So Dewey set the children to solving the problems of primitive man and retracing for themselves the steps in the evolution of industrial processes. They picked the cotton from the boll, carded, spun it into thread and wove it into cloth on machines of their own making and for the most part of their own devising. This gave opportunity for personal experimenting and taught them history by repeating history, not repeating a verbal version of history. And the history they thus learnt was the history of the human race, not the history of some chosen people.
This recapitulation theory, like all others, has since been carried to an extreme. Acting on the idea that children normally pass through the same stages as European civilization some teachers seem to think it necessary to keep them to the chronological curriculum. So they cultivate a pseudo-savagery for a year or two, then make them pagans and later teach the ideals of the age of chivalry which are hardly less repugnant to the modern mind. So careful are they to avoid anachronism that if a boy should by any accident behave like a Christian before he reached the grade corresponding to A.D. 28 he would be likely to get a bad mark for it. So, too, I have known teachers of mathematics who would not allow their pupils to take a short cut to the answer by way of algebra unless it was in the algebra class and teachers of chemistry who would not permit the word "atom" to be mentioned in classroom until the term was half through. But such extravagances find no countenance in Dewey's writings or the examples he cites.
In the laboratory school of the University of Chicago Professor and Mrs. Dewey had for several years a free hand in developing and trying out their theories. Their aim was to utilize instead of to suppress the fourfold impulses of childhood; the interest in conversation, the interest in inquiry, the interest in construction and the interest in artistic expression. The volume in which Professor Dewey explained what he was trying to do and why, "School and Society", was first published in 1899 and has been reprinted almost every year up to the present.[1] It might well have borne the same title as Benjamin Tucker's volume on anarchism: "Instead of a Book, by a Man Too Busy to Write One." It consists of the stenographic reports of three informal talks by Professor Dewey to the parents of his pupils and the friends of his school, supplemented by some fugitive papers. Yet it has an influence comparable to no other modern book of its size unless perhaps Herbert Spencer's tract on "Education."
How far the seed was sown is shown by "Schools of To-morrow",[2] which tells of a dozen places where the ideas that were so novel and startling in the nineties are in practical operation. But it is characteristic of Dewey's self-effacement that he makes no claim for priority, and there is no hint anywhere in the volume that many of the methods described were first devised and tried out in the Dewey school at Chicago nearly twenty years ago. He gives the credit for the theory to Rousseau and the credit for the practice to Mr. Wirt of Gary, Mrs. Johnson of Fairhope, Mr. Valentine of Indianapolis, Professor Merriam of Missouri, and others.
Mr. Wirt who organized the school system of the steel city of Gary, Indiana, and who is now employed in remodeling some of the schools of New York City, owes his inspiration and ideas, as I have heard him say, very largely to Dewey.[3] The Gary system differs from the trade schools in that the industries are used for their educative value. The pupils are shifted around from one shop to another three times a year. Their tasks are artificial, symbolic or imitative, but from the fifth grade up real constructive work, for the boys making school furniture, iron castings, laying concrete, and printing; and for the girls, sewing, cooking, marketing, millinery, and laundry, and for both, gardening, pottery, designing, bookbinding and bookkeeping. Arithmetic, writing, history, and geography come in necessarily and naturally in connection with their work. Under this régime the pupils make better progress in the traditional subjects than those who devote their whole time to books. That it does not divert them from higher education is shown by the fact that one third of all the pupils who have left the Gary schools in the eight years of their existence are now in the state university, an engineering school, or a business college, a remarkable record for a population mostly composed of foreign-born steel mill laborers. All the schoolrooms are in use for something all day long, so the "peak load" is avoided and a great economy effected. The grounds and buildings also serve as community centers and the last trace of the ancient feud between "town and gown" has been wiped out.
The chief advantage which these "schools of tomorrow" have over those of the past is, in Dewey's opinion, that they come a step nearer toward giving the type of training necessary to prepare citizens for democracy. In this new book, then, he is working toward the ideal he promulgated at the beginning of his career when he entered the faculty of the University of Michigan as the youngest man ever appointed to a professorship in that institution. He sounded the note of his philosophy thirty years ago in a paper on "The Ethics of Democracy",[4] and he has never faltered in his allegiance to the high ideal he there set forth, although he has broken away from the Hegelian mode of thought he then used. The paper was written to confute Sir Henry Maine who, in his "Popular Government", argued that democracy was an historical accident and the most fragile, insecure, and unprogressive form of government. Dewey objects to his mechanical and mathematical conception of democratic government and sets forth a very different conception as the following quotations will show:
The majority have a right to "rule" because their majority is not the mere sign of a surplus in numbers, but is the manifestation of the purpose of the social organism.
Government is to the state what language is to the thought: it not only communicates the purposes of the state, but in so doing gives them for the first time articulation and generality.
A vote is not the impersonal counting of one; it is a manifestation of some tendency of the social organism through a member of that organism.
The democratic formula that government derives its powers from the consent of the governed ... means that in democracy the governors and the governed are not of two classes, but two aspects of the same fact—the fact of the possession by society of a unified and articulate will.
The aristocratic idea implies that the mass of men are to be inserted by wisdom, or, if necessary, thrust by force, into their proper positions in the social organism....
Democracy means that personality is the first and final reality.... It holds that the spirit of personality indwells in every individual, and that the choice to develop it must proceed from that individual. From this central position of democracy result the other notes of democracy, liberty, equality, fraternity—words which are not mere words to catch a mob, but symbols of the highest ethical idea which humanity has yet reached—the idea that personality is the one thing of permanent and abiding worth, and that in every human individual there lies personality.... It means that in every individual there lives an infinite and universal possibility: that of being a king or priest. Aristocracy is blasphemy against personality.
Even in those days when socialism had hardly begun to be whispered, at least in academic circles, Dewey was not afraid to say that: "Democracy is not in reality what it is in name until it is industrial as well as civil and political.... A democracy of wealth is a necessity." Twenty-five years later I saw Professor Dewey giving a public demonstration of his faith in democracy when I found him marching with a small body of men at the tail end of a suffrage procession while the crowds that lined Fifth Avenue jeered and hissed at us. Who would then have thought that five years later all parties would be committed to equal suffrage and four presidential candidates would be bidding against one another for the privilege of giving the women the vote!
Education for democracy is the burden of Dewey's message to the world, and I must give one more quotation on this point:
Democracy, the crucial expression of modern life, is not so much an addition to the scientific and industrial tendencies as it is the perception of their social or spiritual meaning. Democracy is an absurdity where faith in the individual as individual is impossible; and this faith is impossible where intelligence is regarded as a cosmic power, not an adjustment and application of individual tendencies.
... Democracy is estimable only through the changed conception of intelligence that forms modern science, and of want, that forms modern industry. It is essentially a changed psychology. The conventional type of education which trains children in docility and obedience, to the careful performance of imposed tasks because they are imposed, regardless of where they lead, is suited to an autocratic society. These are the traits needed in a state where there is one head to plan and care for the lives and institutions of the people. But in a democracy they interfere with the successful conduct of society and government.... If we train our children to take orders, to do things simply because they are told to, and fail to give them confidence to act and think for themselves, we are putting an almost insurmountable obstacle in the way of overcoming the present defects of our system and of establishing the truth of democratic ideals.
Children in school must be allowed freedom so that they will know what its use means when they become the controlling body, and they must be allowed to develop active qualities of initiative, independence, and resourcefulness, before the abuses and failures will disappear.—"School and Society", p. 304.