They continually experimented with different ways of [teaching] young students about primitive life in the Bronze Age … early Greek civilization … Prince Henry of Portugal, Columbus, and other explorers … Shakespeare’s plays; science; mathematics; algebra and geometry; English, French, and even Latin.
Further, despite his commitment to an experiential method, Dewey “taught by standing in front of his class and lecturing.”
But Dewey’s ultimate aims were another matter. He held that all learning is ultimately for the purpose of “saturating [students] with the spirit of service.” In Dewey’s view, the purpose of education is not to convey “bodies of information and skills that have been worked out in the past”; not to teach the child “science, nor literature, nor history, nor geography”; but rather to prime him for “social cooperation and community life.”
This was the stated goal of one of America’s most formidable intellectual figures. Dewey was no mere “curriculum designer” trained in modern educational theories, IQ testing, and best methods of developing differing tracks for students of diverse intellectual capacities. Rather, he held a PhD in philosophy from Johns Hopkins University and taught philosophy for decades at the University of Chicago, Columbia University, and elsewhere. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on Immanuel Kant, was expert in the history of philosophy, and much of his original writing centered in this field. He was a brilliant mind trained in academic study, and his abstruse writings on technical philosophy gained him a worldwide reputation as a towering intellect. Dewey gave the Progressive movement the sanction of “lofty philosophy.”
Thus, Dewey’s educational influence was catastrophic. In addition to setting the goal of Progressive education as socializing the child, saturating him with the spirit of service, and priming him for community life, Dewey lent credibility to a host of virulent opponents of academic training, one of whom was William Heard Kilpatrick (1871–1965). …
Kilpatrick was the prime mover behind “the project method” of learning. An avid opponent of academic education, Kilpatrick chaired the Committee on the Problem of Mathematics of the CRSE, where he argued, among other things, that math instruction should be severely curtailed and students should be grouped into segments, so that only future scientists, engineers, and the like would engage in any substantial mathematics. He held that the rest—the overwhelming majority of American students—should be taught little more than basic arithmetic in high school. …
His project method was not about activities that train the individual’s mind, advance his knowledge, and promote independent thinking. That is the essence of the Montessori Method, which we’ll consider below—along with Kilpatrick’s criticism of it. Kilpatrick was interested not in encouraging independence but in engineering social conformity. …
Not surprising, Kilpatrick admired the Soviet Union, and when he visited it in 1929, he was delighted to see his project method in action. For instance, he witnessed groups of students “disposing of disintegrating carcasses of animals left frozen by the roadside.” And he reported, “no school system in history has been more thoroughly and consistently made to work into the social and political program of the state.”
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