His ideas altered the education of children worldwide
In July 1894, a train carrying a young philosopher from Ann Arbor, Michigan, pulled into Chicago Union Station. Its arrival was delayed by striking workers of the American Railway Union, who were made furious by the Pullman Company’s decision to cut their wages. The strike ended two weeks later, took the lives of thirty people, and symbolized a rapidly changing America dominated by corporations that set laborers against owners.
The philosopher had entered a city whose population was exploding with immigrants, many of whom were illiterate; a city of half-built skyscrapers and noisome meatpacking plants; a city with a new university funded by John D. Rockefeller, the University of Chicago, whose Gothic buildings and eminent faculty would rival those of Harvard and Yale. John Dewey had arrived to chair the philosophy and pedagogy department. Once in the city, he visited the strikers, applauded their “fanatic sincerity and earnestness,” praised their leader Eugene Debs, and condemned President Cleveland’s suppression of the strike. Worried about working for a university dedicated to laissez-faire capitalism, Dewey found himself becoming more of a populist, more of a socialist, more sympathetic to the settlement house pioneered by Jane Addams, and more skeptical of his childhood Christianity. He would conclude that a changing America needed different schools.
In 1899, Dewey published the pamphlet that made him famous, The School and Society, and promulgated many key precepts of later education reforms. Dewey insisted that the old model of schooling—students sitting in rows, memorizing and reciting—was antiquated. Students should be active, not passive. They required compelling and relevant projects, not lectures. Students should become problem solvers. Interest, not fear, should be used to motivate them. They should cooperate, not compete.
The key to the new education was “manual training.” Before the factory system and the growth of cities, children handled animals, crops, and tools. They were educated by nature “with real things and materials.” Dewey lamented the disappearance of the idyllic village and the departure of children’s modesty, reverence, and implicit obedience. He was, however, no reactionary: “It is radical conditions which have changed, and only an equally radical change in education suffices.” Urban children needed to sew, cook, and work with metal and wood. Manual training should not, however, be mere vocational education or a substitute for the farm. It should be scientific and experimental, an introduction to civilization.
“You can concentrate the history of all mankind into the evolution of flax, cotton, and wool fibers into clothing,” asserted Dewey. He described a class where students handled wool and cotton. As they discovered how hard it was to separate seeds from cotton, they came to understand why their ancestors wore woolen clothing. Working in groups to make models of the spinning jenny and the power loom, they learned cooperation. Together they understood the role of water and steam, analyzed the textile mills of Lowell, and studied the distribution of the finished cloth and its impact on everyday life. They learned science, geography, and physics without textbooks or lectures. Learning by doing replaced learning by listening.
Peter Gibbon – Humanities – Spring 2019, Volume 40, Number 2
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