text: No intellectual can afford to be unacquainted with the immortal John Dewey and his "experimental school." Who would dare criticize the education legend inseparably linked with the irreproachable rhetoric of "progressivism?" I would.
  
  Dewey's conception of the child as learner assumes that the uneducated mind is essentially capable of directing its own knowledge by a spontaneous inquisitiveness stemming  from nature study. This he then expects to blossom into a more expanded consideration of the various academic subjects with the teacher merely facilitating transitions and answering the child's self-posed questions. The problems in Dewey's model begin with his science fair-meets-museum-meets-playground-meets-lecture hall school design: the model is untested on any large scale and the cost plus upkeep is prohibitively expensive. Classes are small and require several specialists and non-reusable materials. As if kids didn't have enough problems with the basic skills set already, Dewey would have them heavily involved in shop and home economics. Even more outrageous in Dewey's model is the premise that we ought never force students to study what they do not like. Their own intellectual prejudices reign supreme and by implication, teachers are discouraged from evaluating against solid standards. Experienced teachers know that kids can easily hide their shortcomings even when required to study their weak subjects, and that remediation is hard to implement before they slip further behind. How could Dewey's recommendation to cater almost exclusively to the child's intrinsic likes NOT further disguise and exacerbate low performance?
  
  Deweyism of course, like many other off-the-wall theories of education, denies Behaviorism when it refuses to acknowledge psychological patterns in man. It depicts formulaic teaching and learning as fundamentally faulty and generalized curricula as harmful to student individuality. Nothing could less representative of the quality research conducted, particularly Project Follow Through: the great skeleton in the student-centered advocates' closet. I'd personally like to see Dewey's updated plan for seamlessly moving kids, who come into class with their "natural inquisitiveness" programmed by TV, rap music, and other pop media, into colonial American history, calculations of hyperbolic asymptotes, Tennessee Williams, and the "plus-que-parfait" tense. But of course, such leaps of interest are unnecessary if we utterly throw out the old-fashioned academic corpus along with the old-fashioned school system.
  
  90% of students in high schools today report that they do NOT feel adequately challenged. Maybe the answer doesn't lie in yielding to children's lack of intellectual discipline but in tapping their potential to control that uninformed caprice. Dewey's "progressivism" relies upon the contradiction of allowing uneducated mind educate the teacher on its own education. From the absurdity of it, I can only conclude that sane people latch onto this school gedankenexperiment to maintain an escapist fantasy in light of dismally high drop-out rates, lowered standards, and social discord. But a radical solution is not necessarily synonymous with a good one
  