Abstract
In 1896, John Dewey started an experimental school at the University of Chicago to test ideas and teach children. He was aware from the beginning that this public act would call for abilities that he thought important, but had not yet mastered. During the Laboratory School’s early years, the philosopher wrote that “the kind of studies I have pursued, and my natural bent of mind have tended to give me a habit of isolation in work.” These interests and tendencies, he felt, had caused him “serious difficulty … in getting into cooperative relations with people—my theories to the contrary notwithstanding.”1 Yet in spite of his inclination to solitude, Dewey sought out such cooperative relations in deliberately created communities dedicated to change, experimentation, and social reform.2 His ground-breaking philosophical work on pragmatism was brought to life in the Laboratory School, where Dewey and others created a “community of inquiry” in which, as one teacher wrote, they “were all on a piece of research together.”3 Dewey figured centrally in other such collective ventures at the turn of the century, including his friend Jane Addams’s Chicago settlement house, Hull House, and philosopher Thomas Davidson’s Glenmore Summer School for the Culture Sciences in New York’s Adirondack Mountains.4
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Notes
John Dewey to Frank A. Manny, January **, 1897 (01871), The Correspondence of John Dewey (electronic resource) (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999–2004). For a discussion of a related assessment in Dewey’s autobiographical essay, see Alan Ryan, John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism (NY: W. W. Norton, 1995), 81.
For this essay, see John Dewey, “From Absolutism to Experimentalism” [1930], in Jo Ann Boydston, ed., The Later Works, Vol. 5: 1929–1930 (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois Press, 1984), 147–160.
Fellow pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce is often credited with the phrase, and certainly the concept of, a “community of inquiry.” See Matthew Lipman, Thinking in Education (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 20;
and Robert Westbrook, Democratic Hope: Pragmatism and the Politics of Truth (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005).
On Peirce, see also R. Jackson Wilson, In Quest of Community (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1968), 46. The teacher quoted is Katharine Andrews Healy, writing to Katherine Camp Mayhew, undated, but approximately 1930, box 44, Edwards Family Collection (1484), Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library.
In the early part of the century, the Dewey family also visited Byrdcliffe, the Arts and Crafts colony in Woodstock, New York. See Tom Wolf, Eva Watson-Schutze: Photographer (New Paltz, NY: Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, State University of New York at New Paltz, 2009).
Katherine Camp Mayhew and Anna Camp Edwards, The Dewey School: The Laboratory School of the University of Chicago, 1896–1903 [1936] (New Brunswick, NJ: Aldine Transactions, 2007), xiii–xiv.
Jane Dewey, “Biography of John Dewey,” in The Philosophy of John Dewey, P.A. Schilpp, ed. (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University, 1939), 3.
For full-length biographical studies of John Dewey, see Coughlan, Young John Dewey; George Dykuizen, The Life and Mind of John Dewey (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois Press, 1973);
Jay Martin, The Education of John Dewey (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002); Ryan, John Dewey; and
Robert Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991). 9. This study will also rely on the related body of work on the history of pragmatism.
See Theo Anderson, “One Hundred Years of Pragmatism,” The Wilson Quarterly, 31, 3 (Summer 2007), 27–35;
Richard Bernstein, “The Resurgence of Pragmatism,” Social Research, 59 (Winter 1992), 813–840;
David Hollinger, “The Problem of Pragmatism in American History,” Journal of American History, 67, 1 (June 1980), 88–107;
James Kloppenberg, “Pragmatism: An Old Name for Some New Ways of Thinking?,” Journal of American History, 83, 1 (June 1996), 100–138, and Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870–1920 (NY: Oxford University Press, 1986);
Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001);
C. Wright Mills, Sociology and Pragmatism (New York: Paine-Whitman, 1964);
Robert Richardson, William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2006);
Alan Ryan, “Deweyan Pragmatism and American Education,” in Amelie Oksenberg Rorty, ed., Philosophers on Education: New Historical Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 1998), 394–401;
R. W. Sleeper, The Necessity of Pragmatism: John Dewey’s Conception of Philosophy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986); and Westbrook, Democratic Hope. My work here will be to integrate these often overlapping lines of analysis—bringing together biography with intellectual and social history.
Max Eastman, “John Dewey: My Teacher and Friend,” in his Great Companions: Critical Memoirs of Some Famous Friends (New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1959), 258.
Arthur Wirth, John Dewey as Educator: His Design for Work in Education (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1966), 7.
Jane Dewey, “Biography,” 15. On the history of Johns Hopkins, see John Thelin, A History of American Higher Education (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Univeristy Press, 2004), 112, 117.
Lewis Feuer, “John Dewey and the Back to the People Movement in American Thought,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 20 (1959), 555.
See Irene Hall, “The Unsung Partner: The Educational Work and Philosophy of Alice Chipman Dewey,” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 2005.
On Dewey and religion, Alan Ryan claims that 1891 was a “turning point” for Dewey (“insofar as anything so untroubled could be a turning point”) when he ceased to be “conventionally religious.” See Ryan, John Dewey, 29. On Mead’s more anguished religious struggles, see Gary A. Cook, George Herbert Mead: The Making of a Social Pragmatist (Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1993), especially ch. 1.
On coeducation at the University of Michigan and elsewhere during this period, see Rosalind Rosenberg, “The Limits of Access: The History Of Coeducation in America,” in John Mack Faragher and Florence Howe, eds., Women and Higher Education: Essays from the Mount Holyoke College Sesquicentennial Symposia (NY: W. W. Norton, 1988), 107–129.
On the University of Michigan and President Angell, see Ruth Bordin, Women at Michigan: The “Dangerous Experiment, 1870s to the Present” (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1999);
Howard H. Peckham, The Making of the University of Michigan, 1817–1992 (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1994);
and Brian A. Williams, “Thought and Action: John Dewey at the University of Michigan,” Bentley Historical Library Bulletin, 44 (July 1998), 1–36.
Jane Dewey, “Biography,” 29–30. Charlene Haddock Seigfried argues that Jane Addams was a pioneer in exploring, through her settlement house work, how the relation between democracy and morality developed into a pragmatist ethics. See Charlene Haddock Seigfried, “Introduction” to Jane Addams, Democracy and Social Ethics (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002, first 1902), x.
See also Seigfried’s Pragmatism and Feminism: Reweaving the Social Fabric (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996); and “Socializing Democracy: Jane Addams and John Dewey,” Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 29 (June 1999), 207–230.
For an excellent biography of Addams, see Louise Knight, Citizen: Jane Addams and the Struggle for Democracy (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005); on the early connections between Dewey and Addams, see 237–240. For an insightful explanation of the relationship between Dewey and Addams, see also Menand, The Metaphysical Club, ch. 12.
William Knight, ed., Memorials of Thomas Davidson the Wandering Scholar (Boston: Ginn and Company, 1907), 55.
See Knight, Citizen, endnote 26, page 478, on the likelihood that John Dewey and Jane Addams met through Dewey’s University of Michigan colleague Henry Adams, who was also friends with Addams’s friend Henry Demarest Lloyd. On Henry Demarest Lloyd and his work with the Glenmore Summer School, see Chester Destler, Henry Demarest Lloyd and the Empire of Reform (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1963), 243. On the Farmington School of Ethics and Glenmore, see Knight, Memorials of Thomas Davidson.
Paul Schneider, The Adirondacks (New York: Henry Holt, 1997). George Prochnik has written an informative study of Putnam Camp: see his Putnam Camp: Sigmund Freud, James Jackson Putnam, and the Purpose of American Psychology (New York: Other Press, 2006).
On her experiences in Keene Valley, see Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman [1935] (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 229–231. See also Ryan, John Dewey, 123.
See Menand, The Metaphysical Club, 304–305, on Dewey’s work on democratic theory during his Ann Arbor years. On Dewey’s place in the context of the development of the American curriculum, and the influence of figures such as Francis Parker, William Torrey Harris, G. Stanley Hall, and Johann Friedrich Herbart, see Herbert M. Kliebard, The Struggle for the American Curriculum, 1893–1958 (Boston, MA: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986).
See Westbrook, Democratic Hope, 87–88, on Dewey’s idea of workplace democracy. For an early article on democracy, see John Dewey, “The Ethics of Democracy” [1888], in Jo Ann Boydston, ed. John Dewey: The Early Works, 1882–1898, Vol. 1 (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969), 227–249.
On the Laboratory School, in addition to Mayhew and Edwards (1936), see also Martin Bickman, Minding American Education: Reclaiming the Tradition of Active Learning (New York: Teachers College Press, 2003);
Ida B. DePencier, The History of the Laboratory Schools: The University of Chicago, 1896–1965 (Chicago, IL: Quadrangle Books, 1967);
Anne Durst, “‘The Union of Intellectual Freedom and Cooperation’: Learning from the University of Chicago’s Laboratory School Community, 1896–1904,” Teachers College Record, 107, 5 (2005), 958–984;
James Scott Johnston, Inquiry and Education: John Dewey and the Quest for Democracy (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2006);
Ellen Condliffe Lagemann, “Experimenting with Education: John Dewey and Ella Flagg Young at the University of Chicago,” American Journal of Education, 104 (May 1996), 171–185; Martin, The Education of John Dewey; Menand, The Metaphysical Club;
Diane Ravitch, Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000);
Aaron Schutz, “John Dewey’s Conundrum: Can Democratic Schools Empower?” Teachers College Record, 103, 2 (April 2001), 267–302;
Laurel Tanner, Dewey’s Laboratory School: Lessons for Today (New York: Teachers College Press, 1997); Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy;
and Arthur G. Wirth, John Dewey as Educator: His Design for Work in Education (1894–1904) (Huntington, NY: Robert E. Kreiger Publishing Company, 1979).
Ellen Condliffe Lagemann, “The Plural Worlds of Educational Research,” History of Education Quarterly, 29, 2 (1989), 195.
See also Lagemann, An Elusive Science: The Troubling History of Education Research (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
On the Chicago community, see also Mary Jo Deegan, Introduction to George Herbert Mead, Play, School, and Society (New York: Peter Lang, 2001), xxiii;
and Jean Block, Eva Watson-Schutze: Chicago Photo-Secessionist (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1985).
On a similar “cooperative community,” see Joyce Antler, Lucy Sprague Mitchell: The Making of a Modern Woman (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987).
This will be discussed further in later chapters. On Chicago reform thought, see Mary Jo Deegan, Jane Addams and the Men of the Chicago School, 1892–1918, (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1988).
As Louis Menand argues, Jane Addams and the “sociology laboratory” she established in the settlement house were central to Dewey’s formulation of pragmatism. See Menand, The Metaphysical Club, 312–315. For a review of Menand’s text that focuses on his treatment of Dewey’s Chicago years, see James Kloppenberg, “Teaching The Metaphysical Club,” Intellectual History Newsletter, 24 (2002), 88–94.
George Herbert Mead, “The Psychology of Social Consciousness Implied in Instruction,” Science, 31 (May 6, 1910), 691. Mead wrote that he was using “Professor Dewey’s phrase.” For a discussion of Mead’s article, see Lipman, Thinking in Education, 84–85.
John Dewey to Alice Dewey and children, October 19 and 21, 1894 (00211), The Correspondence of John Dewey (electronic resource) (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999–2004). For a recent discussion of pragmatism that includes an analysis of “interpretation,” see John Jacob Kaag, “Pragmatism and the Lessons of Experience,” Daedalus, 138, 2 (2009), 63–72.
John Dewey, “The Bearings of Pragmatism upon Education,” in Jo Ann Boydston, ed., The Middle Works, 1899–1924, Vol. 4 (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois Press, 1977), 188.
John Dewey, “Democracy in Education,” The Elementary School Teacher, IV, 4 (December, 1903), 194.
Westbrook, Democratic Hope, 4. Westbrook goes on to say that “pragmatism—by virtue of its methodological commitment to experimental inquiry … has a powerful elective affinity with democracy” (8). On the “Chicago School” and the importance of the Laboratory School for the “dissemination of ideas from the Philosophy Department,” see Darnell Rucker, The Chicago Pragmatists (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1969), 12.
This will be discussed in Ch. 3. See Nancy Hoffman, Woman’s “True” Profession: Voices from the History of Teaching (Old Westbury, NY: The Feminist Press, 1981);
David Hogan, Class and Reform: School and Society in Chicago, 1880–1930 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985);
Victoria-Maria MacDonald, “The Paradox of Bureaucratization: New Views on Progressive Era Teachers and the Development of a Woman’s Profession,” History of Education Quarterly, 39, 4 (1999), 427–453;
William J. Reese, Power and the Promise of School Reform (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986);
Kate Rousmaniere, Citizen Teacher: The Life and Leadership of Margaret Haley (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2005);
and David Tyack, The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974).
See Lagemann, “Experimenting with Education,” 171; and Robert Westbrook, “The Authority of Pragmatism,” Intellectual History Newsletter, 17 (1995), 22.
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© 2010 Anne Durst
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Durst, A. (2010). John Dewey and the Beginnings of the Laboratory School. In: Women Educators in the Progressive Era. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230109957_2
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