C167 (Book Club): John Dewey Part 1

Welcome to confession number 167. My name is Lu Gerlach from thinkchat. This episode is starting a new book club series, because you know I love a good book club. 

The Stoics and the GOATs of Education
This summer, while traveling, I've been diving deep into podcasts and books that have genuinely shifted how I see the world. One author in particular has really resonated with me, a fellow Texan named Ryan Holiday. His podcast, The Daily Stoic, and his books draw fascinating connections between ancient Stoic philosophy and the challenges we face today. I've found myself captivated by figures like Marcus Aurelius, who, despite being one of history's most powerful rulers, spent his life wrestling with the most human of questions: What is the whole purpose of why we're here? He wasn't just a conqueror or a statesman. He was a thinker, someone who looked at the world around him and refused to stop asking why.
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This curiosity led me down a rabbit hole. I started exploring what Plato, Socrates, and the other great minds we've heard about our whole lives actually had to say about how we should live and how we should learn. The recurring theme I keep encountering is this: life has always been hard. It has always been a challenge. But those who rise to meet it are the ones who come out the other side stronger, wiser, and more grounded. This seems to be the throughline in everything the Stoics wrote, no matter the century, no matter the context.

Right now, I'm reading a tiny but remarkable book called How to Be a Stoic by Penguin Books. Don't let the size fool you. It is dense with wisdom, the kind of nuggets you can sit with for days and still find new meaning in. I'll be transparent: I don't know how to pronounce half of the philosophers' names, but that's okay. What matters is what they're saying. One of them wrote something that stopped me completely in my tracks: "An impression is all you are, not the source of the impression." Think about that for a moment. When I consider the world we live in today, flooded with impressions from every screen, every platform, every advertisement and algorithm, all of it quietly shaping what we want and who we think we are, that idea feels more urgent and more radical than ever. We are not the things that influence us. We are how we respond to them.

The same philosopher also writes, "Don't hope that events will turn out the way you want. Welcome events in whichever way they happen. This is the path to peace." Simple. Profound. Surprisingly hard to actually practice. But isn't that the whole point? The Stoics weren't offering easy comfort. They were offering something much more valuable: a framework for navigating a world that will never fully cooperate with our plans.

John Dewey
Here's where my brain did what it always does: it made a leap. If these ancient Stoics were the philosophers of life, then who are the Stoics of education? Who are the all-time greats, the true GOATs, who forever changed how we think about learning, about the rights of children, about what it actually means to teach? My brain started percolating. Naturally, names like John Dewey and Vygotsky rose to the top. These are people we reference constantly in education circles, people whose ideas form the backbone of so much of what we believe about how children learn.

Here's my honest confession though: even after years in this field, I've been guilty of grabbing light, contemporary snippets of their work rather than going back to the source. We all do it. We'll take a quick quote, a brief summary, a secondhand interpretation, and we move on. We lean toward the contemporary and the convenient rather than sitting with the original OGs and really wrestling with what they actually said. So this summer, that's exactly what I decided to change. My personal inquiry project became this: go back to the roots. Read what these people actually wrote. Understand them deeply enough to apply their ideas to the world we're living in right now.

I started with John Dewey's Experience and Education, originally a lecture series he delivered for Kappa Delta Pi back in 1938. Now I want to give you a little background on this man, because he deserves it. John Dewey graduated from the University of Vermont and earned his PhD from Johns Hopkins University, one of the most prestigious academic institutions in the world. He went on to teach at the University of Chicago and Columbia University, and before his death in 1952, he produced a body of work that continues to shape how we think about learning to this day. He is, without question, one of the most influential American philosophers in the history of education.

One of the things I've come to appreciate most about Dewey is that he placed the learner at the absolute center of everything. That's probably why so many educators have clung to his ideas across generations. It took me a while to fully arrive there myself, but I'm a believer now. Reading his actual words, rather than summaries of his words, made all the difference.

Experience and Education
In Experience and Education, Dewey emphasizes experience, experimentation, purposeful learning, and freedom as the cornerstones of what he called progressive education. Here's what strikes me about that: this was nearly 100 years ago. Nearly a century has passed, and we still have schools all over the world where children sit in rows, learning in subject silos, being talked at rather than engaged. On a large scale, we have not moved the needle. Why? Dewey's work points toward an answer, and it's a challenging one. It comes down to teachers. Not students. The students are ready. They have always been ready. It's the systems, and the people within those systems, that have resisted.

Right from the preface of this book, Dewey sets the tone with clarity: "All social movements involve conflict, which are reflected intellectually in controversies. Thinking about things that are an important social interest, such as education, were not also an arena of struggles, practical and theoretical." In other words, any time we try to push education forward, we should expect resistance. We should expect theoretical clashes, pushback from colleagues, pressure from administrators, skepticism from parents. That's not a sign that we're doing something wrong. It's a sign that we're doing something that matters.

He then says something I found both humbling and strangely comforting. “Developing a true philosophy of education is extraordinarily difficult, because every movement toward new ideas eventually faces a gravitational pull back toward the familiar. When life gets hard, when the workload becomes overwhelming, when we don't know what we're doing, we retreat. We reach for the tools and methods we already know, even if we've outgrown them.”

My Personal Connection
I felt that personally this past school year. I walked into my classroom managing three curricula at once, two of which had been so heavily revised they felt completely new to me. Half the time, I genuinely didn't know what I was doing, and I'll freely admit that. So what did I do? I reached back into my toolkit and pulled out inquiry-based practices I'd trusted for years. Not because I was abandoning new ideas, but because I needed something solid under my feet while I found my footing. I needed a foundation. Dewey would understand that impulse completely, because he writes about it. He acknowledges that sometimes the pull toward the past isn't weakness. Sometimes it's wisdom, as long as we don't stay there.

What I find remarkable is that even in 1938, Dewey was being labeled a progressive educator, and people were already fighting about it loudly. Traditionalists insisted on keeping to the old ways. The new school movement said tear it all down and start over. Dewey, wisely, refused to align himself fully with either camp. He warned that when any movement becomes an -ism, it gets so consumed by reacting against other -isms that it loses its own integrity and its own purpose. Progressivism stops being a genuine philosophy and becomes a thing, a target, something for opponents to dismantle rather than a set of ideas that are simply good and true and worth fighting for. We see this everywhere today, in politics, in media, in school board meetings. The moment you attach a label, you invite a war. Dewey saw it coming nearly a century ago.

This brings me to the passage that genuinely stopped me cold, and I want to remind you that I'm only on page 17 of this book. Dewey writes: "Mankind likes to think in terms of opposites. It is given to formulating its beliefs in terms of either-ors, between which it recognizes no intermediate possibilities." Read that again. He's describing with perfect precision what we see playing out today in every corner of public life. You're either with the traditional model or against it. You either believe in structure or you believe in freedom. You're either a rigorous teacher or a permissive one. There is no room for nuance, no space for complexity, and that rigidity is precisely what keeps us stuck.

He points out that this either-or thinking is especially dangerous in education, because those in power use it strategically. When educators try to move ideas forward, it becomes very easy for opponents to frighten parents, frighten voters, and frighten anyone who might otherwise be open to change. You're either teaching children to read or you're letting them run wild. You're either preparing them for the future or you're coddling them. The nuance gets lost, and the children pay the price.

Dewey describes what he sees as the core belief of traditional education, and I want you to sit with this: "The subject matter of education consists of bodies of information and of skills that have been worked out in the past. Therefore, the chief business of school is to transmit them to the new generation." The job of the teacher, in this model, is to deliver the past into the present. That's the whole role. Take what has already been figured out, package it, and hand it to the next generation. Dewey is not dismissing the value of that knowledge. Facts matter. Foundational skills matter. But he is asking us to consider whether transmission alone is truly education, or whether it's something closer to imitation.

He's also clear that the answer isn't to throw tradition out entirely. He says that both are essential. We need the content, the knowledge, the skills that generations of human beings have worked hard to develop. We also need purposeful learning, genuine experience, student agency, and the freedom to make meaning. When we strip out either one, we commit what he calls a miseducation. We short-change the child. The problem isn't tradition versus progressivism. The problem is the insistence that we must choose only one.

Dewey Application
So as you sit with all of this, whether you're a teacher, a school leader, a curriculum coordinator, or a parent, I want you to ask yourself something honest: are you promoting new thinking, or are you simply packaging the past? Are you creating space for children to inquire, to collaborate, to construct meaning, or are you delivering information and calling it learning? These are not easy questions. They're not meant to be. John Dewey wasn't offering easy answers in 1938, and the questions he raised are still unresolved today.

This is exactly why I want to keep unpacking this book with you. I'm only in the introduction, and already it's reshaping how I think about my own practice. In the next episode, we're going to do a real deep dive into chapter one and explore what Dewey says about traditional versus progressive education in much greater detail. For now, I just want to leave you with this: go back to the GOATs. Don't settle for the secondhand summary or the social media snippet. Read what these people actually said. Understand them in their own words. Because the more deeply we understand where these ideas come from, the more powerfully we can apply them to the classrooms and communities we're building right now.

I love you all. Keep doing the amazing work you're doing. This book is inspiring me, and I hope it inspires you too. See you in the next episode.