Abstract
American educators have been pulled in different directions by two twentieth-century legacies: E. L. Thorndike is often portrayed as a proto-behaviorist who created a top-down technocratic view of modern educational administration. In contrast, John Dewey is seen to be promoting a fundamentally social, discovery-based, hands-on construction of knowledge. Dewey was prescient about the ways in which the hierarchical, corporate nature of educational bureaucracies can deaden the excitement of self-directed growth. Thorndike wanted to reform education in the Progressive era by promoting accountability through science; in so doing, he left a positive modern legacy of educational research. This historical chapter aims to unearth the subtleties in both men’s work that have often been overlooked by casting them in opposition to one another.
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Notes
- 1.
Indeed in Mayhew and Edwards’ memoir (Mayhew & Edwards, 1936/1966) of how the Dewey School operated, there is virtually no mention of the Civil War or slavery in the curriculum up through age 14.
- 2.
Not that Thorndike himself used the word; the word “meritocracy” entered the language—in a pejorative sense—in 1956, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.
- 3.
Yes, Dewey used this term, chiefly in Conduct and Human Nature (1922). His views remind one of the ideas of that other erstwhile Vermonter, Bernie Sanders.
- 4.
And as Lagemann (2000) trenchantly points out, throughout the early twentieth century, the administrators and researchers were almost all men, and the teachers almost all women.
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Cox, B.D. (2018). The Place for Dewey’s Constructivism of Intelligent Action in the American Meritocracy of Thorndike. In: Kritt, D. (eds) Constructivist Education in an Age of Accountability . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66050-9_2
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