John dewey and pragmatism in the primary school: A thing of the past?

Abstract

In 1906, J. J. Findlay, Professor of Education at Manchester, eased English readers into pragmatism’s foreign beginnings by setting John Dewey alongside Pestalozzi, Herbart and Froebel. This paper investigates the interweavings of pragmatism in the years following the First World War, when it appeared in views of children, pedagogy and curriculum, in for example the work of the Board of Education and Susan Isaacs. Pragmatic aims of schooling are initiative and adaptability, accomplished by continuous reconstruction of children’s experiences out into organized bodies of knowledge and by cultivation of habits of inquiry in the context of real problems. Recently a radically different paradigm for schooling has entered the English schooling community, namely an exchange of children’s following interests and teachers learning with children, for equipping children with a hierarchy of concepts before seeing how concepts function in their environment. This new paradigm compromises a pragmatic tradition in English schooling. © 1996 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.