John Dewey, Progressive Education
and the Place of Henry George

Frederick W. Roman

[An address at the Henry George Congress, 10 September, 1928.
Reprinted from Land and Freedom, November-December, 1928]

The social philosophy of Henry George has come into a new and rich inheritance. Modern progressive education has within recent years discovered that it would not make effective progress unless the factors of environment were reorganized and made creative of thought. Rousseau in his Emile, 1762, had already announced to the world that education proceeds through man, nature and things. Ever since that period, educational thought has been laying increasing stress on the facts of environment.

The great educational revolutions of Pestalozzi and Froebel were built on this motive. Pestalozzi believed that he could reform man through environment. His earliest schools were composed of children taken from the unfortunate outcast ranks of life. He placed them on farms, assigned them to delightful tasks, and the world took cognizance that this educator had made a new discovery. Kings, princes and the influential from all the world went to Verdun to see the work of twenty-five years of this new experiment. John Dewey, the world's greatest living scholar, is the last product of this new role of teaching. He has given it the most profound philosophic setting we have had up to this time, and it is significant for the Henry George movement that Dewey should have discovered that, to attain the conditions necessary for the best possible education, he would find himself under the necessity of cooperating with the motives and ideals of the philosophy of Henry George.

When it was announced within the last year, to many of the land taxers, that John Dewey had given his approval to the social and economic philosophy of Henry George, it was heralded as an outstanding event for the cause which Henry George had announced to the world. It is safe to say that most people have, even at that, failed to get a greater part of the significance of this new recruit. Most people would consider that it was the addition of a very important man, and that that would have the effect of winning other friends who, more or less, take their cue and guidance on the basis of authoritative opinion. Whereas we in no wise wish to underestimate the personal influence that John Dewey would have in any cause or activity in which he might enlist his sympathies, it seems to be more important to point out that what is really taking place is that a whole school of educational philosophy has suddenly found itself in the camp of the philosophers who are sympathetic to the social philosophy of which Henry George was the great exponent.

What has really happened is far more profound than the casual observer may know. It is not some new recruits that have been enlisted, but it is the confluence of a stream of educational thought that has been evolving for 150 years, and now finally it has joined forces with the economic evolution that had its start with the French physiocrats, was further developed by Rousseau, given additional clarity by Adam Smith, and finally given a perfect statement from its economic side by Patrick Dove. Then again, this same principle seems to have been discovered and announced independently by Henry George. It is a truth that is finding its way. We could already show that it has been thought out in various parts of the world without necessary help from other sources. It is an interesting case of thought parallelism.

Now, the same forces that seem to have been provoking economic readjustment for the last two centuries have also been reacting in a way to bring about educational readjustment, and the important idea that we wish to present tonight is the fact that these two streams of evolution have, in the last two years, found themselves in a confluence, and from this date both the economic idea and the educational idea will go forward with increasing momentum and accelerated pace because of the mutual support which the one gives the other. It also gives an additional assurance of the correctness of both the economic philosophy and the educational philosophy, in view of the fact that the trend of the thinking seems to carry both streams of thought in its current. One current of thought might be temporary, an abnormality, but two currents that can show continuous growth and development for nearly two centuries gain an additional prestige thereby. There is something compelling about this new union of the doctrines of progressive education and the economic philosophy that finds it necessary to stress economic justice.

Dewey and his followers have learned that education of the child goes forward best in a school environment that has fair play, that gives the child all the rewards which his labor gains for him. Dewey has found out that school work is most successful when carried on as a conjoint co- operative activity; that the reward comes out of the activity itself; that the child is happy when he makes discoveries that secure mental and emotional release, and this is freedom.

It is not at all strange that very soon he should come to understand the idea that, if he is going to succeed in the school and the community, the child will have to come from a home in which there is the atmosphere of justice and economic freedom. Fathers and mothers who are exploited economically are not able to give their children their just rewards. Dewey and his school seized upon the idea that, not only the school environment must be ideal, but the community in which the child lives must also have economic justice and political equality, and at that moment some one pointed out that there had already been a long evolution of a new economic philosophy that was striving to attain just these things, and this philosophy was the doctrine of Henry George.

Hence Dewey and his followers found that there was nothing else for them to do except to join in a cooperative way with the school of economic reforms that had already been pointing out the way, lo, these many decades.