John Dewey (1859-1952), and the Progressive Movement. 

In educational psychology learning is the process by which we change our thinking and behavior. The goal being to make the learner more capable or able to survive in an ever-changing world. Over the past century educational psychology as applied to learning theory can be encapsulated in three basic thrusts. Learning as response acquisition, learning as knowledge acquisition, and learning as knowledge construction. Many of the major ideas underlying today’s thinking in educational psychology were formulated by a few of psychologies pioneers. Such as James, Hall, Dewey and Thorndike.

Like all of us Dewey was profoundly influenced by the historical and technical changes of his time. In the course of his 92 years he witnessed dramatic changes in almost every aspect of human life. When he was born on October 20, 1859 Abraham Lincoln had not yet been elected president. The Civil War was no more than a storm cloud on the horizon. He died during the presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower. After two horrific world wars one of which was ended by the atomic bomb. At the time of Dewey’s birth most Americans were depended on wind, water and wood technologies. During that year 1859 America drilled its first oil well which led to many of the technologies that we now take for granted.

John Dewey is considered to be the father of the progressive education movement. Which shifted focus away from authoritarian rote memory learning in favor of a more engaging experiential type of knowledge acquisition. Dewey believed that the shut up and pay attention type of schooling was incongruous with real life. And it was a disservice to both the child and the society if lessons from real life were not taught in parallel with reading, writing and arithmetic. That teachers must convey the how and why of human behavior in thought, word and deed. Dewey’s progressive education relied on two central principles. First, continuity, the notion that the effects of experience are cumulative. That every experience prepares one for the next, whether good or bad. And second, interaction. Current experiences can be understood as a function of past stored experiences. Dewey’s pedagogy pragmatically took account of student’s past experiences and organized curricula in a way that encouraged students to open their minds to new ideas. And thus, achieve positive growth. As the progressive era accelerated the pace of modernization in all areas, from industrialization to urbanization, educators looked to psychologists for assistance in categorizing, socializing, and instructing the flood of poor immigrant children entering urban schools

Dewey’s association in Chicago with social reformer Jane Addams and his involvement with Hull House where she provided community services afforded him firsthand knowledge of the poverty and despair of the hundreds of thousands of immigrants who were attempting to make their living in Chicago during the 1890’s. Although the Dewey’s were only in Chicago for 10 years those were crucial years for their lives and work. Both Dewey’s were thoroughly involved in the education of their own children and close observers of their learning processes. These experiences and John’s experiments in psychology led him in 1896 to found an elementary school that would serve is a laboratory for the Universities new department of education.

For Dewey as it would be later for John Piaget learning is not a series of truncated arcs but a continuing circuits or rhythm of imbalance and restored equilibrium. The learner is not a passive recipient of experience but an active player within it, bringing with her a set of complex behaviors and expectations from past events. Now Dewey’s analysis as he later elaborated it in his five-step description of effective learning also known as the method of intelligent goes like this:

1. Emotional response
2. Definition of problem
3. Formation of hypothesis
4. Testing/ experimenting
5. Application

In a state of equilibrium say playing with the familiar toy comes upon something unexpected. Her equilibrium is disturbed. The situation is now unstable and this instability triggers an emotional response. The child attempts to make the situation more stable by applying lessons learned from past experiences. The new situation calls for exploration just as previous ones have. This phase of learning involves an intellectual response. Now that the problem has been defined as something that requires exploration the child uses a familiar method she reaches for the candle. Her reach for the candle is a test of the propose solution. In the past she has grasped objects in order to become better acquainted with them, but now her attempt to apply this familiar solution results in a burned finger. If the burn sensation is sufficient to prevent further exploration the child has completed the circuit of learning. She now knows about the effect of flames on fingers and has thus added a new circle of adjustment to her understanding of the world. The problematic situation has been resolved. As an organism she is once again in a state of equilibrium. If the burn is not sufficient to prevent further exploration the experiment starts all over again until the lesson is leaned and equilibrium is restored. Dewey insist that learning always begins in the middle of things.

Dewey argued that moral laws, physical laws and even mathematical laws are true only as regulative principles. Regulative principles are principles that shape our behavior. All things being equal. They are general rules of action that have been so thoroughly refined over time that it is highly unlikely that will ever need to be revised. In general, for example touching objects is usually a good way to find out about them. When we attempt to apply such principles however we find that actual conditions create exceptions.

Moral truths for example such as the regulative principle do not kill are subject to exception such as the defense of one’s person, family or country. Physical truths such as the speed of light is 186, 0000 miles per second may also have exceptions. In 1999 for example Harvard physicists slowed the speed of light to 38 miles per second in her laboratory. Several months later she was able to stop it altogether. Along with the rest of us Dewey would probably had been surprised at this particular result. Even so he had already provided a place for it in his theory truth. The same can be said of mathematical truths. Take the well know equation that says 10 divided by 3 equals 3 1/3. Dewey argued that this equation is only a guide and not an absolute truth. Its application is subject to the pressure of real events. For example, you cannot divide ten children in to three equal groups. The best you can do is to get two groups with three and one with four not three groups with three and a third child each. Sometimes even well establish regulative principles undergo dramatic change. Before Galileo for example most astronomers thought the earth was the center of the universe. Now of course it’s a truth or to use Dewey’s term a regulative principle of astronomy that the earth revolves around the sun. Will that truth ever change? probably not, but Dewey argued that if our knowledge is to grow we must always be open to new experiences. Up until 1999 for example, it seemed inconceivable that the speed of light could ever be modified.

As for the relativists who think that truth is just arbitrary or accidental Dewey realized that they are correct in the sense that cultural practices are different in different parts of the world and that each of us has our own unique perspective. But he also argued that carefully designed experiments whether they be in the arts, the science or the humanities can produce objective truths. Even though such truths may change over time they are validated at the time that the experiments are completed and we may proceed with confidence until we were faced with new and conflicting data.

Dewey’s pragmatic theory of truth therefore rejected the common idea that truth is the correspondence between a statement or idea and some fact or state of affairs in reality. In his view, truth neither discovered as the absolutists claimed nor invented as the relativists claimed. It is instead constructed as a byproduct of the process of solving problems. This conception of truth is basic to the philosophical tradition called pragmatism with which Dewey is often identified.

The central idea of pragmatism is that the meaning or truth of an idea lies in its possible consequences. Dewey thought that truth is like to fit between a key and a lock. There is no absolute key that fits all lock and not just any arbitrary key will do if you want to open a particular lock. If we want to make a key fit the lock there are objective conditions that must be taken into consideration. Dewey thought that his pragmatic model of truth was applicable not only to the construction of better outcomes in the natural sciences but also to experimentation in every area of human life including social and political institutions.

By 1905 Dewey had left Chicago to accept a position at Columbia University in New York City. His appointments were in the department of philosophy and at Teachers college. He would remain at Columbia until his retirement at the age of 80 in 1939. During his extensive travels during the 1920’s and 30’s Dewey turned his attention more and more to understanding the relationship between the ideals of democracy and cultural diversity.

He visited Mexico, China, Japan, Turkey and the Soviet Union in addition to many counties in Western Europe. Wherever he went he was keen to discover whether local institutions such schools promoted democratic forms of association and the growth of individuals. This was a time of great political upheaval. Most acutely represented by the raise of fascism in Italy and Germany and communism in the Soviet Union. Unlike some of his academic colleagues Dewey was drawn to neither ideology. He continued to affirm his faith in democratic ideals even as he criticized the failure of the American political system to fully realize those goals. One person who knew Dewey at this time is Louise Rosenblatt who is to become an important influence in the teaching of literature.

Dewey’s writings are a constant meditation in one way or another on the idea of democracy as a way of life and not just a set of ideas. Now of course it’s that ability to think about the consequences of to imagine the consequences of your actions, your decisions and to place yourself in the place of others who will be affected by it that a person who is a member of a democracy must possess is that power of imagination that ability to resist the either or the… the… self-interest and the ability to resists the either or a point of view those were the ideas that were very much Dewey’s and certainly ones that I tried in my humble way to apply in the field of the teaching of reading.

LARRY HICKMAN The learner is not a blank slate upon which idea are to be written nor is his or her mind a cabinet into which facts are to be filed away. Each learner is a living organism, with his own history, his own needs his own desires and perhaps most importantly his own interest. As we saw in the newsreel clip Dewey thought that learning takes place outside as well as inside the school room. But it is in the context of the University of Chicago elementary school that Dewey’s ideas about learning receive their most rigorous tests. This school was opened in the same year that Dewey published his reflex arc article. From 1901 until 1904 Alice would serve as its principal. The laboratory school was a laboratory in fact as well as in name. Dewey never intended it to be a model that other school should follow nor did he think that any school would ever be a perfect model. In his view education always reflects the circumstances of the times and students involved. It should evolve as these elements change. Dewey’s educational ideas were imparted a rejection of the wrote curriculum-driven approach to learning that was the standard method of his day.

Dewey also reject the opposite concept the exaggerated child-centered approach. In his view the child-centered approach uncritically follows the impulses and uninformed interest of the child. Unfortunately, Dewey’s term progressive education has too frequently been used as a put down phrase to describe such educational practices. Practices that involve what Dewey rejected as plan-less improvisation. In Dewey’s view the challenge of education should be to integrate the educational subject matter with the talents and interest of the learner.

As we will see Dewey often overcame either or dichotomies by looking beyond the conflicts they presented. At the lab school children learned traditional academic subjects such as arithmetic, reading and science but they were also taught skills such as weaving, carpentry, cooking and art. These practical skills were presented as examples of problem solving but they were also taught as embodiments of more abstract forms of knowledge and is providing important tools for undertaking further discoveries.

If education is adjustment within an environment as Dewey thought then it is the whole person that adjust and not just the part of the organism we call the intellect. Deborah Meier principal of Mission Hill school in Boston has been a force for extending this scope of Dewey’s methods.

Like John Dewey’s Mission Hill school’s task is to think about how we can make schools help prepare can people for real life and use the academic disciplines not for the purpose of teaching the disciplines but for teaching young people how to confront real life problems and central to those real-life problems is the question of being strong democratic citizens. Our school of Mission Hill is a public school in Boston and we serve 164 students between the ages of five and fourteen. Dewey’s five-step analysis were process of inquiry applies to how our students go about their learning.

JOHN DEWEY: I am not here to knock going to college. If a young person has the opportunity to go and has the character and intelligence to take advantage of it, it’s a good thing. But going to college is not the same as getting an education, although the two are often confused. A boy or a girl can go to college and get a degree and not much else. On the other hand, a boy or girl in the shop, factory or store can get an education without a degree if they make up their mind to it. They have to want to learn, they have to be willing to talk to those who are wiser than themselves to be observing to keep their ears and eyes open and to set apart some time every day to read. They have to struggle harder than those who go to college but if they are willing to make the effort the struggle gives them power. They get their education from contact with realities of life and not just from books.