Criticisms of Dewey

A philosopher with Dewey’s influence inevitably draws sharp criticism. The article works through the standard charges, drawing primarily on the work of Henry Edmondson, one of Dewey’s most persistent critics. Some of the criticisms reach actual weaknesses in Dewey’s account. Others target what Dewey would have called the failure of schools to implement his approach properly. Both kinds are worth understanding.

The three main lines of criticism

The criticisms of Dewey cluster around three themes that have been repeated by different critics over more than a century.

The first is that Dewey was dangerously radical. The charge here is that Dewey’s commitment to overturning the existing educational order was so deep that the result, if implemented, would damage the very institutions society depends on. The accusation reads Dewey not as a reformer but as a revolutionary, and treats his reforms as threats to social stability rather than as improvements to school practice.

The second is that Dewey rejected religion, and that the rejection has corroded the moral and spiritual foundation of education. Dewey was, by his own account, not religious in the institutional sense by his mature years. His writings on religion treated the religious life as a quality of human experience rather than as adherence to any particular faith. Critics have charged that this rejection of organised religion, absorbed into the schools that adopted Dewey’s approach, has produced a generation of students without the moral grounding that religious instruction would have provided.

The third is that Dewey’s experimentalism puts children at risk. The Dewey School and its successors were laboratories in a literal sense: they tested new methods on real children. The critic’s worry is that the experiments might fail, and when an experiment in education fails the children pay the price. Untested ideas applied to ten-year-olds can produce ten-year-olds whose education has been damaged by the experiment.

Each of the three charges deserves serious examination. None of them simply destroys Dewey’s contribution. Each of them points to something a thoughtful Deweyan has to address.

Flashcard

What three main lines of criticism are levelled against Dewey?

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Answer

Dangerously radical, rejection of religion, and experimentalism that puts children at risk

(1) Radical: Dewey’s commitment to overturning the existing order would damage social stability. (2) Religion: Dewey’s rejection of organised religion has corroded the moral foundation of education in schools that absorbed his approach. (3) Experimentalism: testing new methods on real children risks the children paying the price when the experiments fail. Each charge points to something a thoughtful Deweyan has to address.

Henry Edmondson’s case

The most sustained critic of Dewey from a conservative position has been Henry Edmondson. Edmondson’s case is worth working through because it pulls together the three themes into a single connected argument about what Dewey has done to American education.

Edmondson blamed nearly every problem he saw in the schools of his time on Dewey’s influence. The list of charges is long. Low literacy rates were Dewey’s fault: a curriculum that did not prioritise the slow careful work of reading and writing was producing students who could not read or write well. Teacher burnout was Dewey’s fault: a school structure that asked teachers to function as facilitators of student-led inquiry placed a heavier psychological load on teachers than the older directive role had. Loss of traditional values was Dewey’s fault: a curriculum that did not transmit the value-bearing texts and practices of the older tradition was producing students with no settled values at all.

The first charge (low literacy) is partly empirical and can be checked. The empirical record is complicated. Some schools that adopted Deweyan methods did show declines in measurable literacy; others did not. The relationship between teaching method and outcome is not as direct as either Edmondson or the most enthusiastic Deweyans claimed. The honest middle position is that poorly implemented Deweyan methods can produce the failures Edmondson described, while well implemented Deweyan methods often produce strong outcomes. The implementation matters more than the philosophy alone determines.

The second charge (teacher burnout) has more empirical weight than Edmondson is sometimes credited with. Facilitating student-led inquiry is harder than delivering content. A teacher who has been trained for one and is asked to do the other often struggles. The remedy is better teacher training, not abandonment of the inquiry approach, but the cost of the change is real and Edmondson is right to name it.

The third charge (loss of traditional values) is the most contested. Dewey’s defenders argue that the values transmitted by a well-run Deweyan school (commitment to truth-finding, respect for others, cooperative work, democratic participation) are real values, even though they differ from the older religious-traditional values Edmondson preferred. Edmondson’s side argues that the Deweyan values are thinner than the religious-traditional ones and cannot support a moral life when the going gets hard. The argument has not been settled and is still going on.

Flashcard

What three problems in American education did Henry Edmondson blame on Dewey's influence?

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Answer

Low literacy rates, teacher burnout, and loss of traditional values

The first charge is partly empirical and complicated; well-implemented Deweyan methods often produce strong literacy outcomes, while poorly implemented ones do not. The second charge has weight: facilitating student-led inquiry is harder than delivering content, and many teachers struggle without better training. The third charge is the most contested and turns on whether the values transmitted by a Deweyan school are thinner or richer than the religious-traditional values they replaced.

The religion charge

The religious-rejection charge deserves its own treatment because it has shaped much of the conservative criticism of progressive education.

Dewey, by his mature years, was not religious in the institutional sense. He had been raised in a Calvinist household and had wrestled seriously with religion in his Michigan years. His settled position was that the religious was a real quality of human experience but that organised religion as he had known it was not the only or the best carrier of that quality. He wrote about natural religion in a way that resembled Rousseau’s natural religion of the heart, set against the institutional religion he had found unsatisfactory.

Critics like Edmondson argue that Dewey’s enmity toward organised religion has been absorbed into American education. The schools that adopted Deweyan approaches treated organised religion either as a private matter outside the school’s concern or as a topic to be studied at a distance rather than practised. The result, on the critic’s view, is the deterioration of morality and traditional values in education.

The strongest version of the criticism is that morality has to rest on something firmer than personal preference or social agreement. Religious traditions, on this view, supply that firmer foundation: an account of right and wrong rooted in something beyond the individual. A school that has cut itself off from religious tradition has cut itself off from the foundation of moral education. What remains is at best a procedural morality (tolerance, fairness, civil behaviour) without any substantive content.

A defender of Dewey’s position has several responses. The first is that religious instruction has its own problems in a pluralistic society: whose religion? whose values? imposed on whom? Public schools that take any one religious tradition as authoritative end up imposing that tradition on students from other traditions or from no tradition. The second is that Dewey’s procedural morality is more substantive than its critics admit; commitment to truth, respect for others, cooperative work, democratic participation are not nothing, even if they are not the same as religious commitments. The third is that the loss of moral force in modern education has many causes, and blaming it all on Dewey’s religious position is too simple.

The argument is open. A teacher today can take seriously the worry that schools have left themselves with a thinner moral foundation than they could have, while also seeing why the older religious foundation cannot simply be reinstated in a pluralistic public system.

Flashcard

What is the religion criticism of Dewey, and what is the defender's response?

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Answer

Critics argue Dewey’s rejection of organised religion has deteriorated moral education; defenders argue the alternative is not nothing

The strongest criticism is that morality needs a firmer foundation than personal preference, and religious tradition supplies that foundation. A school cut off from religion is cut off from moral foundation. The defender’s responses: religious instruction has its own problems in a pluralistic society; the Deweyan procedural commitments (truth, respect, cooperation, democracy) are not nothing; the loss of moral force in modern schools has many causes beyond Dewey.

The experimentalism charge

The third and most pointed criticism is that Dewey’s classroom experimentalism carries real risk for the children involved.

The critic’s argument is direct. A classroom experiment, by definition, tries something that has not been fully tested. If the experiment fails, the students of that classroom suffer the consequences. They get worse teaching than they would have got if the school had used a proven method. The cost is real and falls on the children, who did not choose to be experimented on.

The strongest formulation of the charge is that Dewey’s experimentalism turns students into lab rats. The metaphor is uncomfortable for a reason. Lab rats are subjects of experiments whose purpose is to advance knowledge for other purposes; the rats themselves do not benefit and may be harmed. The charge says that students in experimental Deweyan classrooms are in a similar position.

Edmondson extends the charge to its institutional consequences. Dewey’s classroom experimentalism has led, on his view, to the erosion of teacher authority. A teacher who is facilitating rather than teaching loses some of the authority that the directive role had carried. Students of facilitators may not respect them in the way students of authoritative teachers did. The change in role is not just methodological; it is a change in the social position of the teacher in the classroom.

The same charge extends to the curriculum. A school that experiments with content as well as method ends up with a deteriorating standards-based curriculum. Without fixed standards, what counts as adequate progress becomes contested, and the school cannot say with confidence whether it is doing well or badly. The result is uncertainty that affects students, teachers, and parents alike.

Dewey’s experimentalism, on Edmondson’s reading, leaves students and teachers mired in uncertainty and erodes the moral fabric of human existence. The strong formulation is meant to provoke. It is not, however, simply wrong. A school without a clear account of what it is doing and why does produce uncertainty, and uncertainty has costs even when the experiment is well-intentioned.

The defender’s response is again multi-part. First, all schooling involves some experimentation; teachers always have to adjust methods to circumstances, and adjustment is a form of experiment. Second, well-designed experiments include safeguards that protect students from the worst consequences if the experiment goes wrong. Third, the alternative to experimentation is fixed methods that may themselves be doing harm without anyone noticing. A school that never experiments cannot improve.

The honest middle position is that Dewey’s experimentalism needs to be done carefully and with safeguards, rather than abandoned. The critics are right that careless experimentation harms children. They are wrong that this means schools should stop experimenting altogether. The discipline is to experiment thoughtfully, monitor the results, and be willing to revise when the evidence comes in.

Flashcard

What is the strongest version of the experimentalism criticism of Dewey?

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Answer

Classroom experimentation risks harming the children who are its subjects; they did not choose to be experimented on

The metaphor lab rats captures the worry: students in experimental classrooms suffer if the experiment fails, just as lab rats do. The criticism extends to the erosion of teacher authority (facilitators carry less authority than directive teachers) and the deterioration of a standards-based curriculum (without fixed standards, progress becomes contested). The honest middle position is that experimentation needs safeguards rather than abandonment.