Meads Philosophy of Education1

curi_484

317..334

An essay review of
The Philosophy of Education
(Mead, G. H. G. J. J. Biesta & D. Trhler, Eds. Boulder, CO: Paradigm,
2008)

by
ERIC BREDO
University of Virginia
Charlottesville, VA, USA

This edition of Curriculum Inquiry celebrating its 40th year is devoted to

classics of educational thought. Among classics that may be helpful today
are the writings of American pragmatists, such as C. S. Peirce, William
James, John Dewey, and George Herbert Mead. One reason their work may
be helpful is that it suggests a way of approaching education both modern
and humane, a combination neglected of late.
Of this quartet of classical pragmatists, George Herbert Mead (1863
1931) is the most often overlooked. While Mead had considerable
influence on social psychology and small-group sociology, he has been
almost completely neglected in general psychology, cognitive science, and
education. The rise of behaviorism swept his approach aside in much of
psychology by adopting a narrowly positivistic conception of behavior
that proved inadequate to handle higher mental processes. When the
cognitive revolution brought mind back in it neglected social interaction,
becoming unable to explain the origin of reflective thought (Bredo,
1997). Meads work provides a way around this division between behavioral versus cognitive psychologies and their shared neglect of social
life.
Until recently few knew that Mead not only taught philosophy of education but also left behind extensive lecture notes for the course. These
languished in a drawer at the University of Chicago until being discovered
by two careful European scholars, Gert Biesta and Daniel Trhler, who
published them recently as The Philosophy of Education (Mead, 2008).2
2010 by The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto
Curriculum Inquiry 40:2 (2010)
Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc., 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA, and 9600 Garsington Road,
Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK
doi: 10.1111/j.1467-873X.2010.00484.x

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Because this book is new and a classic (in the sense of work of a thinker of
continuing importance) I have chosen it as the contemporary classic to
review here.
Before turning to Meads philosophy of education I would like to
set the stage by considering some of Meads other work, making this a
review of Meads course in the context of his other thought. I begin
with Meads concept of sociality and his evolutionary philosophy
more generally. These are related, next, to his aim of developing a
naturalistic but nonreductive account of reflective thought and selfconsciousness. I next show how Mead achieved this by building on
Deweys psychology of the act and Peirces triadic theory of signs, applying them to understanding the evolution of meaning and reflective
thought in social interaction. Following this introduction, I return to
Meads course in philosophy of education, showing how he used a conception of the stages of the disrupted act to analyze both sociocultural
evolution and individual development. Because education is viewed as the
chief way of resolving such conflicts, it occupies a central place in Meads
story. The result is an understanding of education that highlights its
social-interactional and developmental aspects and gives a practical basis
for a critique of conventional tendencies in education. I conclude with
observations about Meads contribution to resolving theoretical and practical difficulties that continue to plague us.

Sociality
Near the end of his life, Mead outlined the principle of sociality, which he
thought central to his work (D. L. Miller, 1973). He defined sociality as the
capacity of being several things at once (Mead, 1932, p. 49). This is a
deceptively simple concept. I am both father and son. I have the capacity of
being both, although my behavior may express either one role or the other
at different times. I have no need to decide which of the two I really am,
because I really am both.
While sociality seems obvious when considering social roles, Mead
extended the concept to include everything. According to him, everything
in the universe possesses sociality. As an example, light can be both particle
and wave, giving it two seemingly contradictory forms at the same time.
It becomes one or the other when we detect it with an experimental
apparatus. As a result our attempt to detect its meaning helps determine
that meaning.
Mead used the concept of sociality to undergird his theory of emergent
evolution. In this view, evolution involves recurring cycles of adjustment in
which new forms (species) develop that enable ongoing processes, like the
basic processes involved in all life, to continue in new environments (Mead,
1964). These newly emergent structures and more specialized functions

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change the field of interaction, resulting in new difficulties and the evolution of new forms. Considered in this way, evolution builds on itself, adding
new structures and functions to native, resulting in new cycles of adaptation. This sounds like the traditional adaptationist conception of evolution,
but is more akin to recent work emphasizing the way organisms inherit
environments as well as genes from their ancestors (Odling-Smee, Laland,
& Feldman, 2003).
Meads approach highlighted the way evolution alters nature itself.
Before organisms that eat evolved, for example, there was no food
because nothing could perform that function. Similarly, there were no
objects properly speaking before organisms with proprioceptive and
manipulatory organs evolved. This does not mean nothing existed, but
nothing could function as an object of an organisms action, since this
involves being perceived at a distance and manipulated to bring about
some preferred consummation. The evolution of human beings resulted
in another set of objects that never existed before, such as words. Meads
point was not merely that evolution builds on itselfalthough that is
truebut that newly emergent objects and functions alter the context
from which they emerge. Evolution is not just something happening
within nature; nature itself is evolving.
This perspective led Mead to develop a unique conception of history. In
his philosophy of the present the past is the sequence of events that
leads up to and results in the formation of the present (Mead, 1932). This
is what the past means considered pragmatically. But if present processes
result in the formation of a new object that does not fit the previous
developmental pattern then the past itself is changed. The old past no
longer leads to the new present so it must be some other presents past.
As Emerson (1907) wrote of poetic genius, it arises to abolish the past, and
refuse all history. Genius is like a novel event that breaks the old pattern,
taking things in a new direction. In viewing history in this way, Mead was
not saying that the past is just a subjective construction. Rather, truly
adopting an evolutionary view means that events can change the whole
direction things are going in, the whole set of future possibilities. If one
takes evolution seriously, things are neither foreordained by the past nor
directed to a given future. The future and its past are being worked out in
the uncertain contingencies of the present.

Mind and Nature

Meads central project within this evolutionary way of thinking was to find
a better way of relating mind and nature (Mead, 1964). Difficulties relating
the two arose with the split between a mechanical conception of behavior,
governed by deterministic laws, and a moral or mental conception governed by laws of our own making. These two ways of thinkingone based

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on mechanical systems, the other on human volitionled Descartes to

postulate two different kinds of entities, natural entities, like physical
objects, and supernatural entities, like the soul or God (Descartes, 1637/
1969; Ryle, 1949). This division between materialistic and idealistic viewpoints took a more collective and evolutionary turn by the late 19th
century, one school adopting neo-Hegelian idealism, the other a mechanistic interpretation of Darwinian evolution (P. Miller, 1968). The former
tried to understand human thinking part of within a collective mind that
was developing in a foreordained direction, while the latter saw it as evolving out of a fixed original nature.3 In effect, one school explained it by its
destination, the other by its origin.
Mead was located at the confluence of these two streams of thought. He
studied with Josiah Royce, the last of the Romantic Idealists, and William
James, the first of the Darwinian psychologists. He described his own
version of this late-19th-century quest to relate mind and nature as an effort
to find such a place for mind in nature that nature could appear in
experience (Mead, 1932, p. 161). In other words, he sought a naturalistic
account of the evolution of human intelligence adequate to understanding
the way a scientific understanding of nature could emerge within it. In this
approach human intelligence emerges from what came before resulting in
new structures and functions that are neither determined by nor reducible
to that origin. These alter what comes later, such as by developing scientific
understandings that change human behavior and the natural world in new
directions, some anticipated and some not.

The Psychology of the Act

The key to developing a naturalistic yet nonreductive account of mind is to
get from animal to human intelligence. How can one account for the
emergence of human reflective thought from the simpler behavior of
nonlanguage using animals without reducing human thinking to that of
the rat or pigeon? And how do children, similar to other animals in so many
ways, become reflective, self-conscious adults? The psychologists of Meads
day failed to account for these transitions. Behaviorists like John Watson
turned human psychology into a form of animal psychology, making it
impossible to understand higher human processes. Introspectionists,
such as those positing an inner ego doing the thinking, could describe
reflective thought but could not explain where it or the actions of the inner
ego came from. Mead sought to avoid both limitations by adopting an
approach that he termed a form of social behaviorism, although he was
careful to distance himself from Watsons positivistic version of behaviorism
(Mead, 1934).
The central concept in Meads account was the act. As Reck (1964, p. 90)
notes, The act is the key to Meads constructive pragmatism. In fact,

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Mead regarded the act as the ultimate fact of existence (p. 95). This
surprising claim becomes understandable if one notes that since everything
we do is an actat least everything other than falling down accidentally or
making spastic movementseverything we can possibly experience, know,
do, or value must have some role in an act.
In fleshing out a conception of the act, Mead drew on Deweys view
of it as a sensorimotor coordination rather than a knee-jerk reaction
(Dewey, 1896/1972).4 Unlike the conventional conception of stimulus and
response as sensory and motor events, Dewey viewed an act as a feedbackregulated process having both sensory and motor aspects. In perceiving a
cup of coffee, for example, I turn my head and focus my eyes. Seeing it
involves both movement and sensation, not sensation alone. In reaching
for the cup, my hand is guided by visual input and its feel as I grasp it. My
reach is not a mere motor jerk.
Dewey argued that stimulus and response are better viewed as acts
having perceptual and manipulatory functions within a larger act than as
separate sensory and motor events. This seemingly arcane point is important because it leads to an entirely different approach to psychology. An
approach based on a linear sensory stimulusmotor response conjunction, considers behavior an externally determined reflex or jerk. Neither
Dewey nor Mead denied the existence of reflexes, but viewed most behavior as a feedback-regulated process, a sensorimotor coordination, in
which stimulation is partly of ones own making, just as I moved my head
to better perceive the cup. In this view activity is implicitly purposive,
rather than merely reactive, because we act to alter our own stimulation
rather than being prodded from behind by stimuli (a word deriving
from a Roman short sword).
This conception of an act makes clear that acts evolve over time
(Bredo, 1998). An act is an ongoing event, as Mead put it, not a discrete jerk (Mead, 1938, p. 364). For an act to develop successfully, earlier
phases must prepare the way for later until the act is completed. To grab
the cup of coffee, I must first locate it, my act of locating being coordinated with the beginnings of my act of reaching. The fact that an act
develops over time is critical to understanding social behavior, Mead
argued, for if acts develop, animals can learn to respond to the early
phases of one anothers acts before they are fully completed. This makes
it possible for them to respond to what another will do without presupposing the gift of prophecy or a self-conscious theory of the others
behavior.
Mead termed preparatory phases of an act that function as signals to
another organism of the completed act to come, gestures (Mead, 1934).
A lions beginning to stare at an antelope could be a gesture stimulating an
antelope to run. The antelopes preparing to run could be a gesture for the
lion, in turn, stimulating it to begin to chase. If each learns to respond
to the beginnings of the others act as it would to the completed act to

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come, then each responds as though it understood the meaning of the

others gesture. This apparently meaningful interaction could occur even
though neither animal is conscious of the meaning of the signals to which
it is responding. Organisms that respond to one another in this way engage
in what Mead termed a conversation of gestures. They respond to the
early beginnings of one anothers acts unconsciously as though they knew
what they meant, like two boxers feinting and counterfeinting, blocking
anticipated blows in an habitual manner before either throws a complete
punch.
The conversation of gestures was important to Mead because it is the
source of social meaning.5 As Mead put it,
Meaning arises and lies within the field of the relation between the gesture of a
given human organism and the subsequent behavior of this organism as indicated
to another human organism by that gesture. . . . In other words, the relationship
between the stimulusas a gestureand the later phases of the social act of which
it an early . . . phase constitutes the field within which meaning originates and
exists. Meaning is thus a development of something objectively there as a relation
between certain phases of the social act; it is not a psychical addition to that act
[or] . . . an idea as traditionally conceived. (Strauss, 1956, pp. 178179)

If the lions stare causes the antelope to begin to run, and the antelopes
beginning to run causes the lion to begin to chase, then the lions stare
meant chase in their social interaction. It functioned as a signal that a
jointly constructed chase was about to begin.
This approach to meaning takes it out of the realm of the subjective or
internal, placing it in social behavior itself. Mead was assisted in developing
this analysis of meaning by Peirces (1998) triadic conception of signs. In
the more familiar dyadic conception, there is a sign and its meaning, a
signifier and a signified. The lions look means it is going to chase. This
is inadequate in practice, however, because a sign may mean many different
things (recall the concept of sociality), gaining definite meaning only when
it is interpreted by an organisms response. In practice sign-relations
involve a minimum of three interrelated events: a sign, an interpreting
response on the part of an organism, and the meaning of the sign as
interpreted by that response. As Mead put it:
A gesture by one organism, the resultant of the social act in which the gesture is an
early phase [i.e., its meaning], and the response of another organism to the gesture
[i.e., the interpreting response], are the relata in a triple . . . and this threefold
relationship constitutes the matrix within which meaning arises. (Strauss, 1956,
p. 178)

Because it takes three interrelated events to give a signal a meaning,

the meaning of one animals behavior in their interaction involves an
interplay of both animals actions. One organisms behavior may suggest a

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meaning (implicitly or habitually), serving as a stimulus to the others

response, but it takes the completion of the first organisms act to confirm
the implicit interpretation of the second. If the antelope begins to run in
response to the lions beginning to stare, then the stare is implicitly interpreted by the antelope as meaning a chase, but if the lion does not take
up the chase, this implicit interpretation is not confirmed. The antelope
plays a role in determining the meaning of the lions stare, just as the lion
plays a role in confirming or disconfirming the antelopes interpretation.
Social meaning is jointly constructed rather than given independent of
interaction or determined unilaterally by a single organisms response. In
adopting an interactional approach to social meaning, Mead neatly evaded
both deterministic and voluntaristic extremes, just as his emphasis on
evolution as an emergent process allowed him to evade materialistic and
idealistic extremes in evolutionary theory.

Minds and Selves

The conversation of gestures was important to Mead for another reason, for
it is also the matrix from which reflective thought emerges. It was the key
concept allowing him to explain how reflective thought could emerge from
simpler forms of interaction, such as that of nonreflective animals.
The jump from animal to human interaction is simple conceptually
if one views reflective thought as an internalized (or autonomous)
conversation of gestures. To work out a move in a game like chess, for
example, one imagines an initial move, responds to the meaning of that
move as an opponent would, responds to the meaning of the opponents
response, and so on, until a sequence is found that concludes in a desirable
manner. Reflective thinking is a conversation of gestures one has with
oneself in which one takes different roles or perspectives at different points
in time.
This conception views reflective thinking as inherently social. It is social
in the sense that an individual becomes able to respond to his or her own
behavior as another would. To do this, one must take the role of the
other, adopting their attitude toward ones own act, then ones own attitude toward theirs, and so forth. When this process is internalized, or
becomes autonomous, one can think reflectively, the reflective aspect of
this conception deriving from the notion that the meaning of ones
actions is reflected in the response of another.
Mead thought that children learned to engage in this process by participating in cooperative activities with others. They begin with very simple
forms of play such as alternating chasing one another around the yard.
Unanticipated responses in play make them conscious that their actions did
not work as anticipated, lending them to become aware of the way the other
person responded to the beginning of their action, giving it an implicit

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meaning. Facility in play prepares the way for participation in more structured games, like tag, in which roles and goals are defined by more
definite rules, such as who is it and not it, and what each should attempt
to do. Facility in games with rules prepares the way for participating in even
more complex activities, like basketball, in which a set of rules defines a
division of labor and a goal to be sought by the team as a whole. In this case,
one can learn to adopt a third-person attitude, which Mead termed the
perspective of the generalized other, toward first- and second-person
conduct (Mead, 1934). For instance, one might view successful coordination between two players as undesirable for the aims of the team as a whole.
To take one anothers perspectives in this way, a gesture must have the
same meaning for different actors, where meaning is defined pragmatically, as above. Mead termed gestures that function in this way significant
symbols or elements of language.
The self was viewed by Mead as involving this same reflective process
directed toward oneself as an object. One might look in a mirror, for
example, and note certain features of ones expression by responding to
them as an observer would. This process of responding to ones own
appearance or behavior as another would is what it means to have a self.
As William James (1892, p. 216) put it in an earlier attempt to get rid of the
concept of an inner entity doing the thinking, the thoughts themselves are
the thinkers. Mead extended this approach in a more social direction
while adopting Jamess distinction between two phases of the self-process,
the I and the me. A first response, such as ones initial look in the
mirror, functions as an active phase, an I. This initial response becomes
a stimulus to a second response that interprets, or gives a meaning to the
initial response. This interpretation is the me, the self as interpreted by
another. The self as a whole is a cyclical process of I and me phases of action
and response. In effect, the self is a cycle of action in which we are constantly trying to catch ourselves but inevitably failing, because the catcher
cannot catch itself in the act. Things nevertheless get worked in the
process, such as deciding which way to comb ones hair.6
Once one considers people as reflective and having selves, one gets a
more complicated view of society than the conventional deterministic
account adopted by many sociologists (Blumer, 1969). Social life comes to
be viewed as a process of mutual coordination involving a great deal
of signaling of intentions, responding to the signaling of others, and
so forth. Most of the time, habit prevails, as in interaction among
animals. In this case, behavior is not without meaning, but its meaning is
implicit. When habitual coordination breaks down, conscious attention is
stimulated and reflective processes attempt to work out a way forward. This
involves discourse between people and discourse within them, so to
speak, as a way forward is sought which, becomes the basis of new habits.
The beauty of this account of mind, self, and society is that it is naturalistic yet nonreductive. No spooky inner agents are invoked, such as in

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nonnaturalistic accounts that presume the existence of minds or egos as

entities. Nor is reflective behavior reduced to nonreflective behavior, as in
Watsonian behaviorism. Once positivistic and individualistic biases are
overcome, the path to a naturalistic understanding of mind is clear.

Philosophy of Education
With this introduction in place, let me turn to Meads course in philosophy of education. Meads class must have come as a surprise to those
expecting a conventional introduction to philosophy of education for it
contained few references to classic philosophical texts, such as those of
Plato, Locke, Rousseau, or Kant. It was, rather, a set of 38 lectures whose
subjects alternated between act psychology and sociocultural evolution.
Lectures on the phases of the act, the nature of emotion and the role of
aesthetic imagery in action are interspersed between others on Aboriginal
cults, Greek and Medieval culture, and the development of modern
science. The notes for each lecture, which vary from three to nine pages
long, are rough and fragmentary because Biesta and Trhler decided to
make the documents available to other scholars with minimal editorial
change (appropriately, in my view). The result is not a particularly good
read, unlike the carefully edited student notes making up some of Meads
other works (Mead, 1932, 1934, 1936, 1938), but it is helpful in giving us
an account of Meads thinking in his own words. In what follows, I give an
interpretation of his overall argument which is not so easily followed in
the book.
Mead described the aim of the course as bringing individual and social
aspects of education together into a single account:
On the one side the development of the child will be considered as the justification
for a psychological theory of education, while on the other side the demands of the
society into which the child is entering, will suggest the sociological theory. The
inadequacies of each will be indicated, and the necessity of replacing them by a
social conception of education which can recognize both the child and society at
once. The chief features of present school practices and theory will be criticized
from this standpoint. (Mead, 2008, p. 5)

The key concept for bringing the psychological and sociological aspects
of education together was understanding the stages an act goes through
as it develops. Like other pragmatists Mead begins with habitual action,
which is an organisms routine way of restoring equilibrium with its
environment. A well-habituated act usually goes through three stages
perceptual, manipulatory, and consummatory. One sees a ripe peach,
reaches out to grab it, and commences to eat it. This is just the usual
psychological triplestimulus, response, and reinforcementexcept, as

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we have seen, each is regarded as a feedback-regulated processes rather

than a sensory or motor event alone.
While habits form the background for his analysis, Mead was more
interested in what happens when habitual action breaks down. When an
act cannot be completed, due to conflicting responses to a novel stimulus,
the process of readjustment goes through three somewhat different stages,
the emotional, aesthetic and intellectual, which follow chronologically
in this order (Mead, 2008, p. 83). These three stages of adjustment to
disrupted activity form the central conceptual structure of Meads course
and are used to describe the pattern of both sociocultural development
and individual development. Meads approach is interactional throughout, as emphasized in the preceding discussion, so we might see him as
bringing the psychological and sociological aspects of education together
in a single analysis by a) describing both in terms of the same stages of
development, and b) describing both in interactional terms.
The first of the three stages, the emotional, arises from inhibition
in the act caused by conflicting responses. Having lost the trail, one is
frustrated, anxious, uncertain, scared, angry, and so forth. Mead views
emotion as arising whenever activity is disrupted for a prolonged
time, while shorter disruptions result only in interest. In the second
aesthetic phase, a conscious redefinition of the situation develops that
appears to integrate its fragments into a single unified whole. One imagines that all will be well if one goes back and looks for the trail that must
have been missed at the meadow. This phase of adjustment unifies the
act imaginatively, but may not work out in practice. Having gone back
and looked carefully one may fail to find the trail. This may give rise to
conflicting images, each appearing to make sense of the situation in
terms of a differing gestalt. In the third phase, the intellectual, specific
aspects of each image are abstracted and tested experimentally to find
elements that can be relied upon in building up an approach that
resolves the situation (see, e.g., Mead, 2008, pp. 8384).
Mead uses these three stages of adjustment to describe both sociocultural evolution and child development. As he put it, the stages of development here are parallel to those of race and individual (Mead, 2008,
p. 83). Primitive societies are viewed as focusing primarily on the emotional aspects of adjustment, like young children. Mead begins his analysis
of this stage of sociocultural development by considering hunter-gatherer
societies, treated as analogous to a habitual mode of activity requiring little
readjustment, because children can learn adult roles easily at this stage by
playing, imitation, and participation. A crisis occurred with the shift to
agriculture, however, which was more boring and indirect than the hunt,
presumably leading to conflict between young and old. This breach led to
the development of the cult, which Mead treats as an educational institution. Magical practices learned in the cult helped resolve the means/
ends breach by making it seem as though immediate means could affect

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distant ends. Mythical stories helped relate present activity to that of heroic
ancestors. Practical techniques could also be passed on in more reliable
fashion in the cult. At the end of education in the cult, stressful initiation
rituals helped transform youths into adults in an emotional but ultimately
rewarding manner.
When Mead turns to the aesthetic phase, his principal example is
ancient Greece. This stage of adjustment was viewed as analogous to
the phase in elementary or middle school when a child turns to art and
elaborate stories of other times and places. In this case, a crisis arose as a
result of Greek commerce with other civilizations, resulting in familiarity
with the numbers of myths which necessitated harmonizing (Mead, 2008,
p. 111). It also resulted in new technologies becoming available that were
not monopolized by a cult (presumably creating competition). To resolve
this crisis, the Greeks created new art forms bringing conflicting attitudes
or perspectives together in a single aesthetic image. Plays, philosophical
dialogues, histories, and geographies helped make sense of the more
complex urban and interstate situation. History helped place different
cultures one before another . . . in a temporal arrangement . . . to avoid
opposition (Mead, 2008, p. 111). Geography helped give a picture of the
origin of different traditions in different places. Schools developed to teach
such perspectives, helping to induct the young into a more complex and
varied communal life.
In the third stage, the intellectual, a scientific way of thinking emerged
analogous to later adolescence or adulthood. While Mead is not explicit
about the social contradictions leading to this development, parallelism
suggests it arose from conflict between schools of thought and new technologies that undermined the value of both aesthetic accomplishment and
manual labor. Mead notes the origins of science in classical Greece, and
devotes considerable time to various philosophers contributing to it, but
views the Greeks as stopping at the aesthetic, problem-definition stage. In
Greek tragedy, for example, the problem is clear but the solution is not.
Treating the Middle Ages in cursory fashion, except for Copernicus and
Galileo near its end, he arrives at the development of modern science.
Science, like the other additions to the content of social thought, such as
myths and stories, history, and geography, is also viewed as primarily educational in nature:
[S]cience, a theory of method, is essentially educational. Education is training in
the method, and insofar as science becomes method, it is education. And so far as
science takes on consciousness of itself it takes the form of method. (Mead, 2008,
p. 163)

Viewed in this way, science is not about any given result so much as it is a
process of continually improving ones results. Science is the process of
evolution when that process has become conscious of itself.

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Meads account must have been gratifying to the educators in the class
because it depicted education as essential to social life and as the primary
mechanism of social advance. Mead also turned this equation around
viewing social life as essential to education. He used the same approach here
as in other work, taking the interactional process as the central focus.
Mead defined education, at least in its formal aspect, as the conveying
of meanings (Mead, 2008, p. 172). In other words education is primarily
for enabling people to engage in meaningful interaction with one another.
For this to be possible, children must participate in cooperative social
activity:
We have to recognize that what the child requires is not poured into a receptacle.
Meaning must arise in the childs consciousness in some sort of intercourse with
others. . . . The attitudes we take in response to other persons are the processes in
getting meaning. (Mead, 2008, p. 177)

As suggested earlier, an object or event is given a determinate meaning

by being responded to in a certain way: [I]t is our response . . . to another
person, which gives meaning to an act of the other. . . . The child by taking
an attitude to another gets the . . . meaning of another (Mead, 2008,
pp. 172, 178). This could sound as though a child unilaterally determines
meaning, but this is incorrect. Everyone must give things an interpretation
of their own, but this does not mean the interpretation will work as
expected. Nor does it mean that anothers response settles the matter.
Rather, meanings get worked out in a series of takes and countertakes that
can develop in various directions (Klemp et al., 2008).
Biesta and Trhler seem to offer a more subjective interpretation in
their introduction, writing that Meads point here is that objects do not
have any meanings as such; they do not have objective meaning. Their
meaning lies in what they mean to us, and this is to be found in how we
respond to them (Mead, 2008, p. 5). This interpretation would seem to
conflict with Meads claim that meaning is objectively there as a relation
between certain phases of the social act (Mead, 1934, p. 179). Biesta and
Trhler may merely be suggesting that meaning arises in social interaction,
but their labeling this as nonobjective conflicts with Meads attempt to
place mind within nature rather than viewing it as something subjective.
Biesta and Trhler also largely overlook the social-evolutionary aspects of
Meads account, perhaps because it has similarities with the Germanic
tradition that conceives of education as bildung (development, unfolding,
building) of which they are critical.
Be that as it may, both the interactional and developmental aspects of
Meads analysis have important educational implications. The interactional
aspect suggests that education, viewed as conveying meanings, cannot
occur without social participation. One has to learn to use linguistic and
conceptual tools to understand their meaning at a practical level, just as

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one needs to learn to use a hammer. The difference is that the environment in which linguistic and conceptual tools are used is a social one. As a
result, one cannot practice using these tools without doing so with others,
attempting to coordinate actions, convince others with an argument, and
so forth. If education is to convey meanings and not merely teach rote
responses, it must involve social participation. No social participation, no
meaningful education.
The developmental aspect of Meads analysis also has important implications. Consider student adjustment to a new school or class in which the
first day is emotionally uncomfortable because one does not know how
others will respond. This discomfort is allayed over time as classmates get to
know one another and build trusting relations. This may gradually lead to
valuing the group and its activities, and even to adoption of cult-like features, such as mascots, stories about the ancestors who came before, and
other ways of distinguishing their group from others. Emotional attachment to the group and the development of group pride is followed eventually by separation as they graduate, rites of passage completing their
transformation into new beings.
There are also aesthetic cycles within this socioemotional cycle of
separation, attachment, and reseparation. When students are introduced
to a new field, for example, it helps to give them a sense of its historical and
geographical development. Taking the role of others can also be encouraged in earlier years, such as when my daughter wrote and performed a play
about the Civil War with her classmates that brought together two brothers
fighting on different sides, revealing their differing (and common) attitudes as they interacted with one another. I am not sure if she knew the
exact dates of the war at the end, but she certainly had a good sense of the
attitudes and justifications of each side. Such aesthetic understandings can
become more precise and reliable in the intellectual phase when students
identify specific problems, consider possible solutions, and test their ideas
experimentally against new evidence. This phase is more individualistic,
because it is their own problems and solutions that are being considered,
but still social in character because they have to learn to adopt a thirdperson attitude toward their own work.
Mead seems to suggest that the three phases of adjustment occur ideally
when earlier phases can form structures supportive of later ones. The
emotional phase should seemingly eventuate in trusting relations, the aesthetic in mutual understanding across difference, and the intellectual in
shared public methods for evaluating and testing ideas.
Despite talk of primitive and modern, Mead clearly did not want to
demean the primitive or elevate the modern, having both critical and
appreciative things to say of each. His effort was, rather, to gain greater
recognition of the importance of play, emotion, and aesthetic imagery, so
that later more specialized activities do not occur without a proper socioemotional context. As he put it, modern life gives the child an enormous

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amount of information but little appreciation of . . . real human values

(Mead, 2008, p. 178, italics original).7

CONCLUSIONS
The analysis in Meads philosophy of education suggests that we commonly
approach education exactly backward. We focus, even in early years, on
evaluating and ranking children on individual task performance. We also
make adult aims central, breaking adult understandings into fragments
that children learn piece by meaningless piece. This tendency to privilege
autonomous over collaborative performance, and adult understandings
over those that make sense to children, is buttressed by theories of education that focus on individual performance on well-defined tasks, like those
drawn from behavioristic and cognitive psychology.
Meads analysis suggests that these priorities should be reversed. We
should begin with simple social activities, like play, that involve common
activities or simple role divisions. We should also begin by emphasizing
socioemotional comfort and bonding, rather than intellectual performance, gradually building to more autonomous and intellectually focused
activities. Each of these stages should be understood as inherently social,
requiring participation in joint activity, although the kinds of activities
change. The resulting approach would be less efficient for training workers
for industry but more efficient for fostering mutually regarding members of
a community.
Meads way of thinking is helpful for resolving a variety of theoretical
dilemmas, such as those arising from polarized conceptions of mind versus
nature, individual versus society, structure versus agency. The mind/nature
dualism is dealt with easily, as we saw, once acts are treated as developing
processes and the unit of analysis shifted to the social level. One can then
find mind within nature and begin to understand how it becomes internalized and elaborated in human thought.
The apparent conflict between individual and society is also handled
by shifting to an interactional view, resulting in the recognition that
selves and societies are much the same. Once dancer and dance are seen
as aspects of the same social process the conflict between individual and
society dissolves, leaving us with only practical problems of coordination
between different individuals, groups and organizations (see also, Dewey,
1920).
Deterministic and voluntaristic extremes are avoided in much the same
way, by focusing on interactional cycles rather than external causes or
internal aims. If social acts are viewed in a cyclical manner, individuals
can add novelties to the process, although these may or may not be
incorporated in subsequent phases of a social act. We propose and our
interactional partners dispose. The self that proposes involves a similar

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331

combination of novel and habitual aspects. Every I response is unique,

when considered as a whole, yet this unique event must be picked up in
subsequent responses to play a significant role in behavior. We can also act
collaboratively to change the social environment in which our selves and
their acts are received or rejected, such collective acts also being viewed as
part of a cyclical process that may or may not incorporate them into the
changing social environment.
All of this does not mean there are no difficulties in Meads account. His
analysis of sociocultural evolution is too vague, geographically jumpy, and
schematically abstract to be believable. It is tempting to repeat G. Stanley
Halls criticism of Deweys similarly neo-Hegelian early psychology in
which Hall grumbled that the facts are never allowed to speak out plainly
for themselves . . . but are always read into the system (Dykhuizen, 1973,
p. 55). Mead, like Dewey, also tended to view science in highly idealized
terms, rather than in terms of the diverse activities of actual scientific
communities. Nonetheless, Mead still has much to teach us. His most
important lesson is to remind us of a collaborative and emotionally sensitive
approach to social life that it often seems we can no longer fully imagine or
believe in.

NOTES
1. I am grateful to Ray McDermott and Dennis Thiessen for their encouragement
and many helpful suggestions. The effort has been collegial, but responsibility
for remaining errors isunfortunatelymy own.
2. Mead taught the course at the University of Chicago in 1905, 1908, 1909, and
1910, making it likely that he took it over from John Dewey when the latter left
for Columbia in 1904.
3. Hegel thought biological species fixed. As a result, what evolved were basic ways
of conceiving of nature (Hegel, 1837/1953).
4. Mead and Dewey developed these ideas together, Dewey crediting Mead for
major contributions to his theory of emotion (Dewey, 1894, 1895).
5. Some signs may have nonsocial meaning, like thunder serving as a signal of rain
in the behavior of an animal. Mead sometimes makes a distinction between
social and nonsocial meaning but at other times drops it.
6. Note that a mirror is not always necessary to this process because we can hear
ourselves talk, much as others can. This is why vocal gestures are particularly
useful and important.
7. The recapituationist overtones of Meads analysis might also be questioned, but
Mead explicitly disavowed the culture epoch theory, arguing that there are
only loose parallels between sociocultural evolution and child development
(Mead, 2008, pp. 64, 174). This might be compared with the experience in

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biology which first adopted the view that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, later
rejected it, and has recently come to see informative parallels between the two
(Carroll, 2006).

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