text: It is not surprising that Laurie would quote a progressive like Dewey in The Parents’ Review given that Charlotte Mason classified herself as progressive when she wrote, “We are progressive” (The Parents’ Review, volume 5, 1894 p. 426).
  But to your question, if we grant the hypothesis that the failures of the American public school system can be traced back to Dewey’s ideas, it would seem to implicate Plato more than Mason. Mason’s contemporary M.L.V. Hughes (1915), in a work cited by Mason, aligns Dewey with Plato as follows:
  “On the other hand, Professor Dewey is setting his counter-emphasis on the civic aspect of education… How can Emile and the Montessori school be brought into line with the civic teaching either of Professor Dewey or of Plato, based as his was on the magnificent self-effacement of Socrates? Must we, indeed, as Rousseau bade us, ‘choose between making a man and a citizen, for we cannot make them both at once’?” (Citizens to Be, p. 46)