Introduction

Although this essay focuses on the ideas of one individual—the American philosopher of education, John Dewey—its purpose is to raise questions about those ideas rather than their author. Dewey is famous for inventing (or spreading) some familiar ideas: that educational reform is at the heart of creating a democratic society, that the classroom is as important to democracy as the polling booth, that the central aim of education is to foster the individuality of the child and that teachers must teach children how to think for themselves rather than pass on cut and dried knowledge. These ideas have been resisted by philosophers who have thought that the aim of education is to teach children some defined and circumscribed skills, or to transmit to them as much factual information as they can usefully be given during their school years. They have also been resisted by thinkers who have wanted to limit the scope of education, to say that schools exist to serve limited, non-political purposes, and that ‘schooling’ properly ends at sixteen, eighteen, or twentyone when it sends adequately educated students out into the world to earn a living, raise a family, and do their wider social and political duty.

Of course, the opposition is not as stark as that; writing a century ago, Dewey expected most children to leave school at fourteen, he expected them to learn a great many facts and to acquire a great many skills, and he had no difficulty in distinguishing schoolteachers from politicians.