Record: John Scott Gray, “Dewey and the American Movement to Homeschooling,” in Education 3-13, vol. 46, no. 4 (2018), pp. 441-446. [Abstract Here]
Summary:
Gray, a philosophy professor at Ferris State University, here argues that homeschooling is incommensurate with the educational ideals of John Dewey. He begins with a very brief orientation to homeschooling and explains that he wrote this article in light of the 100th anniversary of Dewey’s classic 1916 work Democracy and Education. Dewey had argued that society perpetuates itself by and in communication, and that public schools are society’s common communication platform and content. When parents remove their children from the public schools, they remove them from the most important institution for “collectively communicating essential ideals while attempting to weed out undesirable tendencies, including racism and sexism.” (p. 442) Schools are assimilative institutions, countering the many isolating and fragmenting forces in modern life.
One such fragmenting force is religion. Continue reading