Abstract

If you are of a certain age, let us say, old enough to be a grandparent, you have seen it happen in your lifetime. You do not need this work to tell you that American public education at all levels has degenerated in the course of the past half century. Edmonson lays the blame on the unfortunate espousal in professional educational circles of John Dewey’s theory of education. Dewey’s emphasis on experience denigrates the inherited and the necessity to study ancient and foreign languages in order to master the past. For him, the function of education is to challenge the received, to challenge Western civilization in its core beliefs. Dewey’s philosophy of education is, of course, only one aspect of his pragmatic naturalism, but more than that it is a political program. Dewey came to that position slowly. If one were to survey only his later atheistic and socialist writings, one would be surprised to find the newly created Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins lecturing to students at the University of Michigan on “Our obligation to know God.” That was when Dewey was still a convinced Hegelian and open to the transcendent. As Hegel came under fire by empiricists on both sides of the Atlantic for his failure to adequately account for method as actually practiced in the natural sciences, Dewey abandoned the idealism of his intellectual mentor in favor of British empiricism. He became a disciple of David Hume, John Stuart Mill, and Karl Marx, and subsequently embraced the social determinism of Emil Durkheim.