ge of educational reforms that degraded into today's version of progressive education. To see how such misunderstanding might have arisen--or not--it may be instructive to look briefly at Dewey's views directly. Dewey hopefully declared that "true education comes through the stimulation of the child's powers by the demands of the social situations in which he finds himself " (Dewey, 1897), which implies that education policy and praxis are linked to social well-being. Dewey envisioned education as an environment of safety in which method and principle could be discerned and tested, and later applied "on a wide scale, making it available for the mass of men, making it commercial. But the first thing is to discover the truth, to afford all necessary facilities" (Dewey, 1897).
Between the ideal vision and the reality of public education there lay tendencies that Dewey deplored. One was a tendency, just gaining traction at the turn of the 19th century, to track one set of students for academic and another for vocational study, with institutions of higher learning altogether aloof from primary and secondary schools. Another was the "subject-centered curriculum" that required students to learn facts without context instead of equipping them with resources of critical thinking and abstraction that could be brought to bear on new experience. That suggests that Dewey considered knowing how to think more valuable for students than knowing "the right answer." That aspect of Dewey's thought is in the background of what is called a constructivist or cognitive approach to learning, to describe a teaching method that valorizes active student engagement with the tools of knowledge "so as to develop[] a community of learners" (White, 1997). It is in that context that modern educational theory stresses the process of learning how to learn.
However, as Hirsch points out, Dewey was critical of reforms that privileged indirect methods of learning whil...