Abstract
SINCE the end of the nineteenth century, John Dewey has been the most effective force in the development of American education, while on this side of the Atlantic he has won for himself a large body of disciples, and the influence of his reforming zeal may be seen in British schools as well as in those of the United States. Many teachers will, therefore, welcome the publication of this volume of essays, written between 1897 and 1908, and selected from the large corpus of his writings to give the dominant themes of his educational work. These are summarized in “My Pedagogic Creed”(1897), which forms the first chapter of the book, and the relevant articles are then applied in a series of essays on “The Primary–Education Fetich”, “The People and the Schools”, “The Place of Manual Training in the Elementary Course of Study”, “Democracy in Education”, and “Religion and Our Schools”. Some of these are inevitably dated, and the battles for which Dewey fought thirty or forty years ago have been largely won: yet the victory has nowhere been so complete or so secure that all danger of a counterattack is removed, and though the title given to this book is rather misleading, yet its contents have a relevance to the problems of to–day which cannot be ignored, and they are shot through and through with flashes of universal truth and wisdom which make them independent of time and place.
Education To–day
John Dewey. Edited, and with a Foreword, by Joseph Ratner. Pp. xvi + 86. (London: George Allen and Unwin, Ltd., 1941.) 5s. net.
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JACKS, M. Education To–day. Nature 148, 481–482 (1941). https://doi.org/10.1038/148481a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/148481a0
