John Dewey and Our Educational Prospect: A Critical Engagement with Dewey's Democracy and Education

7. Dewey’s Reconstruction of the Curriculum: From Occupation to Disciplined Knowledge

7 Dewey’s Reconstruction of the Curriculum From Occupation to Disciplined Knowledge HERBERT M. KLIEBARD With the publication of Democracy and Education in 1916, John Dewey brought to near fruition his long-standing inquiry into the deceptively simply question: what should we teach? That question was brought into Dewey’s consciousness with a certain urgency once he had undertaken to found and run the Laboratory School at the University of Chicago between 1896 and 1904. Most of Dewey’s creative work on the curriculum was undertaken in those years. For Dewey at the time, tackling the question was no arcane intellectual puzzle; it was a matter of practical necessity. No school has ever existed without something to teach, and during the period of the Laboratory School, Dewey turned first to existing turn-of-the-century answers to the “what to teach” question. He was satisfied with none of them, but, like so many of Dewey’s other philosophical undertakings, his analysis and criticism of those extant positions became the basis for forging his own, and during that time he published freely on the subject, most notably The Child and the Curriculum and The School and Society (1902). By the time Democracy and Education was in the works, he articulated a version of his own distinctive theory of curriculum and integrated it into a framework encompassing social aspects of education including the role that organized knowledge 113 114 John Dewey and Our Educational Prospect plays in human affairs and the nature of democracy, not only as a political system, but as a way of living, thinking, and intelligently acting. There is a sense, of course, in which much of Democracy and Education is about “what to teach,” but in the interest of a focused discussion, I will concentrate on the three consecutive chapters in the book that deal most directly with the curriculum: “The Nature of Method,” “The Nature of Subject Matter,” and “Play and Work in the Curriculum” (chapters 13 through 15). In approaching those chapters, I will endeavor to extract what I believe to be the main themes that Dewey explores. I will quote liberally from the text, and then comment on those themes with reference to their genesis. I will also refer to previous or subsequent works of Dewey’s in which themes are also expounded. This approach is particularly pertinent to the concept of occupations with which Dewey opens the chapter on play and work in the curriculum. “Occupations” is a deceptively complex idea and, from Dewey’s treatment of it in Democracy and Education alone, it may be difficult to apprehend just how it is to supposed to function in his theory of curriculum. In exploring these themes, I am also concerned with the broad question of Dewey’s influence on American education in general and the curriculum in particular. A widespread belief exists that Dewey’s ideas had a profound influence on what is taught in schools, a belief that is so often repeated that it has become conventional wisdom. As I hope will become clear, my own view on this matter is that Dewey’s actual influence on American schooling has been negligible not only with respect to practice but even with regard to dominant beliefs over time within the professional curriculum field. In fact, many of his ideas on the curriculum actually run contrary not only to conventional practice but to what many of the leading reformers in the curriculum world tried to promote. Dewey’s philosophy of education ought to be studied, and studied seriously, but not because of some vague sense that he was a powerful mover and shaker in the world of education or that he somehow anticipated what American education would become but because of the integrity of his ideas and because they present a formidable challenge to how education is conventionally conceptualized and practiced, not simply in Dewey’s time but in ours. The Nature of Method Dewey’s devotes a chapter, “The Nature of Method,” as well as the subsequent chapter, “The Nature of Subject Matter,” to establishing the unity of method and subject matter. His position here is an extension of a lifelong effort to create unity out of what are long-standing divisions 115 Dewey’s Reconstruction of the Curriculum and false dichotomies—the theoretical and the practical, experience and nature, schooling and life. In this case, the dualism takes for granted that...