found that, despite all the newest developments in psychology and understanding of humans, none of them was really changing how teachers taught and how students learned. Thus, another of Dewey's idea of pedagogy is to integrate various disciplines to apply them to new situations. As his wife guided him, Dewey has the teacher guide more than instruct the student. The relationship between teacher and student is more egalitarian than what then was the norm.
However, Dewey later abandoned Hegel's for Darwin's unifying scheme through the increasing influence of evolutionary biology and psychology. In shifting his thinking from Hegel to Darwin, Dewey also helped establish what amounted to a school of philosophy at the University of Chicago, where he had moved. Dewey no longer even accepted god in the form of a rationally ordered universe. Instead, he saw knowledge both as another tool a human uses to do something with and as a part of evolution. The evolving ape that uses intelligence in selecting his sticks survives over and against the devolving ape that chooses any stick that is at hand. With Charles S. Pierce, William James, and George H. Mead, Dewey began to form a philosophy first known as Pragmatism, alluding to the practical (and non-spiritual) thinking in their philosophy. Later, however, the name was changed to Instrumentalism to reflect this idea of knowledge as a tool and schools as places where one simply learns to use that tool. (Many of Dewey's educational theories easily lent themselves to vocational education.) After this, the name was changed to Experimentalism, reflecting the scientific practices on which Dewey tried to model his educational theories.
Also at this time Dewey developed his theories of pedagogy, publishing his first books and eventually establishing a department of pedagogy at the University of Chicago. Again, his own upbringing can be seen in the tenet that a child's education should be oriented t...