SIX MAJOR PROPHETS
by some fugitive papers. Yet it has an influence comparable to no other modern book of its size unless perhaps Herbert Spencer's tract on "Education."
How far the seed was sown is shown by "Schools of To-morrow",[1] which tells of a dozen places where the ideas that were so novel and startling in the nineties are in practical operation. But it is characteristic of Dewey's self-effacement that he makes no claim for priority, and there is no hint anywhere in the volume that many of the methods described were first devised and tried out in the Dewey school at Chicago nearly twenty years ago. He gives the credit for the theory to Rousseau and the credit for the practice to Mr. Wirt of Gary, Mrs. Johnson of Fairhope, Mr. Valentine of Indianapolis, Professor Merriam of Missouri, and others.
Mr. Wirt who organized the school system of the steel city of Gary, Indiana, and who is now employed in remodeling some of the schools of New York City, owes his inspiration and ideas, as I have heard him say, very largely to Dewey.[2] The Gary system differs from the trade schools in that the
- ↑ "Schools of To-morrow", by John Dewey and Evelyn Dewey (Dutton), 1915.
- ↑ Doctor Georg Kerschensteiner who founded the famous "workshop schools" of Munich also acknowledges his indebtedness to Dewey.
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