I was a thousand miles away from the first storm center, yet I distinctly felt the vibrations. That was in the University of Kansas when the psychology class was put in charge of a young man named Templin just back from his Wanderjahr in Germany. This study had hitherto belonged ex officio to the Chancellor of the university who put the finishing touch on the seniors' brains with aid of McCosh. But the queer looking brown book stamped "Psychology—John Dewey" that was put into our hands in 1887 relegated the Princeton philosopher to the footnotes and instead told about Helmholtz, Weber, Wundt and a lot of other foreigners who, it seemed, were not content to sit down quietly and search their own minds—surely as good as anybody's—but went about watching the behavior of children, animals, and crazy folks and spent their time in a laboratory—the idea!—measuring the speed of thought and dissecting brains. This young man in Michigan made bold to claim psychology as a natural science instead of a minor branch of metaphysics, and he did the best he could to prove it with such meager materials as were available at the time. His "Psychology" appeared, as should be remembered, three years before the epoch-making work of James and before any permanent psychological laboratory had been opened in the United States. In taking down again my battered brown copy of Dewey's "Psychology" I am surprised to find how trite and old-fashioned some of it sounds. Although Dewey thought he had thrown overboard all metaphysics it is evident that he was then carrying quite a cargo of it unconsciously.
But the commotion started by Dewey's "Psychology" was a tempest in an inkpot compared with the cyclone that swept over the country when he began to put his theories into practice at the University of Chicago in 1894. I heard echoes of it as far west as Wyoming. The teachers who went to the summer session of the University of Chicago came back shocked, fascinated, inspired, or appalled, according to their temperaments. The very idea of an "experimental school" was disconcerting, suggesting that the poor children were being subjected to some sort of vivisection or—what was worse—implying that the established educational methods were all wrong. "He lets the children do whatever they want to do," whispered the teachers to their stay-at-home colleagues, who, like themselves, were spending their time in keeping the children from doing what they wanted to do and in making them do what they did not want to do. "He lets the children talk and run around and help one another with their lessons!" and all the teachers looked at each other with a wild surmise silent on the school-room platform. Could it be that there was a better way, that this task on which they were wearing out their nerves, trying to reduce to rigidity for five hours a roomful of wriggling children, was no less harmful to the children than to themselves? "I'd like to see John Dewey try to manage my sixty," remarks the presiding teacher as she suppresses a little girl on the front seat with a smile and a big boy on the back seat with a tap of her pencil.
As a matter of fact, the children neither studied nor did what they pleased, but the idea was that if children had a sufficient variety of activities provided they would like what they did and their activities could be so arranged as to result in getting knowledge and in forming good habits of thought. The common assumption that the main idea was to have the children do and study what they liked was a complete missing of the intellectual idea or philosophy of the school, which was an attempt to work out the theory that knowledge, with respect to both sense observation and general principles, is an offshoot of activities, and that the practical problems arising in connection with consecutive occupations afford the means for a development of interest in scientific problems for their own sake. The social grouping of children, and the attempt to get coöperative group work, was always just as important a phase as individual freedom—not only on moral grounds, but because of the theoretical conception that human intelligence developed under social conditions and for social purposes—in other words, "mind" has developed not only with respect to activity having purpose, but also social activity. These same notions of the central place of intelligence in action and the social nature of intelligence are fundamental in Dewey's "Ethics."
The real distinguishing characteristic of schools of the Dewey type is not absence of discipline but a new ideal of discipline. This is most clearly stated in one of his more recent works:
Discipline of mind is in truth a result rather than a cause. Any mind is disciplined in a subject in which independent intellectual initiative and control have been achieved. Discipline represents original native endowment turned through gradual exercise into effective power.... Discipline is positive and constructive. Discipline, however, is frequently regarded as something negative—as a painfully disagreeable forcing of mind away from channels congenial to it into channels of constraint, a process grievous at the time, but necessary as preparation for a more or less remote future. Discipline is then generally identified with drill; and drill is conceived after the mechanical analogy of driving, by unremitting blows, a foreign substance into a resistant material; or is imaged after the analogy of the mechanical routine by which raw recruits are trained to a soldierly bearing and habits that are naturally wholly foreign to their possessors. Training of this latter sort, whether it be called discipline or not, is not mental discipline. Its aim and result are not habits of thinking but uniform external habits of action. By failing to ask what he means by discipline, many a teacher is misled into supposing that he is developing mental force and efficiency by methods which in fact restrict and deaden intellectual activity, and which tend to create mechanical routine, or mental passivity and servility.—"How We Think", p. 63.
But even more revolutionary than Dewey's rejection of the strict discipline then prevailing in the schools was his introduction of industrial training as an integral part of education, not merely for the purpose of giving the pupils greater manual skill, still less with the object of improving their chances of getting a job or of making them more efficient for the benefit of the employer, but chiefly because it is only through participation in industry that one can get an understanding of the meaning of science and the constitution of the social organism. In the old days when most industries were carried on in the household or the neighborhood children learned them by observation and participation. School was then a place where this very effective form of home education could be supplemented by "book learning."
But Dewey faced frankly the fact that the house-hold arts and handicrafts had passed away for keeps, and he refused to join in the pretense that they could be profitably "revived" by the various esthetic and socialist movements of the William Morris and Ruskin type. He recognized that the machine and the factory had come to stay, and if the worker is not to become a factory machine himself he must receive in school such a broad and diversified training as will make him realize the significance of the work he does. Or as Dewey said in "School and Society" in 1899:
We sometimes hear the introduction of manual training, art and science into the elementary, and even into the secondary, schools deprecated on the ground that they tend toward the production of specialists—that they detract from our present system of generous, liberal culture. The point to this objection would be ludicrous if it were not often so effective as to make it tragic. It is our present education which is highly specialized, one-sided and narrow. It is an education dominated almost entirely by the medieval conception of learning. It is something which appeals for the most part simply to the intellectual aspect of our natures, our desire to learn, to accumulate information, and to get control of the symbols of learning; not to our impulses and tendencies to make, to do, to create, to produce, whether in the form of utility or art.
Mere "manual training", then all the rage, has failed, as Dewey said it would, because of its fictitious and adventitious character. His method was as different from the ordinary kind of "manual training" as hay-making is from dumb-bell exercise.
We must conceive of work in wood and metal, of weaving, sewing and cooking, as methods of living and learning, not as distinct studies. We must conceive of them in their social significance, as types of processes by which society keeps itself going, as agencies for bringing home to the child some of the primal necessities of community life, and as ways in which these needs have been met by the growing insight and ingenuity of man; in short as instrumentalities through which the school itself shall be made a genuine form of active community life, instead of a place set apart in which to learn lessons.