Pragmatism, John Dewey, and Progressive Education

Wow, wow, wow, wow, wow I am being totally blown away by what I am reading in this book guys. It is truly incredible the amount of foresight this man had when he was writing this. As I promised, this post will be about Progressive Education and the Progressive Education Movement, but I have to tell you a little bit about a man named John Dewey and a philosophy called Pragmatism before I go into that. So here it goes, I am going to start with Pragmatism.

"Pragmatism is not so much a philosophy as a way of doing without philosophy." That is a quote from the book The Growth of America and it goes on to explain that "pragmatism as a philosophy is a philosophy of process, of change, in a word, of flux. Pragmatists held that everything is continually changing, growing, altering, and becoming." In simple terms it means that they believe that there is nothing that is absolute, nothing that is unchanging, nothing that is eternally the same. A pragmatist named Charles Sanders Pierce said this about pragmatism: "[pragmatism will] serve to show that almost every proposition of ontological metaphysics is either meaningless gibberish...or else downright absurd." Now if you are like me you need a little help on those two words "Ontological" and "Metaphysics". So I looked them up to make it clear for you what he is saying here. Both of those words have to do with the explaining the fundamental nature of being and the world. So what he is saying is that there is no point in learning about why we exist or how we got here because he thinks that it doesn't matter at all. So you can see what this philosophy (or lack thereof) looks like.

A little while later in the book the author says that "the central concept of pragmatism...is that the truth of any thought, so far as it contains any, consists in the effects or results of believing and acting on it." What?!? Do you know what this means? It means that truth is relative! There is a quote from John Dewey where he says of "ideas, meanings, conceptions, theories, systems....." that if they are "instrumental to an active reorganization of the given environment..., then the test of their validity and value lies in accomplishing this work. If they succeed in their office they are reliable, sound, valid, good, true." So basically what he is saying is that if something works for you then it is truth to you. There is no room for morality or any kind of ethical standards in these men's minds! They are saying that you can create your own truth! This is what John Dewey believed. Now why am I going into this crazy philosophy lesson when I was going to be talking about education? Well because like I said, John Dewey believed in pragmatism, he was a pragmatist. You just read that quote from him that basically sums up his beliefs in one sentence. Now this may seem irrelevant to education, but it's not because the Progressive Education Movement was John Dewey's "brainchild" as Mr. Carson put it. So now that you know a little bit about pragmatism and John Dewey let me get into the education part of all this.

John Dewey along with many other "reformers" wanted to use education as means to transform society. Lestor Frank Ward said that "education was the 'great panacea'-for political as well as all other evils." The "Great Panacea" is like the great cure or solution. Albion Small, a disciple of Ward, said that "Sociology knows no means for the... reform of society more radical than those of which the teachers hold the leverage." So it's obvious that these guys saw how huge of a piece education was to their progressive puzzle they were trying to construct. They made quick on trying to spread their fever to others too. In 1904 John Dewey went to Columbia University and as a result Teachers College there became the center for the diffusion of the ideas of progressive education over the country. A man named William H. Kilpatrick, who was a student of Dewey's, "taught some 35,000 students from every state in the Union at a time when Teachers College was training a substantial percentage of the...leaders of American education....In the hands of the dedicated, compelling Kilpatrick, the chair became an extraordinary strategic rostrum for the dissemination of a particular version of progressive education....." I am up way to late right now so I can't put up all the definitions of those crazy big words, but if you don't quite get what he's saying then look up some of those words and it will make more sense. Basically it just means that they were influencing thousands of young students with their progressive ideals and agendas. Not a good thing.

I have to finish this tomorrow y'all cause I am working tomorrow and I need sleep. Peace out and thanks for reading.