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. [MUSIC]
