5.3) Dewey’s Idea of the School as a Social Center

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From the course by University of Pennsylvania

American Education Reform: History, Policy, Practice

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University of Pennsylvania

American Education Reform: History, Policy, Practice

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Discover what shapes how we talk about schools today by exploring the history of U.S. education reform. Engage with the main actors, key decisions, and major turning points in this history. See how social forces drive reform. Learn about how the critical tensions embedded in U.S. education policy and practice apply to schools nationally, globally— and where you live.

From the lesson

John Dewey and the Pedagogical Progressives

This module takes up the major characteristics of Dewey’s Laboratory School at the University of Chicago, 1896–1904; the role of reflective thinking in Dewey’s theory of knowledge; Dewey’s conception of the school as a social center; Dewey’s disengagement from public schools after 1904; William Heard Kilpatrick and the pedagogical progressives’ distortion of Dewey’s theory; and the cornerstones of Dewey’s educational philosophy.

5.1) The Laboratory School of the University of Chicago7:51

5.2) Dewey’s Theory of Knowledge 5:10

5.3) Dewey’s Idea of the School as a Social Center4:17

5.4) Dewey: Missing in Action 6:00

5.5) The Pedagogical Progressives7:13

5.6) A Neo-Deweyan Critique of the Pedagogical Progressives8:02

Meet the Instructors

Dr. John L. Puckett
Professor of Education
Graduate School of Education
Dr. Michael Charles Johanek
Senior Fellow
Graduate School of Education

A frequent visitor to Hull House in the 1890s and a close friend of Jane Addams,

Dewey understood that the settlement was, in his words, primarily and

in the broadest sense, an educational institution.

Rethinking his own theory of school and society under Addams' influence,

Dewey would propose the settlement idea as a strategy for

advancing democracy through the public schools.

As Dewey astutely recognized,

the settlement house provided a new way to conceptualize the role and

organization of public schools in an advanced industrial society.

Hull House directly inspired his idea of the school as a center of life for

all ages and classes, a thoroughly socialized affair in contact at all

points with the flow of community life.

>> In The School as Social Center, his 1902 address to the National Council of

Education, Dewey emphasized the centrality of the neighborhood school in modern

community life, and its potential as a center and catalyst for

stabilizing and strengthening the local community.

The school's social center would provide an easily accessible neighborhood site for

continuous lifelong learning,

which Dewey recognized as a sine qua non of modern industrial life.

It would also be a social clearinghouse,

where face-to-face communication would be the stock in trade.

In his words, where ideas and

beliefs may be exchanged, not merely in the arena of formal discussion,

for argument alone breeds misunderstanding and fixes prejudice, but

in ways where ideas are incarnated in human form, and

clothed with the winning grace of personal life.

Classes for study may be numerous, but

all are regarded as modes of bringing people together,

of doing away with barriers, of caste, or class, or race,

or type of experience that keeps people from real communication with each other.

Properly reorganized, school social centers would be alive with the spirit and

activities of social intercourse.

The school's social center would provide constructive amusement and recreation for

adults, quote, the social club, the gymnasium,

the amateur theatrical representation, the concert, the stereopticon lecture.

>> It is important to note that The School as Social Center marked a radical shift

in Dewey's writing, during the Dewey school era at the University of Chicago.

Strongly influenced by the women of Hull House, Dewey turned, in The School as

Social Center, toward grounding his theory in real world contingencies.

Here, he was not attempting to drive a theory of democratic schooling from

an experiment that was not truly representative of the real world.

The School as Social Center had its roots firmly in turn of the century Chicago.

>> Dewey never reconciled his writings on the laboratory school

with The School as Social Center.

He left that problem for others to think about.

Suffice it to say that he says nothing about the relationship of the social

center to the daily curriculum of the school.

Nor does he say anything about the role such a school might play in

community development.

Capturing an idea that was in the air at the turn of the last century,

Dewey gave it his prestigious imprimatur.

As we will see in our module on the Great Depression, a social movement towards

schools as social centers, or community schools was coalescing in the 1910s.

It would reach its high watermark in the East Harlem, New York City in the 1930s.

In our next episode, we look at Dewey's post-Chicago

retreat from The School as Social Center.

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