John Dewey: Educational Philosophy, Key Works and the Laboratory School

Who was John Dewey

John Dewey was born on 20 October 1859 in Burlington, Vermont, the third of four sons. He graduated from the University of Vermont in 1879 and spent two years teaching high school before turning to philosophy, and he earned his doctorate at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore in 1884. A decade at the University of Michigan followed, broken by a year at Minnesota. In 1894 the University of Chicago put him in charge of a department that covered philosophy, psychology and pedagogy, and his theory of knowledge took shape there. He moved to Columbia University in New York in 1904 and also worked with Teachers College, the university’s school for training teachers. He retired from teaching in 1930 but kept writing: the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP) counts eleven more books. He died in New York in 1952.

He lectured in Japan in 1919 and in China from 1919 to 1921. The Italian encyclopedia Treccani presents him as a philosopher and educator, and judges his influence on education to have been even greater than his political influence.

Pragmatism and the theory of inquiry

The SEP places Dewey among the first founders of American pragmatism, with Peirce and James. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (IEP) describes this school as treating knowledge as the product of an organism adapting actively to its surroundings. Dewey called his own approach “instrumentalism”, since knowledge in it serves as a tool for steering the dealings between organism and environment, though his preferred name was “theory of inquiry”. For his philosophy as a whole he liked yet another label, “cultural naturalism”, which the SEP reads as rebuilding philosophy inside the picture of life drawn by Darwin.

An inquiry starts from a problematic situation, when the usual responses can no longer carry forward what someone was doing. Possible solutions get imagined, and whether they hold up shows only once they are put into practice. Treccani also describes how it ends. Either a test settles the original doubt, or it fails and the search begins again with fresh hypotheses. In this scheme, for Dewey, knowing is the most complex way of working through life’s difficulties, continuous with biological adaptation.

The Laboratory School in Chicago

The experimental elementary school opened in January 1896 in a small house on Chicago’s South Side, with 16 pupils, three rooms and a large yard. Treccani calls it a nursery and elementary school built for observing and experimenting, in support of the education courses Dewey taught at the university. The SEP sees it as the testing ground for his instrumental logic and for functionalist psychology. His wife, Alice Chipman, was among those who ran it.

In the history the school tells about itself, Dewey wanted to challenge traditional education and find out how a class could become a cooperative community. Each child had a role and tasks, and learned through them what it means to be an active citizen. Around the turn of the twentieth century, garden work was a regular part of the curriculum. The school, which became the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, calls itself the first “laboratory school” in the United States and a pioneer of American progressive education.

Dewey’s relationship with the university broke down over the school. In 1904, after disputes with the administration about the Laboratory School’s status, he resigned and went to Columbia.

My Pedagogic Creed (1897)

My Pedagogic Creed appeared in January 1897 in the magazine School Journal, signed by Dewey as a professor at the University of Chicago. Education in it has two sides, a psychological one and a social one, and neither is to be ranked below the other. The raw material is the child’s instincts and powers. The school remains first of all a social institution, and what holds the subjects together is the child’s own social activity. Dewey describes education as a process of living, and refuses to treat it as preparation for some future life.

In the Creed the teacher does not impose ideas. He is a member of the community who selects the influences the child meets and helps the child respond to them. A child’s interests are signs of growing powers. The Creed asks that they be neither humoured nor repressed, and humouring all of them mistakes the passing for the lasting. The text also defines education as a continuous reconstruction of experience, where process and goal coincide, and calls it “the fundamental method of social progress and reform”.

Between the child and the curriculum

In the 1890s American educators argued over where schooling should start. For the “traditionalists”, as the SEP calls them, it was the curriculum; this was the “old” education in Dewey’s vocabulary. The “romantics”, his “new” or “progressive” education, wanted to start from the child and the child’s natural impulses. Dewey proposed a model of interaction that gave priority neither to the child nor to society. For him the child was an indispensable starting point, to be held together with everything else.

Of the two camps, he pushed back harder against the traditional one, for the weight it gave to discipline and memorisation. Educators, he argued, should abandon teaching methods that treat the mind as a blank slate. The Laboratory School recalls his view that instruction built on memorising and drill left children underdeveloped. In his teaching, rewards and punishments gave way to work on the setting itself: the teacher reorganised it so that the school’s aims met the interests pupils had at that moment. Concrete problems, chosen to bring curriculum and student together, were one way of getting there, with lessons built around them. In the SEP’s account this asked a lot of teachers, who needed child psychology as well as their subjects, and the skill to combine the two.

Learning from experience: the five steps in Democracy and Education

For Dewey experience is activity, an involvement in life. In Democracy and Education (1916) it has an active side, trying, as in an experiment, and a passive side, undergoing the consequences of what was tried. The two belong together, and experience is not primarily a matter of knowing. What an experience is worth depends on the connections it lets us see. Dewey’s line that “an ounce of experience is better than a ton of theory” rests on the idea that a theory only gains a meaning anyone can check inside experience.

The book offers what it calls a “technical” definition of education: a reconstruction of experience that adds to its meaning and leaves a person better able to direct later experience. That education means drawing pupils into an active process is, Dewey remarks, a principle accepted in theory and broken in practice. The methods that work give pupils something to do, and the doing demands thought and an eye for connections. The elements of teaching method are the same as those of reflective thinking, and the book lists five:

1. a genuine situation of experience, one that holds the learner’s interest;
2. a real problem that grows out of that situation;
3. the facts and observations the problem calls for;
4. possible solutions, worked out in an orderly way;
5. testing the ideas by applying them.

Practical example: a third-grade class looks after a vegetable garden, and the tomato seedlings in one bed grow less than the others. The problem came out of the garden work itself. The children check how much sun each bed gets and ask the teacher how to read the label on the bag of potting soil. They come up with two explanations, move some seedlings and water others more. A few weeks later they compare the results.

Learning by doing in Dewey’s own words

The phrase “learning by doing” appears in the 1916 text. Natural development, Dewey writes, always starts from situations where children learn by doing, and the arts and practical occupations form the first stage of the curriculum. The idea is far older than he is. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle had already observed that people become builders by building and harp players by playing the harp.

Dewey adds a warning: activity on its own does not make an experience. You can do things you don’t understand, because many consequences of an action can’t be foreseen. The learning happens when, after acting, you notice results that had escaped you before.

Democratic education

In Democracy and Education democracy means more than a system of government. It is a way of living together, made of experience that people share and pass on to one another. Randall Curren, in the SEP entry on philosophy of education, reads Dewey’s idea this way: a democratic society is a community that investigates its problems and solves them together, with respect for persons and for the scientific method. The IEP finds the same argument in The School and Society as well as Democracy and Education, where democratic habits are formed from the first years of school.

The idea goes back to the Chicago years. In an 1897 essay, “Ethical Principles Underlying Education”, Dewey wrote that school can prepare children for social life only if the conditions typical of that life exist inside the school itself. Drawing on George Herbert Mead, he wanted schools turned into small communities. In the 1916 book the school can itself become a form of social life, a community in miniature in contact with the society beyond its walls. Dewey also attacks one specific split, the one that sent privileged children to the humanities and everyone else to vocational training, and proposes a mixed course of study for all. He goes so far as to define philosophy as the general theory of education, meaning the shaping of intellectual and emotional dispositions toward nature and toward other people. On the SEP’s reading, he held that the success or failure of democracy depends on education.

Experience and Education (1938): continuity and interaction

Dewey published Experience and Education in 1938. Kevin Smith of Cardiff University, writing in 2019 on the blog of the British Educational Research Association, says the book set out to clear up misunderstandings about what “progressive education” was. Massimiliano Fiorucci and Gennaro Lopez, in their introduction to the proceedings of a 2016 conference on Dewey, read it as Dewey’s reply to traditionalist critics who accused him of a model that relied too much on spontaneity. They also see in it a step away from the most extreme activists, who had pulled his theory off course. In the book Dewey sets two criteria for judging an experience. The first is continuity: every experience changes the person who has it, and that change bears on the experiences that follow. Interaction, which Dewey later renamed “transaction”, is read by the educational theorist Gert Biesta (2014) as the search for a sensible link between curriculum and child that avoids both extremes, imposing content or leaving the child to do as it pleases.

For Smith, continuity leads to growth, yet experiences are not all equal. Some are educative and some are what Dewey calls “mis-educative”, and telling them apart takes a skilled teacher. On page 82 of the book an experience is educative only if it leads to knowing more facts and more ideas and to arranging them better. Smith uses these pages to answer critics such as Daisy Christodoulou, whose Seven Myths About Education (2014) portrays a Dewey hostile to facts and to the teacher’s authority. On page 42 Dewey locates the fault of traditional schooling in its neglect of what goes on inside the learner, more than in its care for external conditions.

Dewey’s main works on education

Work	Year	What it contains
My Pedagogic Creed	1897	Education as a process of living, and the school as a social institution
The School and Society	1899	Grew out of the laboratory school; for the IEP, his first major work on education
Studies in Logical Theory	1903	An analysis of inquiry and its phases
How We Think	1910, revised 1933	His theory of knowledge brought into the classroom, written mainly for teachers
Democracy and Education	1916	Democracy, experience and method; for the SEP, his major work on education
Experience and Education	1938	The criteria of continuity and interaction

Dewey in the new education movements, and in Italy

Fiorucci and Lopez use the familiar image of a “Copernican revolution” for the shift that the new education in Europe and the activist movement in American schooling brought to pedagogy between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In their reading the movement’s principles became the base of Dewey’s pedagogy, and he had already set them out in the five articles of the 1897 Creed.

In postwar Italy, as the country rebuilt, Dewey became a point of reference. Maura Striano of the University of Naples Federico II credits Ernesto Codignola and his son Tristano with an important part in spreading his work, through the Florentine publisher La Nuova Italia and the journal Scuola e Città. In 1949 Democracy and Education was among the first of his books to appear in a series devoted to educators of the past and present. The translator was Enzo Enriques Agnoletti, who later edited the magazine Il Ponte. According to Striano, that Italian edition became the book on which two generations of education scholars and practitioners were trained.