Abstract
In 1949, John Dewey’s many friends and admirers organized a celebration of his ninetieth birthday, which followed similar events when he turned seventy and eighty. (He missed his eightieth birthday commemoration, sending a note instead; Newsweek reported that Dewey told a friend: “I was canonized once, but I won’t be canonized again.”1) Nevertheless, he attended the 1949 dinner and festivities, as did Anna Camp Edwards and Mary Hill Swope. Neither Althea Harmer Bardeen nor Katherine Camp Mayhew were still alive—Bardeen died in 1920, when her four children were still quite young, and Mayhew died in 1946, after some years of illness. Dewey missed seeing Edwards at his ninetieth birthday celebration—her response to the invitation was apparently lost, and so Dewey was not aware that she was in attendance until afterwards, when she informed him by letter. He wrote fondly in response: “Among all from whom I heard this past week, there was no one from whom it gave greater pleasure to hear than from you.” He lamented that he had “made a mistake at the outset in telling the Committee in charge of the celebration” that “I was to have nothing to do with it. My working hours are limited and I thought to save myself. I suppose it was natural that the Committee did not know my older friends.
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Notes
Lillie Hoddeson and Vicki Daitch, True Genius: The Life and Science of John Bardeen (Washington, DC: Joseph Henry Press, 2002), 14–15.
Max Eastman, “John Dewey: My Teacher and Friend,” in his Great Companions: Critical Memoirs of Some Famous Friends (New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1959), 274–275.
On parents, see Katherine Camp Mayhew and Anna Camp Edwards, The Dewey School: The Laboratory School of the University of Chicago, 1896–1903 [1936] (New Brunswick, NJ: Aldine Transactions, 2007), 397–401;
and Mrs. William Kent to Anna Camp Edwards, February 18, 1933, box 44, Edwards Family Collection (1484), Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library. See also Ida B. DePencier, The History of the Laboratory Schools: The University of Chicago, 1896–1965 (Chicago, IL: Quadrangle Books, 1967).
Robert McCaul, “Dewey, Harper, and the University of Chicago, April 1902–May 1903,” ch. 5, in William Brickman and Stanley Lehrer, eds., John Dewey: Master Educator (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1966, 2nd ed.), 51. See also Director’s Report. School of Education., written by John Dewey after the 1902–1903 academic year, box 22, Katherine Camp Mayhew Collection (6561), Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library. The School of Education included, along with the two merged elementary schools, the Chicago Manual Training School and the South Side Academy. See Mayhew and Edwards, The Dewey School, 14.
On the last three years of the Laboratory School, see DePencier, The History of the Laboratory Schools; George Dykuizen, The Life and Mind of John Dewey (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois Press, 1973);
Nellie Lucy Griffiths, “A History of the Organization of the Laboratory School of the University of Chicago,” unpublished master’s thesis, University of Chicago, 1927; McCaul, ch. 4, 5, and 6, in Brickman and Lehrer, eds., John Dewey: Master Educator; Mayhew and Edwards, The Dewey School;
Alan Ryan, John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism (New York: W.W. Norton, 1995);
Charlene Haddock Seigfried, Pragmatism and Feminism: Reweaving the Social Fabric (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996), ch. 4;
Laurel Tanner, Dewey’s Laboratory School: Lessons for Today (New York: Teachers College Press, 1997);
and Robert Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991).
Flora Cooke, “Review of The Dewey School,” Progressive Education, XIV, 3 (March 1937), 218. Cooke worked with Francis Parker at the Cook County Normal School, and then was appointed principal of the Francis Parker Elementary School on the city’s North Side.
See Ellen Condliffe Lagemann, “Jane Addams: An Educational Biography,” introductory essay to her edited collection, Jane Addams on Education (New York: Teachers College Press, 1985), 35, on gender, sociology, and social work;
William Reese, The Power and the Promise of School Reform (Boston, MA: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986) on vacation schools;
and Margaret Rossiter, Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies to 1940 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), on women’s place in the sciences.
Kevin Mattson, Creating a Democratic Public (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), 106.
See Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000), 378, who argues, “Progressives struggled with themselves over the choice between professionalism and grassroots democracy, though in the end professionalism would win out.”
See Jonathan Alter, The Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006), 92.
On the influence of John Dewey’s ideas on the New Deal’s Federal Art Project, see Victoria Grieve, The Federal Art Project and the Creation of Middlebrow Culture (Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2009), especially ch. 1.
T. J. McCormack, “Review of School and Society,” Open Court, 14 (1900), 564, 569.
John Lewis Gaddis, The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 10.
John Dewey, Democracy and Education (New York: Macmillan, 1916), 214. In Dewey’s Laboratory School: Lessons for Today, Tanner’s subtitle indicates her extensive discussion of the implications of the Laboratory School for current school improvement efforts.
This in-service experience happened a few years before my discovery of Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), which pointed me in the direction of my study of the Laboratory School teachers. For a discussion of the efforts of Teach for America to define, recruit, and prepare “great teachers,”
see Amanda Ripley, “What Makes a Great Teacher?” The Atlantic Monthly, 305, 1 (January/February 2010), 58–66.
John Dewey, “What Is the Matter with Teaching?” Margaret Haley’s Bulletin, III, 2 (September 30, 1925), 1, 23, 38.
John Dewey, The Educational Situation, Part I: “As Concerns the Elementary School” [1901], in Jo Ann Boydston, ed., John Dewey: The Middle Works, 1899–1924, Vol. 1 (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1976), 268. This essay was first published as “The Situation as Regards the Course of Study.”
Dewey, “The Educational Situation,” 272–273. Dewey cites Ella Flagg Young’s Isolation in the School here. See Ella Flagg Young, Isolation in the School (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1901).
John Dewey, “The Relation of Theory to Practice in Education”, in C. A. McMurry, ed., The Relation of Theory to Practice in the Education of Teachers, Third Year book of the National Society for the Scientific Study of Education, Part 1 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1904), 16.
Gloria Ladson-Billings, Crossing Over to Canaan: The Journey of New Teachers in Diverse Classrooms (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2001).
For a discussion of the benefits of specialist teachers at the elementary level, see Liping Ma, Knowing and Teaching Elementary Mathematics: Teachers’ Understanding of Fundamental Mathematics in China and the United States (Matwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1999).
Harold W. Stevenson and James W. Stigler, The Learning Gap: Why Our Schools Are Failing and What We Can Learn from Japanese and Chinese Education (New York: Touchstone, 1992);
and James W. Stigler and James Hiebert, The Teaching Gap: Best Ideas from the World’s Teachers for Improving Education in the Classrooms (New York: Free Press, 1999).
See Barbara Benham Tye and Lisa O’Brian, “Why Are Experienced Teachers Leaving the Profession?” Phi Delta Kappan, 84, 1 (September 2002), 24–32.
Louise Knight, Citizen: Jane Addams and the Struggle for Democracy (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 275–277.
Some scholars argue, on the contrary, that the Laboratory School was not true to its idea of a “real-world” curriculum. See Lee Benson, John Puckett, and Ira Harkavy, Dewey’s Dream: Universities and Democracies in an Age of Education Reform (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2007). Some scholars argue, on the contrary, that the Laboratory School was not true to its idea of a “real-world” curriculum.
See Lee Benson, John Puckett, and Ira Harkavy, Dewey’s Dream: Universities and Democracies in an Age of Education Reform (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2007).
According to a preliminary study of the program, the students seemed more enthusiastic about attending school and showed an increase in their grades in math and science. Such programs address another urgent problem plaguing twenty-first-century American children—what the Center for Ecoliteracy’s director Zenobia Barlow calls “diet-related disease in children,” including obesity and asthma. The remedy, according to both Waters and Barlow, is to “transform eating habits” and “bring [children] into a vital relationship with food.” To do this, they argue, we must also transform the school lunch program, which as parents of public school children know all too well, is dominated by processed food. See Jane Ciabattari, “The Incredible Edible Schoolyard,” NRTA Live and Learn, Spring 2005.
See also Larry Hickman, “The Edible Schoolyard: Agrarian Ideals and Our Industrial Milieu,” in Paul B. Thompson and Thomas C. Hilde, eds., The Agrarian Roots of Pragmatism (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2000), 195–205.
For an article critical of the Edible Schoolyard program, see Caitlin Flanagan, “Cultivating Failure,” The Atlantic Monthly, January/February 2010, 101–111.
John Dewey, School and Society [1899] (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 91.
E. D. Hirsch makes the case for a “common core curriculum in the early grades.” See, among other works, E. D. Hirsch, Jr., The Making of Americans: Democracy and our Schools (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 186.
See Paul Tough, Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada’s Quest to Change Harlem and America (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008).
John Dewey, “The School as Social Center,” The Elementary School Teacher, III, 2 (October 1902), 86.
John Dewey “Cut-and-Try School Methods” [1913], in Jo Ann Boydston, ed., John Dewey: The Middle Works, 1899–1924, Vol. 7 (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1976), 106. To an extent, some charter schools represent this kind of experimental approach to education.
John Dewey, “Experiment in Education” [1917], in Jo Ann Boydston, ed., John Dewey: The Middle Works, 1899–1924, Vol. 10 (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1976), 123.
Michael Sandel, Public Philosophy: Essays on Morality in Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 186.
Deborah Meier argues similarly that teachers who make important decisions in schools are models, for students, of informed citizens in a democracy. See Meier, Will Standards Save Public Education? (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2000).
To promote excellent teaching in these ways and to apply the findings of these laboratory schools, all schools would require adequate resources for rich curriculum creation. Conditions such as those described in Jonathan Kozol’s Savage Inequalities diminish the self-worth and learning capacities of the children unlucky enough to attend underfunded schools. These conditions also signal disrespect for the teachers who call such schools their places of work. The profession must be more visible in its unwillingness to tolerate inferior conditions in the workplaces that are also centers of learning for our children. See Jonathan Kozol, Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools (New York: Crown Publishers, 1991).
Herbert Kliebard, “Success and Failure in Educational Reform: Are There Historical ‘Lessons’?” in his Forging the American Curriculum: Essays in Curriculum History and Theory (New York: Routledge, 1992), 101.
He quotes John Dewey’s The Sources of a Science of Education (New York: Horace Liveright, 1929), 28, 30.
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© 2010 Anne Durst
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Durst, A. (2010). Implications of the Laboratory School Experiment. In: Women Educators in the Progressive Era. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230109957_7
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