The Classroom Teacher and the Individual School Child

John Dewey (1859–1952), one of the most prominent American intellectuals for the first half of the twentieth century, is considered by many to be the father of public education, advocating for the concept that the purpose of public education was to develop an informed citizenry that prepared them for active participation in public life. He was highly regarded for his lectures on the power of pedagogy, best documented in his seminal volume, Democracy and Education, a book that remains as relevant today as when it first published more than 100 years ago.

He was famous for other lectures as well. Among them, this book represents, for the first time, The Bridgewater Lectures of 1922 as a freestanding volume. Dewey gave these lectures at the Bridgewater Normal School in Bridgewater, MA, an institution founded by Horace Mann. The lectures touch on three themes:

Social Purposes in Education
Individuality in Education
The Classroom Teacher

They appear as full-length speeches, unaltered from their original form.

Additionally, the volume contains three interpretive essays by recognized experts in the philosophy and pedagogy of Dewey:

The Course and Its Occurrences
Individuality, Sociality, and Temporality: Reflections on Dewey’s Bridgewater Lectures of 1922
Dewey’s Bridgewater Lectures and the Emergence of the Aesthetic in His Later Works

This is a book that all Dewey scholars will want to have in their library. In addition, the themes in the volume make it an appropriate adoption for such classes as History of Education, Philosophy of Education and other foundation courses.

Introduction
Individuality and the Art of Classroom Teaching by Leonard J. Waks

The Bridgewater Lectures of 1922
Chapter One
Social Purposes in Education (1922) by John Dewey

Chapter Two
Individuality in Education (1922) by John Dewey

Chapter Three
The Classroom Teacher (1922) by John Dewey

Original Interpretive Essays
Chapter Four
The Course and Its Occurrences by Paul B. Cherlin

Chapter Five
Individuality, Sociality, and Temporality: Reflections on Dewey’s Bridgewater Lectures of 1922 by Vincent Colapietro

Chapter Six
Dewey’s Bridgewater Lectures and the Emergence of the Aesthetic in His Later Works by Thomas Alexander

Bibliography

Index

NOTE: Table of Contents subject to change up until publication date.

Leonard J. Waks

Leonard Waks earned his PhD in philosophy from the University of Wisconsin. He taught philosophy at Purdue and Stanford, and education at Temple, retiring in 2005. From 2018 to 2021 he was Distinguished Professor of Educational Studies at Hangzhou Normal University in China. He is past-president of the John Dewey Society and was the founding editor of Dewey Studies. In addition to numerous articles, he is the author of Education 2.0 (2014), The Evolution and Evaluation of Massive Online Courses (2017), and editor (with Andrea English) of John Dewey’s Democracy and Education: A Centennial Handbook (2017).

John Dewey; education; public education; pedagogy, curriculum; history of education; philosophy of education

PRESENTING SUPERB RESEARCH THAT ADVANCES THE FIELD OF EDUCATION

The Classroom Teacher and the Individual School Child

John Dewey’s Bridgewater Normal School Lectures (1922)

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Leonard J. Waks