A 1998 report suggested, ... that cooperative education functions on the periphery of the academy (Heinemann, 1988, p.109). The report offered evidence to support this concern, examined why it should be so, and offered recommendations to address the issue. A major reason cited in the report for academy indifference to cooperative education is that many teaching faculty and professional educators do not recognize that, " ... learning, thinking, and general professional development can be achieved using the work environment as a 'classroom', with the work itself serving as an instructional vehicle" (Heinemann, 1988, p. 112). In point of fact, the criticisms levied against work experience as a part of the formal study program are not trivial. Advocates are often hard pressed to present a strong educational rationale for incorporating work-integrated learning experiences into the curriculum. At times, too little thought has been given to establishing goals and objectives, developing learning strategies, and evaluating outcomes for such programs. And too often work-integrated learning programs are developed and implemented in the absence of any explicit educational philosophy.
It is in response to the belief that a philosophic rationale is needed if general understanding and acceptance of cooperative education is to be achieved that this essay was prepared. It is not surprising that in this effort we should turn to John Dewey and educational pragmatism. It was he after all who asserted" ... there is an intimate and necessary relation between the processes of actual experience and education" (Dewey, J. 1938, p. 7). While Dewey's ideas apply to all levels of education, this paper concentrates on post-secondary programs.
Because of the diversity of the people and programs in America's colleges and universities, educational excellence needs to be redefined. Instruction needs to extend its path from a narrow focus on the world of ideas taught exclusively in the classroom and instead adopt John Dewey's notion of an anthropological epistemology: that people will learn what they need in order to survive and succeed - in the family, in society, and in their career. Moreover, when individuals see the relationship of knowledge to survival, they will learn. Success is then seen as the individual's self-empowerment in the various arenas of life: family, community, and most importantly, career. What is needed is what cooperative education can provide: an educational experience that will integrate the world beyond the classroom and the curriculum.
The growth in the number of Americans wanting and needing a college education was envisioned by John Dewey at the beginning of this century. During the early 1900's Dewey recognized that many Americans who historically neither had the opportunity, the money, nor the motivation for getting a higher education now had the chance, the means, and the hope of improving their careers through an education (Dewey, J., 1949). Vocational education had always reached the masses either in the home or the shop. This new opportunity to get a college education and not just vocational training opened new opportunities for the majority of Americans.
Dewey explains that the majority of Americans are primarily career driven. Consequently, they do not leave their career needs at the door of the university. They bring a drive for the good life into the university classroom. Dewey's vision as to why individuals go to college is supported by the annual survey of college freshmen conducted by Astin (1990). Consistently, the data show that upwards of 85% of entering freshmen go to college for the express purpose of getting a better job.
Dewey not only supports this need but sees it as the purpose of education. This need for a career should be the focal point for the college experience. But, it is important to recognize that Dewey did not envision the college experience to be narrowly restricted to career preparation. Rather, the student's primary focus becomes the avenue toward attaining other important objectives. Institutions of higher education have the opportunity to help bring about a new participatory democracy by realizing their students' basic needs and using them to promote their intellectual development.
"Since by necessity and through no fault of their own their background is mainly that of getting a secure livelihood and obtaining success in a career . . . Meantime there is some contact with intellectual pursuits and aims, some degree of reshaping of thought and purpose; and it may well be that a new and much more widely and solidly established tradition of culture is in the process of development" (Dewey, J., 1949, p. 181).
Dewey argues that institutions of higher education in America need to reconstruct their learning models. They must change from what Dewey terms the models of either the monastery or the bargain counter to the model of the laboratory.
Historically, the university did start out by modeling the world of the monastery. As the demand for higher education increased in the United States, the bargain basement model evolved. It is a model where too many things are offered. The result is that offerings become too thin and cannot give the type of educational experience needed. The model that Dewey espouses is the laboratory where experience evolves into learning and discovery. The work-place offers this kind of experience.
Still the laboratory model is not a stranger to higher education in America. One can find a suggestion of the dialectic of vocational and academic learning with the early American institutions of higher education. In fact, the first American colleges began as vocational institutions. They furnished training for the clergy, medicine and law. Vocational training was also provided for students who were interested in governmental administrative careers, clerks, secretaries, scribes, etc. Over time the training component of the educational experience ceased to be useful and was either dropped or greatly de-emphasized. The general education component remained and evolved into the liberal arts model found today in most colleges and universities. Graduate education appeared in the late nineteenth century to fill the void for professional programs (Dewey, J., 1949, p. 126).
Yet, Dewey does not suggest that higher education return to the limited vocational training of the early seventeenth and eighteenth century. Neither does he support the monastic paradigm that follows the narrow path of focusing only on ideas, nor the model of the bargain basement that has no focus or depth. He is suggesting that higher education in America evolve into a new model that eliminates the dualism of the world of ideas and the world of work. He warns institutions of higher education that his model of the laboratory is not a dualism of vocational education or academic education. Dewey opposes this artificial separation stating:
" . . . a truly liberal and liberating education would refuse today to isolate vocational training on any of its levels from a continuous education in the social, moral and scientific contexts with which wisely administered callings must perform" (Dewey, J., 1944, p. 156).
Dewey goes on to explain the value of classroom learning in the laboratory setting: the dialectic necessary for all institutions of higher education. The more theoretical studies do not attain their highest development until they find some application in human life, contributing indirectly at least to human freedom and well-being. The more practical studies cannot reach their highest level until they incorporate methods of inquiry (Dewey, J., 1949, p. 183). Dewey reminds us that an educative effort is when a blind activity is transformed into a consciously reflective one (Dewey, J., 1913, p. 58). He also cautions us to understand that not all experiences are educative.
"The belief that all genuine education comes about through experience does not mean that all experiences are genuinely or equally educative. Experience and education cannot be directly equated to each other. For some experiences are mis-educative. Any experience is mis-educative that has the effect of arresting or distorting the growth of further experience. An experience may be such as to engender callousness; it may produce lack of sensitivity and of responsiveness. Then the possibilities of having richer experience (sic) in the future are restricted" (Dewey, J., 1938, p. 13).
For Dewey, colleges should not be producing graduates who are merely efficient in their disciplines. Rather, he embraces the notion of individuals possessing freed intelligence. Dewey defines "freed intelligence" as a social force needed in a participatory democracy where everyone must make choices and be involved. Freed intelligence is the application of scientific thinking to social problems.
For organized, cooperative, experimental intelligence to come into existence and function effectively, changes are needed in our basic ideas, attitudes, and habits of thought and conduct ... A cooperatively controlled and used economy requires a high degree of difficult, complex planning, which in tum calls for a new conception and logic of freed intelligence as a social force (Dykhuizen, G., 1973, pp. 2h6-2h7).
Dewey does not see individuals as extensions of their jobs but intelligent beings reconstructing their world. Institutions of higher education are crucial in developing this type of person. He acknowledges that as far as the actual occupations of people are not affected by the values and perspectives of the liberal ideal" they will be narrow and hard, tending not merely to the 'utilitarian' in its restricted sense, but even toward the brutal and inhuman" (Dewey, J., 1931, pp. 2h-27).
Guidance by the institution becomes a key part of the educational experience. For Dewey the movement of vocational education is to either use schools to tum out more efficient workers or to utilize all the university resources to equip persons to control their future economic careers. Dewey opposes a vocational guidance that just places a person in a job. Instead, institutions of higher education need the type of guidance that keeps people in school until they become equipped to seek and find their own congenial occupations (Dewey, J., 1949, pp. 131-132).
Dewey also suggests that the use of problems or projects would be useful to investigate their relationships and solve problems. Knowledge should be reorganized to show the relationship between theory and application. He also felt that reorganizing knowledge to show its interdependence and its meaning and application would be useful. As he states in Democracy and Education: "The problem is not that of making the schools an adjunct to manufacture and commerce, but of utilizing the factors of industry to make school life more active, more full of immediate meaning, more connected with school experience (Dewey, J., 1916, p. 369).
Finally, Dewey defines industry in a way that shows the necessity of erasing the false dualism of vocational and academic learning. He explains in Democracy and Education:
"Industry has ceased to be essentially an empirical, rule of thumb procedure, handed down by custom. Its technique is now technological: that is to say, based upon machinery resulting from discoveries in mathematics, physics, chemistry, bacteriology, etc., as a consequence, industrial occupations have infinitely larger intellectual content and infinitely larger cultural possibilities than they used to possess. The demand for such education as will acquaint workers with the scientific and social bases and bearings of their pursuits becomes imperative since those who are without it inevitably sink to the role of appendages of the machines they operate" (Dewey, J., 1916, p. 341).
Ultimately for Dewey, this new vision of higher education placed the good life as the end or "end in view" that directs the choices made by all individuals.
Dewey provides strong philosophical and pedagogical rationales for cooperative education. Moreover, his views provide a framework for program design.
Career Focus. Virtually all co-op programs seek to give a career-relevant experience to students. Providing a program that enables students to explore and test career choices is not an ancillary service being provided by institutions. Rather, according to Dewey's philosophy, co-op programs address what should be a fundamental mission of all colleges and universities: one that has important implications for how individuals function in a participatory democracy.
Cooperative education programs that limit their focus to career-related objectives also limit the educative potential of the experience. The career-oriented placement together with students' career interests are strong motivational forces upon which to build expanded educational horizons.
Cooperative Education/ Academic Linkages. It is not the purpose of this paper to discuss specific co-op academic delivery systems, e.g. concurrent seminars, measurable behavioral objectives, daily logs, reports, etc. Criteria for assessing the learning potential of a particular program design are, however, provided by Dewey's writings. The learning effectiveness of any one approach can then be assessed by using these criteria as yardsticks:
In summary, when one considers the world in which our graduates will live, one shaped by internal forces such as the pressure toward equity and equality, economic pressures and cultural pluralism together with changing world events that quickly and directly impact on daily life, Dewey's vision of higher education is as timely today as it was at the turn of the century. Cooperative education, together with work-integrated programs such as internships, can establish Dewey's concept of the laboratory model of higher education resulting in a more broadly educated populace that is so critical to sustaining a democratic society. The cooperative education community as defined by individual programs, professional association, employers and government grant awarding agencies have not given the educational aspects the attention that they require. In turn, co-op experiences tend not to maximize the educational impact on students.