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The year: 1897. Dewey’s age: 38. “My Pedagogic Creed” is a fascinating and original work. It's almost art, in the exotic sense that Wittgenstein’s “Tractatus” is art. They’re both breezily dogmatic, stating a thousand decisive Truths, perhaps a few of which are even true. Here's the key point. Wouldn’t we like Dewey to say he has concluded or demonstrated or observed or discovered something? He does not. Here’s what he says 74 times in My Creed: "I believe...I believe...I believe...” You want education as fevered religious vision, read Dewey. Here’s four of these staccato beliefs:

“I believe that the social life of the child is the basis of concentration, or correlation, in all his training or growth. The social life gives the unconscious unity and the background of all his efforts and of all his attainments.

I believe that the subject-matter of the school curriculum should mark a gradual differentiation out of the primitive unconscious unity of social life.

I believe that we violate the child's nature and render difficult the best ethical results, by introducing the child too abruptly to a number of special studies, of reading, writing, geography, etc., out of relation to this social life.

I believe, therefore, that the true center of correlation on the school subjects is not science, nor literature, nor history, nor geography, but the child's own social activities.”

Here’s what you need to watch with Dewey. He says education but he means indoctrination. He believes the reason kids go to school is to learn to be part of a group. Dewey had absorbed his collectivism from Marx, Hegel and other big thinkers of the 1800s and had, apparently, never doubted it. But how will we reach that brave new world? That is the tactical problem which Dewey is trying to solve in “My Pedagogic Creed.”

You see the offhand way he tosses aside the traditional school subjects. This contempt for knowledge, for facts, for truths--which Dewey states so openly---has stained the entire twentieth century. Please note the irony. He is himself hugely educated. But he has little interest in letting your kids join him. Instead, he is obsessed with their “social activities.”

Listening to John Dewey, you’d think that children have no families, homes, parents, siblings, friends, relatives, neighbors, communities, sports, religions, hobbies, no life outside the school. If they aren’t socialized at his school his way, they’ll be lost souls. Such arrogance. So Dewey inverts the main reason for the school’s existence, which is to provide the intellectual discipline and direction that might not be provided by all those other forces. Dewey wants to take schools out of the education business, as traditionally understood, and put them in the conditioning (or parenting) business...."

THAT'S ABOUT 1/3 OF ESSAY. LINK GOES TO REST

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ALSO, THERE'S A GRAPHIC VIDEO ON YOUTUBE THAT MAKES SOME OF THE SAME POINTS. ALMOST 8600 PEOPLE HAVE VIEWED VIDEO. PRESUMABLY MOST ARE IN ED SCHOOL. SO THAT'S A VICTORY OF SORTS.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rwZTkitm3-I

READING and WRITING are such “special” studies for the child, outside of all relation to “social life”

That is a basic encapsulation of the monstrosity known as “progressive” education which has wrecked our urban schools over many years.

True confessions: I do have sympathy for some “progressive” tenets of education which emphasize that the best learning is often interactive, engaged, more than “rote” memorization etc. BUT, the ludicrous aspects of such progressive education begin with ideas that there is something backward and unnecessary about the “3 Rs” etc.

No serious education is going to happen until students achieve strong levels of proficiency in reading, writing, and arithmetic.... those basic subjects in which tens or hundreds of millions of Americans are now badly deficient thanks to Dewey and his fellow “progressive” educators.

He had an idea that learning and the learned oppressed ordinary uneducated people.

That might have been understandable in the Germany of his day, but not in the US then or now.

It's a bit strange that someone who spent his whole life in academia would romanticize the uneducated, "intuitive" child, and even stranger that someone who distrusted intellect and intellectualism would throw in with the Progressive movement which believed in control of society by trained specialists.

There's a contradiction at the heart of Dewey's theories that encourages critics to find something conspiratorial there -- as though the masses were to be purposely kept ignorant so that they could be more effectively governed by elites.

I think, though, it has more to do with the man's sentimentalism. He couldn't resist idealising the pure, whole, uneducated child, and also couldn't resist romanticizing social engineering. So he mashed the two together in a way that can't help look -- and perhaps is -- manipulative and Machiavellian.

Perhaps he found it hard to resist holding two contradictory ideas at the same time. Anyway it's hard to think that he really has much to say to us now.