John Dewey | dr. p.l. (paul) thomas

[Header Photo by American Jael on Unsplash]

This fall was the start to year 42 for me as an education, the first 18 as a high school English teacher and the rest as a college professor. I have been noting that career in my presentations at NCTE 2025 in Denver, adding that I am toying with at least making it to year 50.

As I ponder that number, I often return to the sense of awe I always feel when I mention my doctoral work, an educational biography of Lou LaBrant—a former NCTE president (1954) who lived to be 102 and taught for a staggering 65 years (1906-1971).

Approaching 100 and with declining eyesight, LaBrant typed her memoir for the head of the Museum of Education at the University of South Carolina and a key member of my doctoral committee, Craig Kridel.

I was thinking about LaBrant during my presentation yesterday, Recovering Our Reading Dream from a Long Crisis Nightmare, because in her memoir, LaBrant expressed her frustration with the back-to-basics movement during the Reagan administration that orchestrated the 80s education crisis with the melodramatic and misleading A Nation at Risk.

LaBrant noted that over eight decades as an educator she worked through several education crisis cycles and multiple back-to-basics movements—notably the 1940s reading crisis spurred by low literacy rates for draftees during WWII.

While my career pales in many ways compared to LaBrant’s, I feel her pain; with education crisis it is déjà vu all over again.

The only thing, it seems, as common as the media announcing yet another education crisis is people rejecting my arguments against education crisis rhetoric.

And right on cue, after my reading crisis presentation about Tomorrow’s Illiterates: The State of Reading Instruction Today (1961) where I mentioned that our colleagues in math education are now in the crisis crosshair, joining the hyper-intense reading crisis boiling over with “science of reading” advocacy, this morning, I saw this: Editorial: For too many American kids, math isn’t adding up.

The media obsession with declaring an education crisis is so commonplace that I started to just scroll on, but, regretfully, I began to read:

Math scores in the U.S. have been so bad for so long that teachers could be forgiven for trying anything to improve them. Unfortunately, many of the strategies they’re using could be making things worse. It’s a crisis decades in the making.

In the early 20th century, education reformers including John Dewey and William Heard Kilpatrick developed a theory – drawing from the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau – that came to be known as constructivism. The idea was that learning happens best when students immerse themselves in a problem and find their own solution. By the late 1980s, math standards had embraced “discovery-based learning.”

I expected the lazy and unsupported “math scores” opening, but that second paragraph is the stunner. In 2025, the media still looks for a way to blame John Dewey for the education crisis they repeatedly manufacture.

It was at the core of the reading crisis in the 1940s, and again, in Tomorrow’s Illiterates (1961) noted above

Also in my presentation yesterday, I uttered Dewey’s name and suggested the attendees track down Alfie Kohn’s Progressive Education: Why It’s Hard to Beat, But Also Hard to Find, which does an excellent job of detailing how Dewey’s progressive education is simultaneously blamed and almost never implemented in formal schooling [1].

I immediately posted on social media that the editorial writers could have just search on Wikipedia and avoided the utter nonsense they wrote about constructivism.

Just a few weeks ago, as well, I covered in my 100-level educational philosophy course that behaviorism and constructivism are educational theories (grounded in the scientific method), distinct from philosophies (grounded in rhetoric and logic, such as Dewey’s progressivism).

Learning theories like educational philosophies are contested spaces, but as I plan to share tomorrow in a roundtable presentation, this math crisis editorial triggers several red flags, notably opening the commentary by exposing the editors lack the basic expertise on education to be making any claim of crisis.

If they wanted to blame constructivism, they could have and should have invoked Piaget and Vigotsky (and plenty of “science of learning” folk have already been doing that, often badly and with the sort of caricature I expect).

The media’s education crisis narrative, however, follows a script you can count on—including misunderstanding or misrepresenting test scores, ignoring social context for educational outcomes, and blaming some cartoon version of a leftist education system that, again, has never existed in the US.

When I mentioned Dewey in my presentation, I joked that almost nobody understood Dewey, including Dewey, which, I think, is a pretty good joke because Dewey (and LaBrant) represented a sort of beautiful and illusive scientific approach to their philosophy of education and their instructional practices.

You see, when Dewey progressives say “scientific,” they mean an organic type of experimentation whereby the educator is always in the process of experimenting and drawing real world conclusions that are evolving (it is better, in fact, to think of Dewey’s ideology as pragmatism, associated with William James).

Theirs is a science of teaching and learning that is grounded in and starts with each individual student in the pursuit of skills, knowledge, and critical awareness. This is distinct from essentialist and perrenialist beliefs that begin with knowledge, basic skills, and Great Books, for example.

Teaching as an experiment only matters in the practical, not any Platonic ideal, and thus, is never settled (one red flag is when anyone makes a claim and bases that on settled science [2]).

A key reason blaming Dewey or progressive education for any education crisis is misguided is that Dewey himself refused to offer prescriptions, calling for every school and every teacher to seek what works best in the evidence before them, the unique set of students who always change.

In short, in teaching and learning, there is no silver bullet, no script, no program that can or will serve the needs of all students.

You can, if you must, insert any content area—math, reading, writing, civics, science, etc.—and shout “Crisis!” But you will be embarrassing yourself.

Just do a little searching, and I dare you to find a single moment over the past century when someone declared that “kids today” are excelling in math, reading, etc.

My point, which is often as misunderstood as Dewey, is not that current teaching and learning are fine, that I am somehow endorsing the status quo.

I am a critical educator; I became an educator to change teaching and learning, and I am disappointed to say that over my 5-decades career, very little has changed, including the popular urge to declare education crisis.

And what remains most disturbingly unchanged is that a vulnerable population of students have always been and continue to be under-served or nearly completely ignored.

But my point also includes that education reform alone (while needed, just not the mainstream way most often tried over and over) will never serve those vulnerable students, whose measurable education outcomes mostly reflect the inequity of their full lives of which the school day is only a fraction:

Almost 63% of the variance in test performance was explained by social capital family income variables that influence the development of background knowledge. Background knowledge is a known predictor of standardized test results. Family income variables are immutable by schools. Only public policies, outside the control of school personnel, can influence family income.

There is some math the education crisis folk never want to calculate.

If you find yourself worrying about your child’s ability to read or do math, I promise you that Dewey is not to blame.

If you find yourself worrying about other people’s children’s ability to read or do math, I promise you that Dewey is not to blame.

Crisis rhetoric, however, doesn’t help; it never has.

Finger pointing and blame probably aren’t very useful either, especially when those pointing fingers go out of their way to show their blame doesn’t quite add up.

In formal education, we have always had and will always have a range of students who excel, struggle, and fail.

As teachers, our job is to serve them all, and serve them better based on who they are and what they need.

However, teachers and schools alone can never be successful.

If evidence of student failure means anything (and those test scores often don’t), it is that we as a democracy are failing not only those students, but also those children, teens, and young adults—many of whom do not have adequate healthcare, food or home security, or the sorts of lives that universal public education, the so-called Founding Fathers, and, yes, John Dewey envisioned that a free people could guarantee.

If you are looking for someone to blame because of those disappointing math scores, well, I hate to tell you that the enemy is us.

[1] I highly recommend also: LaBrant, L. (1931, March). Masquerading. The English Journal, 20(3), 244-246. http://www.jstor.org/stable/803664. Here LaBrant rejects the misunderstood and misapplied project method in the teaching of literature:

The cause for my wrath is not new or single. It is of slow growth and has many characteristics. It is known to many as a variation of the project method; to me, as the soap performance. With the project, neatly defined by theorizing educators as “a purposeful activity carried to a successful conclusion,” I know better than to be at war. With what passes for purposeful activity and is unfortunately carried to a conclusion because it will kill time, I have much to complain. To be, for a moment, coherent: I am disturbed by the practice, much more common than our publications would indicate, of using the carving of little toy boats and castles, the dressing of quaint dolls, the pasting of advertising pictures, and the manipulation of clay and soap as the teaching of English literature. (p. 245)

[2] For example, the math crisis editorial announces authoritatively and with no links to proof:

Unfortunately, a robust body of research has since found that such approaches often fail early math learners (and readers, for that matter). Math rules and facts such as multiplication tables must be taught explicitly, memorized and mastered through practice. Only when this foundation is established can students progress to more complex concepts. Math, it’s often said, is cumulative.