"One Wonders"

Old Dr. John Dewey, the good grey philosopher, has spent his life exploring endless variations on a single theme: experience is the best teacher. Because he hitched William James's pragmatism to Education and insisted that Education must make sense to modern society, John Dewey has exerted a great influence on 20th-century U. S. pedagogy. But he has lived to be 79 and "America's Greatest Philosopher" without ever explaining how Education can make sense when a society does not.

That Dr. Dewey's influence has also made for a certain fuzziness in academic thought was once more made evident last week when a group of his foremost followers, the three-year-old John Dewey Society, issued a yearbook.*

The book was written by ten famed Deweyite educators, among them Professors Harold Rugg and George S. Counts and Professor-Emeritus William H. Kilpatrick of Dewey's Columbia's Teachers College. Examining contemporary society, Dr. Dewey's followers conclude that: 1) a world-wide struggle is being fought beween democracy and dictatorship; 2) the U. S. is a "depressed society" and will probably continue so for many years; 3) rascism is rising in the U. S.; 4) not much time remains to do anything about it.

What the Deweyites propose is to reform the "delinquent" U. S. school system at once. Object: "To bring forth on this continent--in some form of cooperative commonwealth--the civilization of eco-lomic abundance, democratic behavior and integrity of expression which is now po-entially available." To reduce this mouth-filling program to concrete terms and tell exactly how the schools may accomplish it without delay is not easy. It is, in fact, too difficult for Rugg & Co. Their 530-page book reviews hopefully the spread of Progressive Education in the U. S. but concludes that Progressive Education has not gone far enough, that U. S. schools must function much more democratically and study contemporary problems much more realistically than any school does today.

Glooms Professor Counts: "One wonders whether the undermining of democracy . . . has not already proceeded so far that the battle is lost before it is begun."

* DEMOCRACY AND THE CURRICULUM--D. Vppleton-Century ($2.75).

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