Involvement with Education
Although Dewey was not formally affiliated with the pedagogical department, which held the departmental designation of the Science and the Art of Teaching, he was deeply interested in educational issues. He took an active role in high school accreditation visits and helped to found the Michigan Schoolmasters' Club, an organization that united college-level instructors with their high school counterparts. The fact that Michigan was the first American college or university to create a permanent chair in education, in 1879, was not lost on Dewey. He would later make note of that point in his book The School and Society, published five years after he left Michigan.42 Dewey lamented the fact that few universities were seriously attempting to unite theory and practice, and he included Michigan among those universities. It was a question that Burke Aaron Hinsdale, the second chairman of the Science and the Art of Teaching, had alluded to in 1889 when he wondered, "Why should an institution that exists for the sake of investigating the arts and sciences leave its own peculiar art neglected and despised?"43
The School and Society by John Dewey, 1899
There is sufficient evidence to suggest there was a sense of unity among Dewey and the two men who held the newly created post of Chair of the Science and the Art of Teaching, William H. Payne from 1879 to 1888, and Burke Aaron Hinsdale from 1888 to 1900. All three men were closely involved in the accreditation inspections of secondary schools, and all were active participants in the Michigan Schoolmasters' Club as well as the Philosophical Society. In many ways Dewey was mining from the same educational theorists as Payne and Hinsdale. While a number of the initial pedagogical offerings were practical, focusing on methods of instruction and school supervision, the curriculum was expanding to include the history and philosophy of education. During the 1882-83 academic year, Payne began offering a seminar course on the history and philosophy of education that centered on a critical study of Herbert Spencer's Education, followed the next year by a critical study of Rousseau's Emile.44 Spencer and Rousseau were staples of Dewey's courses in the history of philosophy. A description of Hinsdale's course on the history of education sounds very much in line with Dewey's thinking on education. "Education is not a fact by itself," wrote Hinsdale. "Educational facts and ideas therefore, must be taken along with philosophical, social, religious, industrial, and commercial facts and ideas. They all sustain to one another the relation of mutual cause and effect."45
Payne had also been quick to realize the importance of psychology to teaching and education. Payne noted, "Psychology, in fact, stands in the same relation to teaching that anatomy does to medicine. The teacher's art is addressed to mind, and if this art is to be rational, if it is to be administered in the scientific or professional spirit, for these are usually identical, the teacher should know much of the philosophy of spirit."46 By the 1890s, the unity between education, psychology, and philosophy would be noted by all three men.
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