Challenge to liberal thought
John Dewey's case for holding an education in the scientific method above a liberal arts education
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"Challenge to Liberal Thought," an essay by John Dewey published in Volume 15 of John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925-1953, presents Dewey's case against liberal education. In the essay, he argues that liberal education focuses too heavily on the old, as he puts it, and is in fact illiberal because it isolates vocational and practical education from social, moral, and scientific education.
"Rather we rest our own critical estimate of the present educational situation upon a belief that the factors that correspond to what is living in present society, the factors that are shaping modern culture, are either confusedly smothered by excessive attention to the old or are diverted into channels in which they become technical and relatively illiberal in comparison with what they would be if they were given the central position."
Dewey points out that the liberal education of his time relied heavily on the wisdom of writers in ancient Greece (as it still does today). He saw this as a problem because, as he states, the liberal education of Greece was liberal because only those who were free from laborious work enjoyed it.