Jackson, Philip W. (1998). John Dewey and the Lessons of Art. Reviewed by Tracie E. Costantino, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Jackson, Philip W. (1998). John Dewey and the Lessons of Art. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Pp. xvi + 204 $30 (Cloth)       ISBN 0-300-07213-9 $15 (Paper)       ISBN 0-300-08289-4 Reviewed by Tracie E. Costantino University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign August 6, 2001 The title of Philip Jackson's book, John Dewey and the Lessons of Art, holds promise in the current climate of increased advocacy efforts by arts educators for a more secure place for the arts in the core curriculum. It begs the questions, what are the lessons of art according to Dewey, a cherished educational theorist for arts educators, who are the lessons for, and how might these lessons be applied? The answers to these questions are both familiar and surprising, but Jackson makes the reader wait until the end of the book before he addresses the question I was most interested in, how might these lessons be applied to education? The focus of this review will be on how well Jackson answers this question. Jackson clearly states the purpose of his book and its intended audience in the opening lines of the introduction: This book deals with what the arts have to teach us about how to live our lives…It also treats the subsidiary question of how teachers of all kinds might make use of art's 'lessons' (understood in experiential terms) to improve their teaching. (p. xi) Hence, it would seem that the book is targeted primarily to a general audience and secondarily to educators, (Note 1) but later in the introduction Jackson specifies that he is interested in addressing teachers and professional educators in particular, due to his “longstanding interest in teaching as a professional practice and as a human endeavor” (p. xii). This nicely parallels Dewey's theory of art as an essential part of human experience, and foreshadows the link Jackson intends to explore between aesthetic experience and education. He further explains the objectives of his book, citing “two goals—presenting an overview of Dewey's thinking about the arts and saying something about its practical implications for the general reader and especially for educators” (p. xiii). Despite my hopes for a more practical discussion of Dewey's conceptions of the lessons of art and their application to education, as implied in the book's title and the introduction's opening statement, this later statement in the introduction reveals the more musing style of Jackson's writing and his modest intentions to “say something” as opposed to inspire action. Although his main focus on how Dewey's theory of the transformative power of art can “modify irrevocably our habitual ways of thinking, feeling, and perceiving” (p. xiv), does not seem modest at all, his intention is first to present Dewey's theory and then to muse over its relevance for contemporary life and education. By the book's end, it becomes apparent that the responsibility is on the reader to decide how art's lessons might be applied concretely. Jackson's intentions are enacted through the four main themes of the book, which correspond to its four chapters: experience and the arts (chapter one), the spirituality of art-centered experiences (chapter two), experience as artifice: putting Dewey's theory to work (chapter three), and some educational implications of Dewey's theory of experience (chapter four). The first chapter delivers on Jackson's promise to present “an overview of Dewey's thinking about the arts” as it is a careful explication of Dewey's philosophy of experience, focusing on art- centered aesthetic experience as opposed to what Jackson calls naturally occurring aesthetic experiences (those based on watching a sunset, for example, or children playing in a park). The second chapter explores the transformative quality of an experience centered on art—the sense of spirituality that has long been associated with artistic experiences—but here Jackson tests that notion against twentieth-century art. How is spirituality manifested in art created in a post-Nietzschean world? It is in chapters one and two that Jackson identifies the lessons of art according to Dewey: a call for the kind of perceiving that requires patience and careful attending and that results in deeper meanings. According to Jackson, perception is more than looking or recognition; it is a way “to make sense of what one senses, to partake of its meaning” (p. 57). Dewey emphasizes, “What is perceived are meanings, rather than just events or circumstances” (Jackson, 1998, p. 57). Through this heightened perception, common, daily events or experiences can be transformed into meaningful aesthetic experiences that have a strong impact on the perceiver, often changing the way he or she feels or thinks about something for the rest of his or her life. Jackson closes chapter one with perhaps the book's most inspiring and direct statement of art's lessons for life and education. Our failure to partake of life's richness, to enjoy its qualitative immediacy, leaves us divorced from the here and now, vainly directing our thoughts and aspirations toward an imagined future that never arrives. That condition, Dewey would say, is to be avoided at all costs. Works of art help to instruct us in the how and the why of avoiding it. (p. 67) Dewey considers the most powerfully transformative aesthetic experiences to occur during the perception of a work of art, “an aesthetic experience, the work of art in its actuality, is perception” (Jackson, 1998, p. 57). Jackson carries Dewey's idea further in a provocative statement almost fifty pages later in the book, “Could it be, in short, that even extraordinary experiences must be made into art if they are to become transformative for those who undergo them?” (p. 104) He effectively illustrates this idea in his discussion of Elizabeth Bishop's poem The Fish, implying that it is through the poetic expression of an extraordinary fishing experience that the poetess had a transformative experience. Unfortunately, instead of elaborating on this idea further, which has great potential for an understanding of the essential role of art in human experience and, therefore, education, Jackson spends the third chapter presenting an application of Dewey's valuing of perception to three books that seem tangential to the discussion, as none of them specifically reference Dewey. The books are in the self-help genre and despite their lack of a direct reference to Dewey, Jackson believes that they are Deweyan in spirit and offer concrete applications of his philosophy of experience. The first, Wherever You Go, There You Are by Kabat-Zinn (1994), focuses on personal improvement through meditation and the other two, Learning by Heart by Kent and Steward (1992) and Franck's (1973) Zen of Seeing focus on personal improvement through drawing and art making. All are grounded in exercises for increased perception as the means toward greater life fulfillment. Granted, Jackson is trying to illustrate how Dewey's theories can be applied even to books that are not directly informed by his philosophy, thereby demonstrating the broad applicability of his theory of experience. The more simplistic treatment of perception in these works (as explained by Jackson) (Note 2), however, undermines the potency of Jackson's own statement about the role of art in transformative experience, as well as the importance Dewey gives to art as the embodiment of perception, and hence, meaning. Although Jackson's selection of these books does permit him to introduce the reader to a lesser known aspect of Dewey's life—his study with F. Matthias Alexander, creator of the self-help Alexander Technique—these pages may have been better spent on a more significant connection to other important theories about the application of aesthetic experience to daily living and education, such as the emphasis on attending by Maxine Greene (Greene, 1995) or Harry Broudy's concept of enlightened cherishing (Broudy, 1972). I recognize that Jackson aims to address a more general audience with these self-help books, but a reference instead to Greene and or Broudy could both have popular appeal and satisfy the reader interested in education. Jackson's methodical explication of Dewey's philosophy of experience in chapter one and then the extensive discussion of the transformative power of art-centered aesthetic experience in chapter two created for me an eager anticipation of the application of these theories to more meaningful life and educational experiences. Chapter three's discussion of the self-help books diminishes the central role of art carefully constructed in the previous two chapters. In chapter four, Jackson does not address my most pressing question, how might the lessons of art be applied to education, until the last page and a half of the book. Instead, he presents a dichotomized view of the current practice of teaching as divided into two camps, child-centered and subject-centered, and places this view within the historical context of Dewey's own struggle over his advice of “learning by doing” and how to balance that with subject expertise. Jackson then uses Dewey as a case example of a teacher who does not use the lessons of art—perception and attending—in his practice. Based on the impressions of three former students of Dewey, Jackson describes Dewey's lecturing style as “meandering without purpose from one remark to another” (p. 184) and as having a disregard for his students' presence in the audience, implying that Dewey was not paying attention to his students' needs or perceiving the impact of his teaching on them. But what these attentive students eventually realized was that Dewey was not “meandering without purpose” but engaged in the process of creative thinking instead. As Jackson explains, Dewey was …showing them what it was like to do philosophy, what it meant to be a philosopher. In his bumbling and fumbling manner he was offering his students a living instantiation of the principle that lay at the core of his own educational perspective. He was, of all things, learning by doing…His was not a performance that had been rehearsed the day before. This was the philosopher-in-action. (p. 189) The self-absorption of Dewey's lecturing style resembles that of the artist or “philosopher-in-action.” It is as if, according to Jackson, Dewey's teaching depicted the balance between learning by doing and subject expertise. In essence, Dewey was providing his students with an experience. Yet this is retold through the words of three students who may or may not be representative of Dewey's students in general. Is this a lesson in the importance of attending, meaning that these students were perceptive enough to be transformed through the experience of Dewey's “philosopher-in-action” teaching style? Jackson does not make this point explicit, declaring instead that he still considers Dewey a somewhat ineffectual teacher, wondering why he didn't pay more attention to his students or why “he failed to apply the standards nurtured in him by the arts” (p. 194). Despite the intentions outlined in the opening statement of his introduction, by using Dewey as a negative case example and concluding the book with this puzzlement, Jackson leaves the reader still unclear as to how to apply Dewey's rich and persuasive theory of art-centered aesthetic experience to the practice of teaching. Notes Jackson also immediately sets the reader at ease on the first page of the introduction by assuring that a prior familiarity with Dewey's writings is not necessary. For example, Kent and Steward (1992) recommend spending fifteen minutes every day observing the shadows in the corner of a room and writing down everything one sees. While this may be an effective exercise for improving our habits of observation, how does it translate into the meaningful quality Dewey attributes to perception? References Broudy, H. (1972). Enlightened cherishing. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Franck, F. (1973). The Zen of seeing. New York: Vintage Books. Greene, M. (1995). Releasing the imagination: Essays on education, the arts, and social change. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Kabat-Zinn, J. (1994). Wherever you go, there you are. New York: Hyperion. Kent, C. & Steward, J. (1992). Learning by heart. New York: Bantam Books. About the Reviewer Tracie E. Costantino is a doctoral student in Aesthetic Education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is especially interested in studying how students personally relate to works of art in all media, i.e., the nature of their aesthetic experience, and how the aesthetic philosophies of John Dewey, Harry Broudy, and Maxine Greene might be translated into classroom practice.