DEWEY'S EARLY INTEREST IN EDUCATION AND DEMOCRACY

Before coming to Chicago, Dewey, still a relatively young scholar, had investigated a broad range of philosophical ideas, publishing his thought on such disparate topics as materialism, psychology, the embodiment of religion, the nature of knowledge—and democracy.Footnote ¹¹ He published his first work specifically on democracy in 1888 while on the faculty of the University of Michigan: “The Ethics of Democracy.” In this meditation on political philosophy, he questions the notion that citizens are isolated, non-social entities, arguing instead that humans essentially are social beings.Footnote ¹² Four years later, Dewey wrote another brief piece, “Christianity and Democracy,” in which he argues that religious understanding, or revelation, is “in intelligence” in the sense that a human interprets the universe “in terms of his own action at the given time.”Footnote ¹³ Though Dewey would later refrain from addressing religious topics extensively, his argument here offers Christian belief as a means for understanding and justifying a central place for democracy. Beyond these two exploratory works, each of which captures themes that he would amplify in his subsequent work, Dewey did not otherwise focus on democracy again until 1903 when he published “Democracy in Education,” a brief piece that was significantly influenced by Ella Flagg Young.Footnote ¹⁴

The second important intellectual strand of Dewey's work to consider in relation to Democracy and Education is education in a general sense—and schools in particular. Once again, Dewey did not publish much work about education in the years before he joined the UC faculty and began his extensive collaborations with Young. No doubt, he had long understood something of the travails of the classroom. After completing his undergraduate studies at the University of Vermont, he began his teaching career. His cousin, a high school principal, offered him his first job. Reportedly, however, his teaching was undistinguished, if not ineffective. When his cousin departed, Dewey's contract was not renewed. He found another high school teaching position that he kept for a year; but perhaps weary from this work, he subsequently enrolled in graduate school at Johns Hopkins to study philosophy.Footnote ¹⁵ Then during the early years of Dewey's academic career at the University of Michigan, he published a few works that concerned education in a tangential manner: “Education and the Health of Women” and “Health and Sex in Higher Education,” both of which addressed the then-hot topic of whether or not higher education harmed the health of young women, and “Psychology in High Schools from the Standpoint of the College” and “Teaching Ethics in the High School,” each of which explored the possibility of high school curriculum in his areas of primary scholarly interest. He became a member of the Michigan School-Masters’ Club during these years, possibly in solidarity with Michigan men who shared his understanding of the challenges of classroom teaching; but despite this connection, Dewey's published work before moving to Chicago fails to consider schools or education either as a central focus or in a broad sense.Footnote ¹⁶

In sum, before Dewey began teaching at the University of Chicago in 1895, he had made some initial, though very limited ventures into understanding democracy. Similarly, his interest in education existed, though not as an area of focus. He had not connected the two concepts in his published work.

ELLA FLAGG YOUNG'S EDUCATIONAL EXPERIENCE AND INTELLECTUAL FORCE

John Dewey and Ella Flagg Young first met in autumn of 1895 when Young enrolled in the first course that he offered at UC.Footnote ¹⁷ Young, a fifty-year-old assistant superintendent with thirty-three years of experience working in the Chicago schools, took time out of her demanding schedule to pursue a degree at this new institution of higher education. From the start, Young and Dewey reportedly enjoyed vigorous debates with each other in classes, sometimes leaving other students feeling excluded.Footnote ¹⁸ Young deeply admired Dewey's broad philosophical and theoretical understandings. And Dewey quickly came to appreciate that few other persons in the city, or perhaps the country, knew as much about schools as Young. Beyond her impressive knowledge, she also was an extraordinarily capable teacher and leader, not to mention administrator. And as he would later express, she possessed a remarkably agile and quick mind, able to see the theoretical and practical implications of a matter simultaneously.Footnote ¹⁹

Young's educational experience and understanding had been hard won and was in many ways unlikely. She attended primary school only for a few months before dropping out because of intense boredom. She eventually taught herself to read, quickly becoming a voracious reader. At fifteen, friends talked her into taking the teachers exam with them. She easily passed, but school officials would not allow her to teach because of her prior lack of school attendance. Instead, they offered her the chance to enroll in the new Chicago Normal Program. She accepted the offer and easily mastered her studies. She consistently stood out for her “unschooled,” idiosyncratic approaches, such as creating her own mentored practice-teaching experience when the program offered none or devising completely unorthodox and unexpected, yet exceptionally good, interpretations of assignments.Footnote ²⁰ When she began teaching, she created innovative methods grounded in her unique interpretations of then cutting-edge pedagogies such as the object-lesson. She chose to teach students that other teachers warned her to avoid, like the reputedly difficult “cowboys,” who insisted on their freedoms when they were not working in Chicago's stockyards. She repeatedly proved more than equal to such challenges and rose quickly through the ranks.Footnote ²¹ In only a few years, she became principal of the School of Practice and essentially prepared most of Chicago's new teachers. The superintendent at the time said of her leadership: “The training branch of the Normal department, under the instruction and training of Miss N. Ella Flagg … has proved a very satisfactory success, and I do not say too much, when I say that this is not excelled by any similar school in our country.”Footnote ²²

When Young later became principal of a large grammar school, one of the first women in the country to achieve such a position, her school earned the reputation as one of the finest of its kind in the city as teachers, students, and Young worked intensively together in a creative, intellectually charged, and mutually reinforcing environment.Footnote ²³ John McManis, a former student of both Young and Dewey at UC, later a colleague, and finally her contemporaneous biographer, said:

Young drew national fame when a noted education journalist, acting on a tip, visited the Skinner School during her principalship. He then profiled her in a series of widely circulated articles and speeches, describing her as the finest teacher he had ever encountered.Footnote ²⁵ Right after that, she was promoted to an assistant superintendency, again, one of the first women in the country to hold such a position. By the time Young joined Dewey's class, she also had established herself as an accomplished writer, delivering subsequently published papers in a variety of settings including the esteemed National Educational Association annual meeting, one of few women to have done so.Footnote ²⁶ She was, in sum, a gifted teacher, a beloved and highly successful school administrator, an intellectually talented practitioner, and a pioneer in establishing new places for women in schools. Dewey would come to consider her work as an exemplar, maybe even the exemplar of how democracy and education might require and reinforce the other.

DEWEY LEARNS FROM AND DEPENDS ON YOUNG

Once Young began studying with Dewey, she was quickly pressed to increase her involvement at the University of Chicago. UC President William Rainey Harper, who had led the city's so-called Harper Commission, which among other things had advocated for a doubling of professional teacher training, wanted to boost UC's enrollments by hiring the wildly popular Young to teach. Though Harper repeatedly recommended her and the UC Board of Trustees approved funds to hire her as a lecturer even while she completed her early studies and held her assistant superintendency, she mostly declined these offers, citing her already heavy load.Footnote ²⁷ Harper then sought to hire her as a full-time UC faculty member, which she initially refused because she believed that she was unqualified given her lack of a doctoral degree. By 1900, though, she completed and successfully defended her dissertation under Dewey's direction. She then agreed to join the faculty as an associate professor in what was called the “Department of Pedagogy.” She immediately expressed her objection to the name, “Pedagogy,” requesting instead that the department's name be changed to the more encompassing term, “Education,” a request that was granted right away. A year later, she was promoted to professor.Footnote ²⁸

Even before she joined the UC faculty, George Herbert Mead had discussed with Dewey the advisability of hiring Young to become principal of what was initially called the “University Elementary School,” suggesting:

The Chicago Tribune even reported that Young would work closely with Dewey in running the school.Footnote ³⁰ Perhaps because of her notable other responsibilities, though, she declined the principalship of the school. She did, however, become “University Supervisor,” and in this role worked behind the scenes to assist her mentor by ensuring that the school ran smoothly, even drafting its curriculum and instituting necessary practices.Footnote ³¹ She even suggested, wisely, that the school's name be changed to the “Laboratory School.”Footnote ³² Though the school had opened in 1896, well before Young's tenure, it had been riddled with problems ranging from incoherent and incomplete curricula, dysfunctional faculty relations and coordination, poor parental communication, and noteworthy fluctuations in enrollment, mostly downward. Once on-board, though, Young quickly did much to bring the school to a state of functionality and intellectual integrity, even while her primary responsibilities were elsewhere.

In 1901, Dewey made what would prove to be a series of destructive administrative mistakes in running schools at UC, mistakes that ultimately contributed to his departure three years later. First, Dewey bargained with Harper for greater administrative responsibilities in exchange for the higher salary Dewey thought he deserved. Harper relented, giving Dewey a $7000 annual salary, in line with those of Harper's most expensive and illustrious faculty hires. To uphold his end of the bargain, though, Dewey would need to provide oversight of two secondary schools and another elementary school in addition to the Laboratory School. Many years later, Dewey would tell a writer for the Atlantic Monthly that “That demand for more pay did more to make a man of me than any other act of my life!”Footnote ³³ Before this, Dewey essentially had no administrative experience other than leading his small departments at UC, and he found his duties significantly beyond his administrative capabilities.Footnote ³⁴

His second most notable mistake was hiring his wife, Alice, to serve as principal of the Laboratory School. He did this without first telling Harper, yet another sizable error. Her new salary of $500 a year and the free tuition that their children then enjoyed meant that the Deweys’ economic situation had improved considerably. Critics, however, including Harper, expressed concern about such blatant inside hiring and the conflicts of interest that might occur.Footnote ³⁵ Dewey insisted on keeping the arrangement even though Alice Dewey, like John, had taught high school for only a few years. She had no experience teaching primary level children like those in the Laboratory School; neither did she have any administrative experience.Footnote ³⁶ With Alice in the principalship, Young then became a codirector of the Laboratory School along with John Dewey, which meant in part that Young would need to work feverishly in the background to keep the school functioning well and without suffering extensively from the many administrative missteps that the Deweys would make.Footnote ³⁷ Young's work in this regard was largely invisible. On the other hand, Dewey, who typically kept everyday activities and functions of the school at arm's length while relying heavily on Young, to some degree on Alice Dewey despite her tumultuous relationships with many teachers and parents, and also on the school's women teachers, largely enjoyed growing national attention and acclaim for the Laboratory School. Dewey received credit while the women who made the school work, most especially Young, did so in the shadows.

Despite this unequal partnership, Young and Dewey did collaborate meaningfully on another important project in which Dewey endeavored to draw explicit attention to Young's work. Together they wrote and published the University of Chicago's Contributions to Education series, six monographs (1901–02) collected into a single volume with each contributing three monographs. Every one of these monographs reveals something of the influence of the other author.Footnote ³⁸

By far the most significant of Young's works in this volume is her dissertation, Isolation in the School, first published as a book in 1900 and then reprinted for the series in 1901. This work offers a critique of the then increasingly widespread administrative practice of centralized, “one-man power” in schools; it also provides a grounded exploration of how schools can foster freedom and democratic practice among students, teachers, and administrators alike, much as Young had during her principalships and assistant superintendency. Just before writing Isolation in the School, she had struggled with the ripple effects of the Harper Commission's Report calling for tightly centralized school administrative power as well as increased salaries for male teachers at the expense of those for female teachers.Footnote ³⁹ In one widely publicized speech, she also bemoaned what she viewed as a broad shift of teaching from creative, intellectually engaging work into the drudgery of a bored housewife.Footnote ⁴⁰ Most especially, though, Young disliked working with the highly ineffective Superintendent Benjamin Andrews, a close friend and mentor to Harper, who failed to consult meaningfully with Young and the other assistant superintendents, essentially rendering their services irrelevant. As Young's companion, Laura Brayton, would later write, “The time came when the autocratic regime, which reduced assistants to mere machines, and the everlasting playing of politics in the office of the Superintendent of Schools, became unbearable and she [Young] resigned.”Footnote ⁴¹

Perhaps as a way of working out these tensions, in Isolation in the School Young calls for the empowerment of teachers and students alike, which she believes is necessary to eliminate a default tendency toward isolation among the many parts of the educational enterprise. “Isolation” takes on several specific meanings in this work. In one sense, it is a kind of compartmentalization that can exist when an organization splinters into discrete, specialized parts, each of which communicates imperfectly with the others. In another sense, it is the disempowerment that individuals or classes of persons experience when they are discouraged or prevented from exercising free thought and social discourse. Young argues that “it must be predicated that freedom belongs to that form of activity which characterizes the teacher. The schools will be purged of the uncultured, nonprogressive element, the fetters that bind the thoughtful and progressive will be stricken off, when the work is based on an intelligent understanding of the truth that freedom is an essential of that form of activity known as the teacher.”Footnote ⁴²

In the final part of Isolation in the School, Young argues that schools must foster freedom among students, teachers, and administrators alike—all critical to forming a broader American democracy. Schools must help prepare students for living in a democratic society by being thoroughly democratic institutions that sensitize members of the community to their interconnectedness, cultivate an ongoing practice of cooperative decision making, and generally empower all members rather than concentrating authority among a few. “Never has the function of the school in a state been more plainly indicated than is that of the public school in this country evolving a theory and practice of developing self-government for childhood and youth.” This means that students must contend with meaningful choices. So too must teachers. As students must have voice in determining their experiences in schools, teachers must as well. “The school cannot take up the question of the development of training for citizenship in a democracy while the teachers are still segregated in two classes, as are the citizens in aristocracy. … The teaching corps must be unfettered in its activity in striving to realize those things which will involve themselves in a free play of thought in the individual and the community.”Footnote ⁴³

Not content to leave readers only with abstract conclusions, Young describes a means by which this unfettering of teachers may be facilitated: the establishment of councils where teachers have the power to make decisions that affect their experiences in schools. In such councils, she contends, teachers should be able to articulate their thoughts freely and make decisions cooperatively, deliberatively. “The voice of authority of position not only must not dominate, but must not be heard in, the councils. There should be organized, throughout every system, school councils whose membership in the aggregate should include every teacher and principal …” She explains in detail how councils could be organized—largely based on the design she had created and implemented a decade earlier as an assistant superintendent working with teachers in her district. Such councils should be representative, facilitate deliberation, and mitigate the structural power differences between teachers and administrators.Footnote ⁴⁴ In short, Young decisively brought education and democracy together, both in concept and practice.

Young's Isolation in the School inspired important parts of Dewey's thought in two of his Contributions to Education monographs. In “Psychology and Social Practice,” he describes the possible interrelationships between the still-new field of psychology and education. In a footnote, he credits Young, his “friend and colleague,” with influencing his work generally, and his particular understanding of the need for an empowered teaching force, because otherwise teachers would not only lose their capacity for free thought, but would be unable to nurture it effectively in their students.Footnote ⁴⁵ Here, Dewey clearly expresses his emerging understanding of teachers’ central role in linking education and democracy.

In “The Educational Situation,” Dewey describes an overall tendency for schools to be highly differentiated in ways that render them isolated in the senses that Young describes. He cites Isolation in the School when he explains: “The unity and wholeness of the child's development can be realized only in a corresponding unity and continuity of school conditions. Anything that breaks the latter up into fractions, into isolated parts, must have the same influence upon the educative growth of the child.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Then he applies a similar line of reasoning to teachers: “As long as the teacher, who is after all the only real educator in the school system, has no definite and authoritative position in shaping the course of study, [decision-making power] … is likely to remain an external thing to be externally applied to the child,” effectively disempowering teachers and students alike by removing their capacities for free thought.Footnote ⁴⁷ In both of these monographs, Dewey reflects his growing understanding that not only must students be empowered, but so too must teachers.

In 1903, a year after publication of the Contributions to Education series, Dewey offered a more definitive statement on his emerging views of teachers and students in democratically empowered schools when he published “Democracy in Education” [emphasis added], a brief article in the UC journal that Ella Flagg Young edited, The Elementary School Teacher.Footnote ⁴⁸ In this work, he unequivocally articulates the view that while “democracy means freeing intelligence for independent effectiveness,” schools are essentially undemocratic institutions, impinging on the intellectual freedoms of teachers and students alike.Footnote ⁴⁹ He explains that teachers generally do not have “the power of initiation and constructive endeavor which is necessary to the fulfilment of the function of teaching,” that if there is a school system anywhere in the country that enables this power, “that fact has escaped my notice.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Furthermore, he says that “[e]ither we come here upon some fixed and inherent limitation of the democratic principle, or else we find in this fact an obvious discrepancy between the conduct of the school and the conduct of social life—a discrepancy so great as to demand immediate and persistent effort at reform.”Footnote ⁵¹ In this compelling and forcefully argued work, Dewey voices strong agreement with Young's views about the importance of empowering students and teachers alike if schools are to play meaningful roles in cultivating a fully democratic society.

DEWEY RELEGATES WOMEN TEACHERS TO THE MARGINS

By 1904, John Dewey had lost patience with what he viewed as Harper's meddling and political maneuvering, particularly when Harper discontinued Alice Dewey's principalship of the Laboratory School. The UC Board of Trustees accepted his letter of resignation on May 2.Footnote ⁵² He then began his new position as professor of philosophy at Columbia University, a position with no administrative responsibilities and no direct connection with Columbia's Teachers College. Ella Flagg Young, who undoubtedly had experienced her own frustrations with Harper, submitted her letter of resignation two months later, likely in sympathy with Dewey.Footnote ⁵³ Young may also have felt exasperated with some of Dewey's administrative and practical shortcomings through the years, but if she did, she reined in her expression of it, offering only public praise and admiration for her doctoral mentor and colleague. Notably, though, Young did not join Dewey in New York, but instead departed with her companion, Laura Brayton, for a year of travel abroad.Footnote ⁵⁴

Dewey and Young exchanged a few letters over the years and even managed to visit a time or two. From a distance, they also followed each other's careers with intense interest. Dewey was particularly curious about Young's appointment to the Chicago superintendency in 1909, which instantly catapulted her to national and international fame.Footnote ⁵⁵ Even though some members of the Board of Education had explicitly sought a man for the position, refusing to consider a woman, the increasingly organized and highly successful agitation of the female Chicago Teachers Federation—and suffragists around the city—had severely constrained Edwin Cooley, the previous superintendent. After an extensive nationwide search, Board members could not find a male candidate for the position who enjoyed anywhere nearly the rapport and mutual regard among the city's teachers as Young. In the end, they offered her the position in part to recognize what they came to understand as her unmatched experience, knowledge, and record of accomplishment in the schools—but also because in this moment, a male superintendent likely would not have sufficiently understood the range and depth of issues important to Chicago's largely female and increasingly activist teaching force. The women teachers of the city and their allies celebrated this triumphal moment. Young proceeded to experience four relatively smooth years as superintendent in which she, the educators of the Chicago schools, students, and community members would impressively reconstruct the schools as she endeavored to put into practice much of the thought she had developed earlier in her career, then refined and articulated while at UC.

Illinois granted women the vote in June of 1913, after long campaigning on the part of highly determined suffragists. Finally, most of the state's large teaching force could vote on the full range of matters that affected them, especially schools. Young, frequently called on by state and national media, had this to say: “It is the greatest thing Illinois ever has done.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Even the noted and controversial British suffrage leader, Emmeline Pankhurst, proclaimed, “I am convinced that the women of Illinois, among them are numbered such world-famous women as Jane Addams and Ella Flagg Young, will worthily use their newly won liberty.”Footnote ⁵⁷

Almost immediately, though, Young quickly found herself on a collision course with several of the mayor's recent school board appointees. They stripped her of some of her administrative powers. Refusing to be hobbled in carrying out her responsibilities, she resigned only a month after Illinois women had achieved full suffrage.Footnote ⁵⁸ John Dewey wrote his daughter about the matter, explaining that, “Mrs. Young resigned at Chicago because some of the politicians interfered with her. This is where woman's suffrage in Illinois comes in handy; the women will probably force the mayor and the board to keep her and not meddle anymore.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Dewey was right—to a point. Newly empowered women across the city, a significant number of them teachers, rose up in protest, demanding that the mayor do everything in his power to keep Young, which he did for a time.Footnote ⁶⁰ The mayor understood that these angry women could now vote.

Dewey continued to send his family updates on unfolding events, especially the ways that newly enfranchised women—and a powerful backlash movement directed against them—affected the democratic nature of schools.Footnote ⁶¹ And Young sometimes wrote Dewey directly to fill him in, such as when she resigned again half a year later when members of the school board reprised their maneuvers from June. She happily reported to him that, “Nothing is more remarkable than the way the women are developing a knowledge of parliamentary procedure and are also ably distinguishing between speeches made for the purpose of delaying action and speeches made for the purpose of securing a careful inquiry into a report.”Footnote ⁶² Beyond this, Jane Addams and a broad coalition of Chicago's women activists and allied men, especially including teachers, organized a mass meeting that attracted a great deal of national media attention. They also engaged in many other forms of political activism to get the mayor to retain Young again and repair the dysfunction on the board.Footnote ⁶³ The mayor complied sufficiently for Young to return to the superintendency one more time. However, the remaining two years of her service were marred by bitter fights on the board with a persistent faction battling against the political gains won by coalitions of newly enfranchised voters. Young stepped down for good in early January of 1916. Shortly afterward, she read Dewey's Democracy and Education, hot off the press, and then published her review.