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“THEORY RUN MAD”: JOHN DEWEY AND “REAL” VOCATIONAL EDUCATION

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 November 2017

Joseph F. Kett
Joseph F. Kett*
Affiliation:
James Madison Professor of History emeritus, University of Virginia
*
email: [email protected]
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Abstract

Democracy and Education appeared amid intense debate over the relationship between school and work. This debate revealed a stark contrast between Dewey's idea to educate young people to understand the complex relationships of modern industry and the ideas of educators who equated vocational education with training fourteen- to sixteen-year-olds for maximal productivity, a view written into the Smith-Hughes Act of 1917. Whereas Dewey favored integrating vocational education with “a new kind of general education,” his antagonists assailed advocates of the “general” or “academic” curriculum as reactionaries who infected public education with impractical theories that only served those with time and money to indulge their interest in cultural values detached from daily life. Significantly, Dewey did not respond with a defense of theory over practice but with an assertion that his opponents’ thought was permeated by theories, ironically drawn from some of the same sources that influenced mainstream advocates of the “new” education. Understanding how combatants could derive conflicting conclusions from the same sources illuminates the paradoxes and aids in explaining the timing and scope of the Progressive movement.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 16 , Issue 4 , October 2017 , pp. 500 - 514
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2017 

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References

NOTES

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19 Paul H. Douglas, University of Chicago labor economist and future U.S. senator and icon of post-1945 liberalism, saw continuation schools as the best hope for providing social mobility at a time when most families, he was sure, could not afford the opportunity costs of prolonging schooling until sixteen. See Douglas, ibid., 266–68.

20 Digest of State Laws Relating to Public Education in Force Jan. 1, 1915, U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Education, Bulletin No. 27, 1915, William R. Hood, comp. (Washington, D.C., 1916), 527–59.

21 “What Is the Smith-Hughes Bill?,” NSPIE, Bulletin No. 25 (1917), 34.

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23 Charles A. Prosser, “Trade and Educational Agreements”; “What Is the Smith-Hughes Bill?,” 34–36.

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36 Dewey, “Industrial Education-A Wrong Kind,” 119.

37 Ibid., 119–21.

38 Dewey stated that the part of the Indiana law that worked best was its provision for agricultural education since there was “no organization of theorists to influence the law.” Dewey, “Industrial Education-A Wrong Kind,” 121.

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44 Prosser and Allen, Vocational Education in a Democracy, 69. Snedden had similar ideas. See his Vocational Education (New York: MacMillan, 1920), 111–13Google ScholarPubMed.

45 Prosser and Allen, Vocational Education in a Democracy, 83–84.

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47 Snedden, Vocational Education, 20–21.

48 Prosser and Allen, Vocational Education in a Democracy, 114–16.

49 Ibid., 382–486; Kliebard, Schooled to Work, 137–41.

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55 Snedden, Vocational Education, 97.

56 Historians disagree on whether Dewey influenced CPSE. See Wraga, William, Democracy's High School (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1994), 26–28 Google Scholar.

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58 Quoted in Cremin, Lawrence A., American Education: The Metropolitan Experience, 1876–1980 (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), 192 Google Scholar.