What Did Dewey Teach? Part I: Introduction

The baffling lack of substantive content in Dewey’s writings about education is often remarked upon. “What did he want?” people wonder. “No wonder his followers lost the plot.”

But the best way to make sense of Dewey's educational vision, at least as expressed in his writings, may be to say, as one recent writer did, that he desired to “replace the assessment of knowledge with the assessment of general skills.”[1] This is what has come to be known as “teaching critical thinking skills,” which is now often thought of as the opposite of what progressive education achieves.

This is a major misunderstanding. Until at least the 1970s, the defining aspect of any approach that might be labeled “progressive education” was “the ascertainment of these skills, rather than the acquisition of a distinct and defined body of knowledge.”[2]

As Dewey himself put in the preface to his 1910 book How We Think:

Dewey indicates a major reason for this: there was no basis for coordination in the modern school system because it rejected the idea of having a canon, with its emphasis on specialization, choice, “personalized” learning, and universal secondary school. The other major reason was that progressives in the first half of the 20th-century believed society changed too rapidly to prepare students for any concrete role; the best that could be done was to cultivate flexibility in adapting to whatever professional and social roles were to manifest in the future.[4] For all the emphasis on specialization and practical experience, this was a rather generalist and abstract approach. It very much resembles the “knowledge worker” discourse popular in the 1990s and 2000s, and the Common Core-style curriculum that went along with it—similar logic to that underlying 1980s MBA programs, but with even less substantive instruction in professional or social skills.

Critics of progressive education, or at least the current, popular form of education, often mistakenly want to replace it with its own central assumption: the purpose of education is teaching kids how to think, not what to think. The confusion results from the fact that both “sides” do have opinions on what should be taught, and their vision of proper education reflects these opinions, even if only unconsciously. (In the last decade or two, everyone has become more conscious of this, and the nature of the debate is shifting.) The critics tend to have a canon of basic skills and topics in mind.

What progressive educators have in mind has varied greatly, but one of the more identifiable progressive ideas is project-based or experiential learning. A few years before writing How We Think, Dewey had been a schoolteacher himself. In one class, his students handled wool and cotton, and “as they discovered how hard it was to separate seeds from cotton, they came to understand why their ancestors wore woolen clothing.” They learned cooperation by “working in groups to make models of the spinning jenny and the power loom,” and “analyzed the textile mills of Lowell" together, learning more about fabric production. In so doing, they learned aspects of science, geography, and physics via hands-on experience, rather than from textbooks or lectures that they might have found boring or irrelevant to their own lives.[5]

It is easy to see why a student might find this approach to class appealing and even more conducive to learning, but these students were not going to be picking cotton, making their own wardrobes, or working in the Lowell textile mills. “Critical thinking” skills (unified “habits of thought”) may well have been developed in the curious children as they engaged with the fabric, but no concrete skills were being passed on. Dewey insisted that manual training not be vocational in nature, but rather “scientific and experimental, an introduction to civilization.”[6] Unlike showing children how their ancestors made fabric, training them to actually do farm work was merely wasting their time on outdated knowledge. This rather counterintuitive logic is central to understanding both Dewey and the nature of modern debates over education.

In the next installment of this series on Dewey, I will take a close look at Dewey’s famous “Laboratory School” in Chicago, as well as the history of project-based learning.

[1] Cameron Hilditch, “The ‘General Skills’ Your Kids Are Learning Don’t Exist,” National Review, May 5, 2021.

[2] See Cameron Hilditch, “The ‘General Skills’ Your Kids Are Learning Don’t Exist,” National Review, May 5, 2021. Some forms of the “industrial” strain of progressive education did not rely on this assumption, but they remained largely theoretical, failing to catch on with actual progressive educators.

[3] Quoted in Cameron Hilditch, “The ‘General Skills’ Your Kids Are Learning Don’t Exist,” National Review, May 5, 2021. Emphases added.

[4] A third major reason is usually summarized as the false progressive theory of human nature as “essentially benign and altruistic when left to its own devices,” which led to a belief that “culture and civilization were the real sources of evil in human affairs,” and the conclusion that “children needed simply to be allowed to blossom spontaneously into the flower of their inborn natural genius.” The actual progressive theories of human nature were more complicated, intellectually and morally, than either this summary or “blank slate-ism,” but they were certainly dubious and have only become more so as we have learned more about how the human mind works. See Cameron Hilditch, “The ‘General Skills’ Your Kids Are Learning Don’t Exist,” National Review, May 5, 2021.

[5] The text of this article is available for unedited republication, free of charge, using the following credit : “Originally published as “John Dewey: Portrait of a Progressive Thinker” in the Spring 2019 issue of Humanities magazine, a publication of the National Endowment for the Humanities.” Please notify at [email protected] if you are republishing it or have any questions.

[6] The text of this article is available for unedited republication, free of charge, using the following credit : “Originally published as “John Dewey: Portrait of a Progressive Thinker” in the Spring 2019 issue of Humanities magazine, a publication of the National Endowment for the Humanities.” Please notify at [email protected] if you are republishing it or have any questions.