Ben Wilbrink: Dewey and progressivism

In this paper I will argue that the conception of education that continues to shape our schools, and influences what we do to children in its name, was given its modern sense as a result of ideas that were largely formulated in the 1850s. I will try to show the source of many of our present most generally held beliefs about learning, development, and the curriculum, and show that they were based on ideas that were, simply, wrong. These ideas continue to be the source of catastrophic damage and waste of life, and are responsible for the general ineffectiveness of schooling.

“ . . . the accumulation of cultural tools and the profound influence they have on our learning makes it almost impossible, except with pre-language infants, to expose basic principles of natural learning.”

Getting it wrong from the beginning p. 72.

“Spencer also argued for an increase in mathematics, focused on what students would need in their everyday lives.”

p 122

Modernisation
Education
Education in pre-literate, traditional societies
Education and the build-up to modernisation in England
Education and industrialisation, 1780 to 1851
England, 1850 to 1944
England since 1945
Japan
The drive to modernisation in Japan, 1867 to 1941
Japan sice 1945
Education and modernisation

“WE know nothing of childhood, and with our mistaken notions of it the further we go in education the more we go astray. The wisest writers devote themselves to what a man ought to know without asking what a child is capable of learning.” These sentences are typical of the “Emile” of Rousseau. He insists that existing education is bad because parents and teachers are always thinking of the accomplishments of adults, and that all reform depends upon centering attention upon the powers and weaknesses of children. Rousseau said, as well as did, many foolish things. But his insistence that education. be based upon the native capacities of those to be taught and upon the need of studying children in order to discover what these native powers are, sounded the key-note of all modern efforts for educational progress. It meant that education is not something to be forced upon children and youth from without, but is the growth of capacities with which human beings are endowed at birth. From this conception flow the various considerations which educational reformers since his day have most emphasized.

p. 1-2

( .. ) but Rousseau anticipated our present psychology an to the extent in which the action of the organs of sense and movement is a positive cause of the unfolding of intelligence. “If you follow rules that are the opposite of the established practice and instead of taking your pupil far afield, wandering to distant places, far-off lands, remote centuries, the ends of the world and to heavens themselves, you keep him to himself, to his own concerns, he will be able to perceive, to remember, and to reason in nature's order of development.”

p. 8-9

[Rousseau:] “Among the many short cuts to science we badly need one to teach us the art of learning with difficulty.” Of course his idea is not to make things difficult for the sake of having them difficult, but to avoid the simulation of learning found in repeating the formulae of learning, and to substitute for it the slow and sure process of personal discovery. Textbooks and lectures give the results of other men’s discoveries, and thus seem to provide a short cut to knowledge; but the outcome is just a meaningsless reflecting back of symbols with no understanding of the facts themselves. (.. )

To find out how to make knowledge when it is needed is the true end of the acquisition of information in school, not the information itself.

John Dewey & Evelyn Dewey (1915). Schools of to-morrow., p. 14-16
https://archive.org/details/schoolsoftomorro005826mbp
I tweeted this one!

If it was true in Rousseau’s day that information, knowledge, as an end in itself, is an “unfathomable and shoreless ocean,” it is much more certain that the increase of science since his day has made absurd the identification of education with the mere accumulation of knowledge.

John Dewey & Evelyn Dewey (1915). Schools of to-morrow., p. 15
https://archive.org/details/schoolsoftomorro005826mbp

Developmentalism's historic foundations go well beyond the writings of Rousseau, Dewey,and Piaget. Pedagogical theorists such as Johann Bernard Basedow (1724-1790), Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746-1827), Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), Friedrich Froebel (1782-1852), Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), William James (1842-1910), and G. Stanley Hall (1844-1924) are the best known proponents of the past 200 years. In general, their views were premised on either the maturation-only or the maturation/environmental- interaction schemes of development.

The ascendance of developmentalism in America may be related to an early belief about education as a cause of madness. According to Makari (1993), Rousseau's "education naturelle" was presaged by the writings of John Locke in 1691 and Giambattista Vico in 1709. Vico believed that children develop through a series of immutable phases and he condemned educational practices not in harmony with the "natural" progression. He considered abstract Cartesian thought to be particularly harmful. Vico's supposition that that which appears to be unnatural is apt to harmful has been echoed repeatedly even to the present day. Proponents of "developmentally appropriate" teaching practice, for example, believe that the use of incentives with young children are likely to be damaging.

Processes of instruction are unified in the degree in which they center in the production of good habits of thinking. While we may speak, without error, of the method of thought, the important thing is that thinking is the method of ari educative experience. The essentials of method are therefore identical with the essentials of reflection. They are first that the pupil have a genuine situation of experience that there be a continuous activitv in which he is interested for its own sake ; secondly, that a genuine problem develop within this situation as a stimulus to thought ; third, that he possess the information and make the observations needed to deal with it; fourth, that suggested solutions occur to him which he shall be responsible for developing in an orderly way; fifth, that he have opportunity and occasion to test his ideas by application, to make their meaning clear and to discover for himself their validity.

summary p. 192

In the second place, there are variations of point of view, of appeal of objects, and of mode of attack, from person to person. When these variations are suppressed in the alleged interests of uniformity, and an attempt is made to have a single mold of method of study and recitation, mental confusion and artificiality inevitably result. Originality is gradually destroyed, confidence in one's own quality of mental operation is undermined, and a docile subjection to the opinion of others is inculcated, or else ideas run wild. The harm is greater now than when the whole community was governed by customary beliefs, because the contrast between methods of learning in school and those relied upon outside the school is greater. That systematic advance in scientific discovery began when individuals were allowed, and then encouraged, to utilize their own peculiarities of response to subject matter, no one will deny. If it is said in objection, that pupils in school are not capable of any such originality, and hence must be confined to appropriating and reproducing things already known by the better informed, the reply is twofold, (i) We are concerned with originality of attitude which is equivalent to the unforced response of one's own individuality, not with originality as measured by product. No one expects the young to make original discoveries of just the same facts and principles as are embodied in the sciences of nature and man. But it is not unreasonable to expect that learning may take place under such conditions that from the standpoint of the learner there is genuine discovery. While immature students will not make discoveries from the standpoint of advanced students, they make them from their own standpoint, whenever there is genuine learning, (ii) In the normal process of becoming acquainted with subject matter already known to others, even young pupils react in unexpected ways. There is something fresh, something not capable of being fully anticipated by even the most experienced teacher, in the ways they go at the topic, and in the particular ways in which things strike them. Too often all this is brushed aside as irrelevant; pupils are deliberately held to rehearsing material in the exact form in which the older person conceives it. The result is that what is instinctively original in individuality, that which marks off one from another, goes unused and undirected. Teaching then ceases to be an educative process for the teacher. At most he learns simply to improve his existing technique ; he does not get new points of view ; he fails to experience any intellectual companionship. Hence both teaching and learning tend to become conventional and mechanical with all the nervous strain on both sides therein implied.

Such is the situation as an affair of theoretical psychology and as most adequately stated by Aristotle. But this state of things is reflected in the constitution of classes of men and hence in the organization of society. Only in a comparatively small number is the function of reason capable of operating as a law of life. In the mass of people, vegetative and animal functions dominate. Their energy of intelligence is so feeble and inconstant that it is constantly overpowered by bodily appetite and passion. Such persons are not truly ends in themselves, for only reason constitutes a final end. Like plants, animals and physical tools, they are means, appliances, for the attaining of ends beyond themselves, although unlike them they have enough intelligence to exercise a certain discretion in the execution of the tasks committed to them. Thus by nature, and not merely by social convention, there are those who are slaves -- that is, means for the ends of others. 1 The great body of artisans are in one important respect worse off than even slaves. Like the latter they are given up to the service of ends external to themselves; but since they do not enjoy the intimate association with the free superior class experienced by domestic slaves they remain on a lower plane of excellence. Moreover, women are classed with slaves and craftsmen as factors among the animate instrumentalities of production and reproduction of the means for a free or rational life.

Individually and collectively there is a gulf between merely living and living worthily. In order that one may live worthily he must first live, and so with collective society. The time and energy spent upon mere life, upon the gaining of subsistence, detracts from that available for activities that have an inherent rational meaning; they also unfit for the latter. Means are menial, the serviceable is servile. The true life is possible only in the degree in which the physical necessities are had without effort and without attention. Hence slaves, artisans, and women are employed in furnishing the means of subsistence in order that others, those adequately equipped with intelligence, may live the life of leisurely concern with things intrinsically worth while.

To these two modes of occupation, with their distinction of servile and free activities (or "arts") correspond two types of education: the base or mechanical and the liberal or intellectual. Some persons are trained by suitable practical exercises for capacity in doing things, for ability to use the mechanical tools involved in turning out physical commodities and rendering personal service. This training is a mere matter of habituation and technical skill; it operates through repetition and assiduity in application, not through awakening and nurturing thought. Liberal education aims to train intelligence for its proper office: to know. The less this knowledge has to do with practical affairs, with making or producing, the more adequately it engages intelligence. So consistently does Aristotle draw the line between menial and liberal education that he puts what are now called the "fine" arts, music, painting, sculpture, in the same class with menial arts so far as their practice is concerned. They involve physical agencies, assiduity of practice, and external results. In discussing, for example, education in music he raises the question how far the young should be practiced in the playing of instruments. His answer is that such practice and proficiency may be tolerated as conduce to appreciation; that is, to understanding and enjoyment of music when played by slaves or professionals. When professional power is aimed at, music sinks from the liberal to the professional level. One might then as well teach cooking, says Aristotle. Even a liberal concern with the works of fine art depends upon the existence of a hireling class of practitioners who have subordinated the development of their own personality to attaining skill in mechanical execution. The higher the activity the more purely mental is it; the less does it have to do with physical things or with the body. The more purely mental it is, the more independent or self-sufficing is it. These last words remind us that Aristotle again makes a distinction of superior and inferior even within those living the life of reason. For there is a distinction in ends and in free action, according as one's life is merely accompanied by reason or as it makes reason its own medium. That is to say, the free citizen who devotes himself to the public life of his community, sharing in the management of its affairs and winning personal honor and distinction, lives a life accompanied by reason. But the thinker, the man who devotes himself to scientific inquiry and philosophic speculation, works, so to speak, in reason, not simply by *. Even the activity of the citizen in his civic relations, in other words, retains some of the taint of practice, of external or merely instrumental doing. This infection is shown by the fact that civic activity and civic excellence need the help of others; one cannot engage in public life all by himself. But all needs, all desires imply, in the philosophy of Aristotle, a material factor; they involve lack, privation; they are dependent upon something beyond themselves for completion. A purely intellectual life, however, one carries on by himself, in himself; such assistance as he may derive from others is accidental, rather than intrinsic. In knowing, in the life of theory, reason finds its own full manifestation; knowing for the sake of knowing irrespective of any application is alone independent, or self-sufficing. Hence only the education that makes for power to know as an end in itself. without reference to the practice of even civic duties, is truly liberal or free. 2. The Present Situation. If the Aristotelian conception represented just Aristotle's personal view, it would be a more or less interesting historical curiosity. It could be dismissed as an illustration of the lack of sympathy or the amount of academic pedantry which may coexist with extraordinary intellectual gifts. But Aristotle simply described without confusion and without that insincerity always attendant upon mental confusion, the life that was before him. That the actual social situation has greatly changed since his day there is no need to say. But in spite of these changes, in spite of the abolition of legal serfdom, and the spread of democracy, with the extension of science and of general education (in books, newspapers, travel, and general intercourse as well as in schools), there remains enough of a cleavage of society into a learned and an unlearned class, a leisure and a laboring class, to make his point of view a most enlightening one from which to criticize the separation between culture and utility in present education. Behind the intellectual and abstract distinction as it figures in pedagogical discussion, there looms a social distinction between those whose pursuits involve a minimum of selfdirective thought and aesthetic appreciation, and those who are concerned more directly with things of the intelligence and with the control of the activities of others.

Aristotle was certainly permanently right when he said that "any occupation or art or study deserves to be called mechanical if it renders the body or soul or intellect of free persons unfit for the exercise and practice of excellence." The force of the statement is almost infinitely increased when we hold, as we nominally do at present, that all persons, instead of a comparatively few, are free. For when the mass of men and all women were regarded as unfree by the very nature of their bodies and minds, there was neither intellectual confusion nor moral hypocrisy in giving them only the training which fitted them for mechanical skill, irrespective of its ulterior effect upon their capacity to share in a worthy life. He was permanently right also when he went on to say that "all mercenary employments as well as those which degrade the condition of the body are mechanical, since they deprive the intellect of leisure and dignity," -- permanently right, that is, if gainful pursuits as matter of fact deprive the intellect of the conditions of its exercise and so of its dignity. If his statements are false, it is because they identify a phase of social custom with a natural necessity. But a different view of the relations of mind and matter, mind and body, intelligence and social service, is better than Aristotle's conception only if it helps render the old idea obsolete in fact -- in the actual conduct of life and education.

Aristotle was permanently right in assuming the inferiority and subordination of mere skill in performance and mere accumulation of external products to understanding, sympathy of appreciation, and the free play of ideas. If there was an error, it lay in assuming the necessary separation of the two: in supposing that there is a natural divorce between efficiency in producing commodities and rendering service, and self-directive thought; between significant knowledge and practical achievement. We hardly better matters if we just correct his theoretical misapprehension, and tolerate the social state of affairs which generated and sanctioned his conception. We lose rather than gain in change from serfdom to free citizenship if the most prized result of the change is simply an increase in the mechanical efficiency of the human tools of production. So we lose rather than gain in coming to think of intelligence as an organ of control of nature through action, if we are content that an unintelligent, unfree state persists in those who engage directly in turning nature to use, and leave the intelligence which controls to be the exclusive possession of remote scientists and captains of industry. We are in a position honestly to criticize the division of life into separate functions and of society into separate classes only so far as we are free from responsibility for perpetuating the educational practices which train the many for pursuits involving mere skill in production, and the few for a knowledge that is an ornament and a cultural embellishment. In short, ability to transcend the Greek philosophy of life and education is not secured by a mere shifting about of the theoretical symbols meaning free, rational, and worthy. It is not secured by a change of sentiment regarding the dignity of labor, and the superiority of a life of service to that of an aloof self-sufficing independence. Important as these theoretical and emotional changes are, their importance consists in their being turned to account in the development of a truly democratic society, a society in which all share in useful service and all enjoy a worthy leisure. It is not a mere change in the concepts of culture -- or a liberal mind -- and social service which requires an educational reorganization; but the educational transformation is needed to give full and explicit effect to the changes implied in social life. The increased political and economic emancipation of the "masses" has shown itself in education; it has effected the development of a common school system of education, public and free. It has destroyed the idea that learning is properly a monopoly of the few who are predestined by nature to govern social affairs. But the revolution is still incomplete. The idea still prevails that a truly cultural or liberal education cannot have anything in common, directly at least, with industrial affairs, and that the education which is fit for the masses must be a useful or practical education in a sense which opposes useful and practical to nurture of appreciation and liberation of thought.

Chapter Twenty: Intellectual and Practical Studies

1. The Opposition of Experience and True Knowledge. As livelihood and leisure are opposed, so are theory and practice, intelligence and execution, knowledge and activity. The latter set of oppositions doubtless springs from the same social conditions which produce the former conflict; but certain definite problems of education connected with them make it desirable to discuss explicitly the matter of the relationship and alleged separation of knowing and doing. The notion that knowledge is derived from a higher source than is practical activity, and possesses a higher and more spiritual worth, has a long history. The history so far as conscious statement is concerned takes us back to the conceptions of experience and of reason formulated by Plato and Aristotle. Much as these thinkers differed in many respects, they agreed in identifying experience with purely practical concerns; and hence with material interests as to its purpose and with the body as to its organ. Knowledge, on the other hand, existed for its own sake free from practical reference, and found its source and organ in a purely immaterial mind; it had to do with spiritual or ideal interests. Again, experience always involved lack, need, desire; it was never self-sufficing. Rational knowing on the other hand, was complete and comprehensive within itself. Hence the practical life was in a condition of perpetual flux, while intellectual knowledge concerned eternal truth.

ABSTRACT

Despite Dewey's influence on educational thought, those with progressive visions of democratic education are generally on the margins of educational policy and practice. One notable exception was the "Eight-Year Study," a landmark attempt to design, implement, and evaluate democratic secondary schools. The Eight-Year Study was begun in 1930 by the Progressive Education Association (PEA) and the Commission on the Relation of School and College. It studied alternative programs in two school districts (Denver and Tulsa), 26 other schools, and 300 colleges and universities. A total of 1,475 students in alternative programs were matched with nonparticipants and interviewed over the next 8 years. Although the Eight-Year Study was important, it failed to bring progressive educational practices to U.S. high schools. Examination of this effort permits consideration of how democratic priorities can transform both educational practice and policy analysis. Specifically, this study demonstrates the norms, values, and technologies that guide mainstream analysis are poorly suited to record and report the strengths of the democratic orientation inspired by Dewey's work. (LMl)

The findings of the Commission on the Relation of School and College were published by Harper & Row in five volumes in 1942-1943 under the overall title Adventures in American Education. The individual titles are as follows:

Wilford M. Aikin, The Story of the Eight-Year Study (1942)

H. H. Giles, S. P. McCutchen, and A. N. Zechiel, Exploring the Curriculum (1942)

Eugene R. Smith and Ralph Tyler, Appraising and Recording Student Progress (1942)

Dean Chamberlin, E. S. Chamberlin, N. E. Drought, and W. E. Scott (1942). Did They Succeed in College? (1942) [not online?]

Thirty Schools Tell Their Story (1943)

A good discussion of the Eight-Year Study also appears in Bruce R. Thomas, "The School as a Moral Learning Community," in John I. Goodlad et al., The Moral Dimensions of Teaching (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1990).

As Kliebard (1995) points out, the sample may have been invalid from the outset. "Schools had to demonstrate their willingness to experiment with their curricula to be eligible, and this tended to skew the sample strongly toward the prestigious private schools whose headmasters still constituted a significant element in the Progressive Education Association" (p. . . .

“Student-directed education has been extensively evaluated both in England, where it was called progressive education and in America, where it was called open education. The English termed student-directed education, progressive learning, because they expected the practice to have a leveling effect on social class differences and provide the catalyst for social change. For over twenty years it was England’s official educational policy (cited in Sharp, Green, & Lewis, 1975) and was officially adopted in the Plowden report (1967) remaining in effect till its ultimate rejection in 1992 (Grossen, 1993).

Progressive education, it was thought, would promote the democratic ideals of individual freedom and autonomy, however, qualitative evaluations of its effect on working class children showed that it actually had anti-progressive outcomes (Grossen, 1993). A comprehensive evaluation (Sharp et al., 1975) on a school that was judged to be a model of progressive education in England, found that the teachers gave successful students far greater attention, interacted with them more frequently and generally paid more attention to their activities. The higher performing children who were from a higher social class received more attention than the lower performing children who were from the lower working class families, thus perpetuating the inequalities of the very system progressive education was attempting to radically reform (Grossen, 1993). Sharp, Green, and Lewis (1975) suggested that, ‘modern child- centred education is an aspect of romantic radical conservatism’ (p. 227). They concluded that student-directed methods of learning actually had the effect of reinforcing the existing social class structure rather than leveling it, as was the intention (Grossen, 1993). They formed the opinion that progressive educators were ‘unwilling victims of a structure that undermines the moral concerns they profess’ (Grossen, 1993, p. 227).

The philosophy behind progressive education in England was against the implementation of standardised tests, thus the learning outcomes of the model were only evaluated with the relatively recent advent of international competitiveness in education. In 1992 there was an outcry when the English Department of Education and Science (DES) reported on an international comparison that more than 60 per cent of the schools in the English sample scored below the lowest scoring Japanese school (para. 49). The official report (Department of Education and Science, 1992) unequivocally blamed the poor achievement levels of English students on the Government endorsed progressive learning model and in 1992 English educational policy officially endorsed teacher-directed instruction (Grossen, 1993). The conclusion was reached that, ‘Whatever else they do primary schools must get their policies and practices right for teaching the basic skills of literacy and numeracy’ (Department of Education and Science, 1992, para 50). In what was the lengthiest and most comprehensive implementation of student-directed learning practices on record the English admitted their experiment with progressive education had failed (Grossen, 1993).”

p. 33-35

The child centred teacher sees him, or herself as engaging in a radical critique of the authoritarian-élitist assumtions of the more formal, traditional approaches to education. He does not wish to subordinate the child’s individuality to some predefined social requirements or impose ‘high culture’ upon the child in an arbitrary fashion because these would frustrate the realization of the child’s inner potential. We attempt to show some of the ways in which the well-intentioned ‘radical practices’ of the progressive educator produce effects very similar to the hierearchical differentiation of pupils characteristic of formal methods. Whilst laying emphasis upon the freedom of the child, the teacher who has adopted the ideology of the child centredness may well find himself unwittingly constrained to act in ways which pose serious problems concerning the efficacy of accommodating to and encouraging the ‘spontaneous development of the child from within himself’. In our explanation of these and other phenomena which we have researched, what is being suggested us that the child centred educator, with his individualistic, voluntarist, and psychologistic solution to the problem of freedom fails to appreciate the ways in which, even in his own practice, the effects of a complex, stratified industrial society penetrate the school. It is suggested that the radicalism of the ‘progressive educator’ may well be a modern form of conservatism, and an effective form of social control in both the narrow sense of achieving discipline in the classroom and the wider sense of contributing to the promotion of a static social order generally.

pp vii-viii

No doubt, the most radical-seeming of the ‘new’ philosophies in science education is that known as ‘constructivism’ (..) Constructivism represents the most direct influence on pedagogic theory that has come out of science studies scolarship. It seeks to bring together an image of what science is, derived from sociology, with an image of how learning proceeds, adopted from the developmental psychologists Jean Piaget and L. S. Vygotsky. Simply put, it holds that knowledge is not a fixed type of substance, passively received and absorbed, but is instead actively constructed by each human being. What is called ‘scientific understanding’ must be built up anew by each individual through the organization and adaptation of his or her own experience. Objectivity is a complete myth; subjectivity (though often in shared form) is the only reality. The implied model for learning is therefore said to be entirely, even absolutely, student-centered. What the teacher supplies is mere ‘sensory input’.

During the late 1980s and early 1990s constructivism became a unifying concept for much work on science education, a kind of rallying idea for rethinking teaching and the curriculum with the goal of putting the student first. Though not a philosophy self-knighted with the ‘scientific’, it is involved with various psychological theories of learning that do make such claims. Thus, while it seeks to represent itself as the polar opposite to the old positivist view, its followers within the field of pedagogy are no less prone to view it as a means to better promote such things as ‘higher order thinking,’ ‘process skills,’ and ‘conceptual change.’ And even with regard to its ‘Robinson Crusoe model’ of learning, educational constructivism can not overcome problems that have existed for a long time. (..) It is one more theory, in the tradition of G. Stanley Hall and the Herbartarians, that tries to put the human dimension back into learning yet in its own fashion removes it once again.

265-266

Lastly, Dewey stands quite alone in his conceptualization of curriculum as non-teleological, non-technological, guiding, and experiential (cf Doll, 1995). Nevertheless his position can be fruitful for the movement toward a more flexible curriculum if we are willing to conceive of education as a process of communication, participation, dialogue and sharing.

This dissertation constitutes a contribution to the history of education. It describes grassroots educational reform initiatives that took place in the United States, especially in New York City, during the Progressive Era. It also reviews the efforts of the Progressive Education Association — founded in 1919 — to professionalize educational reformers and to protoprofessionalize.

Central to this dissertation is the early history of the New York City Bureau of Educational Experiments (1916-1919). The Bureau was an educational clearinghouse, and it stimulated, subsidized and conducted educational experiments. The Bureau had a previously unacknowledged influence on the founding of the Progressive Education Association. The dissertation sketches the careers of two members of the Bureau: Marietta Johnson (1864-1938) and Caroline Pratt (1867-1954). Both women would become essential links in the establishment of the Progressive Education Association and the formulation of its mission.

A number of findings described in the dissertation directly pertain to recommendations made by the Dutch Parliamentary Commission on Educational Reforms in their 2008 report ‘Tijd voor Onderwijs”.

abstract

The need for a recovery of philosophy, by J. Dewey.--Reformation of logic, by A. W. Moore.--Intelligence and mathematics, by H. C. Brown.--Scientific method and individual thinker, by G. H. Mead.--Consciousness and psychology, by B. H. Bode.--The phases of the economic interest, by H. W. Stuart.--The moral life and the construction of values and standards, by J. H. Tufts.--Value and existence in philosophy, art, and religion, by H. M. Kallen

The increasing number of progressive schools throughout the world shows the wide and fast growing interest on the part of parents and educators in an educational experience for their children which they do not find in schools of the more traditional types. This interest renders an account of an early organized experiment in progressive education suitable and timely.

This school was a cooperative venture of parents, teachers, and educators, and was carried on at the University of Chicago during the years from 1896 to 1903. Under the direction of John Dewey, then head of the University's unified departments of Philosophy, Psychology, and Pedagogy, the undertaking grew out of a genuine desire to work out with children an educational experience more creative than that provided by even the best of the current systems. a name="Godfrey-Smith">

Peter Godfrey-Smith (1996). Complexity and the function of mind in nature. Cambridge UP. isbn 0521451663

On Spencer (Ch 3), Dewey (Ch 4), constructivism (Ch. 5)

Eric Kalenze (2017). DO NOT GO STUPID INTO THAT PUMPING BLOOD blog

. . . about the distance John Dewey put between himself and the practices idealized by the progressive education movement in the late 1920s.

Preface

March, 2019 \ contact ben apenstaartje benwilbrink.nl

Dewey and progressivism. What the literature has to say.

Ben Wilbrink

I will collect publications that touch on the influence of Dewey on education and educational ideology in our time. As time allows, I will annotate them.