John Dewey High School Statue
Photographed in the early 70s. I received an extraordinary education at Dewey, for which this statue is an icon.
John Dewey High School was an experimental school begun in 1969, and run on the "learning by doing" philosophy of John Dewey. If 14 students wanted a class and a teacher was willing to teach it, that class was born. Students could take subjects on independent study; those ambitious and thorough enough could design their own courses. Extended hours gave students the choice of spending time at a resource center, where teachers were on hand to mentor. Alternatively, you could spend that extra time in the library, the labs, or the campus grounds (where I improved my handball game considerably). If you had a good chunk of time, you could scoot off to Coney Island a single subway stop away. A girl like myself could take Mechanical Drawing instead of Home Economics, and fulfill part of my phys. ed. requirement by taking Bowling. Creative arts reigned, along with a well-rounded liberal arts curriculum. By the time I graduated in 1975, the first budget cuts were being lowered on the NYC Board of Education; two decades after Dewey fell victim to those cuts, local school boards across the country started reinventing the wheel with charter schools. They'd have done well to keep the original blueprint for a successful revolution in education. That blueprint, in my opinion, was and still is Dewey.
John Dewey High School Statue
Photographed in the early 70s. I received an extraordinary education at Dewey, for which this statue is an icon.
John Dewey High School was an experimental school begun in 1969, and run on the "learning by doing" philosophy of John Dewey. If 14 students wanted a class and a teacher was willing to teach it, that class was born. Students could take subjects on independent study; those ambitious and thorough enough could design their own courses. Extended hours gave students the choice of spending time at a resource center, where teachers were on hand to mentor. Alternatively, you could spend that extra time in the library, the labs, or the campus grounds (where I improved my handball game considerably). If you had a good chunk of time, you could scoot off to Coney Island a single subway stop away. A girl like myself could take Mechanical Drawing instead of Home Economics, and fulfill part of my phys. ed. requirement by taking Bowling. Creative arts reigned, along with a well-rounded liberal arts curriculum. By the time I graduated in 1975, the first budget cuts were being lowered on the NYC Board of Education; two decades after Dewey fell victim to those cuts, local school boards across the country started reinventing the wheel with charter schools. They'd have done well to keep the original blueprint for a successful revolution in education. That blueprint, in my opinion, was and still is Dewey.