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John Dewey & Decline Of American Education: How Patron Saint Of Schools Has Corrupted Teaching & Learning

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I was teaching first-grade in Brooklyn when I read this book, and found a lot of Edmondson's arguments persuasive, given my classroom experience. Deweyan pedagogy is challenging, if not in some ways damaging, to implement even in the smallest ways in an actual classroom. That said, Edmondson's book isn't really about Dewey or his thought. It's a political work, which repeats a number of points made by educational traditionalists, but doesn't really represent Dewey's thought accurately, or engage with him critically in a serious way. Edmondson takes the portrait of Dewey presented by Russell Kirk in "The Conservative Mind" and imputes it to Dewey. Again, let me stress, I often agreed with Edmondson's assessment of American education, but his book is NOT an accurate or effective account of Dewey's thought and what's wrong with it. John Patrick Diggins' "The Promise of Pragmatism" remains the best account of Dewey's flaws, though it is primarily political, rather than pedagogical.

For contemporary educators, this work will prove to be an invaluable resource. Even if, when finished, you find that you disagree with the arguments crafted, you will still be forced to think deeply about the many issues and dichotomies surrounding the various directions of educational philosophy.

Dr. Edmondsons' book on Dewey was a great read. It was an revealing expose' on the root cause of what is wrong with the present school system. As such, it answered many puzzling questions i. e.: Why do so many public school teachers send their children to private schools? Why do so many parents opt for homeschooling? Why do so many parents desire school vouchers? Is it all an unconscious flight from the insidious influence of "Deweyism"? Dr. Edmondson adroitly answers these queries with insight and clarity.

To be in education is to be, at some level, a political activist. After all, education is the water that feeds the tree of a democratic republic, and those who would educate are preparing the youth for citizenship in said society. Edmondson decries the state and direction of our society and this book is his activist response. While the focus of his scapegoating is John Dewey, the book is much less about Dewey's legacy and his work (which is superficially represented in the book - and naturally so; after all, who could possibly summarize in less than 130 pages the oevre of a man who published over 35 books and scores of articles over the course of his career?) than it is about the tragedy of a judicial interpretation of one of the cornerstones of our founding Constitutional principals: separation of church and state.

The book is interestingly researched and is a unique and lively discussion of Dewey. About half way through the text, though, it becomes clear that the object is not to protest the influence of an educational philosophy but to use the cover of education scholarship to engage in the debate about school prayer. In his discussion of the function of education as an apparatus for moralizing he points towards Dewey and Dewey's ambivalence for religious indoctrination as the root cause for this deficiency in 21st century American classrooms. It seems Dewey, in other words, is directly responsible for having prayer taken out of schools - an extreme claim to be sure.

If partisan scholarship isn't problematic for you, the book ofers some interesting insights into the educational philosophies of our contry's early political leaders. The book offers an interesting spin on the effects of our eduational system - spin that fails to address issues of race and, especially, class in exchange for cliched urgings for a return to a nostalgic educational past.

Most of my thirty four years of teaching the physical sciences and math were enjoyable despite being beclouded by the frustrating confusion of the pernicious decline of educational statistics. Our most earnest efforts in "inovative" programs, better book and innumerable caimpaigns for bigger budgets and better schools notwithstanding, the stats continued their depressing downslides. Why??? Professor Edmondson answers that critical one word question most succinctly in the 123 pages of "John Dewey and the Decline of American Education. It is a compelling read for everyone.
Steve Masone, veteran educator and author of Hammer of Chalk

I am a writer and have read hundreds of books in the last three years dealing with the political and philosophical origins of public education. This book may be the most important one I have read. Read it first yourself. Then give it to Christian school administrators and teachers, whether they work in public or private schools. If you have ever wondered WHY the public schools often seem to undermine the Christian values of parents and children, this book will reveal it all to you.

This is a short read (114 pages). Much of it is an analysis of Dewey's educational philosophy, so it may tax those who aren't accustomed to reading about intangible things. But if you are a Christian, and have any involvement with the public schools, you must read this little book to understand HOW so many things have gone wrong with our schools.

You are welcome to do your own research on John Dewey, but he has hardly corrupted America's schools -- in fact, we've hardly adopted his theories at all. If we had, we would no longer have SATs, LSATs, MCATs, or GPAs for that matter. We certainly wouldn't have the No Child Left Behind Act. This book is about school prayer, not John Dewey.

From Wikipedia: "Dewey's ideas, while quite popular, were never broadly and deeply integrated into the practices of American public schools, though some of his values and terms were widespread. Progressive education (both as espoused by Dewey, and in the more popular and inept forms of which Dewey was critical) was essentially scrapped during the Cold War, when the dominant concern in education was creating and sustaining a scientific and technological elite for military purposes. In the post-Cold War period, however, progressive education has reemerged in many school reform and education theory circles as a thriving field of inquiry. Dewey is often cited as creating the foundations for outcomes-based education and Standards-based education reform, and standards such as the NCTM mathematics standards, all of which emphasize critical thinking over memorization of facts."

My wife is a retired public school teacher who went through the excrutiating stupidity of Deweyism in her career, personally witnessing the destructive effects of John Dewey's theoretical nonsense on our once-excellent system of public education. I am retired from the Defense Department where I was a teacher and a language program administrator for a number of years. Mr. Dewey's perverse theories and destructive postulations eventually found their way even into military education and training programs! This book is an absolute must read for those teachers who have not yet become addicted to the "progessive" educational system with its total failure, nonexistent discipline, and abdication of standards. It should also be read by parents who send their children into the political indoctrination centers known as public schools nowadays. Your property taxes are funding the destruction of what little remains of the public schools and you need to know where all this started and why the "professional educators" are basically modern day co-conspirators with John Dewey in the foisting of an un-American ideology on unsuspecting young people. This book is very well researched and Professor Edmondson fully documents all his claims with hard, incontrovertible evidence of the destruction Mr. Dewey and his followers have caused to our country and our way of life.

In 51 years of observing and experiencing the public education system in America I formed three broad impressions. The first was that educators must have a fondness for experimentation, since they always seemed to be reinventing the wheel. The second, was that all this reinventing was disturbing considering that those same educators didn't even seem to have a firm grasp on what outcome they desired. The third impression I had was that all the experimentation must be good for educators in the sense that it probably gives them ample excuse to go on taxpayer funded junkets to symposiums in swank places like San Franciso; all in the name of discovering the next best "method" of educating children. This book has made it clear why I developed those impressions over the years. The author of all the chaos in the schools is a man who wrote 130 books/papers on educational theory but could not manage or get results in the one actual classroom he taught in - namely John Dewy. Only a liberal could follow such a blind guide. Dewey might be likened to a Jimmy Carter of Education.

This book is not as in-depth as one might like, but the author points out in the preface that oceans of ink have already been spilled over Dewey and his theories. This book seeks to cut through those oceans and offer a brief and devastating critique of the reckless experimenter named Dewey. Dewey serves as type of person who thinks he knows better than parents how to raise and educate children, and who flippantly would use children as pawns in an end-game of social engineering. Sort of sounds like Marxism doesn't it?