Dewey Laboratory School

The Laboratory School of the University of Chicago—commonly known as Dewey's Laboratory School, [Page 291]in tribute to John Dewey's role as its founder, director (1896–1903), and philosopher-in-chief—had a two-pronged function: (1) to cultivate an active and supportive learning community in which the social and intellectual needs and capacities of children could be met and (2) to make discoveries about learning, teaching, subject matter, curriculum organization, discipline, and administration by applying educational theory to practice in an experimental setting. As both an elementary school where children were educated and a university department where scientific investigations were conducted, the Laboratory School had as its constant purpose the fostering of curiosity, inquiry, learning, and growth among students and educators alike. Just as the school created for its students a society-in-miniature where they could learn to solve real-world problems experientially and cooperatively, so too did it provide for its educators an idealized school setting in which they could tinker toward educational innovation experimentally and collaboratively. Indeed, what made the Laboratory School characteristically Deweyan was its fusion of educational means and ends: from the harmonization of the psychological and social factors of learning, to the integration of subject areas, to the unification of method and content in the curriculum, and more.

Dewey's pedagogical theories were by no means fully formulated when the Laboratory School opened in 1896. In fact, some of the strategies he experimented with were simple adaptations of various approaches being tested at comparable lab schools in Europe or in progressive public schools in the United States. Chief among the philosophical influences on Dewey's work were the ideas of Friedrich Froebel, who posited that a school's primary responsibility is to teach children to live cooperatively, that children's activities and play are capable of educational use, and that the school should reproduce on the child's level the typical doings of the mature society. Dewey's realization that some of the most important elements of his own early education were obtained outside the classroom also had a significant impact on his emerging curriculum thought. Finally, Dewey envisioned his school as a place that would release children from the tedium of the typical turn-of-the-century classroom, where lecture and recitation were the norm.

The Laboratory School attempted to embody the ideal of the school as an embryonic society in which children would gain social experience and insight, as well as intellectual and manual skills, by participating firsthand in the activities (referred to as occupations) fundamental to the workings of the home and the larger community. In Dewey's view, engaging in society's occupations would stir the imagination of children who inherently are concerned with whatever adults are concerned with. Rather than merely mimicking adult tasks, however, the occupations would be authentic ends in themselves. For example, when learning history, students would recreate the activities and circumstances of the historical actors they were studying so as to develop historical empathy and social insight, or they would engage in problem-solving activities so as to conceptualize how concrete social problems might be addressed in the past, present, and future. In this scheme, education was none other than life.

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