John Dewey and Education Reform

The best-known reformer to influence pedagogy in the U.S. was John Dewey.  With his wife Alice, he opened the Laboratory School at the University of Chicago, “the most influential model for child-centered schooling in the United States” (Ravitch 171). 

As early as 1897 he published his “Pedagogic Creed,” and American teachers anywhere would recognize the language as that of their instructors in college, for the most part.  He declares at the beginning, however, a sentiment that we don’t hear much anymore: 

            …all education proceeds by the participation of the individual in the social consciousness of the race. This process begins unconsciously almost at birth, and is continually shaping the individual's powers, saturating his consciousness, forming his habits, training his ideas, and arousing his feelings and emotions. Through this unconscious education the individual gradually comes to share in the intellectual and moral resources which humanity has succeeded in getting together. He becomes an inheritor of the funded capital of civilization. The most formal and technical education in the world cannot safely depart from this general process. It can only organize it; or differentiate it in some particular direction (Article I).

The important question for Dewey, of course, is how to go about it.  In School and Society (1899) he notes the changes in the 19^th Century economy that have revolutionized work and the growing alienation from the typical tasks of the family farm, which was “practically the center in which were carried on, or about which were clustered, all the typical forms of industrial occupation” (10).

In words we might attribute to Mike Rose or Matthew Crawford, Dewey extols this household-centered economic activity that produced

…the factors of discipline and of character-building involved in this kind of life:  training in habits of order and of industry, and in the idea of responsibility, of obligation to do something, produce something in the world” (10, 11).

The social connectedness Dewey sees in such an environment, the sense of purpose, engagement, and accomplishment, should be the motive forces in the classroom. 

A child’s activities occur in social contexts, so they are “stimulated to act as a member of a unity, to emerge from his original narrowness of action and feeling and to conceive of himself from the standpoint of the welfare of the group to which he belongs” (Article I).

Dewey doesn’t refer to teachers as “facilitators” as we would writing today, but the conception already has taken shape:  “…under existing conditions far too much of the stimulus and control proceeds from the teacher, because of neglect of the idea of the school as a form of social life” (Article II).

Again, though “child centered” is not in his vocabulary, the thought is there:  "…the question of method is ultimately reducible to the question of the order of development of the child’s powers and interests” (Article IV).

Dewey would probably embrace our obsession with visual media:  “the image is the great instrument of instruction” (Article IV).

Finally, Dewey would apparently subscribe to our contemporary notion that schools are the proper platform from which to launch social change:  “…education is the fundamental method of social progress and reform” (Article V).

Dewey's Laboratory School sought to embody and direct the activity of the child growing up on the family farm.  In School and Society he writes

There is nothing which strikes more oddly upon the average intelligent visitor than to see boys as well as girls of ten, twelve, and thirteen years of age engaged in sewing and weaving. If we look at this from the standpoint of preparation of the boys for sewing on buttons and making patches, we get a narrow and utilitarian conception -- a basis that hardly justifies giving prominence to this sort of work in the school. But if we look at it from another side, we find that this work gives the point of departure from which the child can trace and follow the progress of mankind in history, getting an insight also into the materials used and the mechanical principles involved. In connection with these occupations, the historic development of man is recapitulated. For example, the children are first given the raw material -- the flax, the cotton plant, the wool as it comes from the back of the sheep (if we could take them to the place where the sheep are sheared, so much the better). Then a study is made of these materials from the standpoint of their adaptation to the uses to which they may be put. For instance, a comparison of the cotton fiber with wool fiber is made. I did not know until the children told me, that the reason for the late development of the cotton industry as compared with the woolen is, that the cotton fiber is so very difficult to free by hand from the seeds.

The children in one group worked thirty minutes freeing cotton fibers from the boll and seeds, and succeeded in getting out less than one ounce. They could easily believe that one person could only gin one pound a day by hand, and could understand why their ancestors wore woolen instead of cotton clothing. Among other things discovered as affecting their relative utilities, was the shortness of the cotton fiber as compared with that of wool, the former being one-tenth of an inch in length, while that of the latter is an inch in length; also that the fibers of cotton are smooth and do not cling together, while the wool has a certain roughness which makes the fibers stick, thus assisting the spinning. The children worked this out for themselves with the actual material, aided by questions and suggestions from the teacher.

They then followed the processes necessary for working the fibers up into cloth. They re-invented the first frame for carding the wool -- a couple of boards with sharp pins in them for scratching it out. They re-devised the simplest process for spinning the wool -- a pierced stone or some other weight through which the wool is passed, and which as it is twirled draws out the fiber; next the top, which was spun on the floor, while the children kept the wool in their hands until it was gradually drawn out and wound upon it. Then the children are introduced to the invention next in historic order, working it out experimentally, thus seeing its necessity, and tracing its effects, not only upon that particular industry, but upon modes of social life -- in this way passing in review the entire process up to the present complete loom, and all that goes with the application of science in the use of our present available powers. I need not speak of the science involved in this -- the study of the fibers, of geographical features, the conditions under which raw materials are grown, the great centers of manufacture and distribution, the physics involved in the machinery of production; nor, again, of the historical side -- the influence which these inventions have had upon humanity. You can concentrate the history of all mankind into the evolution of the flax, cotton, and wool fibers into clothing. I do not mean that this is the only, or the best, center. But it is true that certain very real and important avenues to the consideration of the history of the race are thus opened -- that the mind is introduced to much more fundamental and controlling influences than usually appear in the political and chronological records that pass for history.

The emphasis is on activity, discovery, and reflection, guided by adults.  And there were a lot of adults around.  In 1902, there were 143 students, 25 teachers, and 10 graduate assistants helping with instruction.  That’s roughly a 4:1 ratio.  I wonder if that might affect the application of Dewey’s approach to mass education.

Dewey’s optimism hearkens back to Rousseau’s Émile and echoed in the sixties by John Holt’s work, How Children Learn and How Children Fail.  The Romanticism is part of Dewey’s charm, but also part of the problem. 

References

Dewey, John. "My Pedagogic Creed." Pragmatism. Pragmatism.org, 1897. Web. 2016. <http://dewey.pragmatism.org/creed.htm>.