Changing Human Nature

: In Human Nature and Conduct (1922), Dewey seems to suggest that we can and should change human nature. In this chapter, McBride queries Dewey’s account of native impulses and how instincts, impulses, and dispositions relate to human nature. Dewey proffers insights into the ways in which impulses, habitual conduct, and social institutions condition and circumscribe the dominant mode of being human (and the ordering principles that enjoin the relations therein). The chapter argues that these particular Deweyan insights could potentially help us to conceive an education-based path to a decolonial conception of anthropos (human being). In this light, the chapter critically reassesses the Deweyan democratic conception of the alterability of human nature. It brings in additional insights from the decolonial thinking of novelist and philosopher Sylvia Wynter to extend Deweyan philosophy and point to the Euro-American coloniality that undergirds the present order of things. In closing, McBride suggests that a viable decolonial way forward will require a change in human nature in ways that transform our habits and demand the establishment of new social and educational institutions.