McGuffey Readers were used widely in America until just after World War I. During this time, John Dewey, head of the Teachers College at Columbia University from 1904 to 1930, and his disciples began an all-out assault on traditional American education. Dewey was a humanist, a socialist, a statist, and an atheist who believed that "the State can do no wrong, for right is determined by what the State does." He looked with contempt at the 19th-century American educational system, because it stressed traditional values such as patriotism and reverence to God. Dewey believed that a public school should be...