John Dewey: Democracy and Education?

While Dewey is truly the father of modern American education, as a self-proclaimed Progressive he was out to destroy the very fabric of a good education: the selfishness necessary for an individual to rise to the top. In his effort to "democratize" education, he brought the brightest down to the level of the slowest or least likely to advance, and made it nearly impossible for the selfishness of the least likely to allow them to rise through their own will power.

That is why progressives like the new New York City mayor want to destroy charter schools--because it destroys the ideas of Dewey. Common Core is the most modern and so far the worst of the ideas to arise from Dewey's progressive philosophy.

So perhaps you ought to throw a little criticism in to your paper, when and where you see it necessary. One of his critics (and he has hundred who have written books, not to mention have started Montessori or charter schools) said these things.

"When [average persons] hear injunctions against “selfishness,” they believe that what they must renounce is the brute, mindless whim-worship of a tribal lone wolf. But their leaders—the theoreticians of altruism—know better. Immanuel Kant knew it; John Dewey knew it; B. F. Skinner [knew] it; John Rawls [knew] it. Observe that it is not the mindless brute, but reason, intelligence, ability, merit, self-confidence, self-esteem that they are out to destroy." http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/tribalism.html

And her protege wrote this:

"In the whirling Heraclitean flux which is the pragmatist’s universe, there are no absolutes. There are no facts, no fixed laws of logic, no certainty, no objectivity.

There are no facts, only provisional “hypotheses” which for the moment facilitate human action. There are no fixed laws of logic, only mutable “conventions,” without any basis in reality. (Aristotle’s logic, Dewey remarks, worked so well for earlier cultures that it is now overdue for a replacement.) There is no certainty—the very quest for it, says Dewey, is a fundamental aberration, a “perversion.” There is no objectivity—the object is created by the thought and action of the subject."

http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/pragmatism.html

http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=13946

http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/10/john_dewey_...

http://www.intellectualtakeout.org/library/educati...

http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/5...

Yes. There are great, noble, pious and virtuous ideas contained in it which are worth pondering. They are also worth following in our day-to-day life in order to bring a proper meaning to our life. We can also fulfill the main purpose of existence.