John Dewey on Progressive Education

John Dewey (1859–1952) was one of the United States’ best known academics, philosophers and public intellectuals.
From humble beginnings in Vermont, he managed to achieve a PhD in philosophy and become a professor at the
University of Chicago. It his here that he began experimenting with educational reform, establishing his famous
‘Laboratory School’ in 1896 to develop and test ‘progressive’ methods of teaching. This is where Dewey’s lifelong
concerns with the social outcomes of education began, and particularly his interest in the ways in which education
could enhance democracy. He moved to Columbia University in 1904, where he was a professor of philosophy,
regularly lecturing in the University’s Teachers’ College. He worked at Columbia for the rest of his life, writing a
number of books on education and making a major contribution to the American philosophical school of ‘Pragmatism’.
By this, Dewey meant that philosophy had to be grounded in the practical conditions of everyday human life, and that
human knowledge should be linked to practical social experience. This philosophy underpinned all his educational
thinking.

Dewey was the American founder of ‘progressive education’, a direct counterpoint to the ‘traditional’ or didactic
education of the schools of the early 20th century:

At present, the opposition, so far as the practical affairs of the school are
concerned, tends to take the form of contrast between traditional and progressive education. If the underlying ideas of
the former are formulated broadly … they are found to be as follows: The subject-matter of education consists of
bodies of information and skills that have been worked out in the past; therefore, the chief business of the school is to
transmit them to a new generation. In the past, there have also been developed standards and rules of conduct;
moral training consists in forming habits of action in conformity with these rules and standards … [T]he general
pattern of school organization (by which I mean the relations of pupils to one another and to the teachers) … [centres
around] time schedules, schemes of classification, of examination and promotion, of rules of order … Since the
subject-matter as well as standards of proper conduct are handed down from the past, the attitude of pupils must,
upon the whole, be one of docility, receptivity, and obedience. Books, especially textbooks, are the chief
representatives of the lore and wisdom of the past, while teachers are the organs through which pupils are brought
into effective connection with the material. Teachers are the agents through which knowledge and skills are
communicated and rules of conduct enforced … The traditional scheme is, in essence, one of imposition from above
and outside … Moreover, that which is taught is thought of as essentially static … It is to a large extent the cultural
product of societies that assumed the future would be much like the past, and yet it is used as educational food in a
society where change is the rule, not the exception …

The school environment of desks, blackboards, a small school yard, was supposed to suffice. There was no demand
that the teacher should become intimately acquainted with the conditions of the local community, physical, historical,
economic, occupational, etc., in order to utilize them as educational resources …

It is no reflection upon the nutritive quality of beefsteak that is not fed to infants. It is not an invidious reflection upon
trigonometry that we do not teach it in the first or fifth grade of school. It is not subject per se that is educative or that
is conducive to growth. There is no subject that in and of itself, or without regard to the state of growth attained by the
learner, such that inherent educational value can be attributed to it. Failure to take into account adaptation to the
needs and capacities of individuals was the source of the idea that certain subjects and certain methods are
intrinsically cultural or intrinsically good for mental discipline. There is no such thing as educational value in the
abstract …

If one attempts to formulate the philosophy of education implicit in the practices of the new education, we may, I think,
discover certain common principles amid the variety of progressive schools now existing. To imposition from above is
opposed expression and cultivation of individuality; to external discipline is opposed free activity; to learning from
texts and teachers, learning from experience; to acquisition of isolated skills and techniques by drill, is opposed
acquisition of them as a means of attaining ends which make direct vital appeal; to preparation for a more or less
remote future is opposed making the most of the opportunities of present life; to static aims and materials is opposed
acquaintance with a changing world …

It is the cardinal precept of the newer school of education that the beginning of instruction shall be made with the
experience learners already have; that this experience and the capacities that have been developed during its course
provide the starting point for all further learning.

[H]ow shall we … introduce into the school … occupations which exact personal responsibilities and which train the
child in relation to the physical realities of life? … [For] such work engages the full spontaneous interest of the
children. It keeps them alert and active, instead of passive and receptive; it makes them more useful, more capable,
and hence more inclined to he helpful at home; it prepares them to some extent for the practical duties of later
life—the girls to be more efficient house managers, if not actually cooks and seamstresses; the boys … for their
future vocations.

We must conceive of [schools] … as agencies for bringing home to the child some of the primal necessities of
community life … as instrumentalities through which the school itself shall be made a genuine form of active
community life, instead of a place set apart in which to learn lessons …

As one enters a busy kitchen in which a group of children are actively engaged in the preparation of food, the
psychological difference, the change from more or less passive and inert recipiency and restraint to one of buoyant
outgoing energy, is so obvious as fairly to strike one in the face …

[By] the introduction into the school of various forms of active occupation … the entire spirit of the school is renewed.
It has a chance to affiliate itself with life, to become the child’s habitat, where he learns through directed learning,
instead of being only a place to learn lessons having an abstract and remote reference to some possible living to be
done in the future. It gets a chance to be a miniature community, and embryonic society. To do this means to make
each one of our schools an embryonic community life, active with the types of occupation that reflect the life of larger
society.

John Watson's Life

John Broadus Watson​, who lived from 1879 to 1958, was an American psychologist who is
considered the father of the psychological school of ​behaviorism​. He was raised in South Carolina
by a mother with strict religious standards and an alcoholic father who abandoned John and his
mother when John was only 13 years old. Watson struggled academically and was arrested twice
during high school. Yet despite these troubles and his own admission that he was a poor student,
Watson entered Furman College at age 16 and emerged with a Master's degree five years later. He
eventually completed a doctorate in Psychology at the University of Chicago in 1903 and went on to
teach at John Hopkins University in 1908.

The Roots of Behaviorism

By the time Watson began teaching at Johns Hopkins, the official discipline of psychology was
barely 30 years old, having started in Europe in 1879. Watson was one of the early American
psychologists to break the Freudian notions that our unconscious mind was behind most of our
behavior. These ideas were quickly gaining acceptance among psychologists in Europe and later in
the United States. Watson made his most memorable declaration against Freud's theory at a lecture
he delivered in 1913 at Columbia University titled 'Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It.' This
lecture established Watson as a pioneer of a new school of thought that would later become known
as behaviorism.

Behaviorism​, according to Watson, was the science of observable behavior. Only behavior that
could be observed, recorded and measured was of any real value for the study of humans or
animals. Watson's thinking was significantly influenced by the earlier classical conditioning
experiments of Russian psychologist Ivan Pavlov and his now infamous dogs.

Watson's behaviorism rejected the concept of the unconscious and the internal mental state of a
person because it was not observable and was subject to the psychologist's subjective
interpretation. For example, Freud would ask his patients to tell him their dreams. He would then
interpret the dreams and analyze what these dreams were indicating in the person's life. Watson
found this emphasis on introspection and subjective interpretation to be very unscientific and
unhelpful in understanding behavior.

The Core of Watson's Work

Watson is best known for taking his theory of behaviorism and applying it to ​child development​. He
believed strongly that a child's environment is the factor that shapes behaviors over their genetic
makeup or natural temperament. Watson is famous for saying that he could take a 'dozen healthy
infants... and train any one of them to become any type of specialist he might select - doctor, lawyer,
artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief.' In other words, he believed that you can
expose the child to certain environmental forces and, over time, condition that child to become any
type of person you want. As you might imagine, this was radical thinking and a type of behavioral
control that many people were not comfortable with at that time

BEHAVIORISM (JOHN B. WATSON – 1913)

Thorndike and Pavlov provided important contributions to behavioral psychology, but it was
John B. Watson (1878-1958) who championed the popular behaviorist movement. Pavlov’s
contribution was made from the discipline of physiology and was somewhat indirect. His
connection with American behavioral psychology was initially made by Watson, who felt that
Pavlov’s experiments provided a good example of a sound experimental method used to
observe the conditioning process of the secretory reflex, by monitoring the flow of saliva
(Watson, 1916, p. 92; 1928, p. 35; 1930, p. 50). As for Thorndike, it is unlikely that he
would have labeled himself a ‘behaviorist’, since it wasn’t until 1913 that the term began to
come into vogue. This new term, and the perspective on the study of psychology to which it
referred, quickly became the dominating school of psychology in American universities. It
was in his article entitled, ​Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It,​ that Watson (1913)
positioned behavioral psychology as “a purely objective experimental branch of natural
science” with a “theoretical goal” of “prediction and control of behavior” (p. 158). Watson
(1928) more plainly defined behaviorism by saying that,
Behaviorism is the scientific study of human behavior. Its real goal is to provide the basis
for prediction and control of human beings: Given the situation, to tell what the human
being will do; given the man in action, to be able to say why he is reacting in that way. (p.
2)
Later, in reflecting on the behaviorist movement, he wrote,
Behaviorism, as I tried to develop it in my lectures at Columbia in 1912 and in my earliest
writings, was an attempt to do one thing—to apply to the experimental study of man the
same kind of procedure and the same language of description that many research men had
found useful for so many years in the study of animals lower than man. (Watson, 1930, p.
v)
Watson’s initial research focused on animal subjects such as rats (1903), rabbits (Watson &
Watson, 1913), birds (e.g., 1907; 1908a; 1910), and monkeys (1908b; 1909). But by the
year 1919 he had been able to apply the same experimental procedures to the study of
man—the goal he had established for himself in his 1913 article. This article has come to be
referred to as the ​Behaviorist Manifesto​.
Through his own efforts and through the reports of other researchers working in the same
field, Watson collected data through “daily observation of several hundred infants from
birth, through the first thirty days of infancy and of a smaller number through the first years
of childhood” (Watson, 1930, p. 118). From this data he concluded that “young children
taken at random from homes of both the poor and of the well-to-do do not make good
subjects” (p. 149) because their behavior was too complex. His solution to this problem was
to study hospital-reared children belonging to wet nurses. Perhaps his most famous
experiments were those conducted to establish conditioned emotional responses in “Little
Albert” by exposing him to various small animals and simultaneously sounding a loud noise
that had been found to elicit crying. Through repeated pairing of the animals with the noise,
the animals themselves came to elicit responses of fear, crying, and avoidance
behavior—where previously they had not (Watson & Rayner, 1920). Several other
experiments conducted with children are accounted in Watson’s 1930 publication entitled,
Behaviorism.​
Watson’s perspective on learning—i.e., his theory of habit formation—is illustrated in the
following example generalized from his observations of several children in similar situations:
To make the whole process a little more concrete, let us put in front of the three-year-old
child, whose habits of manipulation are well established, a problem box—a box that can be
opened only after a certain thing has been done; for example, he has to press inward a
small wooden button. Before we hand it to him, we show him the open box containing
several small pieces of candy and then we close it and tell him that if he opens it he may
have a piece of candy. This situation is new to him. None of his previously learned formed
manipulation habits will completely and instantly work in this situation. None of his
unlearned reactions will help him very much. What does he do? That depends upon his
previous organization. If well organized by previous handling of toys, he goes at the
problem at once—(1) he picks the box up, (2) he pounds it on the floor, (3) he drags it
round and round, (4) he pushes it up against the base-board, (5) he turns it over, (6) he
strikes it with his fist. In other words, he does everything he has learned to do in the past in
similar situations. He displays his whole repertoire of acts—brings all of his previously
acquired organization to bear upon the new problem. Let us suppose that he has 50 learned
and unlearned separate responses at his command. At one time or another during his first
attempt to open the box, let us assume that he displays, as he will, nearly all of them
before he pushes the button hard enough to release the catch. The time the whole process
takes, we will say, is about twenty minutes. When he opens it, we give him his bit of candy,
close up the box and hand it to him again. The next time he makes fewer movements; the
third time fewer still. In 10 trials or less he can open the box without making a useless
movement and he can open it in two seconds. (Watson, 1930, p. 204)
Watson explained this instance of learning—the ability to open the box with increasing
speed and with fewer and fewer useless movements—as a function of ​frequency​ and
recency.​ The act that is performed most frequently persists while the rest die away. The act
that has been performed most recently is more likely to appear sooner in the next
succeeding trial. Watson’s explanation of recency and frequency as the basis for habit
formation was criticized by some writers, and specific experiments were performed to
demonstrate the inadequacy of these two factors alone to account for learning (Gengerelli,
1928). However, these factors do not form Watson’s complete picture of learning. In his
introduction to a republication of Watson’s ​Behaviorism​ (Watson & Kimble, 2002, p. xii)
Kimble lists nine hypothetical laws of learning identified by Watson.​[1]​ The first two are
frequency and recency. The remaining seven are
3. Conditioning is a process of stimulus substitution: “The [conditioned stimulus] now
becomes a substitute stimulus—it will call out the [response] whenever it stimulates the
subject” (p. 21)
4. The process of conditioning is ubiquitous, “So far as we know we can substitute another
stimulus for any stimulus calling out a standard reaction” (p. 22). Thus, learning never
produces truly new responses. “The organism starts out life with more unit responses than
it needs” (p. 24). The process that appears to establish new responses “concerns itself
really with stimulus substitutions and not reaction substitutions (pp. 25-26).
Laws 5-9 came from Pavlov, by way of G. V. Anrep (Watson does not give a reference).
5. “Conditioned responses [may be] temporary and unstable. After periods of no practice
they cease to work [but they can] be quickly reestablished.”
6. “The substituted stimulus can be made [so specific that no] other stimulus of its class will
then call out the reflex.” But, in apparent contradiction to this idea, Watson also noted that
conditioned responses generalize (transfer) to similar conditioned stimuli.
7. “The magnitude of the response is dependent upon the strength of the [conditioned]
stimulus”.
8. “There is a marked summation effect. If a dog is conditioned separately to [two stimuli],
there is a marked increase in the [strength of the response] if the stimuli are given
simultaneously.”
9. “Conditioned responses can be ‘extinguished’” (pp. 28-29).
Though Watson’s role as the recognized founder of behaviorism as a school of psychology is
clear (Morris & Todd, 1999), his impact on educational learning theory is limited, as
evidenced by the (at best) tangential coverage he is given in comprehensive books on
learning theory (e.g., Bohlin et al., 2009; Bower & Hilgard, 1981; Driscoll, 2000; Eggen &
Kauchak, 1999; Hilgard, 1948; O’Donnell et al., 2007; Olson & Hergenhahn, 2009; Ormrod,
2003; Sternberg & Williams, 2010; Woolfolk, 2010). Perhaps this is because his explanation
of frequency and recency was never fully accepted as sufficient to account for learning, and
because his other laws—as summarized by Kimble—weren’t really unique, with most of
them having been adopted without change from Pavlov.