Abstract:
John Dewey has been criticized for failing to articulate social experiments in education that grew out of his pragmatic, experimental philosophy. This work responds to the criticism by showing, first, that Dewey’s Laboratory School at the University of Chicago was a social experiment that grew out of his philosophy; and, second, by arguing that just because Dewey’s portrayal of the relationship between idea and action requires the maker of the idea to participate in the action that tests the idea, he thought that ideas do not necessarily have general applicability to situations existing apart from the maker of the idea.