JOHN DEWEY
gesting that the poor children were being subjected to some sort of vivisection or—what was worse—implying that the established educational methods were all wrong. "He lets the children do whatever they want to do," whispered the teachers to their stay-at-home colleagues, who, like themselves, were spending their time in keeping the children from doing what they wanted to do and in making them do what they did not want to do. "He lets the children talk and run around and help one another with their lessons!" and all the teachers looked at each other with a wild surmise silent on the schoolroom platform. Could it be that there was a better way, that this task on which they were wearing out their nerves, trying to reduce to rigidity for five hours a roomful of wriggling children, was no less harmful to the children than to themselves? "I'd like to see John Dewey try to manage my sixty," remarks the presiding teacher as she suppresses a little girl on the front seat with a smile and a big boy on the back seat with a tap of her pencil.
As a matter of fact, the children neither studied nor did what they pleased, but the idea was that if children had a sufficient variety of activities provided they would like what they did and their activities could be so arranged as to result in getting
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