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For anyone who seeks to understand American educational thought, John Dewey remains a central figure to consider. The amount of writing that Dewey produced during his remarkably prolific career, however, often can seem daunting to students of American pedagogy. Thus, students new to Dewey's thought need a starting point. As much as any other work, Dewey's The Child and the Curriculum is a useful place to begin. It provides a good beginning point not only because it relates closely to contemporary issues, but also because it deals directly with the two most central components of any educational process: learners and subject-matter. The text deserves to be revisited now not merely because it was published precisely 100 years ago, although the passing of this marker seems to be noteworthy in and of itself. The Child and the Curriculum, rather, merits attention because the book offers serious lessons from which contemporary educators can learn during a time when public education faces considerable challenges. The current climate of educational debate can benefit greatly from an engagement with the manner in which Dewey resolved the various problems that he attacked in this surprisingly short, but powerful book.
This article explores the lessons that Dewey taught in The Child and the Curriculum and relates those lessons to the context in which he worked. It also relates Dewey's message to some of the contemporary issues that face American pedagogy. Because of the significance of historical, social, and political context to Dewey's philosophy, a reasonably in-depth look at the different levels of context that relate to Dewey's work must be considered before one can understand what Dewey was doing in The Child and the Curriculum.
A BRIEF CONSIDERATION OF CONTEXT
The late 19th century American intellectual climate in which Dewey worked was dynamic. In the same year that Dewey was born, 1859, Charles Darwin rocked the world with his publication of The Origin of Species. As Dewey later recalled, the impact of Darwin's work was profound not only in the realm of philosophy, but also much more widely in the study of biology, chemistry, physiology, psychology, education, and others (Dewey, 1910). Many social and political thinkers in the late 19 century, including Dewey, were unsure how the idealism that had dominated...