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Dewey's The Child and the Curriculum contains an influential and remarkably clear account of how dualisms or false distinctions arise, how they can be taken up by different sects and so become the focus of opposing viewpoints, and how the dualism eventually can be dissolved and the dispute resolved; the account is illustrated by reference to the 2 schools of thought that oppose each other about the nature of the curriculum. In this article I argue that Dewey's views on dualisms show clear signs of the influence of the German philosopher Hegel's work on "dialectic," and I examine whether Dewey's method of resolution is applicable to all types of dispute. But Dewey's essay is also noteworthy for his use of the analogy of an explorer and a map to illustrate the relation between the psychological and the logical ordering of subject matter, and this is analyzed.
It is somewhat paradoxical that in order to celebrate the centenary of John Dewey's work at the University of Chicago we would think in terms of an artificial distinction: the work he did there, versus the work he did elsewhere. Dewey himself would have protested, for although of course he did not object to the making of distinctions per se, he stressed that they must be taken with a "grain of salt" and not treated as in any sense being "absolute" (as being what he called "dualisms"). He was the archenemy of attempts to force the variety, flux, continuities, interactions, and organic quality of the world into bifurcated and watertight categories (such as body vs. mind, thought vs. action, inner vs. outer, school vs. society, and interest vs. effort-one particularly important example of which is discussed in Bredo, 1998, in this issue).
To make his case about how un-Deweyan such a biographical procedure was, Dewey might even have pointed to the very example of his own struggles with the issue of dualisms, which themselves constituted a continuum stretching back a decade or so before he moved to the Midwest and which extended long after he left. His antidualistic fervor reached a crescendo about 12 years after his Chicago period for, as is well known, in Democracy and Education (1916/ 1966) he attacked more than three dozen...