DEWEYS PROBLEM

John Dewey's contribution to educational thought and practice has been identified with child-centered schooling: the problem he is thought t o have addressed was how to eliminate rote teaching and learning and a dapt instruction to students' interests. Some applaud this while other s consider it a disaster. But Dewey was no less dismayed than his crit ics about what passed for child-centered education. Though he was repe lled by rigid, rote teaching and learning, the problems he worried mos t about did nor arise in schools and reached far beyond education. The y included the growth of industrialism, increasing economic inequality and the political inequality that resulted from concentrations of wea lth and poverty, and the collapse of organic communities as social bon ds were torn by capitalist economic relations. These were the problems that Dewey sought to solve in School and Society and much other writi ng. In that volume he sketched a scheme in which schools would create a counterculture that would correct the human and social devastation o f industrial capitalism. The power of the new scheme would arise from a new system of curriculum and instruction that rooted academic learni ng in scientific, social, and technical problem solving and required d emocratic social relations. These countercultural agencies would make over American society by making over its children. The schools he prop osed were not child-centered in the conventional sense, for Dewey had very firm ideas about what students should learn, and he sketched a ps ychology of work and learning that he thought would guarantee students ' fascination with school. His proposals were child centered chiefly i n the sense that children's schooling would be the key to social, poli tical, and cultural renewal. But Dewey never tried to solve the proble m of how such countercultural institutions could thrive in the society they were to make over.