Welcome to our module on John Dewey and the Progressives. Dewey is America's preeminent philosopher, the leading theorist of American democracy, and arguably, the most important philosopher of education since Plato. Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, Dewey was a world figure, celebrated by American liberals for his theory of participatory democracy, honored in China, Japan, the Soviet Union, among other nations for his theories of teaching and learning. Yet in the United States, Dewey's was a voice crying in the wilderness, a prophet ignored, if not at times scorned, by the administrative Progressives. And betrayed by well-meaning disciples, lesser lights who madly misinterpreted him by cherry-picking his theories. In this episode, we briefly chart Dewey's life and career up to his years at the University of Chicago where he established his famous Laboratory School. And we look at the theory and practice of this pioneering school. >> Dewey was born in 1859, just one month before Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, which introduced the Darwinian theory of evolution. This theory would dominate the intellectual zeitgeist of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and have a palpable influence on Dewey's philosophy. Dewey's birthplace was Burlington, Vermont on Lake Champlain, where his father operated a grocery business. Dewey's mother was a Fundamentalist Christian who frequently admonished young John to, get right with Jesus. Dewey was educated badly in the Burlington schools and well at the University of Vermont, which commanded a hill overlooking that town. His undergraduate degree was in philosophy. Over time, Dewey would break traumatically with his mother's otherworldly Pietism and seek out a philosophy that would bridge the mind/body dualism implicit in Fundamentalist Christianity. >> Mm. After trying his hand for a few years as a schoolteacher, a job for whose rigors he was temperamentally and physically unsuited, the bookish Dewey entered Johns Hopkins University to pursue his Doctorate in Philosophy. Under its president, Daniel Coit Gilman, Hopkins was an intellectual hothouse in the 1880s, with luminous faculty and PhD seminars, famously modeled on the German university. Dewey completed his PhD in 1884 and soon distinguished himself as a rising star in his field. From 1884 to 1894 he professed philosophy at the University of Michigan. Here he met and married one of his students, Alice Chapman, a woman of formidable intelligence and strong social convictions. >> It was at Michigan that Dewey began to theorize democracy as being more than a form of government, as being a way of life. What he would later call, in his inimitable prose style quote, a mode of associative living. At Michigan, Dewey also came to understand the central role education would have to play if a genuinely democratic way of life were to be achieved. During his Michigan years, Dewey began to take a strong interest in schooling, an interest no doubt influenced by the fact that he and Alice now had several children in tow. He left Michigan for the University of Chicago in 1894, convinced that education for democracy would have to be vastly different from what passed for public education in late 19th century America. >> Mm. At the University of Chicago, a new university funded by the industrialist, John D Rockefeller, whose president was William Rainey Harper, Dewey chaired the Department of Pedagogy, and the Department of Philosophy and Psychology. In 1896, with Harper's blessing, Dewey established his famous Laboratory School of the University of Chicago, better known as the Dewey School, which he directed until 1902. At Chicago, Dewey hoped to achieve nothing less than the transformation of American public education. He set out to establish a radical alternative to the common school. Dewey's Chicago writings, in particular the essays in The School and Society, published in 1900, and his famous monograph on The Child and the Curriculum, published in 1902, were largely concerned with deriving a set of principles and abstractions from what was unambiguously a laboratory school experiment. Dewey and his teaching staff cleverly used the theme of occupations, their term for generic world historical cultural developments such as weaving, sewing, cooking, and metalworking, as the organizing framework for the curriculum. Children worked experimentally and cooperatively on problems like building a miniature smelting furnace, discovering why wool predated cotton in the evolution of cloth manufacturers, and testing the effects of scalding, simmering, and boiling water on egg whites. The children in effect, were guided to experience in a laboratory setting something of the evolution of human culture writ large. By all accounts, these simple yet imaginative activities, shepherded by superb teachers, elicited great intellectual excitement in the children, and no small amount of real learning. >> Dewey believed that his school modeled the reconstruction of the American elementary school as a seedbed of democracy. In his words, as a, quote, miniature community, an embryonic society. Yet the, there was very little about the Dewey School that reflected turn-of-the-century Chicago. Its enrollment was primarily children of the University of Chicago's families. In that respect, the school was neither the miniature community, nor the embryonic society, that Dewey claimed it to be. Yet Dewey was onto something very big in his theorizing about the Laboratory School. In perhaps his most brilliant short theoretical work, The Child and Curriculum, Dewey distinguished between the logical and the psychological ordering of subject matter. In other words, subject matter as represented in a text book authored by a scholar, and subject matter as meaningfully learned by a young learner. With respect to the learner, to psychologize subject matter is to make it available to the child as a means for solving a problem or intellectual in, dilemma that has engaged the child's interest. Put another way, subject matter is meaningfully learned through its contribution to solving a real-world problem-. >> Mm. >> In the child's experience. Dewey believed that subject matter adapted and applied in such a fashion is not only retained but acquires, quote, an absorbing value of its own. This is subject matter adapted to the needs, interests, and capabilities of children. In a word, to their experience. [SOUND]
