity in a narrowly defined field. Testing itself 
normally occurs within an environment that is already structured by the idea of test taking 
and a whole set of techniques is employed to guarantee students‟ participation in the test 
taking: confining students to their seats, maintaining silence, interrupting lines of sight 
that have crept across towards the work of other students, and so on. There are of course 
a wide variety of test taking situations, and the techniques employed may vary a 
considerable deal, but it is never the case that the test all on its own is enough to inspire 
the collective student body to complete the particular problem set. 
 
The multiple choice test, in particular, in a somewhat obvious way introduces an 
indeterminate situation: which of the possible answers is correct? This indeterminate 
situation is designed with the intent of initiating a process of inquiry for the student who 
must choose exactly one response for each question. There is an implicit expectation in 
the design of any such test that students will take up as their own end-in-view the quest to 
answer each question correctly by way of inquiry within the rules laid down by the 
proctor. One may not complete the inquiry by glancing at the answer sheet of a fellow 
 79 
 
test-taker, for example, and the most carefully structured tests are purposefully designed 
with the intent of making those strategies impossible (e.g. by systematically varying the 
tests that individual students receive). 
 
For those test-takers who do take up the ends-in-view that are already implicit in the test 
taking situation, the test may do its job wonderfully: a student will engage in honest 
inquiry to resolve the indeterminate situation presented by each problem of the test. In 
doing so, the habits that make up the student‟s own pattern of inquiry will be, to some 
degree at least, exposed. Regular errors may be discovered, or unique mishaps, or in rare 
but wonderful cases entirely new ways of solving problems may be found to drive the 
students towards the correct response. It is then possible for the teacher who analyses the 
test results to employ techniques of intervention to discourage those habits of inquiry that 
result in mistaken responses, or encourage those that work out as desired. 
 
The test itself, however, stands to any student who is taking it first and foremost as a 
problematic situation that must be overcome in order to return to those ongoing projects 
organized by the student‟s own ends-in-view, and those ends-in-view, as a result of the 
complex environment that the student inhabits both inside and outside of the school, may 
or may not have anything to do with completing every problem with the correct response. 
Again a range of techniques is employed to encourage students to take up that end-in-
view as their own, by way of grades, competitive communities, explanation of the impact 
of the test on the student‟s future and so on. But unless these techniques are successful in 
directing a student‟s ends, the inquiry that students engage in to overcome the test-as-
 80 
 
problematic-situation may result in an entire menagerie of „bad‟ habits, in the first and 
most obvious instance, those test taking strategies that are called cheating. 
 
Cheating on tests involves a set of techniques that students invent or acquire as a result of 
successful inquiries into the test-as-a-problem. They qualify, then, as a kind of growth, 
though of the problematic, non-recursive kind, akin to the growth of a pickpocket who 
has become better at picking pockets. We can see here though the need to look at the 
habits produced by some particular growth with respect to their influence on future 
growth: possession of successful cheating strategies make students less likely to take up 
the ends-in-view of learning the material covered in the test, instead only strategies to 
complete the test without learning the material are honed and insofar as those strategies 
operate without regard to the content of the particular test they are employed to defeat, 
the student‟s habits become narrower rather than wider: the cheat can only cheat, whereas 
the student who does not cheat but is successful on many differing tests has a different set 
of habits for each differing test. 
 
That cheating is not the sort of growth we wish to promote as educators will surprise no 
one, but perhaps it should come as a surprise that the very technology of the test itself is 
the problematic situation that inspires inquiry to produce the habits of cheating in the first 
place. Cheating is what we have here called a kind of resistance, and it should be noted 
that it is produced by the entire complex situation of the student taking the test in the 
school within the community, and further that it is not in any way limited to the actions of 
an individual student, but that cheating itself can become a uniting cause for a community 
 81 
 
of students, a sub-culture as it were, whose ends-in-view are united against those of the 
educational system they are found in. 
 
This is a far from ideal situation, though it has its own history because cheating itself is a 
problematic situation that has become the subject of inquiries into techniques and 
technologies that might make it impossible, an ongoing arms race that will persist so long 
as there are tests and students whose interests drive them to consider the test as a problem 
to be solved by means other than those intended by the creators of the exam. There are 
other, less obvious modes of resistance though that are more difficult to detect, more 
difficult then to interrupt, in particular, the habit of doing the bare minimum, of not 
taking up the project of completing the test in the correct manner at all, but of doing just 
enough to avoid notice, those habits that remove the test as obstacle but accomplish 
nothing more. 
 
The Silent Generation 
Despite this somewhat troubling situation, and for a whole host of well-intentioned 
reasons, universal standardized testing has become a dominant paradigm in the world of 
education. In our current political and economic climate, it seems likely that cuts to 
educational funding and disruptions of the organization of educators will increase, rather 
than decrease the importance of such testing within our schools. This strikes us as a 
traumatic, even catastrophic turn of events. 
 
 82 
 
The end-in-view of scoring well on a standardized test may be taken up by a range of 
students, though there is plenty of documentation that a wide variety of students from 
what might somewhat ironically be called „non-standard‟ backgrounds struggle with 
standardized tests (see, for example, Good 2003, which deals with „performance gaps‟ 
associated with Black, Hispanic, and low income students as well as with girls vs. boys). 
Approaches that focus on improving the situation with regard to each group that might be 
statistically identified and then problematized are necessary within the current paradigm, 
but they fall short of dealing with the more global issue that is a result of the very nature 
of the test as a technology in its own right. 
 
There have, on the other hand, been several genealogical studies, in the wake of Foucault, 
on the exam as a technology (e.g. Ball 1990). These serve as a step in the right direction, 
as they problematize the exam itself, but they fall short, as genealogies might be expected 
to, of giving us anything in the way of a solution for the problematic situation they 
announce. 
 
The real scope of the issue however, and the need for radical effort to resolve the 
situation, can only become truly manifest for those students living through an education 
is centered squarely upon the standardized test. I myself watched the high school I 
attended transform as the state of Colorado adopted No Child Left Behind policy. 
Whatever it might appear to be from the perspective of those who have dedicated 
themselves to the noble work of education, from the perspective of the students, the 
 83 
 
standardized test becomes a symbol of the total disconnect between the ends of the 
educational institution and the ends that the students might call their own. 
 
To begin with, the skills that such tests seek to put on display are often skills that have 
become obsolete in the technological environment of modern student life. It is only a 
dedication to the social structure that one finds oneself in that could lend any reason to 
adopting as an end-in-view the mastering of skills that one will need never make use of in 
light of readily available technology. The vacuum-sealed, technology-free space of the 
exam already announces the test‟s tangential relationship with reality. The ease with 
which even a simple cell phone might be used to overcome whatever problem the test 
might pose is a testament to gaping void between the ideal conception of the test and its 
awkward reality. 
 
If our analysis here is anywhere close to truth, one would expect a wave of students who 
treat the entire educational system, insofar as it has become dominated by testing that 
must strike at least some portion of the student body as counter to their own ends, as itself 
a problematic situation to be overcome. This ranges from the obviously problematic 
students who take up the goal of scoring well on such tests without also aligning 
themselves with the purposes of the test, resulting in the wide variety of strategies of 
cheating, to those students who simply understand that committing the bare minimum of 
effort is often the easiest way to overcome whatever obstacle that school might become. 
 
 84 
 
There is then a critical mass of apathetic students that can be reached such that an 
informal agreement to avoid all participation becomes the status quo. I would not venture 
such a hypothesis without having witnessed the event, not only once, and not only in one 
state, or one level of education. I have watched helplessly as entire classes became battles 
between teachers who could only at times resort to begging students to react at all. Such a 
problem can develop without any individual or group planning or executing anything like 
a well-formed strategy. Instead the collective resistance seems to grow out of the ever-
increasing silence that hangs behind the speech that issues from the mouth at the head of 
the classroom. Day by day as that silence grows, it becomes less and less attractive for 
any individual student to break it, until it becomes apparently the teacher‟s responsibility 
to call out individuals and force them to participate. 
 
This disturbing pattern is, on my view, a result of the disconnection between students‟ 
activities in the classroom, organized by ends-in-view that are decided ahead of time and 
for the general population, and their lives beyond the school‟s walls, teeming with 
complexity and organized by a plurality of ends-in-view that differ not only by the 
individual but within the individual as well. We might re-emphasize that swelling class 
sizes mean that these issues are beyond the reach of teachers swamped with more 
students than they can give attention to. 
 
The tension between the school and the students confined to it will only grow so long as 
the problem is taken up as one that can be solved within the very paradigm that is its root 
cause. As student resistance to the educational program is problematized and inquired 
 85 
 
into without an eye towards the intervention that inspires the problematic growth in the 
first place, a technological war between students and the educational system develops 
while calls of blame shift from teachers to parents to the students themselves. 
 
This is neither a problem caused entirely by standardized testing, nor one resolvable 
simply by removing that particular object from the classroom. The standardized test is 
instead only symptomatic of an eroding canyon that marks the space between the 
institutional world of the school and the complex life that surrounds the school grounds. 
That widening gap though is of terrible importance: as more and more students find 
themselves subject to a process that they have no active stake in, the potential for 
dramatic consequence increases. Students whose ends are in obvious conflict with the 
ends that their school intends them to take up are more likely to drop out, cheat, subvert 
or worse. That my generation has given birth to the disturbing and as of yet unexplained 
pattern of violence committed by students upon their peers is a haunting reminder that an 
environment that alienates students from their caretakers and from their peers is an 
environment that harbors a potential for horrific rupture. 
 
The technologies of security meant to stave off such violence such as video-surveillance, 
monitored attendance, armed security guards, metal detectors and the like might be relied 
upon to prevent particular instances of violent rupture, but they are far and away from 
addressing anything like the root cause that makes such catastrophes possible in the first 
place. Only by recognizing that bad habits emerge as the result of the environments they 
occur within can we begin the process of a reevaluation and reconstruction of educational 
 86 
 
practice that will confront the monstrous possibilities that have only just recently erupted 
onto the scene. 
 
Barring collective student revolt, albeit perhaps of the hollow men, “not with a bang but a 
whimper” variety, and a full scale inward collapse of the current educational system, we 
can only sketch out the beginnings of an inquiry that might lead us away from such 
hazards. 
 
Another Way 
While Dewey‟s analysis of human experience might give us the foundations for a 
thorough criticism of educational practice, the inquiry that follows the institution of this 
particular problem points towards a deep inquiry into the nature of cooperation. Any 
systematic, generalized approach to education is bound to become entangled in the 
dialectic of student resistance. If Dewey‟s model of human experience bares a coherent 
relationship with reality, such that learning and growth are always the result of inquiry 
into indeterminate situations, any educational paradigm that is not first and foremost 
cooperation with the students will inevitably include the possibility of conflicting ends 
and the production of habits of resistance. We must recognize that in so far as education 
is standardized there will be some degree of conflict between students' and teachers' ends, 
and that ignoring such conflicts is a dangerous thing. Well educated students will have 
ends-in-view that connect well with their circumstances: they will have grown in ways 
that allow them to continue to grow in their environment, and in so far as that 
environment is a social one, that growth necessitates cooperation. 
 87 
 
 
Dewey himself places cooperation at the heart of his Ethics, and we would do well to 
recall his careful formulation, 
Cooperation implies a common end. It means that each is interested in the success 
of all. This common end forms then a controlling rule of action, and the mutual 
interest mean sympathy. Cooperation is therefore one of nature's most effective 
agencies for a social standard and a social feeling. (MW Vol.5 pp.44) 
Cooperation is only possible in light of a shared end. Until such an end has been 
established, cooperation is impossible. Once it has been established on the other hand, 
education is inevitable, as interested parties work together to solve a problem they share. 
Education is, at its heart, cooperation towards the common end of growth that encourages 
further growth. It is the production of new technologies and techniques for overcoming 
obstacles that block the progress of collective projects. And insofar as it is imposed from 
on high as a technological solution to human beings as inherently problematic material 
which must be worked into the shape of some set of ideals (the scientist as we saw in Ms. 
Perlo‟s ice hands, but also the performer, the athlete, the artist and so on) it will consist of 
an increasingly complex arms-race between the institution and its wards. Risk, in this 
case as others, can only be reduced in statistical likely-hood, never to zero, and with the 
most catastrophic possibilities remaining as inconceivable shadows until the day they 
make their sudden appearance. 
 
A student population engaged in indolent resistance is no one‟s fantasy. Unless we work 
to close the gap that separates the classroom from the surrounding environment however, 
 88 
 
we face towards this perhaps overly maudlin image. Cooperation isn‟t easy of course. It 
requires the recognition of the real complexity of student life beyond the boundaries of 
the school, specific to not only the particular community but all the way to the individual 
student. At the first sign that there is a separation between the interests of the teacher and 
the interests of the student, the dialectic of resistance begins. To avoid this entanglement 
requires something like a move from what Mary Parker Follett called integration. Her 
pioneering work on conflict resolution might be usefully applied in the classroom: 
I have different wants to integrate; you have different wants to integrate. Then 
there are your wants and my wants to be joined. But the process is not that I 
integrate my desires, you yours, and then together we unite the results; I often 
make my own integration through and by means of my integration with you. 
(Follett1924) 
Or perhaps we might look towards the pragmatic phenomenology that Megan Craig 
builds out in Levinas and James, engaging in the destabilizing interruptions that make up 
education by, “Responding to such instances with careful, nonviolent attention and 
staying awake to their indeterminate possibilities” (Craig 191). Following folks like 
Dewey, Follett and Craig, we might build out a cooperative ethics of education, this 
would have to stand in for what would otherwise be provided for in a universal plan for 
educational procedure. 
 
We must here recall the piece of Dewey that opens our first chapter: 
A philosophy of education, like any theory, has to be stated in words, in symbols. 
But so far as it is more than verbal it is a plan for conducting education. Like any 
 89 
 
plan, it must be framed with reference to what is to be done and how it is to be 
done. (LW Vol.13 pp.13) 
A cooperative ethics of education would then answer to the „how it is to be done‟ part of 
a plan for conducting education, but in the end, we must leave it at that, for what is to be 
done will depend upon the myriad of particularities of the individual educational situation 
a teacher finds themselves in. What is to be done can no more be decided in advance than 
in medical practice. One must diagnose the situation, discover the patterns of behavior 
that persist within the unique environment, their modes of production and the conflicts 
they result in. Only then can we begin the real hard work of designing an intervention 
that will result in productive growth, eliminating current conflicts of ends. It is perhaps 
only this sort of intervention that might truly deserve the title of progressive education. 
 
Coda 
Extension of the qualities that make up the scientific attitude is quite a different 
matter than dissemination of the results of physics, chemistry, biology and 
astronomy, valuable as the latter may be. The difference is the reason why the 
issue is a moral one. The question of whether science is capable of influencing the 
formation of ends for which men strive or is limited to increasing power of 
realizing those which are formed independently of it is the question whether 
science has intrinsic moral potentiality. Historically, the position that science is 
devoid of moral quality has been held by theologians and their metaphysical 
allies. For the position points unmistakably to the necessity for recourse to some 
other source of moral guidance. That a similar position is now taken in the name 
 90 
 
of science is either a sign of a confusion that permeates all aspects of culture, or is 
an omen of ill for democracy. If control of conduct amounts to conflict of desires 
with no possibility of determination of desire and purpose by scientifically 
warranted beliefs, then the practical alternative is competition and conflict 
between unintelligent forces for control of desire. The conclusion is so extreme as 
to suggest that denial in the name of science of the existence of any such things as 
moral facts may mark a transitional stage thoughtlessly taken to be final. It is 
quite true that science cannot affect moral values, ends, rules, principles as these 
were once thought of and believed in, namely, prior to the rise of science. But to 
say that there are no such things as moral facts because desires control formation 
and valuation of ends is in truth but to point to desires and interests as themselves 
moral facts requiring control by intelligence equipped with knowledge. Science 
through its physical technological consequences is now determining the relations 
which human beings, severally and in groups, sustain to one another. If it is 
incapable of developing moral techniques which will also determine these 
relations, the split in modern culture goes so deep that not only democracy but all 
civilized values are doomed. Such at least is the problem. A culture which permits 
science to destroy traditional values but which distrusts its power to create new 
ones is a culture which is destroying itself. War is a symptom as well as a cause of 
the inner division. (LW Vol.13 pp.171-2) 
 
The French poet was wrong when he said: “Expel nature, she comes back at the 
double”. There is no expelling her, she is there all the time. We have dwelt on the 
 91 
 
question of the transmissibility of acquired characteristics. It is highly improbable 
that a habit is ever transmitted; if this does occur, it is owning to a combination of 
many favorable conditions so accidental that it will certainly not recur often 
enough to implant the habit in the species. It is in customs, institutions, even in 
language, that moral acquisitions are deposited; they are then transmitted by 
unceasing education; it is in this way that habits which pass on from generation to 
generation end by being considered hereditary. But everything conspires to 
encourage the wrong explanation: misdirected pride, superficial optimism, a 
mistaken idea of the real nature of progress, lastly and above all, a very 
widespread confusion between the inborn tendency, which is indeed transmissible 
from parent to child, and the acquired habit that has frequently become grafted on 
to the natural tendency. (Bergson 1935) 
 
“Accordingly, when, lying awake at about half-past five on the morning of April 
18 in my little „flat‟ on campus of Stanford, I felt the bed begin to waggle, my 
first consciousness was one of gleeful recognition of the nature of the movement. 
„By Jove,‟ I said to myself, „here‟s B.‟s old earthquake after all‟! And then, as it 
went crescendo, „And a jolly good one it is too!‟ I said... 
“The emotion consisted wholly of glee and admiration; glee at the vividness 
which such an abstract idea or verbal term as „earthquake‟ could put on when 
translated into sensible reality and verified concretely; and admiration at the way 
in which the frail little wooden house could hold itself together in spite of such a 
shaking. I felt no trace whatsoever of fear; it was pure delight and welcome. 
 92 
 
“„Go it‟, I almost cried aloud, „and go it stronger!’... (James Memories and 
Studies, quoted by H.M. Kallen in Why Religion, quoted by Bergson at great 
length in Two Sources of Morality and Religion, 1935) 
 
 
 
 
 93 
 
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