Laboratory Schools

In 1896 John Dewey opened the doors of his Laboratory School to 16 children and 2 teachers. Professor Dewey was the newly appointed head of the departments of philosophy, psychology, and pedagogy at the University of Chicago. With $1,000 appropriated by the university, he was creating a laboratory for his department of pedagogy.

Laboratory schools were emerging across the United States at that time. They were, by definition, attached to a college or university, either public or private. But the points of connection varied. Some, like at the University of Chicago, were attached to an academic unit in the general and liberal arts, and dedicated to preparation of supervisors and professors of pedagogy. Others, most notably Teachers College at Columbia University, were originally dedicated to preparing school administrators and teacher educators. More generally, and to keep pace with increasing demands for preparation of teachers and a steady rise in states' credentialing requirements, the mission of the laboratory schools grew to include teacher preparation for entry-level teaching positions.

The University of Chicago Laboratory Schools are perhaps the most widely known, even today, in part because Dewey was a prolific author. His books and essays provide vivid examples of his pedagogy and the general framework that came to be known as the Lab School Method. His intent was to provide a site for demonstration and scientific experimentation. It was not the kind of science practiced in, for instance, a chemistry lab. Rather, it was about applying the scientific habits of the mind in the social interactions among children and their teacher. For instance, teachers at the lab school were positioned to raise questions in and through and about their own teaching, and then adopt a scientific method for confirming or discon-firming their general knowledge and assumptions about children. Thinking was the process of intellectual inquiry and, therefore, the lab school method of teaching. For Dewey, intelligence did not reside in a person; it was prompted among persons in action around a common and shared interest. Rather than adopting curriculum as a given and fixed body of knowledge to be taught, the teachers and children, together, were to work out a number of possibilities that could soon enough become the curriculum. This was, in fact, learning at its best. There was no drill. Learning was a creative act of shared questioning and problem solving. Knowledge that resides in theory could not be separated from its practice; each could be worked out only with the other. Similarly, practice without inquiry could not sustain either. In concert, each could nourish the other. Separated, each would reduce to mindless procedure.

In laboratory schools, parents of the children at the school were a first audience for Professor Dewey's lectures, two of which were later published as essays—The School and Society and The Child and the Curriculum; both are still available. His essays emphasize the social world of the child, including family, community, occupations, economy, history, and daily life, as providing real and [Page 506]material resources for curriculum that are intrinsically interesting to children. The school was to be at the center of life in the larger community. In a reciprocal direction, home and community life, including cooking, weaving, and manual arts as well as adult occupations, were to be brought from the outside in to become central features of life in school. There was no place in a lab school for memorizing the rules of grammar or doing the rote exercises that were typical fare in other schools of the day. Dewey was framing a pedagogy that placed him at a leading edge of the progressive movement in education.

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