JOHN DEWEY
allow their pupils to take a short cut to the answer by way of algebra unless it was in the algebra class and teachers of chemistry who would not permit the word "atom" to be mentioned in classroom until the term was half through. But such extravagances find no countenance in Dewey's writings or the examples he cites.
In the laboratory school of the University of Chicago Professor and Mrs. Dewey had for several years a free hand in developing and trying out their theories. Their aim was to utilize instead of to suppress the fourfold impulses of childhood; the interest in conversation, the interest in inquiry, the interest in construction and the interest in artistic expression. The volume in which Professor Dewey explained what he was trying to do and why, "School and Society", was first published in 1899 and has been reprinted almost every year up to the present.[1] It might well have borne the same title as Benjamin Tucker's volume on anarchism: "Instead of a Book, by a Man Too Busy to Write One." It consists of the stenographic reports of three informal talks by Professor Dewey to the parents of his pupils and the friends of his school, supplemented
- ↑ The University of Chicago Press published a second edition of "School and Society", revised and enlarged, in 1915.
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