Instead, he asserted that the major purposes of education were clustered around the concept of becoming a member of the community. He wrote: "What nutrition and reproduction are to physiological life, education is to social life."
The impact, then, of Dewey's popularity was to de-emphasize a teacher's concern for curriculum ("knowing that" and "knowing how to"), and instead emphasize those aspects of education which are social in nature. The direct result is that American high schools have clubs and sports teams, counselors and student councils, and classes about health and parenting.
It is difficult for us, living in the twenty-first century, to imagine a time when the average American high school had none of these things - so deep is Dewey's influence on our educational institutions.
But how do we evaluate Dewey's contribution? Has it been good or bad? Critics note that since Dewey's time, American students have mastered fewer and fewer of the core concepts of higher mathematics, fewer of the central works of world literature, and fewer foreign languages. In the words of a 1991 report from the Excellence in Broadcast Network, schools are teaching students about condoms and recycling
instead of Aristotle. We're not teaching anything else very well. Our kids get lower scores on math and English tests every year. As a result, kids from backwater European and Asian countries are outperforming our kids left and right in school because we're hung up on teaching feel-good history and worthless social gobbledygook.
That was twenty years ago. In which direction have we gone since then? Have American schools continued to do the jobs of parents and neighborhoods, or have they returned to serious education? During the typical school day, is learning interrupted by forays into counseling, peer relationships, sexuality, relationships, environmentalism, etc.?
Dewey's influence caused the schools to perform the tasks of parents and neighborhoods, which meant first that parents and neighborhoods had nothing to do (the schools having taken over their roles), and second that the schools weren't doing much educating (because they were busy raising children instead of instructing students).
The question for education in the twenty-first century, then, is this: are we moving further into Dewey's influence, or beginning to escape from it?
