From 1902, when he delivered his paper, The School as Social Center, to the National Council of Education in Minneapolis. Until his death in 1952, Dewey had little more to say about school social centers, school community centers, or community schools. In fact, beyond the 1902 piece, Dewey published no more than three short essays related to any of these topics. That Dewey abandoned, in all but a token way, community centered schooling is also evident, in his absent in key archival records related to the community school idea, and the deafening silence in his correspondence. The Spier's School of Teachers College, hailed by the educator Harold Rugg as the nation's first community school, is an exemplary case. Even at home, Dewey was in absentia. Dewey is missing in existing documents that likely would have recorded his activity at, at Spier, had there been any. Including annual publications of the dean's report and articles and teacher's college record. His letters mentioned no involvement, and suggests only a passing interest in the school. >> Why then did the world famous John Dewey, America's preeminent educational philosopher, pay such short shrift to an idea that once loomed so large in his theory? The answer is to be found in large part in Dewey's change of venue from Chicago to New York in 1905. Dewey resigned his chair at the University of Chicago in the spring of 1904 following an acrimonious dispute with Chicago's president, William Rainey Harper, over the administration of Dewey's laboratory school. His resignation would deprive Dewey of the powerful influence of Jane Addams, the founder of Hull House, an activist with brilliant educational insights, who worked closely with Dewey. And Ella Flagg Young, an extraordinary teacher and practical thinker who studied with Dewey at the University of Chicago, and helped him link the workings of the laboratory school with his theoretical pursuits. Later, as superintendent of Chicago's schools, Young would become the first woman to head a large city system. >> Another factor intruded in the summer of 1904. Dewey's home life began to deteriorate. During a family trip to the British Isles, his eight-year old son, Gordon, contracted typhoid fever and died. An event that devastated Dewey, and even more so his wife, Alice, who suffered a mental breakdown from, from which she apparently never recovered. Another son, Morris, had died nine years earlier of diphtheria in Milan, Italy. The writer, Max Eastman, saw Alice, who was principal of the Dewey School, and a major irritant to William Rainey Harper, as the indispensable activist in Dewey's life, without whom the Dewey School would never have happened. Dewey's wife, he tersely noted, kicked him to become an activist. From his vantage point as a close friend of Dewey, Eastman wrote tellingly, quote, nothing seems important to him but thinking. He is complete and extrovert as ever lived, but the extroversion all takes place in his head. Ideas are real objects to him. And they are the only objects that engaged his passionate interest. Of Alice Dewey's influence, Eastman observed, quote, Mrs. Dewey would grab Dewey's ideas and grab him, and insist that something be done. She kept pulling him down into the real world. But after they left Chicago, Alice became far more of a burden than an inspiration to Dewey. She lost her zeal, and grow increasingly resentful and caustic. >> It might be said of course that Adams and Young had also pulled Dewey into the real world. As a result, without the benefit of their influence and insights, and Alice's exhortations, and lacking of supportive institutional venue, Dewey turned, as if by default, to scholastic writing and publication. While he was active in political and social movements at the time, with industrial labor groups, teacher unions political parties, his academic work has shifted away from ground level experimentation. >> In 1905, Dewey joined the faculty of Columbia University. Where until his retirement in 1927, he retained an endowed professorship in the Department of Philosophy and Psychology, and a joint appointment at Teachers College. At Columbia, he withdrew from any practical activity to improve the American schooling system. While he continued to write from the treasure trove of experiences and ideas cultivated at the Chicago Laboratory School, he ventured no new school experiment or educational project to build, test, or refine his educational theories. How We Think, Dewey's brilliant disquisition on reflective thinking, published in 1910. As the historian Robert Westbrook notes, is essentially a Chicago work. To a certain extent, this is also true of perhaps his most famous work, Democracy in Education, published in 1916. Which revisits and extends many of the ideas expounded in the School and Society, The Child and the Curriculum, and rough of other Chicago essays, and How We Think. Though Dewey added some new writing on education in the 1920s and 30s, these essays contributed little more than a clarification of ideas that Dewey's disciples had distorted into a romanticized view of children. And in the main, these ideas were essentially derived from Dewey's Chicago years. [MUSIC]
