Citizen Politics and Schools as Civic Centers - Introduction to Dewey Lecture

Citizen Politics and Schools as Civic Centers - Introduction to Dewey Lecture
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Citizen Politics and Schools as Civic Centers

“Will Democracy Survive Big Data and Artificial Intelligence?”[1]

Harry C. Boyte, 2017 John Dewey Society Lecture

San Antonio, April 27 2017

“We live in a technophilic age. We love our digital devices and all that they can do for us…[But] without some kind of oversight, the golem, not God, might emerge from machines…it is naïve to believe that government is competent, let alone in a position to control the development and deployment of robots, self-generating algorithms, and artificial intelligence. Business is self-interested and resists regulation. We, the people, are on our own here…”

Sue Halpern, “How Roberts & Algorithms Are Taking Over”[i]

“I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.”

Nelson Mandela’s poem (“Invictus,” by William Ernest Henley) [ii]

Introduction

What will it take to become masters of our collective fate in the age of smart machines?

In this 2017 Dewey lecture I explore how we might affirmatively answer the question raised by nine digital scientists and leaders in Scientific American in their essay, “Will Democracy Survive Big Data and Artificial Intelligence?” The article elaborates the argument made earlier in Sue Halpern’s New York Review of Books essay, “How Roberts & Algorithms Are Taking Over.” Both Halpern and the Scientific American authors detail the ways algorithms and smart machines control more and more of our economy, politics, education, and everyday lives.

Early in his career as a radiation oncologist, O. Carl Simonton discovered that a significant factor in cancer patients’ survival was the conviction “that they exerted some influence over the course of their disease.” This “mind-body link,” initially scorned in positivist medicine, has become widely accepted over time.[iii]

I follow the tradition of Simonton, convinced that belief in human agency makes an enormous difference in our collective fate, just as it matters in treating cancer. I also emphasize strategy to enhance material conditions of agency, political skills, habits, and concepts, and also face to face relational contexts where people of diverse backgrounds, ages, and views can undertake what John Dewey called experimental inquiry. As Roudy Hildreth has unpacked Dewey’s concept, such inquiry provides a starting point of normative resources for critique of power relations as well as an ongoing process of action, reflection, and further action. [iv]

Dewey also identifies the place for such inquiry in his prophetic 1902 speech, “School as a Social Centre.” In Dewey’s Dream, Lee Benson, Ira Harkavy and John Puckett well describe the insights informing his visionary idea. “It is not the judicial, legislative and administrate State but rather the complex schooling system of American society that 1) must function as the strategic subsystem of the society; 2) has performed that function poorly…at all levels; 3) must radically improve its performance.”[v] They also ask the crucial question: why didn’t a substantial movement for “schools as social centres” emerge? They criticize Dewey for putting aside practical local experiments when he left Chicago for Columbia University in 1904. The detached culture of Columbia may have been a factor, but I will argue that a substantial movement for schools as centers of community life – I will call them “civic centers” –depends on a concept of a “different kind of politics,” citizen politics, which can be distinguished from dominant understandings of “politics” in Dewey’s time and even more today when political campaigns have become war-like battles about elections and public policies.

In the following, I briefly sketch the great unravelling of social and civic life that stems, in significant measure, from the rise of the smart machines as information systems replace the messy inefficiency of human relationships. Then I make a constructive case for action in three parts. First I explore deep resources in Dewey’s work for what Yvonne Hofstetter, one of the Scientific American authors, calls “the fight for our freedom against the rise of intelligent machines,” highlighting his ideas of experimental inquiry, human growth, and social intelligence, and his trenchant critique of the rising class of detached experts. Second I argue that Dewey overlooked “citizen politics” in his treatment of “politics,” both historically in democratic change, and contemporarily, in terms of building a movement with conservatives as well as with modernist progressives. We need to “bring citizen politics back in.”

Third, I make a case for a broad movement involving people across the “traditional-modern” and partisan divisions for schools as civic centers, suggesting some ways it might be organized through “civic organizing” and deliberative and public work practices. Schools as civic centers can function as sites for civic repair, overcoming partisan divisions and social fragmentation by “creating publics” for experimental inquiry and education. They can challenge domination by elites, left and right, who use digital technologies to engineer school changes from the outside, serving as examples of broader challenge to technocratic elites in both business and government. Schools as civic centers also reaffirm the primacy of “the relational,” over “the informational,” human beings over smart machines. I show possibilities for citizen politics by telling the story of the debates and productive conversations we have had this year with David Randall, author of the National Association of Scholars report, Making Citizens: How American Universities Teach Civics, and other NAS leaders.

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