“All learning is from experience.” This adage is consistent from our experience as adults, that we learn by doing, and not by sitting quietly for hours in the hope that what someone else reads or says will become what we know, can act on, and can examine independently and critically. The criticisms that students would level at formal education today are not new. John Dewey, the preeminent educational philosopher, raised many of the same concerns with traditional education in explaining the need for the Laboratory School he opened in Chicago in 1896. What you will see from the passages below, some in Dewey’s words and some written by Katherine Camp Mayhew and Anne Camp Edwards (who worked with John Dewey at the Laboratory School from 1896 to 1903 and wrote a book about the school), is that the problems with traditional schools have a long history and stubbornly resist change. In many ways, Ideal Schools shares Dewey’s philosophy of education and his goals for the Laboratory School and for primary and secondary education more broadly.

Describing the principles underlying his laboratory school over 100 years ago, John Dewey explained how the school stood apart from traditional schools:

“The basic principle necessarily demanded a very considerable break with the aims, methods, and materials familiar in the traditional school. It involved departure from the conception that, in the main, the proper materials and methods of education are already well-known and need only to be furthered, refined, and extended. It implied continual experimentation to discover the conditions under which educative growth actually occurs. It implied also much more attention to present conditions in the life of individuals, children, and contemporary society than was current in schools based chiefly upon the attainments of the past. It involved the substitution of an active attitude of work and play and of inquiry for the process of imposition and passive absorption of ready-made knowledge and preformed skills that largely dominated the traditional school. It implied a much larger degree of opportunity for initiative, discovery, and independent communication of intellectual freedom than was characteristic of the traditional school.”

“[T]hose subjects which have a positive content and intrinsic value of their own, and which call forth the inquiring and constructive attitude on the part of the pupil are made the core of the school work."

“For genuine intellectual development it is impossible to separate the attainment of knowledge from its application. The divorce between learning and its use is the most serious defect of our existing education. Without the consciousness of application, learning has no motive to the child.”

In other words, students must understand why they are learning what they are learning and why it matters. What Dewey described is now referred to as project-based or problem-based learning, which has become a mainstay of elite professional schools that rely on case studies, clinical programs, and other means to bring students into direct contact with the application of what they are learning. Ideal Schools will bring this approach to high school.

Dewey also saw the importance of small, innovative schools as laboratories for educational best practices that could ultimately inform the practices of larger traditional schools:

“In spite of all the advances that have been made throughout the country, there is still one unsolved problem in elementary and secondary education. That is the question of duly adapting to each other the practical and utilitarian, the executive and the abstract, the tool and the book, the head and the hand. This is a problem of such vast scope that any systematic attempt to deal with it must have great influence upon the whole course of education everywhere.”

Unfortunately for Dewey and for students today, his Laboratory School did not have the broader “great influence” he hoped.

Mayhew and Edwards further explain Dewey’s philosophy and goals as manifest in the Laboratory School as follows:

“‘He must learn by experience’ is an old adage too little heeded by modern methods of schooling. Too often these methods take for granted that there is a short cut to learning and that knowledge apart from its use has meaning for the developing mind. The memorizing of such knowledge has come to be a large part of present-day education, with the result that great masses of young lives have been denied the thrill of experimental living, of finding the way for themselves, of discovery, of invention, of creation. . . . The strong urge to investigate, present in every individual, is often crushed by the memorizing of great masses of information useless to him, or the learning of skills that he is told may be useful to him in the far-away future, the sometime, and the somewhere.”

“Custom and convention conceal from most of us the extreme intellectual poverty of the traditional course of study, as well as its lack of intellectual organization. It still consists, in large measure, of a number of disconnected subjects made up of more or less independent items. An experienced adult may supply connections and see the different studies and lessons in perspective and in logical relationship to one another and to the world. To the pupil, they are likely to be curiously mysterious things which exist in school for some unknown purpose, and only in school. . . . A great deal of school material is irrelevant to the experience of those taught and also manifests disrespect for trained judgment and accurate and comprehensive knowledge.”

“Our schools have still much to learn about the difference between inspiring a social outlook and enthusiasm, and imposing certain outward social conformities.”

Dewey, Mayhew, and Edwards, like students in school today and many of their teachers, recognized that traditional schools fall short of what is possible. Schools can be places where students want to be and where students learn and do great things that prepare them to succeed as adults. Today, we have a failure of imagination in formal education. Good ideas have been around for a long time; the challenge is to make them real. This is the aim of Ideal Schools.