John Dewey

[Dewey] has, in my view, the single best claim to be the father of the modern American public high school.

• The Vanishing American Adult
  • p. 26 (St. Martin's Press, 2017)

[Dewey] is responsible for allowing schools to undermine how Americans once turned children into adults.

• The Vanishing American Adult
  • p. 26 (St. Martin's Press, 2017)

To the degree that we have forgotten the fact that a school should be a tool—a means to an end, not an end in itself—Dewey is the culprit. For him, the school would become everything—the literal center of the world, he said on occasion. In Dewey's dream, the school ceased to be an instrument supporting parents and became instead a substitute for parents.

• The Vanishing American Adult
  • p. 26 (St. Martin's Press, 2017)

[Dewey] never admits to his readers what is obviously one of his ambitions... He doesn't want the school any longer to be in the handmaiden role, aiding parents in their goal of passing literacy and tradition and deferred gratification on to their progeny... his schools now have the socially transforming purpose of displacing the parents, with their supposedly petty interests in their children as individuals.

• The Vanishing American Adult
  • p. 26 (St. Martin's Press, 2017)

I want my children to be formed by ideals and principles that are definable and debatable—by me and by them—even if such ideals and principles are not always in vogue. I want my children to be introduced to the enduring debates between Augustine and Rousseau, not to have these debates hidden from them, as Dewey seeks to do.

• The Vanishing American Adult
  • p. 27 (St. Martin's Press, 2017)

[Rousseau] is not making a total claim of ownership on my kids without any existential acknowledgement that they are my kids—which is basically the claim on them that Dewey is making.

• The Vanishing American Adult
  • p. 27 (St. Martin's Press, 2017)

The failures of Dewey's vision for our kids weren't as obvious when America's economic upward trajectory was climbing at a historically unprecedented pace...

No longer. We cannot assume the middle class will easily self-perpetuate in the future.

• The Vanishing American Adult
  • p. 28 (St. Martin's Press, 2017)