SOURCE: "John Dewey and the Laboratory School," in Dewey, Russell, Whitehead: Philosophers as Educators, Southern Illinois University Press, 1986, pp. 14-42.

[In the following essay, Hendley presents a history of Dewey's Laboratory School, and focuses on Dewey's philosophical and educational goals for the school. ]

I went to the Dewey School one day,
And saw the children all at play.
But when the tardy bell had rung,
All the classes had begun.
Some to Science, some to French,
Some to shop to work at the bench.

L.o.t.D.o.E., Dewey, Dewey, Dew-ee-ee.

When Thursday afternoon is here
There are excursions if it's clear
To Stony Island in Highland Park,
And they often stay till nearly dark.
Mister Gillett points here and there,
Showing things both strange and fair.

L.o.t.D.o.E., Dewey, Dewey, Dew-ee-ee.¹

Thus the students immortalized in song the experimental school run by the Department of Pedagogy of the University of Chicago and headed from 1896 to 1904 by John Dewey. The refrain of the song is shorthand for "Laboratory of the Department of Education." Although the school was officially called the University Elementary School, it became popularly known as the "Dewey School" or, on the suggestion of Ella Flagg Young, the "Laboratory School."² Dewey himself often compared the function of this school in his department to that of laboratories in biology, physics, or chemistry. "Like any such laboratory," he said, "it has two main purposes: (1) to exhibit, test, verify, and criticize theoretical statements and principles; (2) to add to the sum of facts and principles in its special line."³

Having a school to test educational theories and ideas suited Dewey's pragmatic temper nicely. He thought that "the mere profession of principles without their practical exhibition and testing will not engage the respect of the educational profession" and that without such exhibition and testing, "the theoretical work partakes of the nature of a farce and imposture—it is like professing to give "thorough training in a science and then neglecting to provide a laboratory for faculty and students to work in."⁴ Rather than separate the theory from the practice, we should bring the two together. This will result in a more viable, realistic set of ideas and principles of education as well as give direction and guidance to our dayto-day educational activities.

Dewey felt strongly that in education as in other areas of thought and action a well-ordered experiment requires that "There must be a continual union of theory and practice; of reaction of one into the other. The leading idea must direct and clarify the work; the work must serve to criticize, to modify, to build up the theory."⁵ In pedagogy especially, Dewey felt that we must escape the dualism between general principles and empirical routine or rule of thumb and instead promote a "vital interaction of theoretical principle and practical detail."⁶ How he saw this taking place he spelled out in greater detail in an essay entitled "The Relations of Theory to Practice in Education."⁷

Dewey distinguishes two ways to approach practice in education: from the point of view of the apprentice and that of the laboratory. The apprentice approach would have us seek to give teachers a working command of the tools of their trade, a skill and proficiency in teaching methods, a control of the techniques of class instruction and management. With the laboratory approach, we "use practice work as an instrument in making real and vital theoretical instructions; the knowledge of subject-matter and of principles of education."⁸ Here the immediate aim is not to produce efficient workmen but to supply the intellectual methods and materials of good workmanship, just as in other professional schools (architecture, engineering, medicine, law, etc.) where the aim is "control of the intellectual methods required for personal and independent mastery of practical skill, rather than at turning out at once masters of the craft."⁹

Dewey always insisted that teaching is a profession, and the training of teachers should follow scientific lines. Too often it had been thought that "anybody—almost everybody—could teach. Everybody was innocent at least until proved guilty."¹⁰ The time had come to pay greater heed to the theory and practice of teaching. Although he favored the establishment of practice schools for teachers, he recognized that most practice schools only approximate ordinary conditions of teaching and learning, usually safeguarding the children's interest and supervising their activities to such an extent that "the situation approaches learning to swim without going too near the water."¹¹ He criticized normal practice work in education for depriving the practice teacher of responsibility for discipline in the classroom, and for its unrealistic aspects such as the continued presence of an expert teacher, the reduction of class size, and the use of predetermined lesson plans. The very context of such training for teachers militates against an immediate practical application because it fails to connect the theory with experience, even with the very practical experience of life that the apprentice-teacher has had before coming to learn how to teach in the first place.

Another factor often missing in such schemes is a lack of instruction in subject matter. Since there are obviously good teachers who have never had any training in practical pedagogy but show only a mastery of and enthusiasm for their subject matter (one wonders if Dewey had himself in mind here since he reputedly followed very few of the accepted methods for effective teaching¹²), "scholarship per se may itself be a most effective tool for training and turning out good teachers."¹³ There is, Dewey points out, method in subject matter, scientific method, the method of the mind itself. True scholars are "so full of the spirit of inquiry, so sensitive to every sign of its presence and absence, that no matter what they do, nor how they do it, they succeed in awakening and inspiring like alert and intense mental activity in those with whom they come in contact."¹⁴

For Dewey, this applies to teachers at an elementary level of education as well as to those engaged in higher education. What is needed in the training of teachers is more of a continuity of classroom experience with actual conditions of teaching and learning as well as with real life experiences, more emphasis on the subject matter to be taught, more freedom and responsibility for the practice teacher. In a later formulation, Dewey said that the method of teaching is the method of an art. It involves the study of past operations and results that have been successful, thorough acquaintance with current materials and tools, and careful scrutinizing of one's own attempts to see what succeeds and fails.¹⁵ This is what Dewey sought to provide in his Laboratory School.

The school was not meant to be a practice school in the ordinary sense; nor did Dewey see the training of teachers to be the main goal of the Department of Pedagogy. Rather, he saw the school as taking "teachers who have already considerable experience, and who now wish to acquaint themselves more thoroughly with the rational principles of their subject, and with the more recent of educational movements."¹⁶ What he had in mind were former superintendents and normal school teachers. The Laboratory School would serve as a focus to keep the theoretical work in touch with the demands of practice and experimentally to test and develop methods of teaching. Dewey believed there was nothing the primary schools needed more than "the presentation of methods which are the offspring of a sound psychology, and have also been worked out in detail under the crucial tests of experience."¹⁷

He did not intend his school to "turn out methods and materials which can be slavishly copied elsewhere."¹⁸ It sought to demonstrate certain principles as fundamental in education. It could be seen as having an indirect influence on public education by serving as an example of new experimental lines of thought and thereby preparing the public for the acceptance of similar changes in the system, by training specialists in theory and practice who could begin to make such changes, and by publishing the results of the experiment to make them available to teachers elsewhere.

Dewey undoubtedly saw this as an opportunity to break down the isolation he so often decried in education. Here at Chicago the beginning phases of the educational system (kindergarten and the elementary grades) were to be in vital contact with the highest (university and graduate school), and the more concrete and practical problems were to interact with the more abstract, theoretical speculations to the benefit of both. The traditional dualism between thought and action was thus to be overcome, and working hypotheses in education were to be exhibited and tested to prove their worth. In all this we could say that Dewey himself was attempting to practice what he preached about knowledge in general and about teaching and learning in particular. Students in the Department of Pedagogy were to be instructed in the history and theory of school systems, "the theory of the best attainable organization and administration in our own country under existing conditions," the historical development of ideas concerning education, and the bearings of psychology and sociology upon the curriculum and on teaching methods.¹⁹ "The nerve of the whole scheme," said Dewey in an early statement to President William Rainey Harper of the University of Chicago, is "the conduct of a school of demonstration, observation, and experiment in connection with the theoretical instruction."²⁰

Harper evidently agreed that such a school would be a valuable component in the training of teachers, and Dewey's proposals were approved by the Board of Trustees and an appropriation of $1,000 made to help get the school started. The rest of its income was expected to come from tuition and gifts from parents and friends.²¹ The tale of this initial appropriation sheds some light on Dewey's subsequent falling out with Harper over the school. According to his wife, Alice Dewey, "The trustees of the University had felt the need of a laboratory of Psychology, but they were suspicious of a laboratory of Education. It so happened that in October of 1895 a sum of one thousand dollars had been appropriated for a Psychological laboratory. As no room or other facility for utilizing that fund could be provided, it was likely to revert. Influence upon the president at that moment brought him to consent to its use for Education, thus officially sanctioning the Educational phase of the new department."²² Although it is certainly not unusual for a University administrator to reallocate funds already provided for in his budget, this does not seem to me to indicate the kind of enthusiastic support of the school that some have attributed to Harper.²³

Even the thousand dollars had strings attached to it, for it was "not in cash, but in tuitions of graduate students who were to teach in the school."²⁴ As his daughter, Jane Dewey, put it, "The University allowed one thousand dollars in free tuition to teachers in the school, but gave no further financial aid. For the seven and a half years of its existence friends and patrons contributed more to the support of this school than did the University."²⁵ On top of this, Dewey was required to submit an annual budget to Harper for consideration and approval by the university trustees. Small wonder that Dewey reportedly found the financial relationship between his school and the university "trying and, at times, even vexing."²⁶ Some of the financial difficulties faced by the school can be gleaned from Dewey's Report to the President for the year July 1898-July 1899. Total expenses were listed as $12,870.26, of which tuition covered $4,916.00. "The University gave seven free scholarship tuitions, aggregating $840.00 in return for service in the school," according to the report, and the rest of the money had to be made up by personal gifts. About $350.00 was realized from a series of lectures given by Dewey to parents, students, and friends of the school and subsequently published as the book The School and Society.²⁷

The school opened in January 1896, with sixteen pupils, aged six to nine, and with Miss Clara I. Mitchell, formerly of the Cook County Normal School, in charge and Mr. F. W. Smedley, a graduate student of pedagogy, directing the manual training work.²⁸ In October 1896, the school changed locations and added Miss Katherine Camp, formerly of the Pratt Institute, to teach science and the domestic arts. She later became Mrs. Katherine Camp Mayhew and with her sister, Anna Camp Edwards, a history teacher and special tutor for older children, wrote a thorough and detailed history of the school. After several changes of location and the addition of more staff, the school's enrollment eventually grew to 140 students of from four to fifteen years of age with a teaching staff of twenty-three and ten part-time assistants.²⁹ Dewey served as director, Mrs. Dewey as principal, and Ella Flagg Young, who was later to become Chicago's first superintendent of schools, as supervisor of instruction.³⁰

Each of these women exerted a strong influence on Dewey. Jane Dewey claimed that her father "regards Mrs. Young as the wisest person in school matters with whom he has come in contact in any way. . . . Contact with her supplemented Dewey's educational ideas where his own experience was lacking in matters of practical administration, crystallizing his ideas of democracy in the school and, by extension, in life."³¹ His wife was said to be a moving force behind the school. According to Max Eastman, Dewey would never have started a Dewey school had it not been for his wife Alice. "Dewey never did anything, except think . . . unless he got kicked into it. . . Mrs. Dewey would grab Dewey's ideas—and grab him—and insist that something be done. . . . Dewey's view of his wife's influence is that she put 'guts and stuffing' into what had been with him mere intellectual conclusions."³²

The Deweys had more than an academic interest in the school since by 1902 four of their own children were enrolled.³³ Even before they came to Chicago, Alice was said to be keen on trying out some of John's theories on their children at home. While Dewey was at the University of Michigan, this was said to have led to "many unconventional and unexpected situations which, when created in the presence of outsiders, caused considerable merriment and comment, Old Ann Arborites,' according to one report, 'still regale themselves with tales of how the Dewey methods worked.'"³⁴ However amusing these early attempts might have been to some outside observers, the experimental approach of the Laboratory School was no laughing matter among professional educators. In 1900, A. B. Hinsdale, professor of the Science and the Art of Teaching and a colleague of Dewey's at the University of Michigan, claimed, "More eyes are now fixed upon The University Elementary School at Chicago than upon any other elementary school in the country and probably in the world—eyes watching to see the outcome of the interesting experiment."³⁵

Mayhew and Edwards state that the students in the Laboratory School came mainly from professional families.³⁶ McCaul estimates that most were faculty children from middle- or upper-class backgrounds.³⁷ The vast majority of parents were strong supporters of the school. At the beginning of the second year a Parents' Association was formed "to assure financial support for the school and to provide information about its radical departures in method and content." For three years "a parents' class was formed, open to all members, in which Mr. Dewey set forth his theories, discussed them, and answered questions regarding the activities of the school.³⁸ Although Dewey counted on the parents for moral and financial support for his endeavors, not all of them were totally enamoured with what was going on in the school. One father made this caustic comment about his son's experiences there: "One year at the University Preparatory Laboratory, otherwise known as the D—School (supply the proper word, not on Sunday, please!) nearly ruined him. We have to teach him how to study. He learned to 'observe' last year."³⁹

Ella Flagg Young maintained that people who came to the school with preconceived notions on how teaching and learning were to be carried out often went home disappointed with what they had seen. Traditional ideas of order and discipline, of the role of the teacher and the place of the student, of how it should be manifest that something had been learned, even of the posture of the child in his or her seat, all these tended to obscure what was actually being accomplished.⁴⁰ Laura Runyon has described her first visit to the school as a curious parent who found that her initial scepticism gave way to an enthusiastic endorsement of what was happening.⁴¹ She liked what she saw so much that she became a teacher of history at the school and wrote an M.A. thesis at the University of Chicago on The Teaching of Elementary History in the Dewey School (1906, unpublished).

Unfortunately, most of our information about the school and its achievements is of just that sort of personal and impressionistic writing. Harold Rugg bemoans the fact that no systematic and critical appraisal of Dewey's educational experiment was ever made. He points out, "Mayhew and Edwards assembled scattered comments on the success of the School made by visiting educators, parents, and former pupils—'thirty years after.' But these are all pro-Dewey and so far as I can see contribute nothing to the needed critical appraisal of the educational product. Students of educational reconstruction will regret . . . that the Dewey group did not conduct a systematic and objective inquiry into the traceable effects of the school's work in the later lives of its graduates."⁴²

It is not entirely fair of Rugg to chide the Dewey group for failing to employ methods of social scientific investigation and evaluation which it happened were themselves in a very embryonic stage at the turn of the century. The teachers did manage to write a number of accounts of the ongoing activities of the school and the rationale behind them which were published in the University [of Chicago] Record from 1896 to 1899. During 1900, Dewey edited nine issues of The Elementary School Record, "which dealt exclusively with the practices, content, and rationale of the University School."⁴³ Typed reports and summaries of 1901 and 1902 were collected and edited by Laura L. Runyon. Alice Dewey had collected a great deal of material pertinent to the school, intending to write its history; but she died in 1927, and the task fell to Katherine Mayhew and her sister Anna Edwards. Dewey collaborated with them and contributed parts of the book, some from previous writings and some new. The most important of the latter eventually became "The Theory of the Chicago Experiment," an appendix to their book. In addition, some of Dewey's writings and talks at the time (for example, those collected in the book, The School and Society) make specific reference to the school and its operations.

I would like to consider this material in order to explain the operations of the Laboratory School and, so far as can be gathered, why things were done as they were. My aim is not to pass judgment on the educational products of the school, nor is it primarily to make comparisons with what Dewey tried to do and what is being done in elementary education today. What I hope to find is some link between the practice and the theory, some indication of whether the theoretical principles and the practical details did indeed interact, some indication of the way the leading ideas affected the day-to-day practice and whether or not the ensuing practical results had any impact on the theory. It should be especially interesting to see if a case could be made for Dewey's having changed any of his important educational theories because of what happened when he tried to put them into practice in the Laboratory School. The remainder of this chapter is a summary of the educational practices of the Laboratory School together with an evaluation of how these relate to its underlying theories. A final section considers some recent criticisms of Dewey's educational views in light of what we have seen of their practical exhibition and testing.

DEWEY'S SCHOOL: THE THEORY BEHIND IT

The social and intellectual milieu in which Dewey set up his school was a vibrant one. Chicago was growing rapidly, with a large influx of immigrants and with diametrically opposed levels of great wealth and abject poverty. Dewey was to become directly acquainted with people on both levels. The mood of the city fathers was for progress, which many thought could be purchased, given the right amount of cash. Marshall Field, Cyrus McCormick, Philip Armour, Gustavus Swift, and George Pullman typified the powerful businessmen of the day who amassed great fortunes and began to think of leaving behind a legacy, something that would carry on their names after they had fought their last financial battle. Many turned to educational projects for this purpose. Thus, Philip Armour founded the Armour Institute of Technology of 1892, giving it a million dollars a year for five years. George Pullman willed a million dollars in 1897 to found a manual-training school for boys. Not to be outdone, Mrs. Emmons Blaine, daughter of Cyrus McCormick, donated a million dollars to support the educational endeavors of Colonel Francis Parker.⁴⁴

Parker was the principal of the Cook County Normal School (later the Chicago Normal School) from 1883 to 1899. He was forced to contend with the educational authorities on behalf of his extremely child-centered approach to elementary education. In 1899, Mrs. Blaine decided to free him from such harassment and offered him a million dollars so he could train teachers and instruct children in full accordance with his theories and ideals.⁴⁵ President Harper at the University of Chicago became quite interested in this bequest and persuaded Mrs. Blaine to turn the money over to the university board of trustees for the purpose of erecting a new building on campus and assimilating Parker and his staff into the university's faculty.⁴⁶ As we shall see, this would eventually have bad effects upon the status of Dewey's school.

This renewed interest in education in Chicago came at an opportune moment. J. M. Rice had spent five months in 1892 visiting schools across America. Having personally observed more than 1,200 teachers at their work in the schools of thirty-six cities and some twenty institutions for the training of teachers, he deplored the lack of public interest in the education of the young, saying that it smacked of "criminal negligence."⁴⁷ Rice was highly critical of the meager training required of public school teachers. Only a small percentage were normal school graduates. Some had attended a normal school or high school for one or more terms, while a very large number were licensed to teach based on their having been educated at a grammar school and perhaps having received a "little extra coaching."⁴⁸ Obviously, this did not make for much of a grasp of the subject matter to be taught or for much formal training in the methods of teaching or the principles of pedagogy—the very things Dewey deemed necessary for a properly trained teacher.

Rice was especially critical of the public schools of Chicago, which, he charged, used unscientific, antiquated, and often absurd methods of teaching. They concentrated on "busy work," the students mechanically copying words from the book or on the board. One class had been supplied with only one reading book, which was dutifully read and reread until the end of the term. Some schools ran for only a half day, but with no break for recess. In a typical geography lesson, students read a question from their books and then searched for the answer on the map. Heavy emphasis was placed on learning by rote, usually to no apparent purpose. The only exception he saw was the school run by Parker which stressed the freedom and growth of the child and attempted to "bring the child into close contact with nature in the beautiful park of twenty acres in which the school is situated."⁴⁹

Dewey was familiar with such shortcomings in the schools and frequently argued against resorting to heavyhanded discipline, memorization, or even sugar-coating the material in order to arouse the child's interest. He explained that interest (from inter-esse: to be between) involves breaking down the distance between the pupil and the subjects to be studied in order to develop their organic union. Genuine interest implies that one is wholeheartedly involved with what one is doing.⁵⁰ Dewey thought that the curriculum was too often thought of as fixed and final, something to be handed down in a ready-made fashion to the student. But the subject matter, which represents the accomplished results of adult experience, cannot be made a substitute for the child's own experience, nor can it be simply imposed or grafted upon it. We must recognize the connection between the reflectively formulated, logical, and more objective human experience of the curriculum and the relatively disjointed, emotional, subjective experiences of the child. A key point of Dewey's is that there is no difference in kind between the child's experience and the forms of study that make up the curriculum.⁵¹ The child and the curriculum are two limits defining a single process. Education is a process of continuous reconstruction of the child's present experience by means of the adult experience represented by "the organized bodies of truth that we call studies."⁵² We show proper concern for the child by using the subject matter as the means to develop his or her individual abilities. The subject matter is the working capital which enables the teacher to determine the environment of the child so that he or she may grow to full potential. "It says to the teacher: Such and such are the capacities, the fulfillments in truth and beauty and behavior, open to these children. Now see to it that day by day the conditions are such that their own activities move inevitably in this direction, toward such culmination of themselves." 53

Dewey is not, as is often charged, advocating a strictly child-centered approach to education. He does not downplay the importance of the materials to be studied. They represent our intellectual and cultural heritage, the best that man has accomplished thus far. What he objects to is forgetting that this subject matter stems from human experience of the same kind as that of the child in the classroom. Instead of trying to impose it upon the child or clothe it "with factitious attraction, so that the mind may swallow the repulsive dose unaware,"⁵⁴ we should treat it as a means to reconstruct the child's experience and promote his or her growth. Dewey would have us appreciate that the curriculum has a logical and a psychological side to it. It is a more reflective, abstract, logical rendering of experience. It needs to be psychologized, reinstated or restored to the experience from which it has been abstracted, "turned over, translated into the immediate and individual experiencing within which it has its origin and significance."⁵⁵ The function of this subject matter for Dewey is "strictly interpretative or mediatory"—it enables the child to reconstruct his or her experience and grow.⁵⁶ Education, for Dewey, is growth in and of experience.

In addition, Dewey believes that "all education proceeds by the participation of the individual in the social consciousness of the race."⁵⁷ This involves not only coming to understand the reflectively formulated experience conveyed by the subjects of study in school, it also entails living and working and thinking with other human beings at all stages of the individual's development. He wanted his school to be neither child-centered, nor curriculumcentered; it was to be "community centered."⁵⁸ This meant that the school should be a living community in which the child was an active participant. As he put it, "Education being a social process, the school is simply that form of community life in which all those agencies are concentrated that will be most effective in bringing the child to share in the inherited resources of the race, and to use his own powers for social ends."⁵⁹

Since the child lives and grows in communities such as the family, the neighborhood, the school, and the state, Dewey stressed continuity of community activity as much as possible. School activities were to connect with home activities so that the child would be interested in pursuing them. They were then to lead, by means of the curriculum, toward habits of doing, thinking, and feeling that would be part of the productive social life of an adult. Our social inheritance was the means to personal growth and to the progress of society for Dewey. One way to pursue such individual and social growth was by introducing the child to the kind of occupations that he or she would be familiar with (and, it is hoped, interested in) from the home. In Dewey's school, therefore, students engaged in cooking, sewing, manual training, pottery making, weaving, and so on. Dewey thought that these activities "represent, as types, fundamental forms of social activities; and that it is possible and desirable that the child's introduction into the more formal subjects of the curriculum be through the medium of these activities."⁶⁰ He saw activities such as cooking, carpentry, and sewing as being constructive in themselves "while socially they represent the fundamental activities of the race."⁶¹

Thus, the visitor to the Laboratory School would not see children sitting in neat rows, quietly reading or reciting according to some set format. Instead, he would find them engaged in activities Dewey felt recapitulated man's past and provided a good introduction to the more formal studies of the traditional curriculum. In weaving, for example, the child can learn of the different types of material and where they came from and how important this was for early mankind geographically as well as economically. Some elementary mathematics and science might also be included while putting the finishing touches on the end product. In describing how this occurred at his school, Dewey somewhat rhapsodically proclaimed that "you can concentrate the history of all mankind into the evolution of the flax, cotton, and wool fibres into clothing."⁶² Ordinary household occupations served both a retrospective and a prospective purpose for Dewey. They showed students where man had come from and how he had reached his present level of knowledge skills, while preparing for their own future thinking and activity as adults, which was to be achieved by the more formalized studies of mathematics, history, geography, and science.

At no time did Dewey have in mind a kind of primitive job training for the students. As he himself pointed out, "Coming as the children did mainly from professional families, there was little prospect of any utility of this sort."⁶³ Nor did he have in mind the kind of "culture-epoch" theory popular at the time. This was a notion, derived from Herbart, that there was a direct parallelism between the development of the child and the historical development of the human race. This parallelism was supposed to guide our selection and arrangement of the materials to be studied in the curriculum so that "the appropriate basis of the content of study at each period of child growth is the culture products (literature especially) of the corresponding period of race development." Dewey said the theory could best be summed up by a line from Goethe: "The youth must always begin anew in the beginning, and as an individual traverse the epochs of the world's culture."⁶⁴ Although he admitted that one could trace a general correspondence between the cultural products of each epoch and the stages of development of the child, Dewey himself denied that there was an exact parallel and argued that we should focus our primary attention on the personal growth of the child. He also objected to the emphasis placed by the theory on the products of a given age without much consideration of the "physical conditions which originated those products."⁶⁵

The main thing, in Dewey's eyes, was to have children in school engage in social occupations providing a link with their home lives, have an active participation in the social life of the school, and enjoy a good introduction to the more formal, disciplined, abstract modes of adult thought and activity that would prepare them to be productive workers and responsible citizens when they left school. The underlying factor was experience: the experience the child had before coming to school, the experience in school itself, and the development of dispositions and habits which make up a large part of adult experience. In this way Dewey saw no major problem of creating interest in the subjects to be studied because they were not foreign to the experience of the students. Nor would it be difficult to relate one subject to another or show their relevance to life. As he put it, "Experience has its geographical aspect, its artistic and its literary, its scientific and its historical sides. All studies arise from aspects of the one earth and the one life upon it. . . . Relate the school to life, and all studies are of necessity correlated."⁶⁶

Dewey was insistent that it was the process of learning, rather than the products that were learned, that was most important. He thought that the scientific attitude of mind was particularly worth promoting. This did not come about by offering more science courses or nature-study projects but by encouraging students to follow a certain method of thinking.⁶⁷ This was to be more than a merely mechanical skill or an empty formal listing of rules for correct thinking. Teachers were to establish conditions in school that were conducive to critical, problem-solving thinking. Such thinking, according to Dewey, passed through five logically distinct steps: "(i) a felt difficulty; (ii) its location and definition; (iii) suggestion of possible solution; (iv) development by reasoning of the bearings of the suggestion; and (v) further observation and experiment leading to its acceptance or rejection."⁶⁸ This was the kind of experimentalist or instrumentalist approach to thinking that Dewey was to elaborate on in his later works, and in regard to education most notably in Democracy and Education published in 1916.⁶⁹ He saw these steps as characterizing reflective experience in general and scientific thinking in particular, and he never ceased to urge that the learning environment be such that genuine problems could arise in the course of the student's own activity and that the student would be expected to come to grips with them and to formulate at least tentative answers.

Dewey's concern for the process of education, for the continuity of experience between home and school, child and adult, for the social dimension of education and the connection of living and learning, and for the importance of scientific problem solving can all be seen as part of his underlying faith in democracy and education. The best environment for the type of participatory activity and problem-solving thinking that he envisaged was one of free discussion and shared possibility. On the other hand, the surest guarantee for such freedom was the very sort of open exchange of ideas and respect for evidence that characterized what he called the scientific attitude. Rather than simply equating democracy with freedom of action, Dewey would have us see its link with freedom of thought. Thus, it is not surprising that he sees a close relationship between democracy and education.

This he extended to the need to preserve democracy in education. If we are indeed to recognize and protect the "spiritual basis of democracy, the efficacy and responsibility of freed intelligence,"⁷⁰ we must see to it that teachers are given their proper say in the selection of materials for the curriculum, the methods of teaching used, questions of discipline, and so on. It will not do to farm these tasks out to pedagogical experts. How can we justify our belief in the democratic principle if we refuse to put it into practice in our schools? This applies to the role of the students as well. We cannot claim to respect their freedom of intelligence when we seek to impose ready-made subject matter upon them from without. All too often, says Dewey, we let acquiring take the place of inquiring in school; that is to say, we encourage passive and obedient reception of cut-and-dried materials. What we need to do is to allow for the actual problem-solving thinking of the child, to provide materials and situations that will bring about such thinking. We need to make the school "a place for getting and testing experience, as real and adequate to the child upon his existing level as all the resources of laboratory and library afford to the scientific man upon his level."⁷¹

This is not easily accomplished in a traditional classroom setting. As he was to put it later in Democracy and Education: "The physical equipment and arrangements of the average schoolroom are hostile to the existence of real situations of experience. . . . Almost everything tes tifies to the great premium put upon listening, reading, and the reproduction of what is told and read. . . . There must be more actual material, more stuff, more appliances, and more opportunities for doing things, before the gap can be overcome."⁷² Dewey describes the difficulty he had in buying the right kinds of desks and chairs for his school. Finally, he says, one dealer, more perceptive than the rest, told him, "I am afraid we have not what you want. You want something at which the children may work: these are all for listening."⁷³ He also sought to make the school a community in which teachers and students, not ignoring the very real differences in their training, abilities, and temperament, are mutually engaged in inquiring rather than acquiring, in directly experiencing rather than docilely memorizing bits and pieces of second-hand experience and are conscious of and dedicated to the ethical principle upon which democracy rests: "the responsibility and freedom of mind in discovery and proof."⁷⁴ This commitment to democracy animated all of Dewey's views on education. Many years later he was to restate it as follows: "Democracy is faith that the process of experience is more important than any special result attained. . . . Since the process of experience is capable of being educative, faith in democracy is all one with faith in experience and education."⁷⁵ Let us now turn to the actual operation of his Laboratory School to see whether or not this faith was justified.

DEWEY's SCHOOL: THE ACTUAL PRACTICE

The children in the school were divided into eleven groups according to age. From the very start, the social aspects of learning were emphasized. The youngest children (ages four and five) were encouraged to talk about their own home life and the various persons helping in the occupations of the household. They discussed the family's dependence upon the daily visit of the milkman, grocer, iceman, postman, and the occasional visits of the coalman and others. They helped to prepare, serve, and clean up after their midmorning luncheon, an activity which was said to afford many opportunities for selfmanagement and initiative.⁷⁶

The six-year-olds spent the first fifteen minutes of the day in group conversation. They took excursions, played floor games, built a farm house and barn out of blocks, and then cleared a small plot of land outdoors to plant their winter wheat. They planted cotton seeds in pots, ginned and baled the cotton, built a train of cars to transport it to market, and then put on a play summarizing the whole process.⁷⁷ The seven-year-olds began to study primitive life and did experimental work with the materials that primitive people would use. They tried to work out cave life, with its weapons, utensils, and clothing, in a tangible form, while also reading Stanley Waterloo's Story of Ab. They came to some understanding of the use of textiles and the discovery of metals. Museums and books were used as sources. According to Mayhew and Edwards, 'This natural setting of man and his occupations, the basis of their future, was clothed with human significance to these little actors of primitive life as they imaginatively wandered in the sandbox hills and valleys of their tribal habitation. In the process, many scientific facts of geology, of chemistry, of physics, or of biology, found their way into the sinews of their intellectual wings."⁷⁸

The eight-year-olds centered their occupational work around the trading and maritime activities of the Phoenicians. This made them directly aware of the need for a system of weights and measurements, as well as the necessity for a more accurate method of written record. One year they made a large map and another year a rough version of a boat. Science was taken up "as involved in the study of cooking, or of history, and not as a subject by itself."⁷⁹ They studied the travels of Marco Polo, Prince Henry, and Magellan and kept their own "Journal" of these trips. They studied the life and voyages of Columbus and began to read Robinson Crusoe. All of this was in accord with Dewey's desire to avoid what he called "The Primary Education Fetich," which consisted of starting too soon with the teaching of reading and writing. Dewey, not unlike Rousseau before him, would have us hold off until the child has the interest and experience to want to learn to read and write. We must avoid the premature use of the child's analytic and abstract powers. We must start first with activities that engage the child's positive and creative impulses "and direct them in such ways as to discipline them into the habits of thought and action required for effective participation in community life."⁸⁰ Language study is needed to provide discipline, organization, and the effective means of communication. It can best be taught when the child has an awareness of this need and seeks for itself such discipline. The child will make the effort to learn to read and write when he or she sees some point in doing so.

The nine-year-olds were divided into two sections and "In order to secure more time for practice in reading and writing, the school day was lengthened an hour in the afternoon."⁸¹ They studied local history and geography, with many visits to local museums and historic spots. They learned about early French exploration and one year built a model of Fort Dearborn. Field trips were frequent, says Ida DePencier in her history of the Laboratory School, "to the quarry on Stony Island where glacial markings were observed, to the cotton mills in Aurora to see the spinning of cotton, and others to Ravinia to see the clay bluffs, to Miller Station to see the sand dunes and desert, and to Sixty-third Street and the city limits to see a typical prairie area."⁸²

The children were said to be anxious to attain greater facility in writing and number work in order to carry on their projects to a desired conclusion.⁸³ Some German and French were introduced. The children were even more involved in the general social activities of the school, helping out with the printing of school materials, the running of assemblies, and indoor and outdoor games. The ten-year-olds studied colonial history and built a colonial room. Here the teachers observed one of the first instances where the children themselves decided on a division of labor by gender: The boys built the furniture for the room and the girls made the fabrics. Heretofore boys and girls had participated in the same activities together.⁸⁴ There was much collateral reading on the American colonies, and a relief map was made of the campaigns of the American Revolution. The origin of flax was studied, and its spinning and dyeing were demonstrated to the class by a German woman.⁸⁵ Whenever possible the school made use of immigrant workers in Chicago for firsthand information on such occupations.⁸⁶ The physiology of digestion was discussed, with some experimental work being done with foods in the cooking laboratory. Many excursions were made to Jackson Park to gather specimens of plant and animal life. Mayhew and Edwards make the claim, "With proper laboratory facilities and proper organization of subjectmatter into topics, a group of ten-year-olds, that are shielded from distraction and waste of energy, can make much progress in many directions."⁸⁷

The eleven-year-olds looked at the European background of the colonists. The students were divided into two sections on the basis of previous school experience. One section studied the lives of great men of the period, the other English village life. There was more drill in writing and spelling. Electricity was studied and the working of simple machines. "An account of Faraday's experiment with an iron core and a coil was the starting-point for their construction of a dynamomotor." As preparation for a visit to the technological displays of the Armour Institute, they reviewed the things they would want to see; there were, in their preferred order: "a motor, a dynamo, a galvanometer (which they called a tester), a storage battery, and an apparatus for telegraphy."⁸⁸ The students made a pair of scales. They dissected the heart and lungs of a sheep and examined the circulatory, respiratory, and digestive system of a frog. They worked out the school tax bill and studied taxes in general. More teamwork was stressed in physical education, and with help from the university coach considerable proficiency was developed in basketball.

The twelve-year-olds' activities took on the nature of occupations. They saw more and more clearly their need for certain skills to achieve desired results. Since the child himself saw this need, "his need for skill thus became sufficient to engage himself in its acquisition; he had an impelling motive from within for analysis and mastering rules."⁸⁹ They were led to appreciate the importance of a scientific attitude of mind. Throughout their study of changing civilization, it had been brought continually to their attention that "it was always science and scientific method that had broken down physical barriers, conquered disease, and eliminated evils once thought insurmountable."⁹⁰ Science was seen as a means to the control of nature and to the perpetuation of social progress. Some of the boys in this and the older groups "were irked by the historical approach to their school subjects and seemed to require a shift in method." In one of their rare admissions of failure, Mayhew and Edwards state, "These boys were finally taken out of the class and allowed to follow their own diverse and individual lines until the general trend of their interest could be determined." Most of them eventually ended up working in the shop.⁹¹

The thirteen-year-olds, most of whom had been in the school since its beginnings, reviewed U.S. history. "A large number of books were listed and each child was urged to seek out his own sources and to get the help of parents and friends in writing up his topics."⁹² They studied photography (the use of the camera, its parts) and made visits to university laboratories to see perfected instruments. This led to the formation of a Camera Club and the subsequent need for darkroom facilities; another club, the socalled Dewey Club for discussion and debating, was also looking for a meeting place. So it was decided that the students would build their own club house. Although Mayhew and Edwards bemoan the fact that "Lack of a library, lack of quiet, lack of beauty, lack of adequate space for club meetings all made it impossible to carry out many individual and group plans,"⁹³ they do admit that the project of building the club house drew the whole school into an exciting cooperative effort which turned out to be one of its most memorable accomplishments.

The final group of students were of ages fourteen and fifteen. The oldest were given special tutoring and review courses in preparation for their college board examinations. One visitor to the school says he was initially quite disturbed "when I learned that three or four of the older pupils, whom I saw over in one corner, were being drilled up for college examinations in the old way, the regular work of the school having failed to prepare them to pass such tests. As I considered the matter on my way home, I satisfied myself that the fault lay with the type of examination, rather than with the kind of training which these children had received."⁹⁴ Wherever the fault lay, this group of students seemed more difficult for the school to deal with. They were allowed to choose their own shop work, and "the results were unsatisfactory." Their writing style was clear and fluent but loose and inaccurate in sentence structure. It was thought that their skill in artistic expression should keep pace with their intellectual concepts, but "this was an ideal difficult to attain and more often than not failed of achievement."⁹⁵ The pressure of college preparatory examinations made it necessary to drop from the program for the older children a planned course in the techniques of cooking. Despite these shortcomings, Ella Flagg Young noted that they all did well in their later schooling. She said, "It may be well for those who incline to the opinion that philosophy is attractive in theory, but not possible in practice, to know that the valuation put by the high school on the preparation of this class was high."⁹⁶

Throughout the school year, the teachers held weekly meetings to review, discuss, and improve upon the past week's work. They also had almost daily contact at lunch or after school. The teachers came from different backgrounds, but they usually had a college education or training in a technical school such as Pratt, the Drexel Institute, or the Armour Institute of Technology. Most of the teachers were said to be strongly supportive of the school and of what it was trying to accomplish. Over the course of time, the weekly meetings became more structured and more formal, with Dewey himself and later Mrs. Young and Mrs. Dewey present.⁹⁷

Dewey maintained an active interest and involvement in the activities of the school, which he visited almost daily.⁹⁸ When it became apparent that a new building would be made available through the generosity of Mrs. Blaine, he sent her a detailed, two-page handwritten letter setting forth his view on the location of rooms, kitchen facilities, work equipment, space for reading and writing in the library, the need for an assembly room, and so on.⁹⁹ As mentioned previously, Dewey often gave lectures to parents and friends of the school.

A close relationship was maintained with the University of Chicago. The children made use of many of its facilities, and Dewey enlisted the help of a number of faculty members from outside his department. Robert McCaul notes that there was a substantial core of professors at the university sympathetic to what Dewey was trying to accomplish. "Excluding Dewey and members of the Department of Pedagogy, there were thirty-seven full professors in the arts, literature, and science departments in 1896-7. Of these sixteen had had previous experience as teachers or administrators in subcollegiate schools."¹⁰⁰ Dewey could count on men such as Chamberlin (geology) and Starr (anthropology) for support. Others, for example Small and Vincent in sociology, Coulter in botany, and Hale in Latin, gave occasional lectures to the children, offered teacher education courses in their departments, and showed an active interest in pedagogical theory. 101 Their cooperation and creative help seemed to justify Dewey's criticism of the amount of waste in our educational system owing to the isolation of its component parts. For all his battles over finances, Dewey would have heartily endorsed the view of Mayhew and Edwards that the close relationship of the school to the university "was of incalculable help and importance in maintaining the stability and reality of the experiment."¹⁰²

Despite some notable successes and achievements,¹⁰³ outside events began to overtake the noble experiment. Harper succeeded in winning Mrs. Blaine's million-dollar donation to the University of Chicago, and with it came Colonel Parker, his school, and its staff. Dewey and his supporters resisted the amalgamation of the two schools, so Chicago for a time had two University Elementary schools, one heavily endowed and the other struggling to pay its bills. This caused inevitable confusion and not a little bickering, much of it between Dewey and Wilbur Jackman, Parker's aide. Parker died in 1902, and Dewey was made director of the School of Education and the two elementary schools were consolidated under his direction. The administrative task facing Dewey seemed awesome. "His previous administrative experience had been confined to a department of philosophy with seven faculty members, a department of education with four, and a Laboratory School staffed by a coterie of fifteen devoted females and one devoted male. Now he was in command of some one hundred persons and a budget of several hundred thousand dollars a year.¹⁰⁴ Small wonder that he wrote to Mrs. Blaine in August 1902 that although his relations with the staff of the School of Education had thus far been amicable and he sincerely hoped they would continue to be so, "the administrative work is not just in my line."¹⁰⁵

Things came to a head when Mrs. Dewey was made principal of the newly formed University Elementary School for the year 1903-4. This did not set well with the Parker staff who feared they would lose their identity, if not their jobs, in such a family affair as the Dewey School was becoming. Harper as usual tried to please all parties concerned by interpreting Mrs. Dewey's appointment as being for a one-year period only. She evidently did not think of it this way; when he informed her of this in an interview of March 1904, she was furious and resigned: "Because your attitude toward my position on the Faculty of the School of Education places my work on a personal rather than on an educational basis."'¹⁰⁶

Dewey's reaction was equally swift. He wrote in a letter of resignation to Harper on 6 April that "since the administrative side of the work which I undertook in assuming the Directorship of the School of Education has now been accomplished, and since the conditions as you outline them are not favorable to development upon the educational side," he could no longer continue as director of the School of Education. On 11 April, he also resigned as professor and head of the Department of Philosophy, though he politely thanked Harper for his past support. Such politeness went by the board when Dewey heard that Harper was telling people he had resigned because his wife was not to be allowed to stay on as principal. This was not so, he protested, perhaps a bit too strongly. In a letter of 10 May to Harper he asked that it be made clear to the board that "the question of the alleged failure to reappoint Mrs. Dewey as Principal of the Elementary School is in no sense the cause of my resignation, and that this question had never been discussed between us till after our resignations were in your hands. Your willingness to embarrass and hamper my work as Director by making use of the fact that Mrs. Dewey was Principal is but one incident in the history of years."¹⁰⁷

"With the resignation of Mr. Dewey and the subsequent dispersal of all save three or four of the faculty of the Laboratory School," says Mayhew and Edwards, "this experiment in education ended."¹⁰⁸ Not, we might add, with a whimper but with a bang. Some say Dewey left with a sense of failure and never again tried to engage in this kind of practical experimentation in the schools.¹⁰⁹ His defenders, such as Mayhew and Edwards, maintain that the experiment worked and that Dewey's basic approach to education was vindicated. In the remaining part of this chapter, I evaluate the experiment and in particular try to trace out the interaction between the theory and the practice. I consider what Dewey thought of it after the fact as well as some recent criticisms that have been made of both the practice and the theory behind it, and conclude with some remarks on what I see as the proper relationship between theory and practice.

DEWEY'S REACTIONS TO THE SCHOOL

From his comments written for the Mayhew and Edwards book, we can see that Dewey was aware of certain problems with the school and the approach it took. Since the principles upon which the school was founded were taken to be "working hypotheses," he had felt that their application, development, and modification should be left largely in the hands of the teachers. After the fact, Dewey speculated that perhaps too much responsibility was imposed upon the teachers. "In avoiding hard and fast plans to be executed and dictation of methods to be followed, individual teachers were, if anything, not given enough assistance either in advice or by way of critical supervision. There might well have been conditions fairer to teachers and more favorable to the success of the experiment."¹¹⁰

This is a surprising comment for him to make, given the frequency of teachers' meetings, discussions, and written reports and the active involvement of Dewey himself with the teachers. What happened, says Dewey, was that the discussions tended to revolve around the peculiarities and difficulties of individual children, and the underlying principles "were too much taken for granted as being already understood by all teachers; in the later years an increasing number of meetings were allotted to the specific discussion of underlying principles and aims."¹¹¹ Even then one wonders how open and wide-ranging such discussions could be for a young teacher facing the impressive triumvirate of John and Alice Dewey and Ella Flagg Young.¹¹² One problem with having a coterie of devoted followers is that there is less likelihood of frank assessment of pet theories.

Because they were working comparatively unbroken ground, Dewey realized that much trial-and-error experimentation was required in order to bring the needs and interests of the child into view as well as to determine the desirable components of the curriculum. He admitted that "the school was overweighted, especially in its earlier years, on the individualistic' side in consequence of the fact that in order to get data upon which we could act, it was necessary to give too much liberty of action rather than to impose too much restriction."¹¹³ The ideas and policy of the school were modified in light of such experimentation in regard to two points:

(1) The children were originally intended to be mixed together, older and younger, so "the younger children might learn unconsciously from the older." The increase in enrollment made this unfeasible, and the children were grouped, as we have seen, primarily according to age.

(2) The original assumption was that "an all-round teacher would be the best, and perhaps it would be advisable to have one teacher teach the children in several branches." This was abandoned in favor of having different teachers specialize in different subjects.¹¹⁴

No grades were assigned, although there was indication that "some of the children desired external marks as proof of their own development." The ever-present need to prepare the older children for their college entrance examinations often intruded into other school activities for that group. Yet even with them, "Written or oral review on completion of the work to be done took the place of examination."¹¹⁵

Without a doubt the biggest problem the school faced, from Dewey's point of view, was the financial one. In one of his reports on the school in The Elementary School Record, Dewey reviews the work of the past five years and states that "practically it has not as yet been possible, in many cases, to act adequately upon the best ideas obtained, because of administrative difficulties, due to lack of funds—difficulties centering in the lack of a proper building and appliances, and in inability to pay the amounts necessary to secure the complete times of teachers in some important lines."¹¹⁶ While we can sympathize with him about meager finances, we should not forget that when the Blaine money became available and Dewey was put in charge of the newly consolidated University Elementary School, things got worse instead of better. While generally praising Dewey's handling of the staff in his school, Arthur Wirth acknowledges that "Dewey was not the perfect administrator. He was far from blameless in the wrangles with Colonel Parker's staff, particularly with Wilbur Jackman."¹¹⁷

Even sharper criticisms have been made of Alice Dewey. She was said to be extremely critical of some of the staff of the Parker school and quick to dismiss teachers from her own faculty.¹¹⁸ Max Eastman, a friend of the family, said that as an administrator she had "the faults of her virtues. She was not a good mixer. She had an uncanny gift of seeing through people who were faking, and made such witty game of them that she alarmed even those who were not faking. . . . And she had a kind of inside-out timidity, a fear of being presumptuous, that because of her obvious superiority looked sometimes like snooty coldness."¹¹⁹ Here too Dewey may well have erred as an administrator by putting his wife in such an influential position in his own school. It certainly would make it more difficult to bring about radical changes in policy or guiding principles.

A more fundamental criticism that has been made is that the school itself was too much of a special situation to be much of a test of Dewey's ideas. The students were mainly from middle- and upper-class families. Their parents were highly interested in and supportive of the school. The teachers were better trained and more committed to the enterprise than one would normally find. Classes were small,¹²⁰ and the vast resources of the University of Chicago were close at hand. No doubt, as McCaul suggests, with a more heterogeneous school population Dewey would have been forced to adapt his theory and approach more to the capacities, interests, and goals of the average child, and as a result he might have achieved "some sort of educational synthesis of theory and practice, of scientific inquiry and direct experience, and of the ideal as prevailing in his school and the actual as existing in the typical schools in which his students would later teach."¹²¹

Henry Perkinson makes an even more pointed comment about the idealistic nature of the Dewey experiment: "Dewey's educational philosophy depicts a school or school enterprise that never existed and probably never could exist. To carry it out would require superteachers and superstudents." The teachers in his ideal school are expected to have "a thorough understanding of his philosophy plus a knowledge of the subject matter, including its history, its logical structure, and its connection with other subject matters, plus a sociological-psychological understanding of the child and his development." The students, for their part, were learning to be dedicated scientists, "indefatigable in the pursuit of inquiry into the problems of men. . . . "¹²² Perkinson doubted whether the entire nation could produce enough such teachers and students to fill a single classroom.

As we have seen, Dewey had not claimed to be setting up a model school of practice turning out materials and methods to be slavishly copied elsewhere. Even Professor Hinsdale, who is often quoted as saying the eyes of the country were on Dewey's experimental school, went on to say that, of course, "No man of sense expects to see the children of the people generally taught in schools like the one that Professor Dewey has set up, but there are many who are hoping that this school may contribute something of value to the progress of elementary education."¹²³ Dewey realized that in many respects, though hardly in its financial setup, his school operated in nearly optimal conditions. He even admitted, "Like every human enterprise the Laboratory School came far short of achieving its ideal and putting its controlling ideas into practice."¹²⁴ Some years after he had severed his connections with Chicago, he dealt with the question of why educational ideals so often fail to be put into practice, speculating that perhaps it is because "the research persons connected with school systems may be too close to the practical problems and the university professor too far away from them, to secure the best results."¹²⁵ In his own case he might have added more candidly that the theoretician is not necessarily the best person to enact practical policies. As Plato says, few of us are capable of being philosopher-kings.

Another thing Dewey might have said in his own defense was that the ideals he set for the school were high ones and therefore were going to be difficult to attain under any circumstances. For example, when Mayhew and Edwards claimed that one of the school's goals was to see to it that "the music, the literary and dramatic efforts of the children, and their artistic expression . . . all should represent the culmination, the idealization, the highest point of refinement of all the work carried on," Dewey replied that "the school can justly be said to have failed more often at this point than at any other. This failure, however may be taken as evidence that the difficulty of achievement in this direction is proportionate to its importance."¹²⁶ Taking this line of thought, Dewey could defend his "working hypotheses" that the child's experience can be made continuous with that represented by the studies in the curriculum, that the child should be an active member of a democratic, social community in the school, and that the model for all thinking is the scientific, problem-solving method of science; all these he might say are worthwhile objectives, no matter how difficult—or expensive—they may be to reach. Some recent critics of Dewey would challenge these very hypotheses and claim the theory was wrong even before he tried to put it into practice. Let us turn to them now.

SOME RECENT CRITICISMS OF DEWEY' S EDUCATIONAL THEORY

Many contemporary philosophers of education, particularly in Great Britain, have moved away from Dewey's key notion of the unity of knowledge and experience, and from his primary concern with the interests and growth of the child toward an analysis of the component parts of an ideal curriculum and the logical characteristics of the subjects to be studied. Paul Hirst, for example, argues for a return to the Greek ideal of a liberal education based on the nature of knowledge itself.¹²⁷ For Hirst, this entails initiating the young into the forms of knowledge. These are "the complex ways of understanding experience which man has achieved, which are publicly specifiable and which are gained through learning."¹²⁸ They include mathematics, physical sciences, human sciences, history, religion, literature and fine arts, and philosophy. Each form has its own distinct set of concepts, logical structure, statements and expressions, and ways of testing these against experience. It is by means of the forms of knowledge that experience has become intelligible to man. As educators we want our students to be able to deal with experience in terms of these forms (i.e., to think mathematically or scientifically) and to recognize that they are mutually irreducible (e.g., to do mathematics is not the same kind of activity as doing science), though interdependent (e.g., to do physics requires a knowledge of mathematics). The proper way to learn a form of knowledge is to study its paradigms from someone who has already mastered it.

John White uses Hirst's analysis of the forms of knowledge to construct an argument for a compulsory curriculum.¹²⁹ For White, our aim in education is to equip our students to make autonomous choices. This requires that they be made aware of all the possible activities they might choose to engage in for their own sake. But some activities, most notably those of mathematics, science, and philosophy, cannot be understood unless one has engaged in them. That is to say, nothing in a child's prior experience is a sufficient basis for understanding curricular activities of this sort, so we are justified in compelling students to study such subjects in order to be properly equipped to make those autonomous choices. Some external imposition is unavoidable in school because of the very nature of the subject matter, such interference in the child's liberty being justifiable as being in his or her own best interests.

Because of their views of the nature of knowledge, White and Hirst would doubtless agree with Frederick Olafson in his criticism of Dewey's notion of learning as reconstruction of experience. Olafson asserts that education has to do with a process of "internalizing the distinctive procedures of a preexistent discipline . . . , rather than in terms of discovery and reconstruction."¹³⁰ There is a sudden and precipitate jump from the familiar world of common sense to the domain of abstract thought. For Olafson, "the process of mastering, of internalizing a preexistent idiom of thought is very different in respect of the kind of communication and sociality it entails from the form of experience that precedes such a process."¹³¹

He also charges Dewey with having misconstrued science as a kind of cooperative consensual activity on a par with democratic decision making. This view of science fails to take account of the fact that there are accepted canons of scientific procedure and a special symbolic code and that the processes of scientific inquiry involve a movement to conceptual levels other than those of common sense.¹³²Kathryn Morgan echoes this sentiment by charging it is absurd to claim that children have a natural bent for scientific investigation, since they lack most of the features necessary for scientific orientation toward the world, features such as the "detachment of the object from the self .. . ; a capacity for engaging in sustained disinterested speculation; and the systematic naturalization of and deanthropomorphizing of object predicates."¹³³

Has Dewey overstated the continuity of experience? Does he illegitimately resolve the dualism between the child and the curriculum by romantically idealizing the capacities of the former while defining away the distinguishing characteristics of the latter? Richard Peters warns us not to forget that the children who come to us to be educated start off as barbarians outside the gates. "The problem is to get them inside the citadel of civilisation so that they will understand and love what they see when they get there."¹³⁴ It will not do to ignore, as Dewey does, whole dimensions of the human condition: man's irrationality, his emotional sensitivities and susceptibilities, his life and death predicaments as well as his problems.¹³⁵

Richard Hofstadter calls Dewey's approach to education "anti-intellectual." He claims that Dewey adopts a romantic, primitivist conception of the child, that his notion of growth is nothing but a mischievous metaphor designed to gloss over the need for an externally imposed, adult vision of the good society, that his method of overcoming dualisms is Utopian, and his idea that all learning has to be overtly shared in social action is highly questionable. Dewey has placed the child so firmly at the center of things that questions about the content of what is to be taught and the structure of the curriculum are subsumed under those of method and motivation. But, according to Hofstadter, "the moment one admits that it is not all of life which is presented to children in school, one also admits that a selective process has been set up which is determined by some external end; and then one has once again embraced the traditional view that education is after all not a comprehensive attempt to mirror or reproduce life but a segment of life that is specialized for a distinct function."¹³⁶

Dewey would not deny that the school is a special environment. He called it a simplified, purified, broadening kind of environment.¹³⁷ Simpler than our complex civilization and our numerous social relationships, in school we select features of life and thought that are "fairly fundamental and capable of being responded to by the young" and proceed toward those that are more complicated. This occurs in what Dewey calls a "purified medium of action" in which we have weeded out what is antisocial, immoral, or downright perverse. School seeks to reinforce the power of the best. Finally, by bringing children into contact with a larger, more diverse social group, school aims to create a new and broader environment in which to grow.

This was not meant simply to mirror or reproduce life; Dewey's term is "reconstruction." We help the child develop from relatively crude and narrow experience into the more critically refined, socially responsible experience of the adult. The way to accomplish this is not to center all our attention on the child¹³⁸ any more than it is to be so enamored of the logical features of the curriculum that we fail to appreciate the need to "psychologize" the material so it can be learned by the child. Dewey sought to strike a balance between both factors in the educative process. He set up a school in which the attempt was made for the child to interact with the curriculum in a new and creative way. To those who chide him for neglecting what was to be learned, I would throw back his own challenge of how they proposed to teach it. In real life one seldom has the luxury of settling all philosophical differences before commencing to educate. Dewey at least attempted to practice what he preached.

But did the practice have any lasting effect upon his theory of education? We have seen how the leading ideas were meant to direct and clarify the work; but in what important ways did the actual work serve to "criticize, modify, and build up the theory"? In a recent review of Dewey's writings from 1899 to 1909, J. O. C. Phillips remarks that for all Dewey's talk about the value of the scientific method, he himself was never really an exponent of it. He did not dirty his own hands with experiments in psychology laboratories, and his school "functioned far more as a public demonstration of his views than as a genuinely experimental laboratory." Even his writing does not appear to us now as very scientific. "The research seems thin, the factual evidence impressionistic. Statistics are rare; most of the conclusions are based on deduction."¹³⁹

A similar appraisal was given by Lawrence Cremin in the course of a generally favorable review of Dewey and his school: "Actually, there were few dramatic changes in Dewey's pedagogical theory as a result of the Laboratory School. Rather, he was able to state his initial hypotheses with ever greater confidence and specificity."¹⁴⁰ According to Joe R. Burnett, the lack of direct influence of Dewey's educational practices upon his theory is not so surprising in light of the fact that by 1900 he was already moving away from a direct concern with practical pedagogy and becoming a philosopher of culture. "Within four years," says Burnett, "he stopped discussing matters of practical pedagogy at any length. Even Democracy and Education .. . is a work of social, political, and educational philosophy rather than of practical pedagogy."¹⁴¹

This is not to say that none of Dewey's ideas were vindicated by the school. His belief that teaching should be a profession and teachers trained in their subject matter, the latest teaching methods, child psychology, and the history of education, as well as be given the opportunity to practice in a real school situation, seems to be almost taken for granted today. We should not forget how radical some of these ideas appeared to be at the turn of the century. I think his experience with the school also supports his point about the amount of waste in our educational system caused by the isolation of its parts. He showed how much the elementary level of education could gain by interacting with the university level. It might be added that universities would likewise benefit from this exposure to the practical problems of educating children.

Finally, whatever the shortcomings of his notion of the role of social occupations in the curriculum, Dewey did establish the point that children will learn more readily if we can overcome the distance between them and the subject matter. This should involve making them aware of the origins of much curricular material in the lives and experiences of human beings. The approach to the school as a kind of community in which teachers and students are active participants is another way to overcome an unproductive conflict between the child and the curriculum. Democracy itself he saw as a working hypothesis to be tested in our educational activities. He wanted it not simply to be studied but to be lived.

SOME CONCLUDING REMARKS ON THEORY AND PRACTICE IN EDUCATION

Some conceptual problems remain with theory and practice in education. Do they refer to distinct domains of thought and action? Is there a dualism here that cannot be overcome? Or is the problem that they do not normally interact in the same person? Perhaps we all suffer from a kind of split between what we say and what we do. Is this because of some ingrown tendency in ourselves or is it part of the very nature of things?

Perhaps there is something about education that promotes a division between theory and practice. We tend to espouse very high educational ideals. Education is an act of faith and hope, as well as love: faith in the future of the human race, hope that the young will carry on what we have accomplished and go beyond us, love in the sense of an active concern for their growth and a willingness to sacrifice for their welfare. It has been said that what we want in education is what all good parents want for their own children. If so, then it is not altogether surprising that our aspirations often exceed our accomplishments. Failure to achieve our educational ideals in practice usually serves to prod us to try harder rather than to modify or abandon the ideals altogether.

Another problem has to do with the evaluation of practice. How is it to be evaluated, by whom, and when? There are long-term as well as short-term results in education. Which are we to judge and in what fashion? Not even the great advances by the social sciences since the days of Dewey's school have completely resolved the old issues of the relative importance of nature and nurture in the upbringing of a child, what methods are most effective for teaching various individuals or a class full of them, what content is most worthwhile from the point of view of society and from the individual student's own point of view. Is it obvious that massive increases in equipment and personnel will improve the quality of education? Do we seek to produce happy individuals or good citizens? What things do the young need to learn and how can they, best be taught?

Clearly, Dewey's experiment in education has not answered such questions. If anything it has added to our perplexities. This can be seen in a positive light as a stimulus to the kind of thinking about the problems involved in educating the young that Dewey felt was so crucial. In Dewey's eyes this is an ongoing inquiry where the answers are tentative at best. Whatever theoretical conclusions we might reach, we must also take account of their practical consequences. The most lasting lesson from his experiment may well be that if we are to make progress in education, the duality between theory and practice is one that must be overcome.

NOTES

¹ This is from a copy of the Dewey School song found in the Katherine Camp Mayhew papers in the library of Teachers College, Columbia University.

² George Dykhuizen, "John Dewey: The Chicago Years," Journal of the History of Philosophy, 2, (October 1964):240 n. 60. "Laboratory School" was shortened even further to the "Lab School."

³ John Dewey, "The University School," in The Early Works of John Dewey, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, 1972), 5:437. All subsequent references to either the Early Works or the Middle Works of Dewey will be made in the standard format, i.e., EW or MW.

⁴ "The Need for a Laboratory School," EW 5:434. As a graduate student at Johns Hopkins, Dewey had personal experience of the use of the laboratory for observation and experiment in his psychology course taught by G. Stanley Hall. See Dorothy Ross, G. Stanley Hall (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 154. According to Ross, Hall opposed the renewal of Dewey's fellowship at Hopkins and later rejected a suggestion that Dewey be engaged to handle undergraduate instruction in philosophy (p. 146). Hall wrote a mildly critical review of Dewey's book, Psychology (New York: Harper and Bros., 1887), in the American Journal of Psychology, vol. I, no. 1. (November 1887): 146-59; and Hall referred to Dewey's work in "paidology" as having nothing new to offer in his autobiography, Life and Confessions of a Psychologist (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1924), 500.

⁵ "Pedagogy as a University Discipline," EW 5:288.

⁶ "Report of the Committee on a Detailed Plan for a Report on Elementary Education," EW 5:454.

⁷ "The Relation of Theory to Practice in Education," MW 3:249-72.

⁸Ibid., 249.

⁹Ibid., 251 (italics are Dewey's).

¹⁰ This is from remarks of John Dewey recorded in a shorthand report of a departmental conference on "The Training of Teachers" held at the University of Chicago on 13 May 1904 and found in the Anita McCormick Blaine Papers, The McCormick Collection, State Historical Society of Wisconsin in Madison.

¹¹ "The Relation of Theory to Practice in Education," MW 3:252.

¹² For some firsthand accounts on Dewey as a teacher, see George Dykhuizen, "John Dewey and the University of Michigan," Journal of the History of Ideas, 23 (1962):528; Sidney Hook, "Some Memories of John Dewey," in Pragmatism and the Tragic Sense of Life (New York: Basic Books, 1974), 101-14; Corliss Lamont, ed., Dialogue on John Dewey (New York: Horizon Press, 1959); Harold Larrabee, "John Dewey as Teacher," in John Dewey: Master Educator, ed. William W. Brickman and Stanley Lehrer (New York: Society for the Advancement of Education, 1959), 50-57; Una Bernard Sait, "Studying Under John Dewey," Claremont Quarterly, vol. 11, no. 2 (Winter, 1964), pp. 15-22; and Herbert W. Schneider, "Recollections of John Dewey," Claremont Quarterly, vol. II, no. 2 (Winter 1964):23-35.

¹³ "The Relation of Theory to Practice in Education," MW 3:263.

¹⁴ "The Relation of Theory to Practice in Education," MW 3:265.

¹⁵Democracy and Education (New York: Macmillan, 1916); MW 9:177.

¹⁶ "A Pedagogical Experiment," EW 5:244.

¹⁷Ibid.

¹⁸ "The University Elementary School," MW 1:319.

¹⁹ "Pedagogy as a University Discipline," EW 5:285-87.

²⁰ "The Need for a Laboratory School," EW 5:434.

²¹ Robert L. McCaul, "Dewey and the University of Chicago," part I: July 1894-March 1902, School and Society (25 March, 1961): 153.

²² Alice Dewey in an unpublished sketch of the school, quoted by Lawrence A. Cremin, The Transformation of the School (New York: Knopf, 1961), 136 n. 8.

²³ Cf. Robert L. McCaul, "Dewey's Chicago," The School Review (Summer 1959):266-67; Arthur Wirth, John Dewey As Educator (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1966), 35; and Dykhuizen, "John Dewey: The Chicago Years," 231.

²⁴ Katherine Camp Mayhew and Anna Camp Edwards, The Dewey School (New York: D. Appleton-Century Co., 1936; reprint, Atherton Press, 1966), 12.

²⁵ Jane Dewey, ed. "Biography of John Dewey," in The Philosophy of John Dewey, ed. Paul Arthur Schlipp (New York: Tudor Publishing Co., 2d ed., 1951), 28. It should be noted that this biography was "written by the daughters of its subject from material which he furnished" (p. 3).

²⁶ McCaul, "Dewey and the University of Chicago," Part 1, 153; this point was made by McCaul despite his own views on how supportive Harper was of the school.

²⁷ "The University Elementary School," MW 1:317.

²⁸ "The University Elementary School," MW 1:325. Smedley eventually became director of the Child Study Department of the Chicago Public Schools; cf. Wirth, Dewey As Educator, 195.

²⁹ Mayhew and Edwards, Dewey School, 8.

³⁰ Cremin, Transformation, 135.

³¹ Jane Dewey, "Biography of Dewey," 29. For a good recent biography of Mrs. Young, see Joan K. Smith, Ella Flagg Young (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1979).

³² Max Eastman, Great Companions (New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1959), 273.

³³ McCaul, "Dewey and the University of Chicago," Part 1, 157.

³⁴ Dykhuizen, "John Dewey and the University of Michigan," 534. He in turn is quoting from De Witt Parker and C. B. Vibbert, "The Department of Philosophy," in The University of Michigan: An Encyclopaedic Survey, vol. 2, ed. Wilfred B. Shaw (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1951), 674.

³⁵ B. A. Hinsdale, Journal of Proceedings and Addresses of the Thirty-ninth Annual Meeting of the National Educational Association (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1900), 326-27. For Dewey's relationship to Hinsdale as a colleague at the University of Michigan, see McCaul, "Dewey's Chicago," 260-61. There is also a reference to a debate between Dewey and Hinsdale at Michigan in John A. Axelson, "John Dewey 1884-1894: Decade of Ferment for Young Michigan Teacher," Michigan Education Journal (1 May, 1966), 14. The Hinsdale quote is incompletely given and incorrectly attributed to a meeting of the National Council of Education by Wirth, Dewey As Educator, 215-16. Wirth is quoting Hinsdale as presented in Ida B. DePencier, The History of the Laboratory Schools: The University of Chicago, 1896-1957 (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1960; 2d printing, Quadrangle Books, 1967), 16. The latter is a chatty but not very scholarly account of the Laboratory School.

³⁶ Mayhew and Edwards, Dewey School, 57.

³⁷ McCaul, "Dewey's Chicago," 275.

³⁸ DePencier, Laboratory Schools, 23-24.

³⁹ Richard J. Storr, Harper's University, The Beginnings (University of Chicago Press, 1966), 298.

⁴⁰ Ella Flagg Young, "Democracy and Education," Journal of Education, vol. 84, no. 1 (6 July, 1916):5-6. This review of Dewey's Democracy and Education by his trusted follower and confidant is surprisingly missing from the list of reviews of the book listed in MW 9:379 n. 10.

⁴¹ Laura L. Runyon, "A Day with the New Education," Chautauquan, vol. 30, no. 6 (March 1900):589-92.

⁴² Harold Rugg, Foundations for American Education (New York: World Book, 1947), 555-56 (italics are Rugg's).

⁴³ George Eastman, "John Dewey on Education: The Formative Years," D.Ed, diss., Harvard University, 1963, 495; for a list of Dewey's Contributions to The Elementary School Record, see p. 646. Lawrence Cremin states that "The published records of the school are more voluminous and detailed than for any similar venture of the time," Cremin, Transformation, 139 n. 3.

⁴⁴ Two excellent introductions to the Chicago of Dewey's times are: Ray Ginger, Altgeld's America (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1965), and Wayne Andrews, Battle for Chicago (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1946). Also of interest is Bessie Louise Pierce, A History of Chicago, vol. 3, 1871-1893 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957). Good studies of the University of Chicago at the turn of the century are those of Storr, Harper's University, and McCaul "Dewey's Chicago." A lively portrait of the life of the immigrant in Chicago at that time is Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-House (New York: Macmillan, 1910; reprint, New American Library, 1961).

⁴⁵ McCaul, "Dewey and the University of Chicago," Part 1. A short summary of Parker's views and practices can be found in Cremin, Transformation, 128-35. Angela Fraley claims that Dewey simply adopted Parker's theories and used his methods. "At best," she says, "he can be said to have replicated Parker's less formally recorded experimental work"; Schooling and Innovation (New York: Tyler Gibson Publishers, 1981), 45. No one else, to my knowledge, sees the two men in this light. See, for example, Jack K. Campbell, Colonel Francis W. Parker, The Children's Crusader (New York: Teachers College Press, 1967). For Parker's own words, see his Talks on Teaching (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1883) and Talks on Pedagogics (New York: E. L. Kellogg & Co., 1984).

⁴⁶ McCaul, "Dewey and the University of Chicago," Part 1.

⁴⁷ J. M. Rice, The Public-School System of the United States (New York: The Century Co.," 1893), 19. For more background on Rice and his study see Wirth, Dewey As Educator, 31-33. Lawrence Cremin dates the beginning of the progressive movement in American education to the publication of Rice's study; Cremin, Transformation, 22.

⁴⁸ Rice, Public-School System, 15.

⁴⁹Ibid., 210-11; McCaul, "Dewey and the University of Chicago," Part 1, 155.

⁵⁰Interest and Effort in Education (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1913).

⁵¹ "The Child and the Curriculum," MW 2:277-78.

⁵²Ibid., 278.

⁵³Ibid., p. 291 (italics are Dewey's).

⁵⁴ "The Psychological Aspect of the School Curriculum," EW 5:166.

⁵⁵ "The Child and the Curriculum," MW 2:285.

⁵⁶ "The Psychological Aspect of the School Curriculum," EW 5:174.

⁵⁷ "My Pedagogic Creed," EW 5:84.

⁵⁸ "The Theory of the Chicago Experiment," in Mayhew & Edwards, Dewey School, 467. Dewey often took pains to dissociate his own view from the more extreme child-centered stance of many progressive educators. See, for example, his article, "How Much Freedom in New Schools," New Republic (9 July, 1930), 204-6, and his book, Experience and Education (New York, 1938). Despite his efforts, he continues to be described as a childcentered educational theorist. A recent example of this can be found in Christopher J. Lucas, Foundations of Education (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1984), 304-9.

⁵⁹ "My Pedagogic Creed," EW 5:86-87.

⁶⁰Ibid., 90.

⁶¹ "Plan of Organization of the University Primary School," EW 5:230-31.

⁶²The School and Society, MW 1:15. Dewey showed such enthusiasm for the possibilities for learning to be derived from such simple social occupations that he might be criticized for the very thing that he found fault with in the Montessori method—i.e., being so eager to introduce children to the intellectual distinctions that adults have made that he ignores or reduces the amount of time devoted to the immediate crude handling of the familiar material of experience (Democracy and Education, MW 9:153-54). Margaret Naumberg makes this point when she claims that in the Dewey School "the making and doing of things was always subordinated to a social plan, not related to the individual capacities and tastes of the children," and that "neither individual nor group entities initiated much in the way of original planning, however much they may have expanded and adapted the social projects suggested by the teacher"; The Child and the World (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1928), 111.

⁶³ Dewey in Mayhew & Edwards, Dewey School, 47 n. 5. Walter Feinberg charges that Dewey's proposals for curriculum development differed significantly, depending upon the socioeconomic class of the children he was dealing with. After looking at Schools of Tomorrow (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1915), Feinberg asserts that we can see different assumptions in Dewey's treatment of all-black or working-class schools from middle- or upper-class schools, especially in Dewey's acceptance of the relative neglect of academic subjects in the former; Walter Feinberg, Understanding Education (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 263 n. 17. A far-ranging rebuttal to this charge could be constructed from Dewey's writings and actual practices; suffice it to say that the book in question was written by Dewey in collaboration with his daughter Evelyn and that she was responsible for the chapters that described specific schools of the type mentioned by Feinberg (see the preface to Schools of Tomorrow).

⁶⁴ "Culture Epoch Theory," MW 6:408.

⁶⁵ "Interpretation of the Culture-Epoch Theory,*" EW 5:250. A recent article claims that Dewey was closer to the Herbartian viewpoint than he cared to admit; Herbert M. Kliebard, "Dewey and the Herbartians: The Genesis of a Theory of Curriculum," Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, vol. 3, no. 1 (Winter 1981 ): 154-61. For more on Herbart and the Herbartians see: Johann Friedrich Herbart, Outlines of Educational Doctrine (New York: Macmillan, 1901); Gabriel Compayre, Herbert and Education by Instruction (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1907); Charles De Garmo, Herbart and the Herbartians (New York: Scribner, 1895); and Harold B. Dunkel, Herbart and Herbartianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970). A good summary of Dewey's reactions to the Herbartians and to the other educational movements of his time can be found in Melvin C. Baker, Foundations of John Dewey's Educational Theory (New York: Atherton Press, 1966), 86-108.

⁶⁶The School and Society, MW 1:54-55.

⁶⁷ "Science as Subject-Matter and as Method," MW 6:69-79.

⁶⁸How We Think, MW 6:236-37. Although this book was originally published in 1910, some years after he had left the school, Dewey acknowledged in the preface his indebtedness to his wife for inspiring the ideas of the book and "through whose work in connection with the Laboratory School .. . the ideas attained such concreteness as come from embodiment and testing in practice" (MW 6:179). Indeed, reviewers of the book praised its clear and simple style (MW 6:517-18).

⁶⁹Democracy and Education, MW 9.

⁷⁰ "Democracy in Education," MW 3:239.

⁷¹ "Democracy in Education," MW 3:237.

⁷² MW 9:162.

⁷³The School and Society, MW L:21.

⁷⁴ "Democracy in Education," MW 3:230.

⁷⁵ "Creative Democracy," in The Philosopher of the Common Man, ed. Sidney Ratner (New York: Greenwood Press, 1968), 227.

⁷⁶ Mayhew & Edwards, Dewey School, 64-66.

⁷⁷Ibid., chapter 5.

⁷⁸Ibid., 113.

⁷⁹Ibid., 126.

⁸⁰ "The Primary Education Fetish," EW 5:268.

⁸¹ Mayhew & Edwards, Dewey School, 144.

⁸² Depencier, Laboratory Schools, 33-34.

⁸³ Mayhew & Edwards, Dewey School, 155.

⁸⁴Ibid., 166.

⁸⁵Ibid., 175.

⁸⁶ Baker, Foundations, 144.

⁸⁷ Mayhew & Edwards, Dewey School, 183.

⁸⁸Ibid., 208.

⁸⁹Ibid., 200.

⁹⁰Ibid., 203.

⁹¹Ibid., 213-14.

⁹²ibid., 221.

⁹³Ibid., 248.

⁹⁴Ibid., 396.

⁹⁵Ibid., 240-48.

⁹⁶ Young, "Democracy and Education," 6.

⁹⁷ Mayhew & Edwards, Dewey School, 370-75.

⁹⁸Ibid., 382.

⁹⁹ Letter from Dewey to Mrs. Emmons Blaine, 2 August, 1900, Anita McCormick Blaine Papers, The McCormick Collection, State Historical Society of Wisconsin in Madison.

¹⁰⁰ McCaul, "Dewey's Chicago," 264.

¹⁰¹ Ibid.

¹⁰² Mayhew & Edwards, Dewey School, 438.

¹⁰³ A recent appraisal credits Dewey with applying many innovations at his schools, such as "new methods of instruction, reduction in student conformity, students' evaluations of their own work, and the elimination of grading"; Conflict and Continuity, ed. John R. Snarey, Terrie Epstein, Carol Sienkiewicz, and Philip Zodhiates, Harvard Educational Review, Reprint Series No. 15, 1981, ix.

¹⁰⁴ Robert McCaul, "Dewey and the University of Chicago," Part 2: April 1902-May 1903, School and Society (8 April, 1961):180.

¹⁰⁵ Letter from Dewey to Mrs. Emmons Blaine, (4 August, 1902, Anita McCormick Blaine Papers, The McCormick Collection, State Historical Society of Wisconsin in Madison.

¹⁰⁶ Letter from Alice Dewey to William Rainey Harper, 5 April 1904, President's Papers 1889-1925, Department of Special Collections, University of Chicago Library.

¹⁰⁷ Letters from Dewey to Harper, ibid. McCaul attributes Dewey's peevishness in the matter to the tremendous strain caused by the intellectual and social stimuli of Chicago; McCaul, "Dewey's Chicago," 278-79. I think a simpler and more reasonable explanation is that Dewey became angered when his wife was told she was no longer wanted as principal.

¹⁰⁸ Mayhew & Edwards, Dewey School, 18.

¹⁰⁹ See, for example, Rugg, Foundations, 554-55.

¹¹⁰ Mayhew & Edwards, Dewey School, 366.

¹¹¹Ibid., 370.

¹¹² An example of this approach is the experience of Miss Emily Rice (a staunch follower of Parker), whom Dewey consulted about the merger of the two schools and the question of his wife's assuming the principalship. She did not oppose the plan to Dewey's face but expressed reservations privately in a letter to Mrs. Blaine, claiming that she felt unable to speak frankly to him or to Mrs. Young on such a delicate, personal matter; McCaul, "Dewey and the University of Chicago," Part 2, 182 and George Dykhuizen, "John Dewey in Chicago: Some Biographical Notes," Journal of the History of Philosophy, 3 (April 1965):228 n. 67. Presumably, Mrs. Blaine communicated Miss Rice's reservations to Dewey: he strongly criticized Miss Rice for this in his own letter to Mrs. Blaine and sarcastically remarked that "Miss Rice has so completely and repeatedly misrepresented both Mrs. Young and my own statements that I attach no further importance to any statement she makes about other people, so far as that reflect upon them"; Dewey to Mrs. Blaine, 30 April 1903, Anita McCormick Blaine Papers, The McCormick Collection State Historical Society of Wisconsin in Madison.

¹¹³ Mayhew & Edwards, Dewey School, 467-68.

¹¹⁴lbid. 35.

¹¹⁵Ibid. 376.

¹¹⁶ "The Psychology of Elementary Education," MW 1:73. This statement is also quoted with a slight change of wording in Mayhew & Edwards, Dewey School, 248.

¹¹⁷ Wirth, Dewey As Educator, 71.

¹¹⁸ See McCaul, "Dewey and the University of Chicago," Part 2, 182, and Dykhuizen, "John Dewey in Chicago," 228.

¹¹⁹ Eastman, Great Companions, 277. Joan K. Smith reports that Wilbur Jackman had been advised by the Board of Trustees to document any difficulties occurring between Mrs. Dewey and the faculty of the school. He found the basic problem lay in her nature: "so critical that it becomes destructive . . . making it impossible for her to direct others . . . without continual combat"; Smith, Ella Flagg Young, 98.

¹²⁰ R. S. Peters, among others, has noted the extremely favorable teacher-pupil ratio in the Dewey School and suggests that this be kept in mind when we evaluate its apparent success; "John Dewey's Philosophy of Education," in John Dewey Reconsidered, ed. R. S. Peters (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977), 108.

¹²¹ Robert McCaul, "Dewey and the University of Chicago," Part 3: September 1903-June 1904," School and Society (22 April 1961):205.

¹²² Henry J. Perkinson, Two Hundred Years of American Educational Thought (New York: McKay, 1976), 215.

¹²³ Hinsdale, Thirty-ninth Annual Meeting, 237. Hinsdale's cautious sentiment was echoed in a review of Dewey's School and Society that appeared in Dial, 29 (16 August 1900):98, coauthored by Hinsdale and A. S. Whitney: "While no one can tell what the future of the University Elementary School may be, it does not require much foresight to see that it can never become the type of the public elementary school; its cost and the delicacy of the organization make this impossible." A more extreme reaction is that of Maxine Greene, who claims that "a look at the Addresses and Proceedings of the NEA in the years immediately following Dewey's Chicago experiments shows us that his work impressed public-school teachers little, if at all"; "Dewey and American Education, 1894-1920," in Brickman ana Lehrer, John Dewey, 40. I am not sure that such a conclusion is warranted. From the evidence she cites, the most one could say is that those who gave addresses to the NEA during that period did not seem to be talking much about Dewey. A similar observation has been made on the apparent lack of influence of Dewey on educational reformers in England who were at work in the period of 1914-24; "Furthermore the textbooks of the period while respectful, show no signs that Dewey's ideas had penetrated the minds of their writers." R. W. Selleck, English Primary Education and the Progressives, 1914-1939 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), 113.

David Hawkins goes even further and asserts, "Dewey has so far had almost no influence at all on the practical level except, for a time, in a few private schools for children most of whom would have succeeded academically in any case." "Liberal Education: A Modest Polemic," in Content and Context, ed. Carl Kaysen (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973), 156. Unfortunately, Hawkins provides no evidence whatsoever to back up this assertion; William Boyd and Wyatt Rawson in their book, The Story of the New Education (London: Heinemann, 1965), make the same point: "The schools of Parker and Dewey at Chicago were day schools for city children; but they had their most interesting outcome in the later establishment of private-venture Country Day Schools, in which children could grow up in free conditions which afforded greater scope for individual initiative and effort than the ordinary public schools of America" (p. 3).

¹²⁴ Mayhew & Edwards, Dewey School, 7.

¹²⁵The Sources of a Science of Education (New York: Liveright, 1929), 43.

¹²⁶ Mayhew & Edwards, Dewey School, 361-62.

¹²⁷ Paul Hirst, "Liberal Education and the Nature of Knowledge," in The Philosophy of Education, ed. R. S. Peters (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 87-111. Many of Hirst's writings on this topic have been collected in his book, Knowledge and the Curriculum (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974). A response to Hirst, somewhat in the spirit of Dewey, is that of Richard Pring, Knowledge and Schooling (London: Open Books, 1976).

¹²⁸ Hirst, "Liberal Education," 96.

¹²⁹ John White, Towards a Compulsory Curriculum (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973). Also of interest are Keith Thompson and John White, Curriculum Development: A Dialogue (London: Pitman Publishing Company, 1975), and Robin Barrow, Common Sense and the Curriculum (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1976).

¹³⁰ Frederick Olafson, "The School and Society: Reflections on John Dewey's Philosophy of Education," in New Studies in the Philosophy of John Dewey, ed. Steven M. Cahn (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1977), 195.

¹³¹Ibid., 201.

¹³² This criticism is also made by Charles Frankel, who argues that a scientific community is a community of specialized competence whose opinions are checked against the evidence; whereas democracy is a procedure for melding and balancing human interests. "John Dewey's Social Philosophy," in Cahn, New Studies, 20.

¹³³ Kathryn Morgan, "Children, Bonsai Trees, and Open Education," in Philosophy of Education: Canadian Perspectives, ed. Donald B. Cochrane and Martin Schiralli (Don Mills, Ontario: Collier Macmillan Canada, 1982), 314.

¹³⁴ R. S. Peters, "Education as Initiation," in Philosophical Analysis and Education, ed. R. D. Archambault (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965), 107.

¹³⁵ Peters, Dewey Reconsidered, 121. Some early critics saw Dewey's pragmatism as an inadequate philosophy of life in the face of the irrationality of war. Thus, Randolph Bourne wrote in 1917 that Dewey's philosophy assumes the existence of a society that is peaceful, prosperous, and has a strong desire for progress; War and the Intellectuals, Essays by Randolph S. Bourne, 1915-1919, ed. Carl Resek (New York: Harper & Row, 1964). John C. Farrell believes that the outcome of the World War I did not shake Dewey's faith in reason, progress, and the scientific method, because this was really in the nature of an a priori assumption on Dewey's part; "John Dewey and World War I: Armageddon Tests a Liberal's Faith," Perspectives in American History, 9 (1975):337. A good counter to such objections to pragmatism can be found in Hook, Pragmatism and the Tragic Sense of Life.

¹³⁶ Richard Hofstadter, Anti-intellectualism in American Life (New York: Knopf, 1970), 385. Anthony Quinton (in Peters, Dewey Reconsidered has also characterized Dewey's approach as anti-intellectual but only in the sense that his theory of knowledge disagrees with the Cartesian tradition. Quinton looks favorably upon Dewey's anti-Cartesian contentions that all our beliefs are fallible and corrigible, that the knower is an active experimenter, and that the pursuit of rational belief is an essentially social undertaking. Part of my objection to analytic philosophy of education may well be a response to its Cartesian elements—i.e., the view that we can have beliefs that are certain and definitions for which we can find necessary and sufficient conditions, and the assumption that the knower is some kind of contemplative theorist pursuing truth in isolation from his or her fellow investigators.

¹³⁷ See, for example, Democracy and Education MW 9:24-26.

¹³⁸ Thus, in a review of Dewey's Lectures in the Philosophy of Education: 1899, John Childs remarks that these lectures show that Dewey recognizes that "adult guidance is written into the very constitution of the school," and the regard for the individuality of the child and his interests "is no substitute for adult interpretation, evaluation and selection from among genuine social alternatives, each with its own pattern for the molding of the immature." Studies in Philosophy and Education, 5 (Winter 1966-67):69.

¹³⁹ J. O. C. Phillips, "Dewey in Mid-Passage," History of Education Quarterly, vol. 20, no. 1 (Spring 1980): 123. This view also finds support in a recent article on Dewey that concludes that he seems to have been "more of a social engineer than a pure scientist"; Merle Borrowman, "The School and Society: Vermont in 1860, Chicago in 1890, Idaho in 1950, California in 1980," Educational Studies, 11 (Winter 1981):381.

¹⁴⁰ Cremin, Transformation, 140.

¹⁴¹ Joe R. Burnett, introduction to The School and Society, MW I:xix-xx. Burnett's judgment is overly harsh. Dewey continued to write on practical pedagogy throughout the rest of his life. In 1924, for example, he went to Turkey to prepare a "Report and Recommendation upon Turkish Education." The report has been described as speaking directly "to the problems of school systems in all developing countries, today and for many coming decades"; MW 15:xx and 275-97. Even near the end of his life, Dewey was writing about practical pedagogical matters such as the "project method" developed by Professor Kilpatrick at Teachers College; Dewey's introduction to Samuel Tenebaum, William Heard Kilpatrick (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1951).