The old theory of education has been most pungently put by "Mr. Dooley", the saloon-keeper of Archey Road, in one of his monologues with Mr. Hennessy: "It don't matter much what you study—so long as you don't like it." Professor Dewey takes almost the opposite ground when he says:[5] "Interest ought to be the basis for selection because children are interested in the things they need to learn."
This, as he shows, does not mean that in the new schools things are "made easy"; on the contrary the pupils work harder because things are made interesting.
The range of the material is not in any way limited by making interest a standard of selection. Work that appeals to pupils as worth while, that holds out the promise of resulting in something to their own interests, involves just as much persistence and concentration as the work that is given by the sternest advocate of disciplinary drill. The latter requires the pupil to strive for ends which he cannot see, so that he has to be kept at the task by means of offering artificial ends, marks, and promotions, and by isolating him in an atmosphere where his mind and senses are not being constantly besieged by the call of life which appeals so strongly to him. But the pupil presented with a problem, the solution of which will give him an immediate sense of accomplishment and satisfied curiosity, will bend all his powers to the work: the end itself will furnish the stimulus necessary to carry him through the drudgery.... Since the children are no longer working for rewards, the temptation to cheat is reduced to a minimum. There is no motive for doing dishonest acts, since the result shows whether the child has done the work, the only end recognized.—"School and Society."
We have then two fundamentally different theories of training, the Dooley versus the Dewey system. They are now on trial in some degree all the way up from the beginning of the primary to the end of the college.[6] One is authoritarian; the other libertarian. One cultivates obedience; the other initiative. One strives for uniformity; the other diversity. In one the impelling motive is duty; in the other desire. In one the attitude of the student is receptivity; in the other activity. In one there is compulsory coördination; in the other voluntary coöperation.
Obviously neither could be carried to an exclusive extreme, and in practice we find each more or less unconsciously borrowing methods from the others. Doubtless the optima for different temperaments, ages, and studies will be found at different points along the line connecting the two extremes. How far one may safely go in either direction is to be determined by the pragmatic test of experiment. But at present it is safe to say that the tide of reform is running in the direction Dewey pointed out a quarter of a century before, though recently a strong counter-current of militarism has set in. That Dewey is a true prophet is proved by the extent to which his ideas are being carried out in these "schools of tomorrow" that are already in existence to-day.
The third period in Dewey's life began with his appointment to the chair of philosophy at Columbia University in 1905. This relieved him of the burden of responsibility for the conduct of the laboratory school at Chicago and enabled him to concentrate his thought upon the fundamental problems of knowledge. It was then perceived that he belonged on the left or radical wing of that movement to which James applied Peirce's name of "pragmatism." But Dewey is reluctant to call himself a pragmatist, partly because of his constitutional dislike to wearing a tag of any kind, partly, I surmise, because he has an aversion to the spiritualistic tendencies of the two men who are usually classed with him as the leaders of the pragmatic movement—James of Harvard and Schiller of Oxford.
Dewey's doctrine of cognition, the theory of instrumentalism, is now to be found in two recent volumes, one technical and the other popular. The ordinary skimming reader will find the "Essays in Experimental Logic" rather hard sledding, so he will be relieved to find that it has been translated by the author into ordinary English in the little volume entitled "How We Think." This is intended primarily for teachers whose business is supposed to be that of teaching their youngsters how to think, though in reality most of their time has to be taken up with the imparting of information.
The "Ethics" of John Dewey and James H. Tufts (1908) is not only a practical textbook admirably clear in expounding the conflicting theories and eminently fair in criticizing them, but it would be useful to any reader for broadening the mind and pointing the proper way of approach to modern problems. Professor Tawney of the University of Cincinnati in reviewing it for the American Journal of Sociology says: "Probably no more convincing effort to construct a system of moral philosophy by a strictly scientific method has ever been carried out."