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Educational Perspectives
Journal of the College of Education/University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa

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John Dewey in Hawai‘i

Volume 47 v Numbers 1 and 2 v 2015

Educational Perspectives
Journal of the College of Education/University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa

CONTENTS
Donald Young, Dean
Hunter McEwan, Editor
Lori Ward, Managing Editor
Darrell Asato, Graphic Designer
COLLEGE OF EDUCATION EDITORIAL BOARD
Kathryn Au, Professor Emeritus
Curtis Ho, Professor
Mary Jo Noonan, Professor
Eduardo Merc, COEDSA Chair

The Journal and the College of Education assume no
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Published twice each year by the College of Education,
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Copyright 2015 by the College of Education,
University of Hawai‘i at Mānoaiii

Contributors

1 Introduction to this Issue
		 Hunter McEwan, Editor
11 John Dewey’s Visits to Hawai‘i		 Hunter McEwan
23John Dewey and the Beginnings of Progressive
Early Education in Hawai‘i
		 Alfred L. Castle
28 Dewey in Hawai‘i—1899
		 Aulii Silva
34 Hanahau‘oli School: Theory Meets Practice		 Robert Peters
44

From School-Culture-to-Family-Culture:
Reflections on Four Generations of a Deweyan
Education in Hawai‘i		 Amber Strong Makaiau with Linda Summers Strong50		Re-reading Dewey Through a Feminist Lens
Mary Vorsino

55		John Dewey, An Appreciation
Robert W. Clopton

61

Pacific Commercial Advertiser

Synopses and Summaries of Dewey’s 1899 Lectureson the Life of the Child.

		This publication is available in microform fromBell & Howell, 300 N. Zeeb Road,Ann Arbor, Michigan 48106
and in pdf format at www.hawaii.edu/edper/
International Standard Serial Number(ISSN) 0013–1849

Volume 47

Numbers 1 and 2

2015

Cover Layout by Darrell Asato
Cover Photo: Dr. and Mrs. Dewey, John Dewey papers, Special Collections Research Center, Morris Library,Southern Illinois University Carbondale

iii

Contributors
Alfred L. Castle is a former educator and university administrator for the California State University system. Currently heserves as Chief Executive Officer for the Samuel N. and Mary
Castle Foundation, one of America’s oldest family foundations.
He has written and edited three books, contributed to a philosophy textbook, and written over fifty scholarly journal articles andencyclopedia entries in literature, philosophy, philanthropy, andhistory. He is a former Coolidge Fellow at Episcopal Divinity
School, a three-time Hoover Presidential Fellow, and a four-time
National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow. His concise
history of John Dewey and GH Mead’s importance in shaping
Hawai‘i’s early educational philosophy and practice is foundin his introduction to the book, The Collected Letters of Henry
Northrup Castle (Ohio University Press, 2014). He was educatedat Punahou, Colorado State University, the University of New
Mexico, the University of Virginia and Columbia University
majoring in U.S. intellectual history.
Robert W. Clopton (b.1906–d.1981) was a faculty member at
the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa from 1943 to 1967. Prior to
his appointment to the university faculty he served as a teacher
and administrator at a number of island schools including Kaua‘i
High School, Ka‘a‘awa Elementary School, and Helemano Elementary School. He gained a PhD from Northwestern University
in 1941, after which he was appointed as principal of Stevenson
Intermediate School. Clopton is known as a Dewey scholar andcoeditor with Tsuin Chen Ou of John Dewey: Lectures in China,
1919–1920.
Hunter McEwan is professor of education in the Departmentof Educational Foundations in the College of Education at the
University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. He gained his PhD from the
University of Washington in 1987 and was appointed as assistantprofessor in the College of Education in 1988. He has served
as the program chair of the College’s MEd program; chair of
the Department of Educational Foundations; and, from 2010 to2014, chair of the new EdD in Professional Educational Practice.
He has been the editor of Educational Perspectives since 1999.
Amber Strong Makaiau is the Director of Curriculum and Research at the University of Hawai‘i’s Uehiro Academy for Philosophy and Ethics in Education. She is a dedicated Philosophy forChildren Hawai‘i practitioner who achieved National Board Certification while teaching secondary social studies in the Hawai‘iState Department of Education. In 2011 she won the Teaching
Tolerance Award for Excellence in Culturally Responsive Teaching. Her current projects include working with pre-service social
studies teachers, using self-study to promote international collaborations, engaging in deliberative pedagogy, and teaching a brandnew high school course in philosophical inquiry.

Robert G. Peters retired from Hanahau‘oli School in 2013 after
thirty years as Head of School. Hanahau‘oli is a multi age schoolin the progressive education tradition. He is past president of the
Hawai‘i Association of Independent Schools and continues toserve on its board. Peters earned a doctorate from the Universityof Massachusetts in Amherst and has been an instructor in the
UH College of Education and the UH-HAIS master’s degree
program in Private School Leadership. A past member of theWestern Association of Schools and Colleges Accreditation
Commission, Peters also served on the board of the National
Association of Independent Schools. In 2000, he was a Visiting
Scholar at the Klingenstein Center at Columbia University. Peters
is currently chair of the state’s Early Learning Advisory Board
as well as a member of the Ho‘okako‘o Board. In 2008, he was
the UH Shiro Amioka Lecturer. He was a 2011 recipient of theHo‘okele Award given by the Hawai‘i Community and Gerbode
Foundations and serves as a trustee for the Samuel N. and Mary
Castle Foundation.
Aulii Silva is a Native Hawaiian educator who has spent twentytwo years developing, implementing, and evaluating the role ofco-curricular student engagement in holistic student development—the last seven of which have been building Leeward
Community College’s capacity to increase successful outcomes for
its Native Hawaiian students. She earned bachelor’s and master’s
degrees from the University of Redlands and is currently enrolled
in the PhD program in educational foundations at the Universityof Hawai‘i at Mānoa.
Linda Summers Strong has a BFA in Art Education and taught
studio art and art history for twenty-nine years at La Pietra
School. Currently, she volunteers at the Honolulu Museum of
Art School Lending Collection which houses more than thirteen
thousand examples of art and material culture from around theworld that are available to island educators to borrow.
Mary Vorsino is a doctoral candidate in educational foundations
at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa where she is studying critical feminist pedagogy, educational equity, and media discoursesof poverty and education. She received her master’s degree in
education from Chaminade University of Honolulu and also has amaster’s degree in political science from UH-Mānoa. In addition
to her scholarly pursuits, Vorsino is an award-winning Honolulubased writer and communications specialist. She served as a daily
newspaper reporter for more a decade, covering education, social
service issues, and mental health.

John Dewey in Hawai‘i

1

Introduction to This Issue
Hunter McEwan
In 1988, I was hired as an assistant professor in the Collegeof Education at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. My
new duties included membership of the college’s HolmesGroup committee which was developing a new teacher
education degree at the master’s level—the Master of
Education in Teaching (MEdT) program. The committee
wanted to get away from the old formula of teacher
preparation as a series of college courses plus a student
teaching experience. The new approach would get thestudents into the schools from the word go. Student teachers
would be grouped with their faculty advisors and mentor
teachers in partner schools that had a shared commitment
to preparing new teachers. The program also placed a highvalue on student inquiry. The first project that student
undertook was a group inquiry aimed at understanding
the culture of the school—in effect, they were to compose
a portrait of the school. Over the two year program, thestudents gradually gathered more classroom experience,
until, in the final semester, they took charge of their own
classroom under the guidance of a mentor teacher andfaculty supervisor (McEwan, 1996). The approach, indeed
the pedagogy, of the program was Deweyan in both spirit
and character. Students would learn how teach in thecontext of working as a teacher, but guided in their efforts
by experienced mentors who challenged them to reflect on
their practice. Professional inquiry had another important
place in the MEdT program from the group portrait of theschool begun in the first semester to the action research
project completed in the final semester.
For several of the senior members of the planningcommittee, the influence of Dewey derived from an earlier
COE program, the Innovative Program, that shared someof the pedagogic approaches of the MEdT. Occasionally,
Dewey’s name came up in planning discussions, but not somuch in reference to particular works or even to specificaspects of his ideas so much as a commitment to the ideaof learning by engaging student teachers, teachers, andfaculty in shared activities. When Dewey’s name did comeup it was often in reference to his visits to Hawai‘i and of

his influence in shaping Hawai‘i’s schools and programs.
Mostly, these stories seemed to me to be of doubtful
authenticity—suggesting stories that had spread by wordof mouth as opposed to anything based on acquaintance orevidence; and the speakers usually admitted, when pressed,that they had the story from someone else who had it fromanother person, who had it from…and so on. For example,
the story, which I heard from several sources, that he hadsomething to do with starting the University of Hawai‘i lab
school. But in spite of the unsubstantiated origins of theseclaims, I felt they might contain a grain of truth that would
yield something interesting if I took a closer look.
Dewey was connected with the start of the Henry andDorothy Memorial Free Kindergarten (HDMFK), notthe building adjacent to the College of Education, though
he undoubtedly visited the new Castle Memorial building
in 1951 a few years after it was built. He was, however,intimately connected with the establishment of the school
and the earlier HDMFK building that had been constructedon the site of the old Castle homestead on King Street—aconnection that is described in detail in Al Castle’s work,
A Century of Philanthropy: A History of the Samuel N. andMary Castle Foundation (2004). The first HDMFK school
was a building that Dewey would have been very familiar
with, though he would not have seen it in operation withstudents because it opened a few months after his first visit
to Hawai‘i in 1899. However, Dewey was instrumental
in finding the first director of the school, Mrs. Florence
La Victoire—a person whom Dewey knew well and could
vouch for as she had been a teacher in his lab school at the
University of Chicago.
These early intimations of a Hawai‘i connection with
Dewey got me thinking that it would be interesting to
explore the story of his visits to Hawai‘i more fully andto seek some answers to the questions that immediately
arose in my mind—what was his purpose, and what did heachieve? Could it be claimed as some did claim that Hawai‘i
was specially well-disposed to the implementation of his
educational theory?

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Educational Perspectives v Volume 47 v Numbers 1 and 2

The chronology published by the Center for Dewey
Studies at Southern Illinois University records that Dewey
visited Hawai‘i on three separate occasions: first, in August 1899; again, in August 1919; and finally, in January
1951, sixteen months before his death on June 1, 1952.
My first step in seeking answers to my questions about
Dewey’s visits took me to Southern Illinois University
at Carbondale, home to the Center for Dewey Studies,
to consult the collection of Dewey correspondence. The
search brought to light a number of letters from Deweyand his wife, Alice Chipman Dewey, that they wrote,
mainly to their children, describing their 1899 stay. I also
found other letters referencing their later trip in 1919 anda few letters from Dewey and his second wife, Roberta
Lowitz Grant Dewey that were written during the final
trip in 1951. The Dewey Center data base is searchable,
so it was a straightforward matter to identify all references
to Hawai‘i and come up with a complete set of lettersregarding the visits. During my stay in Carbondale, I
was graciously received by the center’s director, Larry
Hickman, and ably assisted in my search by his assistant,James Downhour, and other members of the center staff.
I have James to thank for bringing to light the wonderfulphotograph that we have used on the cover of this issueof John and Alice Dewey and other crew members posing
beside an outrigger canoe on Waikīkī Beach.
On my return to Hawai‘i, I used the dates of his visits
to search through the University of Hawai‘i microfilms
to gather further details from the newspapers of his stays
in Hawai‘i. The search, I am relieved to say, was greatly
facilitated when I discovered the Chronicling America
website and its searchable data base of U.S. newspapers—awonderful resource that helped me to target references
to Dewey’s first visit and freed me from the tedious andeye-glazing task of scrolling through reels of microfilm.
The Pacific Commercial Advertiser (PCA) was a particularlyrich resource and provided a number of detailed reports ofDewey’s lectures to supplement what I had already gleaned
from the correspondence. Chronicling America is a workin progress and although it helped immensely in locating
material relating to the first visit, unfortunately, for thelater visits, it was back to the discomforts and endless knob
turning of the microfilm reader.
So what did I find out? Clearly, from the point ofview of Dewey’s impact as an educator, the first visit is ofgreatest importance. The second visit, a short stopover on
the Dewey’s way to Asia, was a fleeting one that provided abrief opportunity to meet up with friends. The third visit inJanuary 1951, when Dewey was 91, was a longer trip of about
six weeks duration. He was accompanied on this third visitby his second wife, Roberta, and their two adopted children,
Adrienne and John Jr. The letters suggest that this trip was
health related and that Dewey was seeking some relief fromthe cold and damp, and the respiratory problems that were
plaguing him at that time. A fuller description of the visits isprovided in the article, “John Dewey’s Visits to Hawai‘i” on
pp. 14–24 of this volume.
The first visit to Honolulu had several purposes, both
personal and public, but the official one was to deliver twoseries of lectures in support of the establishment of university
extension courses in Hawai‘i. The newspapers at this timerefer to Dewey as “one of the foremost university extensionists…and a man of great executive ability…just the man to
set up a structure already started and push it forward.”2
University extension had been “already started” because
Dewey was preceded by a lecturer, from the University ofMichigan, Professor Henry W. Rolfe, who had arrived
with his wife in April of 1899 to give a series of lectures on
English and American literature.
At this time, Hawai‘i had no university. The Universityof Hawai‘i, which began life as the College of Hawai‘i, did
not get its start until 1908. But the demand in the islands forhigher education was strong and university extension courses
were viewed as a way of meeting that need. The driving force
behind the visits by Rolfe and Dewey were three prominent
Hawai‘i women. As reported in the PCA, those foremost in
the work were “Mrs. Meade (sic), wife of Professor Meade ofChicago; Mrs. F.M. Day; and Mrs Ethel Wing Castle.”3
It added that they had “devoted much time to correspondence to and fro and at the present time Mrs. Day…
is actually engaged in consulting with many of the foremost
educators upon the subject.”4 Rolfe and Dewey were experienced and committed university extension lecturers. Dewey
had been giving extension lectures in Chicago for someyears and Jane Addams recalls in her book, Twenty Years atHull House, an audience who “listened to a series of lectures
given by Dr. John Dewey on ‘Social Psychology’ as genuine
intellectual groups consisting of people from the immediateneighborhood” (p. 436). An interesting footnote, then, toDewey’s contribution to education during his first visit toJohn Dewey in Hawai‘i

Hawai‘i is that he played an important and foundational rolein efforts to establish university level education in Hawai‘i,nine years before the founding of the University of Hawai‘i.
The university extension movement began in Englandaround the same time as the settlement house movement.
In fact, they were closely connected, as was the free kindergarten movement, and each of the three can be considered
as integral outgrowths of the same egalitarian and social
activist spirit. This was also the case with the assertion of
women rights, given the prominence of women engaged
in educational reform like Jane Addams, Helen Castle,
Alice Dewey, and others. Jane Addams saw the settlement
movement itself as “a protest against a restricted view of
education [and] in line with this declaration, Hull Housein the very beginning opened what we called University
Extension Classes with a faculty finally numbering thirtyfive men and women” (Addams, p. 429).
As Mary Vorsino reports in her article in this issue,
a settlement house had been established in Honolulu in
1896—the Palama Settlement. One year earlier, in 1895
the Free Kindergarten and Children’s Aid Association was
created with a gift of $10,000 from Mary Tenney Castle
and under the direction of Harriet Castle, Charles M.
Hyde, and Henry Castle’s wife, Mabel Castle. University
extension would add a third leg to these philanthropic
endeavors—one that was also substantially supported by theCastle family. However, the extension movement that got
under way in Hawai‘i, unlike Chicago, was not annexed to
the Palama Settlement, but for reasons of local circumstanceand location was connected to the work of the teachers’
summer school organized each year from 1895 to 1899 by
Henry S. Townsend, the Inspector General of Hawai‘i’spublic schools. Dewey’s extension lectures were held in theevenings and the teachers’ summer school in the daytime
at the same location, Honolulu High School. The Deweys
had traveled to Honolulu with two of the teacher educatorsfrom Chicago who were to provide instruction at the summer school, Miss Florence Cooke and Miss Zonia Baber.
Both were from Colonel Parker’s Cook County Normal
School, and it is highly probable that the arrangements toobtain their services along with that of John Dewey werecoordinated and partly financed by the Castle family among
other influential people. As a reporter for the Hawaiian
Star observed of an earlier visitor to the summer school,
Colonel Parker: “the fees would not be sufficient to cover3

the expense of bringing the lecturers down. But this can bereadily overcome in a community such as this.”
Because the summer school classes were held during the
day and Dewey’s lectures in the evening at Honolulu HighSchool, summer school teachers were able, indeed encouraged, to attend the extension lectures. This arrangement also
allowed Dewey, on occasion, to visit the summer school.

The Lectures

Dewey agreed to deliver ten lectures in Honolulu between
Tuesday, August 15 and Friday, September 15, 1899. They
would be given in two sets of five lectures—the first set
on the Life of the Child and the second, on Movements
in Nineteenth Century Thought. However, in the end, forsome reason, Dewey cut the second set back to four
lectures; most likely due to a decline in the numbers
attending once the new school year got started at the
beginning of September.
In preparation for his talks, Dewey distributed a brief
synopsis of each lecture which was published in the PacificCommercial Advertiser (PCA) on the same day as his talk.
In addition, on the day following a lecture, the paper
published a summary based on notes taken by an audience
member. Unfortunately, the PCA has no record, either ofsynopsis or summary, for first lecture on August 15. Thismay have been due to some oversight. Or perhaps the editor
had been made aware, too late, after the first lecture, of the
popular demand for accounts of Dewey’s talks. Or perhaps
attendees, unfamiliar with the challenges of the content,
and who needed extra time to digest his ideas, appreciatedbeing able to follow Dewey in print and made this request
after the first lecture has been delivered. Fortunately, thenotes for the remaining eight talks were published andare available online at the Chronicling America website.1
Copies of these synopses and summaries of the first set of
lectures can be found on pp. 66–75.
The idea of the life of the child is a central idea of
Dewey’s pedagogy and one that he was in the process ofdeveloping for his most popular work, The School and Society,the first edition of which was published shortly after his
return from Honolulu, in November 1899. A good many of
the topics covered in his Honolulu talks are covered in The
School and Society, but the lectures also appear to containfresh material that prefigure ideas published in a later essay
on mental development (Dewey, 1900).

4

Educational Perspectives v Volume 47 v Numbers 1 and 2

The Life of the ChildTUESDAY, AUGUST 15
A Study of the Child (Announced in PCA Aug 14, p. 11)
FRIDAY, AUGUST 18
Early Childhood: Play, and Imagination. (See Synopsis in PCA Aug 18 and summary on
August 19) IMAGINATION AND ASSOCIATION The Natural Inheritances of the Child
Finally Dominating His Later Actions
TUESDAY, AUGUST 22
Later Childhood: Interest and Attention (See PCA synopsis on Aug 22
and summary on August 24)
FRIDAY, AUGUST 25
Adolescence and Emotions. (See PCA synopsis on Aug 25 and summary on August 26)
TUESDAY, AUGUST 29
General principles of growth. (See PCA synopsis on Aug 29 and summary on Aug 30)

Movements in Nineteenth Century Thought
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 1, 1899
Influence of Rousseau on French Political History and Literature
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 5
Goethe and Schiller and the Ethics of Culture and Art
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 8
The Influence of Scientific Thought
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 12
The Ethics of Social Welfare

Dewey is frequently regarded as a child-centered as
opposed to a subject-centered educator, which the phrase“the life of the child” would appear to support. But this is
to misunderstand what Dewey means. What is central to
Dewey’s pedagogy is a conception of social life centered on
an ideal of family life, and this was the principal topic andtheme of Dewey’s first set of talks in Hawai‘i. The idea ofthe life of the child represents a reorientation in education—a sort of shift in the center of gravity away from that whichplaced the teacher and subject disciplines as the main focus
in pedagogic practice to an idea of the child as an active,
engaged participant in school activities. School life would

take on the quality of active involvement in family affairs
as a basis upon which to build school life in ways that were
to be guided and directed by the teacher. Thus, in Dewey
words, schooling “is a matter of doing systematicallyand in a large, intelligent, and competent way what forvarious reasons can be done in most households only in acomparatively meagre and haphazard manner” (Dewey,
1899, pp. 23–24).
The second set of lectures on Nineteenth Century
thought are of more general philosophical interest— topics
that would be typical of Dewey’s work as a university
teacher of philosophy, such as the influence of Rousseau on

John Dewey in Hawai‘i

French thought, Goethe and Schiller on ethics and art, andthe impact of science on traditional moral beliefs. Thus, thesecond set of lectures may have been more specialized andless likely to attract the large numbers of educators who had
been drawn to his first five lectures. The PCA provided
summaries of the first talk in the series, two summaries ofthe second talk, and one of the third.

Dewey’s Influence on Education in Hawai‘i

If Dewey’s impact is to be judged merely in regard to his
work in “pushing forward the work of university extension
on the Islands” as the PCA opined then very little would
appear to have come of it. In fact there is no evidence in thenewspapers that the life of university extension extended
beyond Dewey’s visit in 1899. Indeed, university extension
appears to have ended with him. It is likely, of course, that
this may have been due to the expense; but it may also bethat the lectures had succeed in demonstrating the appeal ofhigher education in Hawai‘i and that the powers represented
by the University Club, that select group of professional men
who had enjoyed the privileges of a mainland university
education and who had been placed in charge of university
extension, had decided that resources might be better employed in pushing forward with the grander plan of establishing a university—a reading of events that gives Dewey
and Rolfe a modest and indirect role in the opening of theCollege of Hawai‘i (now the University of Hawai‘i) in 1908.
Dewey’s philosophy of education was an important influence on Harriet Castle who was the driving force behindthe establishment of the Free Kindergarten and Children’s
Aid Association. Dewey also played an important, thoughindirect, role in starting the Memorial Kindergarten aroundthe time of his visit in 1899—first, in recommending theschool’s first director, Florence La Victoire, a teacher at his
lab school in Chicago; and, secondly, though the applicationof his ideas to the work of the school.
As Aulii Silva argues in her article in this issue, Hawai‘i
provided fertile ground for Dewey’ ideas on education. She
recognizes Kamehameha III (Kauikeaouli), King of Hawai‘ifrom 1825 to 1854, as the first progressive educator in his
efforts to establish free schools for all the people of Hawai‘i.
By the end of the Nineteenth Century, progressive education
ideas were widely held and not just by reform-minded people
like the Castles, but among those involved in public education, too; especially as a direct result of the work of Henry

5

S. Townsend, the Inspector General of Hawai‘i’s publicschools from 1894 to 1900.
Townsend has also been referred to as Hawai‘i’s firstprogressive educator (Wist, 136), but whether it is he or
Kauikeaouli who deserves the title, it is certainly the casethat Townsend did a great deal to promote progressive
educational methods among Hawai‘i’s educators; thus
preparing the ground for Dewey’s 1899 visit. First, in
1890, Townsend started a professional educational journal,
The Progressive Educator, which, as its masthead declared,
was“devoted to the theory and art of teaching with specialreference to the educational problems confronting teachersof the Hawaiian Islands.” According to Benjamin Wist thejournal became “the incentive for teacher reading circles anddiscussion clubs. It was thus that the public school teachersof Hawai‘i were introduced to the educational philosophy ofJohn Dewey.”2
Secondly, in 1896, after he had been appointed inspector general, taking over the role from Alatau Atkinson, “anextreme formalist” in Townsend’s opinion, (Townsend,
1936, p. 20), Townsend helped to organize a series ofsummer schools for teachers. Although they ran for only
four years, from 1896 to 1899, the summer schools attracted
some major educators from the mainland including, in
1898, Colonel Francis Parker and his wife from the Cook
County Normal School. In the following year, at the sametime as Dewey’s visit, Frances Cooke and Zonia Baber,also from Cook County Normal school, arrived as visiting
lecturers. In Colonel Parker’s opinion “Miss Baber was thebest teacher of geography that he ever saw in his life…andMiss Cooke was his ideal primary teacher.”3 The Castle
family, especially Helen Castle Meade and Harriet Castle
Coleman, were undoubtedly instrumental in facilitatingthese visits through their connections with the Universityof Chicago, and especially in attracting Dewey to give his
extension lectures around the same time that the summer
school was in session.
It is striking, therefore, that so shortly after Dewey
gave his extension lectures that the forward march of
progressive ideas on public education in Hawai‘i came to an
abrupt halt. In 1899, Townsend’s reign as head of the school
system came to an end, and with his departure a period ofprogressive education gave way to a return to one of extreme
formalism. The catalyst for this change was the Hawaiian
Organic Act of July 14, 1900 and the incorporation of

6

Educational Perspectives v Volume 47 v Numbers 1 and 2

Hawai‘i as a territory of the United States. Townsend was
almost immediately replaced by Alatau Atkinson, whobecame the new superintendent of public instruction.
Townsend, however, stayed on as inspector general,
effectively a demotion to deputy superintendent, for one
more year. Instead of the summer school which had done
so much to introduce Hawaiian educators to progressive
educational thought and ideas, at the Board of Education’s
recommendation, he was directed to conduct a ten-weekexperimental normal school program, in the summer of
1900, at Honolulu High School with the aim of increasing
the number of certificated teachers.
The visits to the summer school of Colonel Francis
Parker, Zonia Baber, Florence Cooke, and John Dewey
provided a progressive impetus to the start of the Honolulu
Normal and Training School that Townsend continued byappointing Edgar Wood as head of the school. Lawrence
Fuchs refers to Wood as continuing Townsend’s traditionof filling the heads of young teachers with progressive ideas(p. 269)—a tradition that Benjamin Wist was to continue
after he was appointed to lead the normal school in 1921.
Townsend’s initial efforts bore fruit and Dewey, who wasinvited to evaluate the work of the Territorial Normal andTraining School, as it was called by 1912, found it to be“well to the front in educational ideals” though headded prophetically and with considerable insight into the
local situation that “it would probably meet opposition inits development.” 4
Townsend was finally assigned to the principalshipof Kaahumanu School, a position he held for a year before
he left Hawai‘i on August 3, 1901 with his wife and threechildren to become superintendent of schools in Manila.5
Lawrence Fuchs (1961) writes that Townsend had mademany enemies among the ruling elite: “His constant prating
about democracy in the classroom, the development ofstudent initiative, and the need for more higher education
marked him as a radical” (p. 265).
The first two decades of the twentieth century brought
about a big change in educational policy and practices in
Hawai‘i. Wist records thatHawaiian educational history records an abruptchange under the Territorial form of government. For
a period of two decades—a period during which thephilosophy of John Dewey was making ever deeper
inroads into educational practices elsewhere—thehistory of public education in Hawai‘i reflects little
response to the philosophy of experimentalism.
Townsend …was forced to give way to conservative
leadership. Public education in Hawai‘i, during thefirst two decades under Territorial government, wascarried on in a pattern of extreme formalism.6
Although public education was given over toformalism, no such constraints inhibited private education.
In many respects, private schools, at least some private
schools, have been far more open to trying out Dewey’s
ideas; undoubtedly because they have the resources to try
them out. For example, Mid-Pacific Institute, formed
in 1908 from the merger of Kawaiahao Seminary for
Girls and Mills Institute for Boys, and subsidized by theDamon, Wilcox and Atherton families, was, in its earlyyears, “led by a principal [Dr. John Hopwood] imbued
with progressive ideas” (Fuchs, p. 267–268). In 1918,
Hanahau‘oli School was founded by Sophie Judd Cookeand dedicated to the implementation of Dewey’s pedagogic
principles—the Hawaiian word chosen for the name of theschool, hanahau‘oli, translated at “joyous work,” has a nicecorrespondence with Dewey’s views on play and work, notas opposing terms but as interconnected attitudes, and as
he puts it: “work which remains permeated with the play
attitude is art—in quality if not in conventional designation”(1916, p. 214). Not only did the school appeal to thoseprinciples in the beginning, it has sustained them in its
practices for close to a century. Two articles in this issue
describe the work of Hanahau‘oli. First, Robert G. Peters,
who was head of school from 1982 to 2013, describes how
Hanahau‘oli puts Dewey’s educational ideas into practiceand how teachers and students learn together “by doing.”
In a second article on the school, Amber Strong Makaiau
and Linda Summers Strong paint a dynamic portrait of theschool and its impact on learning from the perspective offour generations of their family, who are descendants ofthe founder.
By the 1920s circumstances became more favorable
to change and a new, more progressive era of education
was ushered in, largely as a result of a survey conducted by
the Federal Commissioner for Education that criticized
the public school system for providing limited options
to its students and demanding, among other things, that
education “should be encouraged to develop an interest inteaching, law, medicine, research and languages” (Fuchs.

John Dewey in Hawai‘ip. 271). Other factors, such as an influx of teachers from
the Mainland who were influenced in their preparation
programs by progressive ideas, weighed in favor of moredemocratic approaches to education. In addition, the normal
school under Benjamin Wist, was dedicated to preparing
local teachers in progressive ideas. As a result, “Because
Hawaii’s Department of Public Instruction and some of its
most influential teachers were imbued with the educational
philosophy of John Dewey, Hawaii’s schools emphasized
freedom and democracy as much as, or more than, schools
on the Mainland during the 1920s” (Fuchs, p. 284). But not
all of these influential teachers were attending exclusively
to Dewey and his works. Educators were also influenced
by the works of William Heard Kilpatrick and George
Counts. Hubert Everly confessed to me once that Dewey
was too much of a hard read to be useful and that George
Counts and his 1932 call, Dare to Build a New Social Order,
was a bigger influence on him and many other progressive
educators (Potter and Williams, p. 15).
Dewey’s ideas are frequently viewed as too abstractand his writings too difficult to understand to have any
direct impact on what teachers do. A frequent complaintof my students, when studying Dewey’s classical work on
education, Democracy and Education, is that Dewey provides
few clues on how to translate his ideas into action. Such isthe fate of the philosopher. In gauging Dewey’s influenceon education in Hawai‘i, therefore, it is important to focus
attention on a select group of interpreters—those who haveshown an understanding of his work and who have followed
through robustly in implementing his ideas into action in
the schools. Three people who have had such an impact
on education in Hawai‘i stand out in meeting these two
criteria—George E. Axtelle, Miles E. Cary, andRobert W. Clopton.
George E. Axtelle (1893—1974) was a philosopher ofeducation who is best known as the first editor of theCollected Works of John Dewey and president of the executive
committee of the John Dewey Society. What is less
known is that Axtelle served from 1927 as the principalof Kawananakoa Experimental School in Hawai‘i, tasked
with the job of implementing and promoting progressive
teaching methods and curriculum (Fuchs, 285). Dotts and
Sikkema (1994) suggest that at best, the experiment had
mixed results and largely because Axtelle, though immersed

7

in Dewey’s philosophy, had little grasp of how to translatethese ideas into action. Yet, in spite of the challenges inencouraging teachers to embrace the demands placed onthem by Dewey’s pedagogy the Kawananakoa experiment
did achieve results in moving teachers away frommethods based on routine instruction and memorization
drills. As Dotts and Sikkema report, “A number of theteachers involved had, themselves, become learners in an
educational experience that had turned them around andhad permanently changed their perception of education”(1994, 116). Axtelle earned his master’s degree from the
University of Hawai‘i in 1928 and went on to gain his EdD
from the University of California in 1935. In 1959 he wasappointed as professor of education in the Departmentof Administration and Supervision at Southern Illinois
University (SIU) where he helped to start work on The
Collected Works of John Dewey which led in 1971 to theestablishment of the Center for Dewey Studies at SIU.
Miles E. Cary (1894–1959) served as the principal of
McKinley High School from 1924 to 1947. During theseyears, Cary was noted for enacting reforms in the curriculum at McKinley that derived from Dewey’s philosophicalideas on democratic education (Fuchs, 286–291). Caryearned a doctoral degree from Ohio State University in
1937. His dissertation, Integration and the High School
Curriculum, drew inspiration from Dewey’s philosophy
to clarify the meaning of the concept of integration. He
concludes that integration is best understood as “an effort tomaintain dynamic equilibrium in a changing environment,”
and that “it is essential that the environment of the learnerbe rich in materials, tools, experts, etc., and made available,
in order that the individual may use and reconstruct it in theprocess of solving his problems” (p. 91). Fuchs pays tributeto Cary’s contribution to the development of democratic
aspirations among his students in these words: “In no otherinstitution in the Islands was this philosophy carried togreater length than at McKinley High School in Honolulu.
There Miles Cary, with his deep faith in children and contagious enthusiasm for democracy, influenced thousands ofgraduates during his tenure as principal” (p. 286).
Cary left Hawai‘i and McKinley in 1947 and “with theloss of his creative leadership and with no attempt to relieve
it, the program gradually reverted to that of other publichigh schools in Hawai‘i” (Dotts and Sikkema, p 122).

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Educational Perspectives v Volume 47 v Numbers 1 and 2

Robert W. Clopton (1906–1981) was a professor of thephilosophy and history of education at the Universityof Hawai‘i from 1943 until his retirement in 1973. Heserved as Chair of the Department of Education (now the
Department of Educational Foundations) from 1947 to1965. In 1965–66 he was appointed as a senior specialist at
the East-West Center during which time he helped edit abook on John Dewey’s lectures in China.
As a scholar Clopton was deeply appreciative ofDewey’s work and is noted for co-editing, with Tsuin-Chen
Ou, John Dewey: Lectures in China, 1919–1921. Clopton had
discover that no record remained of the lectures that Dewey
had delivered in China, other than the Chinese translations
that were published in newspapers shortly after they had
been delivered. With the help of Tsuin-Chen Ou and a
graduate student, Chung-Ming Lu, the Chinese newspaper
versions were translated back into English. Clopton andOu describe their procedure as follows: “Chung-Min Lu
made exact, literal translations from the Chinese, which
Dr. Clopton rendered into idiomatic English. Dr. Ou thencompared this version for fidelity to the Chinese text, after
which Dr. Clopton incorporated Dr. Ou’s suggestions formodification” (Clopton, p. 33).
As a teacher, Clopton was regarded by his students assomewhat plodding—“he hummed and hawed a lot”—buthe did inspire his students to be reflective and “to shapea vision of education as a force for social, political, andeconomic change” (Potter and Williams, 13–14).
In 1966, Clopton became the Administrative Directorof the University of Hawai‘i Peace Corp Training Centerin Kona on the Big Island. Clopton set about the task intrue Deweyan fashion and sought to implement a program
which immersed peace corp trainees in realistic training
situations. For instance, he and his assistant, Aiko Oda,
had experienced some difficulties in finding suitableaccommodation for the trainees. Clopton thought that
housing the trainees with local families would be an ideal
experiential approach that would simulate some aspects ofactual overseas living situations. Others thought the plan
would meet with resistance. But he was adamant that it
would work if they took a personal approach; so, he andOda set about “walking the coffee fields and small villagesof Kona…and by the end of the week, enough housing waspromised for all the trainees” (Potter and Williams, p. 14).
Clopton’s work shows a deep understanding and love ofDewey’s philosophy as well as a commitment to democratic
education in his university teaching. He also had the good
fortune to meet and befriend Dewey during the latter’s visit
in 1951. His presidential address to the Hawai‘i chapter of
Phi Kappa Phi on May 8, 1962 is published for the firsttime in this issue of Educational Perspectives.

Conclusion

I have now come almost full circle in my narrative.
Aiko Oda, Robert Clopton’s assistant at the Peace Corp
Training Center in Kona, was the first director of the
Master of Education in Teaching (MEdT) program, theDewey-inspired teacher preparation program that I referto in the first paragraph. Dr. Oda, a professor of counselor
education, brought an entirely different and refreshingly
new perspective to teacher preparation—one shaped by her
experience in clinical field work, which placed an emphasis
on professional learning in the context of working in actual
professional settings. Dr Oda and the program faculty werealso strongly committed to collaborative decision making
and working in partnership with the schools—consequencesof our membership in John Goodlad’s partnership for
educational renewal. An executive council composed ofuniversity faculty, partner-school teachers, principals, andstudent representatives met monthly to discuss programissues. Students engaged in collaborative inquiry projects,
often with the involvement of their mentor teachers. These,
and other program features lent the program a powerfulprogressive feel. Dewey’s influence came from several
quarters—from Goodlad, certainly; but also from membersof the planning committee and the group of faculty who
worked with Aiko Oda in the early years to launch theprogram—Barry Bull, Phil Whitesell, Frank Brown,
Anne Phelan, Gay Reed, Hunter McEwan, Sara Hodell,
Alan Awaya, Neil Pateman, and Ralph Steuber (Oda andWhitesell, 1996).
I learned a great deal from my years in working in
the MEdT, and more recently in collaboration with mycolleagues in Educational Foundations on our innovative
summer masters programs—the EdLeads and the Private
School Leadership programs. These experiences provided
lessons and formed professional connections that were put touse when, with faculty and representatives from public andindependent schools, we planned for and launched the new
EdD in professional education practice at Mānoa.

John Dewey in Hawai‘i

The first lesson was about community and partnership.
Dewey talks about the constitution of a democratic
community as one in which there is a variety of sharedperspectives and a free back and forth play of ideas among
members of the group. Diversity in viewpoints bringsnovelty; novelty stimulates thought (Dewey, 1916, p.
90–91). In developing the EdD we aimed to bring together
a diverse group of students and teachers in a climate thatencouraged sharing of different points of view. The firstcohort, for example, included teachers from elementaryand secondary schools, public and independent school
administrators, and higher education faculty. Our teaching
staff were drawn from faculty in several college departments
and from administrators with years of experience—somein private and some in public schools. Our meetings wereconstructed with full group attendance so that we had ample
opportunities for group sharing and discussion.
The second lesson was about the importance ofpractitioner inquiry and of research conducted as a formof artistry. I think that this is one of Dewey’s mostimportant insights about the nature of research—that the
researcher, whether as scientist, engineer, physician, or
teacher is at root the practitioner of an art. My colleague,
Gay Reed, and I have been exploring this theme in a paper(unpublished) that draws inspiration from Dewey’s ideas,
especially on aesthetics (Reed and McEwan, 2014). As
Dewey argues, artistry requires a “full and free interest”
in one’s work. Fullness of interest refers to the intimacy of
the insider viewpoint— the kind of detailed understandingthat comes with familiarity with a particular situationor activity—the situational awareness of what is often
referred to, disparagingly, as the “subjective point of view.”
Free interest introduces the notions of exploration andexperimentation—conditions that enable artistry to flourish.
“There is a tendency among lay critics,“ in Dewey’s view,“
to confine experimentation to scientists in the laboratory.
Yet one of the essential traits of the artist is that he (sic) is aborn experimenter” (1934, p. 148).
It has been one hundred and sixteen years since Dewey
first visited the islands to give his lectures on the Life of theChild and almost one hundred years since the publicationof Democracy and Education, but his ideas on the art ofeducation are still as fresh and relevant today as they were
to his audience in Honolulu in 1899. Dewey’s philosophy
provides a devastating critique of traditional methods of9teaching in which instructional aims are established inisolation from the learner, where teachers furnish readymade material, and learning is measured by memorizationof content imparted. In contrast, he offers a pedagogy ofshared activity and participation, where schooling is a formof community life in which there is “a give and take in thebuilding up of a common experience” (1916, p. 368).
Dewey’s visits, his personal connection to the Castle
family, and the dedication and influential work of disciples
like Henry Townsend, Harriet Castle, Miles Cary, George
Axtelle, Benjamin Wist, and others have contributed to
Dewey’s special status in Hawai‘i as a familiar presence—akind of guiding spirit for educators who want to offer
students an alternative to dominant educational practices
based on teaching as telling and learning as memorization.
In this volume, the articles provide some backgroundto Dewey’s special connection to Hawai‘i and give an idea
about his pedagogic theory and why it is of continuing
educational importance. In addition, they tells us
something of his special relevance to educators in Hawai‘iand why his philosophy will continue to be useful toteachers who make the effort to try out his ideas.

REFERENCES

Addams, J. (1911). Twenty Years at Hull House with AutobiographicalNotes. New York: Macmillan.
Castle, A. L. (2004). A Century of Philanthropy: A History of the SamuelN. and Mary Castle Foundation. Revised Edition. Honolulu: Hawaiian
Historical Society.
Clopton, R. W. and Ou, T-C. (1973). John Dewey: Lectures in China,
1919–1921. Honolulu: University Press of Hawai‘i.
Cary, M. E. (1937). Integration and the High School Curriculum.
Dissertation, The Ohio State.
Dewey, J. (1899). The School and Society. In Boydston, Ed., (19eightyseven), Middle Works, Vol. I, pp. 5–109.
Dewey, J. (1900). “Mental Development.” In Boyston, Ed., (19eightyseven), Middle Works, Vol. I. pp. 192–221.
Dewey, J. (1916). Democracy and Education. In Boydston, Ed.,
(19eighty-seven), Middle Works, Vol. 9, pp. 4–402.
Dewey, J. (1934). Art as Experience. In Boydston, Ed., (19eighty-seven),
Later Works, Vol. 10, pp. 7–453.
Dotts, C. K. and Sikkema, M. (1994). Challenging the Status Quo: Public
Education in Hawai‘ i 1840–1980. Honolulu: Hawai‘i Education
Association.
Fuchs, L. H. (1961). Hawai‘ i Pono. New York: Harcourt, Brace,
Jovanovich.

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Educational Perspectives v Volume 47 v Numbers 1 and 2

McEwan, H. (1996). “Concerning the Master of Education in Teaching
Program.” Educational Perspectives, Vol. 30, 1, pp. 2–4.
Oda, E. A. and Whitesell, P. (1996). “The Development of the METProgram.” Educational Perspectives, Vol. 30, 1, pp. 5–7.
Potter, R. E. and Williams, R. (2000). “Two Progressives: Profilesof Robert Walter Clopton and Hubert Victor Everly.” Educational
Perspectives, Vol. 33, 2, pp. 12–18.
Reed, G. G. and McEwan, H. (2014). “Practitioner Inquiry as Artistry.”
Paper presented at the Twenty-Sixth Annual Ethnographic andQualitative Research Conference (EQRC), Flamingo ConferenceCenter, Las Vegas, Nevada, February 10, 2014.
Townsend, H.S. (1936) Education as I Saw It in the Hawai‘ i of the
Nineties, Ed. B.O. Wist. Hilo: Typewritten Manuscript.
Wist, B. O. (1940). A Century of Public Education in Hawai‘ i. Honolulu:
The Hawai‘i Educational Review.

ENDNOTES
1

Letter from B. O. Wist to John Dewey on the occasion of his ninetiethbirthday, The Influence of John Dewey upon Education in Hawai‘i,
October 20, 1949, Center for Dewey Studies, Carbondal, IL. Ltr 11752.

2

The Hawaiian Star, Aug. 5, 1899, p. 1.

3

The reference to “Mrs Meade” is to Helen Castle Mead, wife of George
Herbert Mead. Mead was a colleague of Dewey’s at the University of
Chicago and a prominent philosopher and psychologist.

4

Maui News, Sept. 14, 1912)

5

PCA, December 14, 1898 p.1.

6

The Hawaiian Star, Dec. 14, 1898, p. 1

7

http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov

8

Ltr 11752.

9(Hawaiian Star, May 20, 1899, p. 1).

10

PCA, December 14, 1898 p.1.

11

Letter from B. O. Wist to John Dewey on the occasion of his ninetiethbirthday, The Influence of John Dewey upon Education in Hawai‘i,
October 20, 1949, Center for Dewey Studies, Carbondal, IL.
Ltr 11752.

John Dewey in Hawai‘i

11John Dewey’s Visits to Hawai‘i
Hunter McEwan

John Dewey visited Hawai‘i on three separate occasions. Of
all three trips, by far the most important, as far as Dewey’s
influence on education in Hawai‘i is concerned, was in 1899
when he came with his wife, Alice Chipman Dewey, tohelp launch the University Extension program in Honolulu.
Dewey gave two sets of extension lectures. The first set,
entitled “The Life of the Child,” was composed of fivelectures; the second was a set of four lectures on the topic
of nineteenth century thought. The Deweys’ second trip
was a very brief one—twenty years later, in 1919, during abrief stopover on their way to Japan and thence to China.
It is possible that they made a similar stop on their return,in 1921, but there is no evidence of this in the Dewey
correspondence.1
The final visit took place in 1951 when Dewey wasninety-one years old and in poor health. Indeed, Dewey’s
health appears to have been one of the main reasons for
his visit, in which he was accompanied by his second wife,
Roberta Lowitz Grant, and their two adopted children,
Adrienne and John Jr.

The First Visit

On August 1, 1899, Dewey and his wife Alice Chipman
Dewey, arrived from San Francisco on the SS America
Maru 2 after a record crossing of five days, nine hours, andfifty-nine minutes.3 By this time in his career, Dewey was
beginning to achieve prominence as an educator and there
was considerable interest being taken at the national level in
his laboratory school. His arrival in Hawai‘i was announcedwith great fanfare and considerable anticipation of what
his presence could bring in establishing university-level
education in the islands. Dewey’s principal purpose was tohelp launch the university extension movement, but he wasalso in Hawai‘i to visit with his friends, the Castles, who
had done so much to support his laboratory school at the
University of Chicago, and who were keen to promote his
ideas among local educators. The Hawaiian Star announced
him as a man possessed of an “aggressive spirit” who was

one of the foremost “university extensionists…a man ofgreat executive ability…just the man to set up a structure
already started and push it forward.”4 Dewey’s celebrity as
an educator and lecturer, it was opined, would attract a wide
audience, and the teachers who were attending summer
school in the same building would especially benefit fromhis ideas on the life of the child. In order to accommodate
the teachers, therefore, the Honolulu High School extension classes were held on Tuesday and Friday evenings anddesigned to be continuous with the teachers’ summer school.
Dewey was preceded as an extension lecturer by Henry
W. Rolfe who had arrived in Honolulu in April, 1899, toteach the first set of university extension courses. Rolfe’s
visit overlapped with the Deweys’ stay by about one week
and the two men seemed to know and like each other well.5
Rolfe was a professor of English literature at the Universityof Chicago and a “bright and brilliant lecturer.”6 Rolfe’s
first extension talks were very popular and well attended,notably the first one which attracted a large and diverse
group composed of eager students and prominent persons.
The Pacific Commercial Advertiser reported that “among
the listeners were those to whom the discourse broughtfond recollections of happy days; and there were many towhom a university education had been denied and who were
anxious to take advantage of what is proving an admirable
substitute.” 7 Rolfe’s first university extension course
certainly attracted some illustrious persons. One grouprepresented the University Club—an all-male club whose
members included President Dole, Minister Mott-Smith,Chief Justice Judd, Judge Frear, and Professor Hosmer of
Oahu College, who were there to lend their imprimatur to
Rolfe’s course.
The University Club, established in 1896 on themodel of prestigious mens’ clubs of the period, was a selectassembly of Hawai‘i-based university graduates.8 Generally
its function appears to have been devoted to bi-annual
banquets, to which were added the diversion of after-dinnerspeeches; but shortly after Dewey’s arrived the club

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Educational Perspectives v Volume 47 v Numbers 1 and 2

Mary Tenney Castle, 1907 (Wikimedia Commons)

agreed to oversee the work of university extension in theislands. Another group in attendance at Rolfe’s talk wererepresentatives of the Castle family such as Mary Tenney
Castle, William Castle and his wife, and Harriet (Castle)
Coleman, who was making such important contributions
to philanthropic work in Hawai‘i and who had been
instrumental in obtaining Rolfe and Dewey through herfamily connections with Helen and George Herbert Meadof the University of Chicago.
The University Extension movement was first developed in England in the 1860s by James Stuart, Professor
of Engineering at Cambridge University. Walter Bittner
writes in his history of the extension movement that, “Asa result of the pioneer work of Professor Stuart of Cambridge…several universities took up his lecture methodwith growing success.”9 A similar approach was adopted in
the United States “and in the years of 1888 to 1892 showeda rapid development. From then on the movement declined
until about 1906, when new methods were adopted and aslow systematic growth set in.”10
Dewey was familiar with the extension movement
through his association with Jane Addams at Hull
House. Jane Addams believed strongly that university
extension was integral to the work that she was doing at

Hull House: “Settlement is a protest against a restricted
view of education (and) in line with this declaration,
Hull House in the very beginning opened what we called
College Extension Classes with a faculty finally numbering
thirty-five college men and women.”11 Thus, “Hull House
became one of the early university extension centers, first inconnection with an independent society and later with the
University of Chicago.”12 Dewey was an eager participant in
the extension movement and among its first supporters. In
1894, he gave a series of extension lectures there on social
psychology and other topics and followed through withregularity in future years.13
As the second extension lecturer in Hawai‘i, Dewey
agreed to give two sets of five lectures over a period of five
weeks from August 15 to September 15. The lectures were
to be given at eight o’clock on Tuesday and Friday evenings.
The first series would be on the Life of the Child; thesecond, on Movements in Nineteenth Century Thought. In
an effort to circulate Dewey’s ideas more widely, the lectures
were summarized in the Pacific Commercial Advertiser, oneof the major Honolulu newspapers.14 In addition, Dewey,
in order to prepare his audience for his lectures, provided
a synopsis of each talk along with a set of questions andexercises. These synopses provided a preview of the talk andwere usually published on the same day that the talk wasdelivered. The summaries, taken from notes written up by
an attendee, were published on the day following the talk.

Honolulu High School, formerly Princess Ruth Ke’elikolani’s
residence, Hale Keoua (Wikimedia Commons upload.wikimedia.
org\wikipedia\commons\a\a2\Keoua_Hale6.jpg)

John Dewey in Hawai‘i

Dewey delivered all of his lectures at Honolulu HighSchool—a venerable Victorian pile that had been built on
Emma Street as the principal O‘ahu residence of Princess
Ruth Ke‘elikolani. Hale Keoua, as it was known, wascompleted in 1883, and designed, it was said, to outdo Iolani
Palace in size and grandeur. Unfortunately, the Princess
was unable to enjoy its accommodations for long as shedied shortly after its opening. In any case, she preferred toreside at her home, Hulihe‘e Palace, on the Big Island rather
than O‘ahu. In 1895 the Legislature appropriated funds topurchase the building and convert it to a high school.15
The high school was also home to the summer schoolfor teachers organized by the Inspector General of Schools,
Henry S. Townsend.16 The summer school classes were
held during the day; Dewey delivered his lectures in theevening, and this arrangement allowed him to participate
occasionally in the work of the summer school, as well
as allowing the teachers who were attending the summer
school to benefit from his lectures.
These summer schools were an important innovation
initiated by Townsend to advance progressive educational
ideas in Hawai‘i. Benjamin Wist describes Townsend as “avisionary”—a man who “did much to lay the foundations for
progressive education in Hawaii.”17 Townsend was clearly
impressed by Dewey’s presence and delighted to have him
visit the summer school—“He was our Great High Priest
and what he said had a tendency to be accepted without
further consideration.”18
Townsend advanced progressive education in Hawai‘iin two important ways. First, he published a journal, The
Progressive Educator, that he distributed to Hawai‘i teachers
free of charge.19 The journal had an instructional purpose
and provided its readers with lots of useful teaching ideas
and lessons plans. Secondly, he organized a series of summer
schools between 1896 and 1899 that brought well known
educators from the mainland to share their ideas with local
teachers. F. B. Dressler of the Los Angeles State Normal
School attended in 1896; Elmer Brown of the University ofCalifornia, Berkeley, in 1897; Colonel Francis Parker andhis wife from Cook County Normal School, in 1898. And
in 1899, following on the successful visit of the Parkers
during the previous year, Miss Flora J. Cooke and Miss
Zonia Baber of the Cook County Normal School arrived on
the America Maru, along with the Deweys. Although Dewey
did not participate directly in the work of the summer

13

Henry S. Townsend (Pacific Commercial Advertiser,
August 5, 1896, p. 1)

school, he did take an interest in what was happening andvisited on several occasions.20
The summer schools were extremely successful inintroducing teachers to the new progressive philosophy andas one newspaper editorial declared “although attendanceat the Summer School was entirely voluntary, the average
enrollment exceeded the number of teachers employed in the
public schools; and the influence of this contact with great
minds cannot soon pass away. Through such influences thepoint of view of many teachers was changed.”21
Dewey’s extension lectures were viewed as another way
of promoting new ideas in education. By 1899, Dewey’s
reputation as a philosopher, psychologist, and educator
was considerable and his ideas and the application of theseideas at the University of Chicago Laboratory School weregathering increasing interest among educators nationally.
Prior to his visit to Hawai‘i, Dewey had been invited togive lectures in California at Berkeley and at Stanford. And
during his stay, he was putting the final touches to his mostpopular work, The School and Society, 22 from which muchof the substance of his lectures on the life of the child weredrawn. Shortly after his Hawai‘i sojourn he was electedpresident of the American Psychological Society.
But it is undoubtedly the Castle family connection thatwas the chief influence in attracting the Deweys to the14

Educational Perspectives v Volume 47 v Numbers 1 and 2

La Victoire as the Memorial Kindergarten director.26
The Henry and Dorothy Castle Memorial Free
Kindergarten was formally opened on November 13, 1899
in a building on the old Castle Homestead on King Street.
The Castle family had moved from there in March 1899
to a new property in Mānoa Valley that they christened
Puuhonua or “place of refuge.”
In making this move the Castle family gave thought towhat they wanted to do with the old property. The PacificCommercial Advertiser reported that

Henry and Dorothy Castle Memorial Free Kindergarten (PacificCommercial Advertiser, December 2, 1899, p. 3)

islands. John and Alice Dewey knew the Castles throughtheir friendship with George Herbert Mead who wasmarried to Helen Castle, and this connection had brought
Alice Dewey to the islands in 1892.23 They would also have
known Henry Northrup Castle, who died so tragically withhis young daughter, Dorothy, in 1895 when the boat they
were traveling in sank in the North Sea. Also of note is thefact that Mary Tenney Castle had been a generous contributor to Dewey’s lab school.
This connection certainly came into play in arranging
for Dewey to give the extension lectures. The Hawaiian Star
attributes the work of university extension in Hawai‘i to thework of “Mrs. Meade (nee Helen Castle), wife of Professor
Meade of Chicago; Mrs F. M. Day, and Mrs Ethel Wing
Castle…and, at the present time Mrs. Day, who is visiting inthe states, is actually engaged in consultation with many of
the foremost of educators upon the subject.”24
But the Castles had another reason to arrange for
Dewey to visit—the proposed kindergarten intended as amemorial to Henry and Dorothy Castle who had tragicallydrowned in the North Sea when their ship, the Elbe, sankin a storm. In August 1898, Dewey had written a youngteacher at Colonel Parker’s Cook County Normal School,
Flora Cooke, to ask her if she would be willing to takecharge of the school and start it up. It appears, however, that
Cooke was not interested in an extended stay in Hawai‘i,
though she would be free to come over with Miss Zonia
Baber to help out with Townsend’s summer school.25 In
Flora Cooke’s stead, Dewey secured the services of Florence

Mrs Castle and her children felt they wanted thehomestead to go on with its missionary work as inyears past. As the different needs of the community
were being considered, appeals came in from time
to time which showed the growing necessities fora home for the homeless children of the foreign
population. After consideration of these appeals it
was finally decided that when the time came to giveup the family residence it should be devoted for ahome for those children made eligible for it.27
Adjacent to the main house on King Street, Mary
Castle had built a “commodious kindergarten building
upon the eastern part of the premises,” which wasconstructed around the time of Dewey’s visit.
The Dewey’s were accommodated during their stayin a cottage at the Castle’s new homestead in Mānoa;28 at
first in one cottage and then, when the Rolfe’s returnedto the mainland, in the one that they had been staying
in. Dewey describes the property, called Puuhonua, thus:“Just where the new Castle house stands was an old temple
and fort—the ‘Sentinel on the Hillside’ they called it, andthe Castles are thinking of calling their place that—in
Hawaiian, of course…Part of the old temple wall is still
standing between the house we are now living in and theone we were living in before—this (the temple) is right insight of Waikiki and the old fishing places, and they say
they used to come up here and sacrifice and then when thepriest said he could see the fishes, they would start for the
shore.”29 The property is just below Tantalus and Deweyrefers to the harvest tradition of rolling sweet potatoes
down the hill.
Mānoa had just begun to be developed at this point.
In a letter to his children, Dewey explained that “it is a

John Dewey in Hawai‘i

new thing for people to live in the hills and away from theocean, although it is much cooler and cooler in every way.”30
However, the distance occasioned a long commute to thehigh school on Emma Street. “If we don’t get a ride with
the Castles downtown, we walk down a mile and there is astreet car which runs every once in a while—they have only
horses here, one line of track, with side switches to pass,
and it is slow work getting about.”31 On September 12, on
the day that coincided with his final lecture, the Deweys
moved from the Mānoa cottage closer to downtown to ahome on Vineyard Street belonging to a Mrs. Dodge.32 No
reason is given for the move, but the new location would
have involved less traveling to and fro and offered theconvenience of being closer to town.
Earlier, in giving consideration to their trip to Hawai‘i,the Deweys had decided to leave their four children (Fredaged 12; Evelyn, 10; Gordon, 3; and Lucy, 19 months) witha friend, Lucy Moore in Santa Barbara.33 They would beapart from the children roughly from July 26 when they left
San Francisco to September 24 when they were scheduled toreturn— a total of eight weeks and four days. As it turned
out, their return was delayed a further two weeks. Theirship, SS America Maru, bound for San Francisco, did not
arrive as scheduled due to a coal fire in the ship’s hold,and it had to return to Yokohama.34 Flora Cooke was also
affected by this delay and the three of them did not get toleave Honolulu until they had booked passage on anothership, The Peking, which didn’t leave for San Francisco until
October 2. The Deweys correspondence indicates thatthey felt that they had stayed too long in Hawai‘i, thatthey missed their children terribly, and they undoubtedly
felt uneasy at being so far away from them and for such along time. Alice Dewey was particularly distressed by theseparation and wrote in a letter to the children: “It is just amonth this morning since we left S.F., and I should reallylike to be back there today. No letters have come from you at
all since the first one. We are not having a good time here as
we did in Cal. and that with not hearing from you has madelife rather blue.”35
Considering their obvious distress at the separation,
what were the Deweys’ reasons for making the trip? It is
likely that they had intended initially to bring the children
with them, but had decided against the idea nearer thetime of the trip and after having accepted the invitation tolecture. Alice Dewey certainly implied in a letter to Flora

15

Cooke in September 1898 that the children would be with
them: “Mrs Mead writes from Honolulu…If you can get
Miss Cook (sic) you will have the eternal blessings of Mrs.
Coleman and the rest of us. Evelyn says, ‘Oh I hope Miss
Cook will come,’ and Fred makes like exclamation.”36
In spite of their misgivings about leaving the children,
Dewey was keen to get university extension going in
Hawai‘i as there was strong support for it in the community.
In addition, the Castles were in the process of setting up theMemorial Kindergarden, and they had approached Dewey
to find an experienced teacher to start up the school. Dewey
obviously had an interest in getting the school properly
established at the outset.
But another reason for the trip would simply be thesame as many people who choose to come to Hawai‘i—toenjoy the beach and the many attractions of the islands. The
Deweys appear to have maintained an active schedule. They
visited schools; they took a trip to Kīlauea volcano on theisland of Hawai‘i; they were taken out on an outrigger canoe
off Waikīkī; they went on a picnic by horseback up the
Ko’olaus, visited the Bishop Museum—on two occasions, atleast—and were taken to the Chinese Theatre in Honolulu.
Dewey’s first official duty in Honolulu was on Monday,
August 7, as one of the speakers at an event (the newspapers
referred to it as a “rally”) at Honolulu High School thatwas intended as the official launch of the university
extension movement in Hawai‘i. The evening was rainy
but the Gazette reported that it in “no way dampened theenthusiasm nor lessened the interest of those who areanxious to see the extension system placed on a firm footing
on these Islands.”37 Professor Rolfe gave a brief history of
the extension movement from its “inauspicious beginnings
in Britain” to its promise in expanding educational
opportunities to those whom “educational opportunities had
passed by.” The report added that Dewey “who will takecharge of the (extension) work here and who is one of thegreatest extensionists, spoke on the manifold advantages ofthe system.”38 Others who spoke at the meeting included,
Henry Townsend (Inspector General of Schools), 39
Professor Scott, and the Education Minister, Mott-Smith.
“The manner of carrying on local university extension
work was discussed, and it was finally decided to entrust
the matter to the University Club, under whose auspices
the work is to be conducted in the future.”40 It was hopedthat Dewey’s talk would “quicken the interest in University

16

Educational Perspectives v Volume 47 v Numbers 1 and 2

Extension.” The same article announced that Dewey would
go to Hawai‘i the following week—from August 8 toAugust 13—to visit the volcano.
On Tuesday, August 8, John and Alice Dewey
embarked on the SS Kinau to Hilo. These were popular
trips arranged by the Wilder’s Steamship Company.41
The ship left Hononlulu on Tuesday around noon, callingin at ports on the way—Lahaina, Mākena, Māhukona,
Kawaihae, and Laupāhoehoe—before arriving at Hilo on
the following evening. This arrangement “allow(ed) tourists
to secure a good night’s rest in Hilo before starting on theirjourney to Kilauea.”
The journey is described in some detail in The Tourists’
Guide through the Hawaiian Islands42:
The volcano being the objective point in the tourist’s program all plans are made with this in view.
Generally Wilson’s livery stables are prepared with
the necessary vehicles and animals to start at short
notice and without limit as to the number of passengers either in buggy hack, omnibus, or on horseback
as the parties prefer. Name the hour when you will
be ready and the conveyance will be at your door. It
is much pleasanter to start early, say eight o clockin the morning, the air being then cooler than later
on. In the afternoon it is more apt to be showery in
passing through the woods. But as regards rain the
tourist must be prepared to encounter it without
notice at any hour of the day or night while he is in
the Hilo district.
An hour or two is allowed at the Half Way
House for lunch rest and sightseeing in the neighboring settlement, and the coach starts on to finish
the remaining fifteen miles of the journey. The roadwhich we are now traveling over has all been constructed during the past few years by the Hawaiian
Government at a cost of about one hundred thousand
dollars. Formerly there was only a bridle path which
led through swamp and bogs over rough lava boulders and clinkers making the journey one of great
discomfort and for ladies almost impracticable. The
rise between Hilo and the volcano is 4,100 feet, but
so well is the new road graded that it is difficult for
the traveler to perceive any rise or fall in it. It is macadamized throughout and well-made with a steam
roller so that it sheds the rain which daily falls…Thecoach arrives at the Volcano Hotel between 3 and 4o’ clock p.m. after what usually proves a pleasant andnot tiresome journey. (Whitney, 1895)

In a letter to his children, Dewey gave an interestingaccount of the visit to the Halema‘uma‘u crater:
The crater that is active, Kilawea (sic), isn’t really amountain at all. It is all a table land up there (4,000 feethigh, while the three big mountains are from ten to
fourteen thousand feet), and then there is this big holewhich you come on suddenly, nine miles around andso pretty nearly 3 across (I guess, for it seems almost
circular) with walls from 100 to four or five hundred
feet high. You go down into these—quite an easy trail
from the hotel—go about two thirds of the way across,over lava, and then you come to another hole in the
big hole—maybe a quarter of a mile across. I don’tknow how deep. It is all covered with clouds of smoke(smells like a sulphur match when it happens to blow
towards you) down down down. Sometimes it blows
away so you can see fine, but not often enough and it
didn’t for us. The lava we walked over was the flowwhich came out (of another hole, now filled up) only
four years ago, and which filled up all the big crater tothe depth of sixty feet. If it should do it again, there
are one or two places where I should think it would
come pretty near to running over and spilling out.
There was a little break in the crust a few hundred feetaway from the small active crater with a ladder it. We
climbed down 10 or 12 feet and found ourselves in alittle room with a temperature of about 150 degrees I
should think. It was dry heat and not uncomfortable.
Not far from there we walked over lava so hot it hisses
when you spit on it and I stuck a stick down a crack
about six inches and it was soon blazing. But that’s
the only volcano fire I saw.43
The Deweys made the return trip on the Kinau, whichleft Hilo at 6:00 pm. on Friday, August 11, arriving in
Honolulu on the evening of Saturday, August 12.
Monday, August 14, was the first day of summer school.
Dewey did not attend. A short opening ceremony was heldwith speeches from President Dole and Inspector General
Townsend. One hundred and fifty teachers from all over theislands attended. Flora Cooke gave a short talk on the subjectof “concentration in primary work;” Zonia Baber “took up
the subject of clay modeling and geography.”44
Dewey gave his first lecture in the series, The Lifeof the Child, on the following day, Tuesday, August 15.45
Each lecture was held at 8:00 pm to accommodate theaudience—7:30 being considered too early for the teachers
after their full day of work at the summer school. His topic

John Dewey in Hawai‘ifor this first lecture was child study—a topic he had written
on and that provided a psychological grounding for his ideas
on child development.46 Initial plans were for him to giveten lectures—five on the life of the child and five on movements of thought in the Nineteenth Century. However, itappears that he rearranged his schedule towards the end andgave only four lectures on Nineteenth Century thought. It
is not clear why Dewey “changed the order of the remaining
lectures.”47 In a letter to his children written on September
2, Dewey refers to a conversation with William Castle inwhich the latter suggested condensing the final lectures sothat he and Dewey could view the recent eruption of Mauna
Loa.48 However, there is no evidence in the papers or in theletters that he took the trip. The shorter schedule may havebeen due simply to the fact that the summer school had
ended on Thursday, August 31—the day before he began
his second lecture series—and the audience would likely
have been much smaller. The topic may also have been too
specialized for general interest and, as a result, the size ofthe audience would have dwindled towards the end.
Prior to delivering a lecture, as was his habit, Dewey
would distribute a synopsis outlining the main points, andthese were published in the Pacific Commercial Advertiser,
usually on the same day as the talk. On the day following
a lecture, a summary was published, probably from notes
taken by an audience member.
The following is a schedule of the talks:

The Life of the Child

Tuesday, August 15		 A Study of the Child
Friday, August 18		 Early Childhood: Play, andImagination
Tuesday, August 22		 Later Childhood: Interest andAttention
Friday, August 25		 Adolescence and Emotions
Tuesday, August 29		 General principles of growth

Movements in Nineteenth Century Thought

Friday, September 1		 Influence of Rousseau on
French Political History and
Literature.

17

Tuesday, September 5		Goethe and Schiller and the
Ethics of Culture and Art
Friday, September 8.		 The Influence of ScientificThought
Tuesday, September 12		The Ethics of Social WelfareThis schedule allowed plenty of time for other kinds ofactivities and afforded the opportunity for the Deweys toplay tourist. On August 16, the Deweys visited Flora Cookeand Zonia Baber who were staying at the beach: “We wentin bathing at the same time; there has been a great deal ofwind so the surf was fine. We are going out canoeing in thesurf with a native to manage the boat someday soon. You
have to go in your bathing suits.”49 On another occasion
they climbed Punchbowl; and on another, on horseback,they picnicked on Tantalus with Miss Carrie Castle: “We
could see through one of the valleys to the other side of
the island in one place and just about ten parallel ridges ofmountains off in the other.”50
On August 19, they went to the high school on Emma
Street to hear Miss Cooke and Miss Baber and in the afternoon all four were given a tour of Kamehameha Schools.51
Alice Dewey, in a letter to her children, provides a detailed
and approving account of the work of the students, bothboys and girls:
This is a very large property which was left by oneof the queens to educate Hawaiian boys and girls.
Mr Perry who lives here at Mrs Castles has been theteacher of manual training there for five years. He
took us about and so did Mr. Thompson the principal
and Mr. Sigdwick who teaches agriculture. The Hawaiian young people care much more for what they
can learn to do than for what they can learn out ofbooks and here the boys have many things to do. The
girls are separate from the boys and do all their workby themselves and they have not so many things to do.
But the house they live in has beautiful rooms and isbeautifully situated on high ground where they canoverlook both the sea and the mountains and also
the town. The boys do all the work even the cooking or at least most of it, and the girls do all theirs
including the washing and ironing. And the houses
are perfectly kept. I saw some fine sewing which the
girls had done, and many sheets and men’s clothes
and other garments which the boys had made in the
tailor shop.

18

Educational Perspectives v Volume 47 v Numbers 1 and 2

Dr. and Mrs. Dewey at Waikiki Beach, August, 1899. The two young women standing together are probably Zonia Baber and Flora
Cooke. (John Dewey Papers, Special Collections Research Center, Morris Library, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale)

Her letter goes into further detail about the plants being
grown there, the fertility of the soil, and the fact that someof the land produced three crops a year. They planned asecond visit once the school year started up on September 4:“Their buildings are many of them beautiful and they haveso much land that Mr Thompson said that if it increasedmuch more in value that in 25 years they would have moremoney than they could use. The children pay 42 dollars a
year apiece and that covers all their expenses.”52
On September 12, the public school year started andthe Deweys were able to visit several schools. In a newspaper
report Dewey declared himself favorably impressed by what
he had seen and interested to learn about the work of theteachers “in giving instruction to classes in which the nationalities are so mixed.” He thought the existing conditions
made the schools of Honolulu an interesting study.53
The letters suggest that they were quite active during
their stay in the islands and that they were keen to visit
schools, meet people, and familiarize themselves with
Hawai‘i and its diverse cultures. One event of interest,
which was reported in the papers, is that they went “slumming” in Chinatown.54 Slum tourism was a practice thatdeveloped in the nineteenth century where people would
visit the less fortunate poor in order to see the conditions inwhich they lived. Visitors on slumming trips were perhaps
driven by a philanthropic desire to improve the living
conditions of the inhabitants; although it was criticized insome quarters as voyeuristic. The Hawaiian Star article
reported that slumming is “frequently done by members of
the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and students ofsociology.” In the case of Dewey, who was accompanied by
his wife and the summer school teachers, Zonia Baber andFlora Cooke, as well as some “local friends,” the aim seems
to have been sociological—driven by a desire to understandthe conditions of people living in Chinatown, which atthis time was horribly overcrowded. The party was safely
conducted on their way by Deputy Marshal Chillingworth,first along the length of Pauahi Street, then to visit “theconfirmed opium fiends at the Tong Hing Society,” andfinally to look into the cells at the police station. It is clear
from Dewey’s remarks, quoted in the paper, that he haddone this sort of thing previously, in San Francisco andChicago, perhaps, or New York City as he compared thepolice work in Honolulu favorably to that conducted inother cities. 55
On September 19, the Deweys and Flora Cooke werescheduled to depart Honolulu for San Francisco on thesteamer America Maru; but, as mentioned earlier, the ship

John Dewey in Hawai‘i

had been forced to return to Yokohama to put out a coalfire that had started in its cargo bay. The delay caused
them considerable distress. They eventually shipped out
on the SS Peking on October 2nd. Nothing survives in thecorrespondence about this period and little was reported
in the papers until a brief report in the Pacific Commercial
Advertiser on October 3, 1899 to the effect that “Dr. andMrs. John Dewey finally got away on the City of Peking
yesterday afternoon.56 It is likely, however, that during thisperiod, Dewey was keen to get back to his scholarly workand the preparation for publication of School and Society,which was first published in November, 1899, shortly after
their return.

John Dewey’s Second Visit

John Dewey’s second visit to Hawai‘i was in 1919. He wasaccompanied by his wife, Alice, and their adopted son,
Sabino.57 It was very brief—a stopover for less than a dayon the Deweys’ voyage to Japan and China. Their purpose
was to drop off Sabino, who was twenty-one and who had
declared, at the last minute, that he wanted to join themon their trip as far as Honolulu. Dewey was bemused bythis sudden decision, but his opinion quickly changed fromdisapproval to approval when he realized that “the adventurous desire was so strong in his breast that it didn’t seemright to head him off.”58 Dewey arranged for Ermine Cross,
who was the director of the Henry and Dorothy Castle
Memorial Free Kindergarten to watch over him during
his visit. Sabino found work at the College of Hawai‘i, as
the university was called at that time. There is little else toreport of the visit except that the Deweys were entertainedby friends and made a short trip to the Pali Lookout before
returning to their ship in time for its departure in theevening.59

committee” that included Samuel N. Castle of the Honolulu
Rapid Transit Co., and a number of officials from the
University of Hawai‘i.60
The Deweys stayed at the Halekulani Hotel. It wasnot, at that time, the acclaimed five-star hotel of today.
Dewey describes it in a letter to Arthur Bentley as a groupof cottages. They were accommodated in one with a sitting
room, two bedrooms, and bath “in a sort of park of palms
and hibiscus, there being a common dining room—all on
the Pacific Ocean beach.”61 However, the location was ideal
as the cottage that they were in was so close to the ocean“the children get plenty of swimming,” and Dewey was
hopeful that the sunshine would provide the looked-for”recuperative results.”62
In spite of his health problems, Dewey did not appear
to devote too much of his time to soaking up the sun on
Waikīkī Beach. He worked on a new edition of Experienceand Education to be published by Beacon Press.63 He
devoted time to the composition of an article for the firstEast-West Philosopher’s Conference that was to be held in
Honolulu in April 1951. In this paper, ”On Philosophical
Synthesis,” Dewey sought to break down the dualism
between an East and a West and advocated that the twohave to be synthesized.64

John Dewey’s Third Visit

Dewey made a final visit to Hawai‘i in 1951 with his
second wife, Roberta Lowitz Grant Dewey, and their two
adopted children, Adrienne and John Junior. Dewey wasninety-one years old and in poor health. Indeed, a hopedfor improvement in his health and sought-after abatementof his respiratory symptoms appears to have been themain reason for their trip. The Deweys arrived on theliner President Wilson for “an extended stay” on Thursday,
January 18. They were greeted by a “large and distinguished

19

John Dewey and Roberta Lowitz Dewey with their children,
Adrienne and John Junior. Halekulani Hotel, January 1951 (JohnDewey Papers, Special Collections Research Center, Morris
Library, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale)

20

Educational Perspectives v Volume 47 v Numbers 1 and 2

It appears that the Deweys were also interested inbuying property in Hawai‘i, especially if the sunshine
and sea air could achieve the “miracle” of recovery in
his health.65 They took a look at some properties in theregion of Diamond Head; however, they found that thehomes were all on a single level and too close to the damp
ground—conditions that exacerbated rather than improved
Dewey’s respiratory problems, which also appeared to beaffected by the dampness of the rainy season.
The Deweys found no shortage of people willing toshow them the sights, host them at their homes, or takethem to local restaurants. One week after the Deweys’
arrival, Robert Clopton, professor of the history andphilosophy of education in the College of Education at the
University of Hawai‘i, wrote to Dewey in the hope thathe could drop by the hotel for a meeting.66 Clopton was
delighted when the Deweys responded in the affirmative,
and the families were soon on friendly terms. They invitedthe Deweys to the Willows, a restaurant close to the
University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, on one occasion and totheir home on another.67
Although there is no evidence in the letters andnewspapers that Dewey visited schools during his stay, it iscertain that he did have time and energy to visit a few. For
example, Dewey’s visit to Hanahauoli School, recorded by
Sophie Judd Cooke, must have taken place during his 1951
visit. We also know that Adrienne and John Jr. continued
their schooling at Punahou during their visit, so it is highly
likely that John and Alice Dewey made a visit, if only toarrange for their children’s attendance. In gratitude, Roberta
Dewey sent the Punahou Scholarship Fund $50.00 “asa token of appreciation for (their) six-weeks’ experienceat Punahou.”68 This is also the time, as word-of-mouth
testimony has it, when Dewey would have paid a visit to
the new Castle Memorial Kindergarten, an institutionthat he had played an important role in helping to found.
The school had been relocated in 1941 from King Street
to a new building specially designed for young children to
be educated along progressive lines in the vicinity of theCollege of Education at University and Dole Avenues.69
In spite of his hope that the sunshine and sea air
would bring about an improvement in Dewey’s health, itappears that the humidity, especially at night, brought on
coughing fits, and his health grew steadily worse rather thanbetter.70 On February 25, the Deweys returned by ship to

Los Angeles and thence to Arizona where they hoped thearid climate would be easier on Dewey’s lungs. Gradually,
Dewey’s health declined. In May 1952, he developed
pneumonia, and his condition slowly deteriorated. He diedat his home in New York City at 7:00 p.m. on June 1, 1952.
REFERENCES

Addams, J. (1911). Twenty Years at Hull House with Autobiographical Notes.
New York: Macmillan.

Bittner, W. (1920). The University Extension Movement. U.S. Government
Printing Office. https://archive.org/stream/universityextens00bittuoft/
universityextens00bittuoft_djvu.txt.

Brigham, W. T. (1909) The Volcanoes of Kiluaea and Mauna Loa on the Islandof Hawai‘i, pp. 196–199.

Castle, A. L. (2004). A Century of Philanthropy: A History of the Samuel N. andMary Castle Foundation, Revised Edition. Honolulu: Hawaiian Historical
Society.
Clopton, R. W. (1973). John Dewey. Lectures in China, 1919–1920.
Honolulu: University Press of Hawai‘i

Dewey, J. (1899) [1976]. The School and Society. John Dewey: The Middle
Works, 1899–1924. Ed. Boydston. Carbondale: Southern Illinois
University Press.
Dewey Correspondence Database. Center for Dewey Studies. Southern
Illinois University, Carbondale.

Kobayashi, V. (1983). Building a Rainbow: A History of the Buildings andGrounds of the University of Hawai‘i’s Mānoa Campus. Honolulu: Hui O
Students.
Martin, J. (2002). The Education of John Dewey. New York: Columbia
University Press.

Townsend, H.S. (1936) Education as I Saw It in the Hawai‘i of the Nineties,
Ed. B.O. Wist. Hilo: Typewritten Manuscript, p. 81.
Wist, B. O. (1940). A Century of Public Education in Hawai‘i. Honolulu:
Hawai‘i Educational Review.

Whitney, H. M. (1895) The Tourists’ Guide through the Hawaiian Islands,
descriptive of their scenes and scenery (2nd. edition). Honolulu: The
Hawaiian Gazette Company Press, 1895.

ENDNOTES
1

2

3

The Advertiser reported or misreported thirty years later that his second
visit was “on route home from China.” The Advertiser, Friday, January 19,
1951, p. 5. If so, it was one without fanfare and was not reported in thepress at the time.
The SS America Maru was a 6,070 ton passenger-cargo ship built at the
Swan and Hunter yard in Newcastle, England. It was launched in March
1898. It was suspected of carrying rats that carried bubonic plague to
Honolulu, resulting in the October, 1899 outbreak in Chinatown thatkilled forty people. In January 1900, in an effort to control the outbreakauthorities set fire to infected building, but winds swept the flames toother buildings and the fire ran out of control. Later, the America Maru
was converted to a hospital ship and then (1943) to a Japanese trooptransport ship. It was eventually sunk in 1944 by the USS Nautilus with
43 survivors out of 642 on board.
Hawaiian Gazette, Aug. 4, 1899, p. 1.

John Dewey in Hawai‘i

4
5

6
7
8

9
10
11
12
13
14

15

16

17
18

19
20

21
22

23

24
25

26

“Mrs Coleman also felt called upon to take me to task in regard to oneof the men of my acquaintance and to ask what his intentions might be.”(00406). La Victoire was replaced after one year by Cora Panebaker who
in turn had to retire due to illness. Ermine Cross then served as Directorof the Memorial School from 1902 to 1926. A. L. Castle, (2002) A
Century of Philanthropy, p. 49.

The Hawaiian Star, Aug. 5, 1899, p. 1.

“Tuesday we went down to the Doric and saw the Rolfe’s off…they arevery nice people indeed.” Dewey to Dewey Children, 8/18/1899. Letter
00376.
Pacific Commercial Advertiser (PCA), April 11, 1899, p. 1.
PCA, April 4, 1899, p.1.

The University Club is no longer in existence. It merged with the PacificClub in 1918.
Bittner, W. (1920, p. 14).
Ibid. p. 14.

27
28

29
30

Addams, J. (1911, p. 428).

Ibid. p. 429.
Ibid. p. 435.

The Pacific Commercial Advertiser was at that time owned by Lorrin A.
Thurston.

The Evening Bulletin, August 20, 1895, p. 3, reported that the cost to theState was $17,000.
Townsend served as Inspector General of Schools from 1896 to 1899
(Wist, 1940, pp. 138–139).
Wist, (1940, p. 136)

“In the midst of this term, we also had the very great privilege of thepresence of Dr. Dewey himself, not only on the lecture platform but inour daily discussions. He was our Great High Priest, and what he said
had a tendency to be accepted without further consideration.” Townsend,
H.S. (1936, p. 81).
Wist, (1940, p. 136).

31
32
33

34

35
36
37
38
39

“This morning we went down town again to hear Miss Cooke andMiss Baber at the summer school…” Alice Dewey to Dewey Children.
8/19/1899. (Letter 00401).
PCA, August 3, 1901, p. 1

In April 1899, Dewey gave three lectures on the University Laboratory
School to parents and other interested persons. These lectures and areport, “Three Years of the University Laboratory School,” formed thefirst issue of The School and Society which was first published in November,
1899. Dewey’s talks in Honolulu drew on these lectures, but also on othermaterial. For example, content of lectures 2-5 is similar to that publishedin John Dewey, The Middle Works, Vol. 1, pp. 175–221.
“Mrs Dewey has departed on a sudden visit to Honolulu Hawaiian
Islands & won’t be back till July sometime” Letter from John Dewey toThomas Davidson, 4/23/1892 (00467).

40
41

42
43
44
45

The Hawaiian Star, December 14, 1898, p. 1

The Castle family in Honolulu, Hawaiian Islands, are going to establish amemorial Kindergarten for members of their family lost at sea. They haveasked us to get a teacher, & to have her in our school, one year, getting
the lines of work started before going out there. Letter from Dewey toFlora Cooke 9/1/1898 (00612)
Florence La Victoire’s tenure at the Castle Memorial Kindergarten was
not a happy one and she left after she had concluded her first year undercontract as director. Writing to Alice Dewey in December, 1899, she
confessed that she found the experience “one big disappointment.” Thechildren were in a “horrible physical condition,” their heads “covered insores” because of lice, and the school closed temporarily because of plaguein Honolulu. However, she found that by far the greatest hardship was“the keen interest” taken in her personal affairs by the Castle family:

21

46

47
48

49
50
51

52

PCA, Nov. 17, 1899, p. 1.

The estate was 8.16 acres purchased at auction on May 12, 1898 for$6,250.
Dewey letter to his children 8/17/1899 (00376)

The Castle house was in the words of Rob and Vicars “a stimulus to threewaves of urbanization in Mānoa Valley—in 1900, 1924, and 1941.” By
its pioneer presence other larger homes were attracted. P. Robb and L.
Vicars, Mānoa’s “Puuhonua”: The Castle Home, 1900–1941.
Dewey letter to his children 8/17/1899 (00376)
Hawaiian Gazette, Sept. 5. 1899, p. 5.

”late in July, Lucy Moore and another friend, Annie Stevens, took all four
Dewey youngsters into their care in Santa Barbara, allowing their parents
to go to Honolulu on August 1.” (Martin. 2002, p. 202).
A coal fire was discovered on No. 2 hold three days out from Yokohama(reported in the Gazette on Oct 10, p. 5).
Alice Dewey to her children. August 26, 1899. (00401)(00634)The Gazette, August 8, 1899, p. 5.
Ibid. p. 5.

Townsend had recently returned from Los Angeles where he had been
attending the convention of the National Educational Association.
Although Hawai‘i’s delegation was not officially recognized because of
the status of Hawai‘i as a Territory and not a State, there was considerable
interest in the Hawai‘i delegation and their headquarters were “deluged…
with people seeking information.” (Gazette, August 4, 1899).
Hawaiian Gazette, August 8, 1899, p. 5.

A contemporary flyer for the Wilders Steam Co. advertises round trip
tickets to Hilo for fifty dollars.
Henry M. Whitney, (1895).

Dewey to his Children. August 7, 1899. (00375).
The Hawaiian Star, August 14 1899, p. 1.

Dr. Dewey had quite a large audience at the high school building last
evening to hear his first University Extension lecture. Nearly all theteachers of the summer school were noticed in the house. The HawaiianStar, Wednesday, August 16 1899, p. 8 On Dewey’s own estimate there
were about 100 to 125 people in attendance (Letter 00376).

See John Dewey, The Early Works, 1882–1898. Vol 5. Ed. Boydston. pp.
204–222.
PCA, Sept. 9, 1899, p. 5.

A flank eruption of Mauna Loa began on July 1, 1899. It ended on July
23rd. William Tufts Brigham. The Volcanoes of Kiluaea and Mauna Loa on
the Island of Hawai‘ i, 1909, pp. 196–199.
Ltr. 00376.

Dewey to his children 9/1/1899. (Ltr. 06584).

The boys’ school was opened in 18eighty-seven and the girls’ school in
1894.
Ltr. 00401.

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53
54
55

56
57

58
59
60
61
62
63
64

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Educational Perspectives v Volume 47 v Numbers 1 and 2

The Hawaiian Star, Sept. 19, 1899, p. 1.

66

The Hawaiian Star, Sept. 18, 1899, p. 1.

Chinese Tong societies were established to provide mutual aid and social
support to Chinese workers throughout Hawai‘i and California
Pacific Commercial Advertiser , October 3, 1899, p. 11.

The Dewey’s adopted Sabino in Italy 1905. They were in mourning fortheir son, Gordon, who had died in September, 1904 from Typhoid fever.
Sabino was around the same age. Martin (2002, p. 235)
Dewey to Evelyn, Jane, and Lucy Dewey. 1/20/1919. (03859).

67
68
69

Pacific Commercial Advertiser, Jan. 30, 1919, p. 1.

The Star Bulletin, Thursday, January 18, year?, p. 1.
Letter 15893.

Ltr to Arthur F Bentley 1/18.51.

Ltr 15892 to Bentley on Jan 18. 1951

Writing to Dewey’s widow, Roberta, in 1965, Charles Moore, Chair of
the Department of Philosophy at the University of Hawai‘i refers to “thevaluable paper which your husband wrote while he was in Hawai‘i back in
1951.” ltr19138. Moore to Roberta Dewey. 2/10/65

Ltr. 19138. Charles Moore to Roberta Dewey. 02/10/65. “I am sure you
know how sad I have been over the years that we were not able to findaccommodations which would be suitable for you and Professor Dewey,so that you could stay in Hawaii. I had a feeling that you would both havebeen very happy here and much more comfortable than in many placesin America. I have always felt that, somehow or other, we in Hawaii did
not meet the opportunity adequately by enabling you to find just what you
wanted as a home. A tragedy of Professor Dewey’s death shortly after thattime made this feeling of failure very serious in our minds—and it still is.”70

Robert W. Clopton and Tsuin-Chen Ou edited John Dewey’s lectures in
China. Clopton discovered that Dewey’s had not kept his notes for thelectures and that the only version of his lectures in China were those that
had been translated into Chinese and published in Chinese newspapers.
Clopton and Ou worked on retranslating the leftures into English.
Clopton and Ou (1973).
See Clopton’s article in this issue.

Punahou Lokahian, March 1951, p. 3.

The building was completed in 1941, just before Pearl Harbor, with agift of $300,000 fro the Samuel M. and Mary Castle Foundation forthe building of a Kindergarten teacher training center. “$100,000 was
allocated for the construction of the facility and $20,000 was designatedannually over a 10-year period to support the program under the
University’s Teachers College” (Kobayashi, 1983).

“After we arrived in Los Angeles, the pain which John experienced in
Honolulu increased to such extent that I took him to the Good Samaritan
Hospital in Los Angeles where they found that his hernia had twisted
and was causing the constant pain he had. They operated and we havejust come here where he is convalescing and mending rapidly.” Roberta
Dewey to Northrup Castle, April 16, 1951. (Ltr. 12550).

John Dewey in Hawai‘iJohn Dewey and the Beginnings of Progressive
Early Education in Hawai‘i
Alfred L. Castle
Hawai‘i has often been the beneficiary of the insights ofextraordinary men and women who visited the islands
and made important observations. Among these wasperhaps America’s most famous philosopher, John Dewey(1859-1952). First visiting Honolulu in 1899 as the guestof Mary Tenney Castle and her family, Dewey would help
establish Hawai‘i’s first progressive kindergartens while
also assisting in the establishment of the new progressive
Castle Kindergarten on King Street. Dewey was a closefriend of his University of Chicago colleague and symbolic
interactionist George Herbert Mead and his wife Helen
Castle. He had met the late Henry Castle, a young
philosopher whose life had been cut short in a shipping
accident on the North Sea, in 1895. Dewey’s visit coincidedwith the incipient efforts of educators to formulate a radical
re-engineering of early education, which would foreverchange the way the public looked at young children andeventually lead to a comprehensive K–12 public education
for the territory, and then the state, of Hawai‘i.
Dewey’s intellectual journey from traditional
epistemological Hegelian-style idealism to the
instrumentalism now associated with his famous namewas well developed by the end of the nineteenth century.
Perhaps his best description of his intellectual position
was described in his 1929 book The Quest for Certainty.
The positions he articulates in this book framed his basic
educational philosophy, which he would apply to Hawai‘i’searly progressive kindergartens and especially to the Henryand Dorothy Memorial Kindergarten and its teachers in thelate nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The historical quest for certainty about which Dewey
writes, and which he deplores, has a long lineage. It
originated in man’s search for security from the perils of
the natural world, a search that resulted in a comfort inmanufactured realms of eternal truth and transcendent
reality. Over the ages, Dewey concludes, mankind, at leastin most cultures, created a set of empirical practices thatallowed them to deal with the inferior realm of material

reality called “practice” while reserving the higher order“theory” for the transcendent, changeless divine realm.
Mystery and glamour attached to the eternal, sempiternal
realm, while the material or “practical” realm wasdeemed inferior. The separation of the two conceptual
orders was mirrored in the distinction between practiceand theory. This isolation of theory and practice has, in
Dewey’s estimation, held mankind back for centuries.
The devaluing of the natural realm of the changing
and flawed mundane world was regnant, according to
Dewey, until the early modern period when Galileo,
Newton, and Bacon began the slow process of taking
the natural world as worthy of precise quantitativeinterpretation. Over time, science rid itself of the last
vestiges of the illusory search for ultimate, invariable
reality and became more secure with experimentalism
and operationalism. As a result of this development,
which, Dewey believed, is fundamental to modernity,
mankind came to see values as not permanently fixed andhierarchical, but relational, instrumental, and corrigible.
Mankind thus possesses the method and means, throughobservation, experiment, and interpretation, to wrestle
meaning and provisional truth from the realm of nature.
For Dewey the pragmatist, mankind was still in theprocess of removing the manufactured barriers between
knowledge and practice, science and values, and thenoxious false problems, such as the relationship between
mind and body, spirit and matter, theory and practice—
between an ultimate Truth and flexible, instrumental,
provisional truths. For him, nature is the origin of allideals and goods vouchsafed to mankind. Men’s minds
were now free to jettison the search for illusionary
certainty and to pursue discoverable, multiple paths toenjoyable goods defined not by gods but by humans.
From the hazards of mutable nature, man could find noredoubt. But in nature he could use ideas as instruments
for action that could achieve partial, corrigible truths andmultiple goods.

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Educational Perspectives v Volume 47 v Numbers 1 and 2

The basic framework above, often called metaphysicalnaturalism, had shaped Dewey’s educational philosophy by
the late nineteenth century. His theory, which would help
to shape education for the twentieth century, resulted fromhis rejection of the rigid and formal approach to educationthat dominated schools in the late nineteenth century.
Such an approach was incorrect, he argued, because it was
based upon an erroneous psychology in which the child wasthought of as a passive creature upon whom informationand ideas had to be imposed.
Equally distressing to Dewey was an education basedon sentiment and idealization of the child. This approach
urged the child to choose what he wanted to study. For
Dewey, this approach ignored the lack of sophisticationof the child’s experience. For the child, education ought
to be a continuous reconstruction of experience in which
practical problems were solved through trial and error.
Once solutions were found, future solutions to identicalproblems would become part of a child’s habits andintelligence. Dewey’s slogan, “Learn by Doing,” was meant
to call attention to the child as a naturally active, curious,and exploring creature. Any properly planned education,
therefore, should be sensitive to this active dimension oflife and must guide the child in such a way as to maximize
his or her participation in different types of experience.
The end of education must be development of the child’s
creativity and autonomy.
As Dewey saw it, the child’s nature is neither
completely malleable nor forever fixed. Like Aristotle,
Dewey believed that the function of education is toencourage those habits and tendencies that constituteintelligence. Dewey stressed creating the proper type ofenvironmental conditions for eliciting and nurturing thesehabits. In the correct and controlled environment, adaptive
lifetime habits could be formed. Moreover, education, as
the continuous reconstruction and growth of experience,
also develops the child’s moral character. Virtue is taught
by cultivating self-mindedness, objectivity, imagination,
openness to new experiences, and the courage to change
one’s mind in the light of new facts.
Dewey thought the school was best understood as aminiature society; as such, it should be representative of theessential institutions of this society. As an ideal society, theschool is the chief means of social reform. In the controlledsocial environment of the school, trained teachers could

develop creative individuals who could work effectively toeliminate existing social evils and build a better society. For
Dewey, the school was the medium for developing habits for
systematic inquiry and for tolerance of the new and untried.
In a rapidly industrializing America, Dewey feared
the threat to the future of democratic practice posedby unplanned technological, economic, and politicaldevelopment. These rapid and unplanned changes, he alsofeared, would increase human aberration and decrease theamount of shared experience that is vital for the democratic
community. For him and for his followers, the school in a
democratic society was the best hope for creation of a freer
and more humane experience in which all could shareand participate.
Dewey, introduced to the Castle family by G. H. Mead,
was soon in contact with Mary Castle about funds for the
University of Chicago Lab School and about coming to
Honolulu to help start the progressive Castle Kindergarten on
King Street.
Like Dewey, Mary Castle understood that if education
was to be relevant and meaningful, it would need to betransformed. Moreover, they wanted education to constantly
expand the range of social situations in which individuals
perceived issues and made and acted upon choices. They
wanted schools to inculcate habits that would enable
individuals to control their surroundings rather thanmerely adapt to them. Traditional formal education, whichemphasized memorization and conformity to lessons taught
by an authoritarian teacher, was incapable of providing an
education that would improve society by making it more“worthy and harmonious” (Cremin, 1964, p. 118). No longer
isolated from the reality of a quickly changing society, theprogressive school would become “an embryonic community
life,” active with types of occupations that reflect the life of
the larger society. As Dewey said,
When the school introduces and trains each childof society into membership within such a little
community, saturating him with the spirit of service,
and providing him with the instruments of effective
self-direction, we shall have the deepest and best
guarantee of a larger society which is worthy, lovely
and harmonious. (Dewey, 1899, p. 51)
Dewey’s educational theory included a condemnationof “the old school” for the passivity of its methods andJohn Dewey in Hawai‘ithe rigid uniformity of its curriculum. For too long the
educational center of gravity had been “in the teacher, thetextbook, anywhere and everywhere you please except in
the immediate instincts and activities of the child himself ”(Dewey, 1899, p. 51). The essence of the new pedagogy was
to shift this center of gravity back to the child. The businessof the new school would be
to not only facilitate and enrich the growth of theindividual child, but also to supply the same results,
and for some, technical information and disciplinethat have been the ideas of education in the past.
(Dewey, 1899, p. 70)
For Mary and her daughter Harriet, education at thekindergarten level must “develop in these citizens of today
as well as tomorrow the habits, attitudes, appreciations, andskills necessary for the life in democracy.” Furthermore, thisprimary instruction would provide miniature democracies
where “situations arise which give opportunity for thedevelopment of . . . habits, attitudes, appreciations, andskills necessary for life.” Perhaps most importantly, young
pupils would be taught to think for themselves, to reason,
to judge and to evaluate the facts of experience. Since
environments change, set and static standards of conduct
would not be enough. Morality, correctly understood, “isan active attitude, not a passive one. Habit must be formed
through action. We must learn to be good.” Kindergarten
education, through teaching perseverance, flexibility,
cooperation, initiative, self-control, and life-long reasoning
skills, would provide citizens capable of sustaining both
democracy and progress in social institutions (Babbitt, 1948,
pp. 79–88).
Dewey viewed the teacher’s role as that of a skilledguide. The kindergarten teacher should create ideal
situations for both sense training and discipline ofthought. All instruction should recall that thinking does
not occur for its own sake. Rather, “it arises from theneed of meeting some difficulty, in reflecting upon thebest way of overcoming it, and thus leads to planning . . .
mentally the results to be reached and deciding upon thesteps necessary and their serial order.”1 Dewey claimed
that this was the best preparation for pure speculation
or abstract investigation. Thought, Dewey argued,
begins with a difficulty, moves through a resolution, andmay appropriately end with an abstract speculation or

25

abstraction. In this last stage, solutions to difficulties
or problems may be generalized to similar difficulties
or problems.
In 1899, in an effort to memorialize her son andgranddaughter Henry and Dorothy Castle, Mary Castle
invited Dewey to journey to Honolulu and, as herhouseguest in Mānoa, to lecture on his theories as part ofuniversity extension work. In addition, she invited him toassist in the formation of the Henry and Dorothy Castle
Memorial Kindergarten. The invitation, delivered by his
close friend George Herbert Mead and his wife Helen
Castle, intrigued Dewey from the start. Dewey was grateful
for Castle Foundation support for his new University of
Chicago Lab School and, moreover, Hawai‘i’s pluralist
and diverse racial and cultural population would test his
progressive theories. He was especially interested in theforms early education would take in a society with great
tolerance for racial differences. In essence, Hawai‘i seemeda good place to test his theories in a different culturalenvironment, one that had avoided the kind of racial
segregation Chicago suffered from, while giving him theopportunity to impact teacher training in the islands.
Dewey’s five lectures on The Life of the Child,delivered at the city’s high school, provided him the chance
to reassert his basic approach to education. His constanttheme was the wide possibilities for learning for theactive child learner in guided child-centered kindergarten
education.2 During his visits to the Castle Kindergarten andits educators, he also noted the multi-racial characteristicsof that center. He certainly had to note the ardor withwhich the children of plantation parents sought out theStandard English language taught there and the emphasis
on liberal democratic political culture. Though the many
assimilationist features of the school would later be
criticized by some, Dewey saw the necessity of preparing
children to be life-long learners who would be voting
citizens in a republic. In 1899, Hawai‘i was, with its
oligarchic political and economic features, along with its
high rates of immigration, a place where democracy andfaith in secular liberal democratic ideals had yet to fully
develop. Dewey clearly agreed with Mary Castle that thetime to transform early education had come and that inthat transformation lay one of the best opportunities for
Hawai‘i’s political and economic culture to be transformed
in important egalitarian ways.3

26

Educational Perspectives v Volume 47 v Numbers 1 and 2Less apparent, perhaps, was the fact that so many
Hawaiian parents had chosen to send children to progressive
venues like the FKCAA and the Castle Kindergarten. One
might note that the Hawaiian language and culture stressedat home was intended to work with Standard English.
Hawaiians enrolled children at only a slightly lesser rate
than Caucasians and Asians in part because of the culturalrespect, but also because Dewey’s ideas about progressive
education seemed to mirror traditional Hawaiian ways oflearning and teaching. Although not formally studied until
the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, theprimary aspects of this learning are generally agreed uponby scholars of Hawaiian history and culture. Scholars suchas Kekuni Blaisdell and Manulani Aluli Meyer have noted
the following key aspects of Hawaiian learning, which werebroadly consistent with the constructivist pedagogical theoryof Dewey and may explain why Hawaiian enrollment inmany progressive kindergartens was relatively high:A.		 In traditional Hawaiian ways of knowing and learning,
the child develops meaning and knowledge from
actual interaction with its environment and practice inaccomplishing tasks guided by the teacher. Meaning
and knowledge, far from being derived from access toan eternal realm of unchanging truths or Platonic
forms, is wrestled from the material world of objects
that the child encounters in achieving solutions topractical problems.
B.		 In traditional Hawaiian ways of learning, the child took
place in a social context where the child would learn
proper balance between individual pursuits and special
necessity. Developing harmony with other children
and with the land, learning reciprocity and generosity,and learning the correct relationship that makes society
possible were all keys to early childhood education.
Dewey’s views of how education makes democraticsociety possible combined with his (and Mead’s) senseof how ideas, beliefs, meaning, and knowledge areconstructed within a social context makes for some
important similarities in instructional similarities.
C.		 For Hawaiians, as for Dewey, there could be no
separation of mind and body as there has been for
Descartes and generations of Western scholars. For
both, knowledge was embodied, physical, unmediated,and experiential. Hawaiians speak of “na‘au” for thesense that knowledge is incorporated in physical bodies
and “felt” in immediate ways.
D.		 For Dewey, as for Hawaiians, learning is viewed as anactivity and is characterized by physical engagementwith the environment. Guided by teachers, the childcentered approach to learning involved the five senses
and “learning by doing” in a manner that allowed
the child to overcome challenges and problems while
receiving feedback. For both Dewey and Hawaiians,
the child’s reward in learning was to solve problems thatwere real, embedded in society, and practical. Learning
was not abstract, but rather specific and accumulative.
E.		 For both, learning took place in a community and wasembedded in natural and human relationships. Nor
need leaning be only an individualistic, competitiveenterprise. For Dewey and Hawaiians, learning canbe and often should be communal, cooperative, andresponsive to social relationships. For both, learning
took place in a world where there was no separation ofnature, life, and society. In a profound way, learning
takes place where there is no separation between mind,
nature, society, and the child.
Scholars have noted how mainstream public schools in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries lost the
chance to capture the affection of many Hawaiian families
with their traditional ways of teaching imported from
New England in the first half of the nineteenth century.
Individual competition, rote memorization, stationary,indoor desks, teacher-centered learning, and “one size
fits all” approaches to teaching tended to be less popularthan the progressive, flexible child-centered approaches
formulated by Dewey’s educational theory. Although
there is no indication that any of his ideas were formulated
through study of Hawaiian ways of learning, he could not
fail to note the high participation rates of many Hawaiian
families in the incipient private progressive kindergartensin Honolulu. The fact that some of the teachers were
Hawaiian and the fact that Hawaiian culture was, to an
extent, honored may also have contributed to the positive
reception the progressive kindergartens had in the late1890’s and for years beyond that.

John Dewey in Hawai‘iJohn Dewey’s international fame has led to him being
studied by scholars around the world. Though not all of
his ideas and ideals have stood the test of time, his workin Hawai‘i in helping to shape progressive education is arelatively unknown part of a long, creative, and valuable life.
REFERENCES

Babbitt, A. E. (1948). A program for children from 18 to 22 months in the
Hawaiian situation. New York, NY: Columbia University.
Cremin, L. A. (1964). The transformation of the school. New York, NY:
Vintage Books.
Dewey, J. (1899). The school and society. Chicago, IL: D. AppletonCentury.

ENDNOTES
1Harriet Castle, Notes on Dewey’s ideas in FKCAA Archives.

2

For a summary of Dewey’s lectures in Honolulu, see The PacificCommercial Advertiser, August 8,1899.

3

For a lengthy examination of Dewey’s influence on the pedagogy of
the Henry and Dorothy Castle Memorial Kindergarten, see Alfred L.
Castle, A Century of Philanthropy: A History of the Samuel N. & Mary
Castle Foundation (Hawaiian Historical Society, 2004) 48-65.

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Educational Perspectives v Volume 47 v Numbers 1 and 2

Dewey in Hawai‘i—1899
Aulii Silva
Dear Bob,
All I know about the lectures Dewey delivered in Honolulu is what I have from you. It is all new,and I will really appreciate your following through and digging up anything we can add to theinformation you sent. In any event, I’d like to have copies of what you have already found—thenewspaper accounts, everything. It’s a new and apparently untouched field for exploration. And
you’re the only one who can really pursue it. Please do.
March 30, 1971, Dr. Jo Ann Boydston, Project Director,
Co-operative Research on Dewey Publications, Southern Illinois University
Dear Jo Ann,
I’ve tossed in the sponge. I cannot locate anything else on the Honolulu lectures. I’ve exhausted ourown microfilms, the State Archives, the Hawaiian Mission Children’s Society Library, and what
have you. One of the newspaper stories mentions Henry Townsend, who was then Superintendentof Schools, and a great admirer (he said “disciple”) of Dewey. I even called Townsend’s surviving daughter, now in a retirement home, to see if by any chance he’d saved a copy of the syllabus
referred to in the news stories—but no luck. I wrote Adrienne, but she didn’t reply.
July 13, 1971, Dr. Robert Clopton, Chairman,
Department of History and Philosophy of Education, University of Hawai‘i

Forty-three years after the preceding exchange between Jo
Ann Boydston and Robert Clopton on the subject of Dr.
John Dewey’s trip to Hawai‘i, the quest to find evidence
about the effect that Dewey’s 1899 trip had still continues.
Last semester, I labored through a class reading
Dewey’s Democracy and Education and Art As Experience—
often without disguising my irritation and impatience withhis writings during class discussions. Whether my professor
or classmates wanted to hear it, I imparted a healthy amountof critique about the value of John Dewey’s contributions
to the chronicles of American education. Aptly focused on
philosophy, I felt that Dewey spent more time thinking
about teaching and learning than he did working with any
students in the classroom. Similarly, I felt, within the realmof art and aesthetics, that Dewey seemed to be arguing more
about their value to society than trying to do anything tobring them about.
As a Native Hawaiian educator whose kuleana(responsibility, obligation, privilege) is to facilitate increased
college enrollment, persistence, graduation, and transfer/career entry for Native Hawaiian students at Leeward
Community College, I have honored my personal andprofessional vocations by investigating how Hawaiian
students’ cultural well-being intersects with our college’s
teaching and learning structures. To find “best practices”
that provide authentic cultural contexts for teaching andlearning, researching origins of Hawaiian knowledge
production and dissemination is an essential cornerstone ofJohn Dewey in Hawai‘imy practice. However, because most of the documentation
about Hawai‘i’s public education system was written byhaole (foreign) and often missionary descendant or affiliated educators, I have eagerly sought out sources of “ourstory”—accounts of the development of teaching and learning in Hawai‘i that have been told via the voice, worldview,
and most importantly, the lived experience, of Hawai‘i’saboriginal people.
It was this same kuleana that influenced me to focus
this paper on what led to John Dewey’s six-week visit to
Hawai‘i in 1899, and what effect, if any, it had on Hawai‘i’sschool system. Unfortunately, as was previously conveyed
within the correspondence between Drs. Boydston and
Clopton, very few sources of evidence from the 1899 visit
credit John Dewey for directly affecting Hawai‘i’s school
system. However, through letters, newspaper accounts,
and secondary sources, there is a great deal of evidence
to suggest that through the relationships he had with theAmerican missionary descendant Castle family, and theiraffinity for and application of his philosophies, Dewey could
be credited with indirectly affecting Hawai‘i’s schools. Thisessay will outline the personal and historic contexts that
motivated the Castle family to invite Dr. and Mrs. Dewey
to Hawai‘i, while appropriately recognizing the Native
Hawaiian ali‘i who established government sponsored public
education within the kingdom.

Dewey’s Acquaintance with Hawai‘i

At initial glance, one might wonder how a Vermont born,
John Hopkins educated, and Chicago established professor
such as Dr. John Dewey found himself with a personal
invitation to come to Hawai‘i at the end of the nineteenth
century. It came about due to a connection with the Castle
family via a close, personal friendship with George H.
Mead. The connection between Dewey and Mead facilitatedan introduction to Mead’s young Hawai‘i-born missionary
descendant roommate from Oberlin College, Henry N.
Castle.
George Mead and Henry Castle were college classmatesat Oberlin College in 1877 (Heubner, 2012 p. 51). So close
were George and Henry that their friendship fueled a loveinterest between George and Henry’s elder sister, Helen K.
Castle and the two married in 1891 (Heubner, 2012, 52).
In 1891, Mead secured a teaching position at the
University of Michigan. It was at the University of

29

Michigan where Mead met John Dewey. After establishing
their working relationship as professors of philosophy at the
University of Michigan, Dewey and Mead continued to be
intimate friends and colleagues, as seen in their work andwritings. In fact, when the University of Chicago offered
Dewey the position of department chair of philosophy in
1894, he requested that the University also offer a teachingposition to Mead. This deal paid off well for the Universityof Chicago as Mead spent the rest of his academic career
there—a total of thirty-six years (Huebner, 2012, p. 88.)
In 1892, Helen Castle Mead traveled home to Hawai‘i,
accompanied by Mrs. John Dewey for an extended period.1
In 1893, Henry Castle decided to leave Hawai‘i for Michigan, motivated to take classes at the University of Michigan
and to participate in the lectures offered by Dewey andMead (Heubner, 2012, p. 53). Henry wrote to Helen andGeorge Mead on April 24, 1893: “I want to go to Ann
Arbor before the term closes, in order to see the work, go
into classes, and get acquainted with Mr. Dewey, etc. Wantto spend the summer with you somewhere. Want to brush
the cobwebs of our brains by contact with your superior
minds.” (Castle, H. N., 2012, p. 32).
The close relationship between George Mead and his
friends Henry Castle and John Dewey was nurtured bya shared set of common beliefs about the social sciences,philosophy, religion, education, and psychology. So
intimate were these bonds between the Castles, Meads,
and Deweys that their wives also participated and lent theirenergies to the progressive academic and community work.
Correspondence between the philosophers’ wives—Helen
Castle, Frida Steckner Castle (Henry Castle’s first wife),
Ethel Wing Castle (Henry Castle’s second wife,) andAlice Chipman Dewey—point to their involvement in the
Chicago Lab School where Dewey’s pedagogical ideas werein development, in the settlement houses, in Free Kindergartens, and in his university extension lectures. Thesebonds, solidified by loyal friendship, intellectual ideals, anda shared nurturing of progressive visions for education andsociety, reveal the motivations behind the Castle family’s
invitation to John and Alice Chipman Dewey to visit
Hawai‘i in 1899.

Who were the Castles?

The Castle family descended from Rev. Samuel Northrup
Castle and Mary Tenney, one of the many New England30

Educational Perspectives v Volume 47 v Numbers 1 and 2

based Congregationalist and Presbyterian missionary families who were sent to Hawai‘i by the American Boardof Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM).
Reverend S. N. Castle came to Hawai‘i with his firstwife, Angeline, to serve as the mission’s financial agent
in 1837 (Heubner, 2012, p. 51). When Angeline died in
1841, Reverend Castle asked his late wife’s sister, Mary,
to become his “companion” on the mission (Castle, A. L.,2004). Samuel N. Castle and Mary Tenney marriedin 1842.
While S. N. Castle may have come to Hawai‘i to advance the Christian mission, his Ivy League educated malechildren reached maturity at a time when Hawai‘i’s economic value as a sugar exporter and her military value as acentral port bridging America and Asian and Pacific nations
were emerging as highly coveted commodities. Together, theCastle family’s sons and their contemporaries, consisting of
fellow Ivy League educated missionary children and grandchildren, quickly realized that whoever controlled Hawai‘i’sarable lands and protective harbors would catapult Hawai‘i
into global prominence. Their only obstacles were Hawai‘i’s
status as an internationally recognized nation-state and herlineal and constitutional monarchs who maintained hersovereign rule. To claim the prize they sought, William B.
Castle, Henry Waterhouse, and Lorrin A. Thurston—eachof whom were Hawaiian kingdom subjects—and ten othersimilarly focused Anglo-Saxon, protestant men formed the“Committee of Safety” and committed treason against thereigning queen of the Hawaiian Kingdom, Lili‘uokalani.
To advance their ambitions, the annexationists sent
emissaries to Washington D.C. to petition the U.S.
Congress and President Grover Cleveland directly tosupport their petition to illegally annex Hawai‘i to America.
One of the messengers carrying this plea appears to havebeen Henry Castle. An account by his descendant, Alfred
L. Castle states
In 1893, he [Henry] returned to the United States toattend the Hawaiian Commission in Washington, which
was investigating American intervention in the Hawaiian
revolution that overthrew Queen Lili‘uokalani….Whenword reached him in December 1894 of a counterrevolt by
Hawaiian royalists, Castle and his daughter left immediately
for Hawai‘i on the steamship Elbe. Both Castle and his
daughter were killed…on January 30, 1895, in the North
Sea. (2004, p. 24)

The most poignant and compelling history detailingthe illegal overthrow was authored by Queen Lili‘uokalaniin her autobiography, Hawai‘i’s Story by Hawai‘i’s Queen.
Our Queen explained exactly what she saw in her nation’s
subjects travels to Washington D.C., the capitol city not of
their nationality, but rather, of their parents,
When I speak at this time of the Hawaiian people, I
refer to the children of the soil—the native inhabitants of the Hawaiian Islands and their descendants.
Two delegations claiming to represent Hawai‘ihave visited Washington at intervals during thepast four years in the cause of annexation, besides
which other individuals have been sent on to assist
in this attempt to defraud an aboriginal people oftheir birthrights—rights dear to the patriotic heartsof even the weakest nation. Lately these aliens havecalled themselves Hawaiians. They are not and neverwere Hawaiians. Although some have had positions
under the monarchy which they solemnly swore byoath of office to uphold and sustain, they retained
their American birthrights. (Queen Lilu‘uokalani,
1991, p. 325)

Progressive Education in Hawai‘i

One of the major shared visions between George Mead,Henry Castle, John Dewey, and their wives was that
education could bridge divides across diverse ethnic,
economic, social, religious, and intellectual groups. The
Meads and the Deweys were applying these ideals in latenineteenth century Chicago, while the Castle women
were experimenting with their vision of social change in
Honolulu via the Free Kindergarten movement.
The Meads, Deweys, and Castles’ social initiatives
shared common objectives such as wanting to address
new immigrant populations, post-agrarian economies,
and industrial technology education. At the end of thenineteenth century, both Chicago and Honolulu offeredcomparable microcosms within which to launch trials of
new teaching and learning strategies.
In communities where schools could serve as a force
for social change, progressive education methods could
be employed as a tactic. The John Dewey Progressive
Education Project (JDPEP) defines “progressive education”
as that which, “…describe(s) ideas and practices that
aim to make schools more effective agencies of ademocratic society.”

John Dewey in Hawai‘i

Further, if a truly progressive education is to berealized, JDPEP has identified the need for…two essential elements: (1) Respect for diversity,
meaning that each individual should be recognizedfor his or her own abilities, interests, ideas, needs, andcultural identity, and (2) the development of critical, socially engaged intelligence, which enables
individuals to understand and participate effectively
in the affairs of their community in a collaborative
effort to achieve a common good.
Using JDPEP’s definition, King Kamehameha III(Kauikeaouli) should be recognized as Hawai‘i’s firstprogressive educator. Dr. Malcolm Chun’s No Na Mamo
credited Samuel Kamakau for documenting Kauikeaouli’s
far-reaching vision and high priority for education in his
kingdom. In Ruling Chiefs of Hawaii, Kamakau recalled in
1824, the eleven year old king, Kauikeaouli proclaimed,“He aupuni palapala ko‘u” (My kingdom shall be a kingdomof learning) (Chun, 2011, pg. 103). Inspired by the king’s
vision, Hawaiian chiefs accomplished “widespread literacy”
by proactively identifying accomplished scholars to becometeachers, first in their households, then throughout thevillages within their lands. (Ibid, pg. 106)
By 1840, Kauikeaouli advanced his vision further by
establishing free schools for all his subjects, regardless ofage, and by establishing a constitution that required literacy
in order to marry or own land. As N. Goodyear-Ka‘ōpua has
written, “King Kamehameha III established the kingdom asa constitutional monarchy in which literacy and an emergent
national public school system became key features informing and formalizing the modern Hawaiian state (2013.)
In addition, in Ruling Chiefs of Hawaii, historian SamuelM. Kamakau (1992) described the prominent role education
played during Kauikeaouli’s reign.
The chiefs saw the value of education…and teachers
were sent all about the country districts. …There wereas many as forty such schools in Honolulu and an equal
number at Waikīkī and education spread widely in those
few years. (p. 270)
Though the King appointed a prominent Native
Hawaiian educator, David Malo, as his first superintendentof public schools, Malo’s deep loyalty to the Protestantmission made learning and literacy more of an occupational

31

extension of faith than a facilitator of national democracy.
Hawai‘i’s second progressive educator was Mataio
Kekūanāo‘a, a Hawaiian of noble birth and governor ofO‘ahu. In 1860, Kekūanāo‘a was appointed the Kingdom’s
fourth Board of Education superintendent. In The Seeds
We Planted, Dr. Noelani Goodyear-Ka‘ōpua’s (2013)
critical analysis of emerging culture-based charter schools,
the author recalls two of Mataio Kekūanāo‘a’s major
initiatives while he served as the Hawai‘i’s foremost public
education leader: 1) removing schools from churches and2) defending ‘ōlelo Hawai‘i (Hawaiian language) as theprimary mode of instruction as a means to preserving
nationhood. First, Dr. Goodyear-Ka‘ōpua points to
Kekūanāo‘a’s 1886 annual report:
In many places the schools, for want of special
buildings, are kept in the meeting houses or chapelsof [the] Protestant or Catholic population…The
result is that in almost all of these places, the publicschools are merely tenants at the will of this or that
religious denomination…It is necessary to provide
as far as possible for all the people the advantage ofa common school education…The common schools
should come to be regarded as strictly neutral groundin religious matters. (pp. 18, 19)
Next, in an almost eerie foretelling of what would
happen to Hawaiian language if it were not defended in
the public education system, Dr. Goodyear-Ka‘ōpua recalls
Kekūanāo‘a’s impassioned statement:
The theory of substituting the English language for
the Hawaiian, in order to educate our people is as
dangerous to Hawaiian nationality, as it is uselessin promoting the general education of the people.
If we wish to preserve the Kingdom of Hawaii for
Hawaiians, and to educate our people, we must insist
that the Hawaiian language shall be the language of
all our National schools, and that English shall betaught whenever practical, but only as an importantbranch of education. (p. 19)
Punahou School serves as a well-suited contrast to
Hawai‘i’s ali‘i-initiated school system. While Punahou isseen today as a very progressive school, its foundation andhistory could be seen as exclusive and formalist. Punahou
was established by American missionary parents who did

32

Educational Perspectives v Volume 47 v Numbers 1 and 2

not want to be separated from their young children forlack of a suitable, protestant primary school education in
Hawai‘i. Though King Kamehameha III established free,public schools to educate all citizens of his nation, themissionaries sought to establish a separate school because
they the felt need to 1) shield mission children from the‘corrupting‘ influence of the Hawaiian tongue, 2) prepare
for the ever-increasing possibility that missionaries andtheir offspring would become permanent residents of theislands…., and 3) safeguard mission children from thesexual attitudes and practices of the Hawaiians (To Teach
the Children, 1982).
After completing their education at Punahou School,
the Castle sons and daughters used their education toachieve remarkably different ends. The sons—William,
Henry, George, and James—completed their university
education at Ivy League universities. They used theirknowledge of economics, government, and law to not
only increase wealth for their numerous family estatesand foundations, but also to overthrow Hawai‘i’s Queen.
The daughters—Helen and Harriet—led by theirsocial justice-oriented and abolitionist matriarch, Mary
Tenney Castle, led very different social change efforts in
Hawai‘i in their work to establish free kindergartens anduniversity extension lectures.
In his book, A Century of Philanthropy, descendant
Alfred Castle places his grandmother and aunts’ works
within a historical context of the Progressive Era. In
his chapter, “Women and Philanthropy,” Castle refers
to historian Robert Crunden’s research on one hundred
so-called “progressives” who were born between 1854
and 1874—the generation that included Helen andHarriet Castle. Castle uses Crunden’s findings todescribe the character of Protestant reformers likehis relatives.
Caught between these two worlds, their lives wereboth creative and problematic…includes birth in a homeof devout Protestantism, restlessness, religious doubt andindecision, psychosomatic illness, a solid education at asmall denominational college, and a vocation invested
with religious and moral significance. In broad outline,
these are the key characteristics for a large number ofreformers who, like Henry Castle, wrestled with theirpast to find a new identity and cause through social
reform. (2004, p. 23).

Castle goes on to describe missionary children of thisera as being concerned with professionalism, regulation,
and a search for political order,….art, music, literature, andarchitecture, as well as the general climate of opinion (2004,
pp. 22–23).

Dewey’s Invitation to Hawai‘i
Tracing Dewey’s invitation to Hawai‘i can most easily bedone in chronological sequence. After meeting George
Mead at the University of Michigan in 1891, John Dewey
starts to learn about Hawai‘i from Henry and Helen Castle.
By 1892, the wives of this progressive pair of thinkers havebecome close friends, as evidenced by Alice C. Dewey’s
travels to Hawai‘i with Helen Castle Mead. In 1894,
both Dewey and Mead took positions at the University of
Chicago where they become acquainted with the newly
established (1889) settlement house Hull House. The settlement house movement that took hold in urban America
sought to …help immigrant families adapt to the language
and culture of their new country…and housed middle-classcollege women in order to facilitate their service to the poor
(Castle, A. L., 2004, pp. 10–11). As progressive social philosophers, Dewey and Mead (and their wives) were intriguedby the prospects of how settlement houses could serve as
venues to apply their ideals for democratic social change.
Meanwhile in Hawai‘i, another Castle sister, Harriet
was working with the matriarch of the Castle family—“Mother Castle” as she was known—on establishing theGerman kindergarten movement in Hawai‘i. Alfred Castle
chronicles his aunt’s work in A Century of Philanthropy. He
notes that by 1897, having done extensive research throughout America on the kindergarten movement, Harriet went
to visit her sister in Chicago and had the opportunity tovisit the Hull House and become acquainted with Dewey’s
philosophical and pedagogic ideas. Harriet brought her conviction for free kindergartens home to Hawai‘i and waged agrassroots fundraising campaign. Part of her argument for
support described early education as, a saver of future tax
expenses for jails, prisons, and almshouses (Castle, A. L.,
2004, pp. 36–37).
Finally, the lack of a university in Hawai‘i at the time
motivated some of the highly educated elite to establish public lectures by which a larger number of Hawaii’s population
could access academic lectures and perhaps earn university
credit. University extension lectures were introduced inJohn Dewey in Hawai‘i

Great Britain in the mid-nineteenth century and spread to
the United States. The Hawaiian Star newspaper described
the university extension process as follows: “a lecturer ofgreat note is sent to the city requiring him and gives a seriesof lectures in which he is a specialist. At the end of thecourse, he is succeeded by another and so on.” The article
goes on to say that people could benefit from the lectures
either for personal development or to complete a course for
credit (The Hawaiian Star, December 14, 1898, p. 1).
The most intriguing part of this article is the title
and introduction, “University Extension: Three Ladies
Interested in a Great Work.” At the time, even though they
had not yet received the right to vote in America, nor own
property, this article credited three Hawai‘i women with thevision to hold world-class intellectual enrichment activities
on the most isolated islands in the Pacific! The author notedthat “[f]oremost in the work is Mrs. Mead [sic] (nee Helen
Castle), wife of Professor Mead [sic} of Chicago, Mrs. F.M.
Day, and Mrs. Ethel Wing Castle.” (The Hawaiian Star,
December 14, 1898, p. 1). Mrs. Ethel Wing Castle wasHenry Castle’s second wife and widow.
Though Dewey wrote voluminously of his educational
ideals in his published work, his personal correspondence
between friends, colleagues, and acquaintances are the only
sources that reveal his personal observations about Hawai‘i.
In 1894, Harriet Castle wrote to both Dr. and Mrs.
Dewey about her enthusiasm to start free kindergartens in
Hawai‘i. In 1898, Dr. Dewey wrote to Ms. Flora Cooke
about the Castle family’s desire to memorialize both Henryand his daughter Dorothy by launching a kindergarten. It
seems a completely natural consequence of events, given
the Castles‘ vision and personal aims to further develop
the reach of progressive and early childhood education in
Hawai‘i, that the Castles (especially Helen Castle Mead)invited Dr. and Mrs. Dewey to the newly introduced
university extension lecture series. The choice of Dewey’s
five lecture topics that focused on child development andthe ethical implications therein, leave one little doubt that
his invitation to lecture for the university extension programin 1899 was to further the work that the Castles and theircolleagues were preparing to devote to the creation of freekindergartens in Hawai‘i.

33

I ka wā ma mua: Look to the past to see the futureThis study explored documents that illustrated thefriendships that led to John and Alice Chipman Dewey’s
collaborations with the Meads and Castles. Together, they
can be credited for leading a collaborative effort that resulted
in the establishment of Hawai‘i’s free kindergartens, Pālama
Settlement, university extension lectures, and one of theoldest family philanthropic organizations in America.
While these were all meritorious outcomes, thisstudy’s aim has also been to show how these events were
circumstantial beneficiaries to Native Hawaiians’ zeal forlearning and our ali‘i’s inspired vision for their citizens to
be educated . It was these Hawaiian leaders’ visions andpriorities that led to a government-funded infrastructurethat launched free public education to all citizens
throughout Hawai‘i.

REFERENCES

Castle, A. L. (2004). A century of philanthropy, A history of The Samuel N.
and Mary Castle Foundation. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press.
Castle, Henry N. (2012). The collected letters of Henry Northrup Castle.
Athens: Ohio University Press.
Chun, M. N. (2011). No Na Mamo : Traditional and Contemporary
Hawaiian Beliefs and Practices. Honolulu, HI, USA: University of
Hawaii Press. Retrieved from http://www.ebrary.com
Goodyear-Ka‘ōpua, N. (2013). The seeds we planted: Portraits of a Native
Hawaiian charter school. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Huebner, D. R. (2012). Becoming Mead: The social process of academic
knowledge. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
The John Dewey Progressive Education Project, (http://www.uvm.
edu/~dewey/articles/proged.html).
Kamakau, S. M. (1992). Ruling chiefs of Hawai‘ i, Revised Edition.
Honolulu: Kamehameha Schools Press.
Queen Liliuokalani. (1991). Hawai‘ i’s story by Hawai‘ i’s queen. Honolulu:
Mutual Publishing.
To teach the children: Historical aspects of education in Hawai‘ i. (1991).
Honolulu: Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum.

ENDNOTE1

In a letter dated April 23, 1892, John Dewey wrote to Thomas Davidson
that“…Mrs. Dewey has departed on a sudden visit to Honolulu
Hawaiian Islands & won‘t be back till July sometime–She may not care
for a farther vacation of long time…” (1892.04.23 (00467).

34

Educational Perspectives v Volume 47 v Numbers 1 and 2

Hanahau‘oli School: Theory Meets PracticeRobert Peters
Science (Nature Study) as well as Mathematics was taught in practical ways. We measured daily
the growth of a banana leaf from a plant growing by the front steps and, as I remember, thegrowth was six inches or more. We also had a hive of bees with glass on one side so we could
watch them. (Dora Derby, Mrs. Cooke’s daughter, from her memories of the first year, 1918, as
cited in Palmer, 1968, p. 5).

A Brief Introduction to Hanahau‘oli School

Hanahau‘oli School was launched in 1918 when Sophie Judd
Cooke and her husband George brought together their six
children with friends on a vacant lot at the corner of Makiki
and Nohea (Nowewhi, then) Streets. The land, almost two
acres, was surrounded by a lava rock wall built in 1902 andhad belonged to C. M. Cooke, Ltd. Two small buildingsthat the Cookes moved to the site from their Makiki
Heights home became the school’s classroom building andshop. Much of the lot was left open for a campus playgroundand eventually included Hawai‘i’s first jungle gym.
Sixteen children, ranging in age from six to elevenyears old, were the first students of this small school, whichfunctioned as a large or extended family. Academic subjects
were taught by Miss Cecil Palmer, assisted by Miss Ruth
Farrington, that first year. They were joined by Japaneseand French teachers, along with Mrs. A . A. Wilson, whotraveled to Makiki from Wahiawā two days a week to teachshop. The importance of the shop cannot be overstated as
it was a center of much of the learning at Hanahau‘oli, notunlike at John Dewey’s Chicago Laboratory School, wherechildren could work out their ideas in the process of “doing,”
characteristic of the progressive education tradition. The
school was built upon the belief expressed by Dewey in My
Pedagogic Creed that the experience of schooling should be apart of life and not separate from it: it (school) is a “processof living and not simply a preparation for future living. . . .”Dewey, 1897 in Dworkin, 1959, p.22).
While a fairly radical departure from traditional
schooling at that time, the progressive movement was
gaining currency nationwide. Mrs. Cooke, along withfamily friends, had been reading progressive educators likeFrancis Parker, William Heard Kilpatrick, and John Dewey.
A fortuitous meeting with Mrs. Goodrun Thorne-Thomsen
offered the motivation to start a “small school.” Mrs. Cooke
attended a lecture for mothers at Washington Place entitled“Literature for Children” delivered by Mrs. Thorne-Thomsen of the Francis Parker School in Chicago, who offeredpractical advice, according to Palmer, for starting a school.
“Our school was ‘progressive’ in every sense of the word. We
tried new methods and broke with the stilted formal type of
instruction which was common at that time.” (Cooke, 1964,
p. 78). She named her school “Hanahau‘oli” meaning “Joyful
Work” at the suggestion of her brother Henry.
Defying the criticism of many in the community by
starting a progressive school, Sophie Judd Cooke followed
her beliefs derived from the Progressive Education movement that methods like “correlating (integrating) the workand ‘learning by doing’” were cornerstones of good educationand that developing individual and group initiative throughprojects would be the result of the Hanahau‘oli experience.
(Cooke, 1964, p.79). The connection to Dewey in theschool’s aims and beliefs was evident from the start.
The 1919 school bulletin clearly expressed its aims in
Dewey terms:
Our aim is to give the child opportunities for self
expression and to provide, through the interests andactivities of the school, occupations necessary forthe development and unfolding at each stage of his
individual powers and capabilities; to show him how
he can exercise these powers, both mechanically andsocially, in the little world he finds about him.

John Dewey in Hawai‘i

As Louisa Palmer notes in Memories, Hanahau‘oli’s
progressive beliefs included the following principles:v

Education is a process of living.

v

School life grows out of home life.

v

Moral training results from entering into “proper
relations with others in a unity of work and thought.”

v

Each child’s “endowments” differ from that of others.

Even clearer evidence of the close tie to Dewey was
the 1923 bulletin which quotes directly from John and
Evelyn Dewey’s Schools of Tomorrow: “To find out how tomake (find) knowledge when it is needed is the true end of
acquisition of information in school, not the information
itself ” (Palmer, 1968, p. 16). Of equal interest to those who
wonder about the progressive legacy at Hanahau‘oli over its
almost one hundred year history may be that this statement
still guides much of today’s curriculum development at
the school. The standards cited in the 1923 bulletin fora “modern school” are the ability to think, to execute, tolead, to co-operate, to judge and to organize (the student’s)
own methods of work—the very standards that we
continue to hold to today and the ones that are described bycontemporary educators as “Twenty-first Century skills.”
From the outset, Hanahau‘oli has been a school that
subscribes to the notion that first-hand experiences, especially through excursions, give real meaning to learningthat information gained from reading a book can, at best,
only approximate. As far back as 1919, as captured in a
letter from Mrs. Cooke to Mrs. Thorne-Thomsen, there isa record of weekly excursions on Mondays after lunch withvisits to places like the Bishop Museum, the Aquarium, theSugar Planter’s Experiment Station, the printing office, thewharves, the pineapple cannery, Makiki Valley stream, andthe blacksmith shop. Mrs. Cooke notes, “These excursions
to actually ‘see and experience’ continue to be a vital part ofHanahau‘oli’s work.” (Palmer, 1968, p. 3).
For Mrs. Cooke, the success of her efforts wasvalidated by John Dewey himself during a visit to
Honolulu in 1951. “Our crowning event was when Dr.
John Dewey, who advocated this theory of teaching, andMrs. Dewey, came to visit our school and gave us ‘thegreen light’. This gratified us.” (Cooke, 1964, p. 79).
Given this brief introduction to Hanahau‘oli andits connection with progressive educational thought, the35main task of this article is to examine the place of theseideas in the more recent history of the school and to
explore their meaning for today’s world of rapid global
and digital change. My aims are to examine how current
the educational philosophy of the Progressives is for theworld of our children’s future lives, when they will cometo occupy positions of leadership, and to assess just how“progressive” these traditions and beliefs are.

Progressive Educational Practice at Hanahau‘oli

While the mission of Hanahau‘oli has undergone revision
over the years, it retains the essential features of the aims
and principles cited above: respect for the uniqueness ofeach individual child; development of individuals who are
independent and collaborative; education that challenges
and promotes the joy of learning; deepening the child’s
understanding of the world through critical and creative
thinking; recognizing the natural way of learning by emphasizing “learning by doing;” building a strong connection
between home and school; and placing an emphasis upon
the arts (Hanahau‘oli Mission Statement, revised 2010). The
mission’s underlying beliefs are clearly recognizable in theoriginal standards of Hanahau‘oli:v

recognizing that parents are a child’s first teachers andwork with the school to promote learning;v

educating the whole child: cognitively, socially,physically and emotionally;vvaluing the natural way children learn and the need fortime to be a child;v

providing a developmentally appropriate, child-centeredprogram;v

respecting that children demonstrate differentv

strengths and develop at different rates;v

recognizing that real-life problems and situations offer
the best means for constructing meaning;v

supporting collaborative learning, inquiry and selfreflection; and,v

focusing on continuous progress for each child as itprovides feedback on learning and promotes growth.

Just as the Progressives of John Dewey’s day spoke tothe founders of the school, their ideas are still prominent in36

Educational Perspectives v Volume 47 v Numbers 1 and 2

the school’s life today and hold promise for guidance of theschool in future.
A few years ago, Alfie Kohn wrote an article for
Independent School (2008), the journal of the National
Association of Independent Schools, in which he lamented
the lack of progressive schools while extolling their value
in today’s world. He cites three basic characteristics of the
progressive school, which I will use as the framework fordemonstrating Hanahau‘oli’s alignment with the progressive
tradition: active learning, community collaboration, andteaching the whole child.

Active Learning and Deep UnderstandingChildren actively inform the curriculum with their questions, solutions, and explanations; they help to form andevaluate what is learned and are engaged in constructing
meaning rather than passively absorbing information. Factsand skills have little meaning themselves but only in a context and for a purpose. Learning becomes centered aroundthemes, projects, and the questions that children pose. Suchlearning encourages connection-making, concept development, and understanding about how their world functions.
Teaching becomes interdisciplinary.
Hanahau‘oli’s curriculum is designed around thematicunits in social studies and science because of its commitment
to the notion that three questions motivate all learning:
Who am I? How does the world work? Where do I fit inthat world? Units created by the teachers, with student
input, address these questions and support children’s naturalinquisitiveness. The units are designed to promote theunderstanding of concepts to help children organize theirworld and eventually form generalizations about how theworld works. These concepts are abstract and broad; they
include change, interdependence, adaptation, technology,
diversity, survival, and others that unite the curriculum bothhorizontally and vertically.
Individual units in the JK to Grade 6 program, support
a wide variety of topics of study that include human needs,
community needs, our island environment, family issues,environmental sustainability, and the origins of democracy.
Children at all levels are invited to share what they alreadyknow about a topic and what they would like to learn. In
this way, they help to shape the direction of their studies,indicate their levels of understanding, and provide input into
different areas of interest and focus. Building upon student

interests supports active engagement and, when work isshared with the whole group, enhances collective learning.
As Dewey would agree, children are giving direction to
the curriculum but not determining it. The latter is the
responsibility of the adult, the teacher, whose experience isbroader and more mature and whose job it is to determine
what is important to be learned.
What has become known as “learning by doing” or“hands-on” learning is emphasized as children venture into
the community to research the subject-matter being studied
while developing their understandings through problem
formulation, problem solving, simulated learning, and theexperience of interacting directly with the environment.
Very much in the Deweyan tradition, the school’s
thematic units help children understand that there need be
no separation between school and life. School is life and life
is learning. Rather than preparing for the future, Dewey
believed that education should address what the childneeds to know now. The best way to do that is to allow thecurriculum to grow out of real home, work, and life situations—like the construction of a new school building.
Construction on campus over the years has provided
an ideal area of study for children to investigate. Observing
concrete footings being poured for one of our new buildings, children raised questions associated with physics,
chemistry, and mathematics as well as with how cement
is made. These observations were developed throughvisits to a cement factory to learn what is involved in the
manufacturing process. The children also raised questions
for investigation about occupations, tool usage, and genderroles. One of our groups during a project questioned why
so few women were on the work crews and interviewed thecontractors and workers to seek answers to their question.
Another group assumed the role of photojournalists tocapture the campus development with digital cameras. They
followed up by interviewing those directly affected (students, teachers, and administrators) about how demolition,
construction, and new “homes” in which to carry out theirwork would affect them. Researching, collecting data, andrecording results led to the publication of their findings,
which they subsequently shared with the school community.
Another group, as part of a project on change andconstancy in social studies, made an historical study of ourschool campus. They interviewed alumni, school administrators, and parents and examined the school archives

John Dewey in Hawai‘ifor further information. These children constructed threemodels of the campus covering its founding in 1918, theWar Years in the 1940s, and the envisioned new building.
The conclusions they drew from the study helped them tounderstand their world and how it works. They recognizedthat while the school and campus have experienced changeover time, there are some things that can be counted on
to stay the same: the importance of experiential learning,
the traditions valued by the school community, the valueof school’s small size, and the symbolic significance of theschool’s bell.
Models of the buildings as they emerged during planning became projects for the study of scale and proportion
as well as material usage by some of the older children. The
skills and understandings needed to proceed with these activities were integrated into the units, giving them meaning
and utility as well as emphasizing that learning is “for now”
and not merely a preparation for the future. These examples
support Dewey’s notion of what can be called “educative”
activities—they are based on children’s interests, grow outof experience, support development, give meaning to skill
application, require joint problem solving, and contribute todeep understanding.
A challenge that the Hanahau‘oli mixed age, Kulaiwi
group (second and third graders) completed this past springis one that exemplifies our emphasis upon project-basedlearning. As part of their year-long study of community andinterdependence, the group studied how communities makechanges over time to meet the needs of their members.
Already having studied Hanahau‘oli as an interdependent
school community, the Kulaiwi children were asked toinvestigate a real campus problem—its aging playgroundand play structure. Identifying the need—the current
playground is getting old and may become unsafe—thechildren took on the challenge of designing a new playground that would be more appealing and useful to allcommunity members. They also required that it be safe,and (at the request of the Head of School), that it be morenatural in design. The expertise necessary to complete thisdesign project was identified as children applied to takeon a variety of roles such as historians, field researchers,
designers, and builders. Children were asked to consider
their areas of interest and strengths and to indicate how
they wished to participate and contribute. This would be across-disciplinary project, which the specific roles required;37

and it would be one that demanded collaboration and anunderstanding of interdependence both within and amonggroups.
Guided by an architect parent who met with the fullgroup, the historians were advised to understand theirpast to get to the future, and not to let their story go. The
historians, much like their counterparts during the campus
construction, utilized the archival resources as a basis fortheir research. They also interviewed faculty members oflong-standing and some alumni who shared their playground memories, giving this group an historical sense of
the growth of the playground and how decisions for change
were made in the past. They even consulted notes from thelast ad hoc Playground Committee, who were responsible
for the current playground design that the students wereseeking to change.
The field researchers divided up their work. Whilesome interviewed teachers and children throughout theschool to determine needs and wants, others honed theirobservation and data-collection skills by examining current
usage by different age levels during actual recess times. Allof their information was shared with the designers who
wrestled with the various needs and demands of the schoolcommunity as they developed drawings for the builders.
Notably, the children revealed a sensitivity to the needsof young children with physical challenges and looked forsolutions to how the designs could meet safety and accessneeds. These designs were presented to the physical education teacher, the Head of School, and the board’s Physical
Plant Committee for feedback. Following a sharing with thegroup in which the drawings were explained and a rationale
was presented, a final selection was made based upon thegroup’s assessment of which design best met the needs of the
project. The builders were assigned the task of translating
the design into a three-dimensional model. This task required extensive measuring, both outside and inside, and theapplication of the concept of scale along with creative useof materials. The project culminated in a final presentation
before an audience of the Playground Planning Committee.
All of these groups integrated a great deal of mathematics into their work. They employed communication
skills—both literacy and design skills—to engage incollaborative problem solving and evaluation of their efforts
through daily goal assessment accompanied by a final
reflection about the design challenge itself. This was a unit

38

Educational Perspectives v Volume 47 v Numbers 1 and 2of high engagement because it was meaningful, demandedauthentic intellectual activity, and demonstrated positive
participation in community life—requirements that Dewey’s
educational philosophy supports as elements of progressive
learning. The design of a campus playground, elements ofwhich the Playground Planning Committee intend to incorporate, reinforces the notion that school and life are notseparate. This unit also models the correlation of the logical(facts) and the psychological (experience) within a social
context, and thus represents the application of Dewey’s
belief that subject matter gains meaning not as a collectionof objective facts but as a human experience playing a part in
the process of living.

Community, Collaboration, and Social JusticeIn progressive learning environments, children learn withand from each other. They are places where competition
yields to collaboration and, what may to some seem likediametric opposites, where independence and interdependence exist side-by-side. A sense of community is fostered as
responsibility for self and others is encouraged. Students are
assisted to realize that they are part of “widening circles ofcare” that extend beyond immediate social groups to include
a more global world.
“When the school introduces and trains each childof society into membership within such a little community (the school), saturating him with the spirit ofservice. . .we shall have the deepest and best guaranty
of a larger society which is worthy, lovely and harmonious.” (Dewey, 1899 in Dworkin, 1959, p. 49).
John Dewey’s emphasis upon the individual reflects
an understanding that society’s needs are best met when
educators capitalize upon the collective strengths, interests,
and talents of the community’s individual members. And
in order for that to happen, the individual needs of groupmembers should be met. For Dewey, service and spirit areto permeate the entire curriculum and, in effect, the fabricof the school. Working together on a project or an activity
implies contributing to something larger than one’s self,
to a common and shared purpose. And, the “doing” of anactivity is insufficient in his view to meet this purpose.
Practical engagement also required the act of “thinking”
or “reflecting” to better understand human needs. (Tanner,
1997, p. 3–5).

At Hanahau‘oli, the principle of the individual as
a community member is a natural outgrowth of boththe social studies thematic unit as well as the school
environment which promotes a sense of communal
living and shared responsibilities. The most obvious
demonstrations of this principle are evident in the daily lifeof the school ranging across such activities as classroom“jobs,” reading/writing buddies, and sixth-grade classroom
helpers. The latter role is an “applied-for” position
with a periodic performance assessment to ensure thehelper is meeting obligations and fulfilling community
responsibilities—a very Deweyan notion of school as lived
experience. Mentoring in our multiage classrooms bycontinuing (second year) students is a natural outgrowthof learning about leadership and inclusion. This type of“community service” is defined within the school context.
It is a first step toward understanding that a community
is a group of people working together to seek a common
result. It also reflects a natural extension of the placeof family and home as the child’s first teachers and itemphasizes a growing sense of belonging with its attendant
responsibilities. Such tasks are applications of John Dewey’s
belief that school life grows out of home life and should“deepen and extend the child’s sense of values bound up in
his home life” (Dewey, 1897 in Dworkin, 1959, p.23).
Beyond the classroom and campus walls, community
involvement is most often a natural result of inquiries thatarise from areas of study that emphasize discovering how
the world works. An example from a few years ago cameabout in a Habitat for Humanity project that involved
providing lunches for workers. This project arose from one
group’s study of the need for shelters in which they learned
about Habitat for Humanity’s effort to support affordable
housing. Unable to participate in the actual house-building,the students nevertheless wanted to contribute, so they
devised a lunch program for workers and, with their parent’s
help, carried it out.
Another example grew out of a study of our local
community. Children on a learning trip to downtown
Honolulu encountered numbers of homeless people andwere surprised to discover that even children can behomeless. Wanting to learn more, they contacted a social
service agency to find out how they could become involved
with this community issue. Discovering that toiletries
were in great need, the children conducted a school-wide

John Dewey in Hawai‘idrive to help meet this need for homeless children andtheir families. In both instances, children reflected about
the socio-economic problems of our local community as an
outgrowth of their unit studies and used that information to
help address the problem.
These are examples of developing that “spirit ofservice” cited above and of introducing children to theconcept of social justice. Both support the progressive
idea that education is intended to improve the quality oflife, for the individual and the community. Perhaps themost explicit expression of these principles can be foundin the sixth-grade classroom. The goal for the sixth
grade students is “balancing responsibilities of the greaterwhole with those of ourselves. “ This goal is played out
as children study the following central pairs of concepts:
self and society; conflict and harmony; diversity andunity; constancy and change. As they complete their final
year at Hanahau‘oli, children are given opportunities toreflect about themselves as individuals and learners andto practice what it means to be a member of a democratic
community. They create a Greek Polis or city-state and set
it up as a working community with defined responsibilities,
expectations for individual and group functioning, andprojects that require sharing individual strengths and talents
while supporting the group’s overall goals. The on-goingreflection and assessment of how the group is functioning
opens opportunities for improvement, problem-solving, anddiscovery of the importance of respecting and considering
diverse viewpoints. Their project is to build a model ofcommunity living and democratic decision-making, and tolearn this by learning from the experience. It is worth notingthat collaboration in all the preceding examples is a key
element in community living as defined by Hanahau‘oli andits emphasis upon shared projects.

The Whole Child and Intrinsic Motivation

The ideas of teaching the whole child and encouraging themthrough intrinsic motivation are implicit in the preceding
sections but are important to explicate as Dewey values that
inform practice at Hanahau‘oli.
Teaching the Whole Child
The phrase, “whole child,” may be considered amuch over-used one, but questions can be raised about
how well-practiced it is once children move beyond the39

preschool years. It denotes the importance Dewey placedon learning being more than the traditionally academic;
it extends to learning how to be a good person as well as
moving beyond just verbal and mathematical proficiency.
It includes attending to all parts of the child and offering
opportunities for growth in the social and physical realm
as well as opening opportunities to discover passions
and make connections. The second construct, intrinsic
motivation, is one worthy of conversation at all levels of
education as it addresses a critical issue for progressives, theperception by many that the primary purpose of learning
is a utilitarian one. Not only did Dewey support the valueof learning derived from the satisfaction of knowing but healso believed, as stated above, that education is a process ofliving, one that addresses what a person needs to know at
the time and not a preparation for future living.
While social development is at the heart of all
Hanahau‘oli classrooms, in which children and teachers
define and create learning communities, opportunities todevelop, explore, and refine interests along with talents andpassions are also key to each child’s Hanahau‘oli experience.
The arts play a central role as vehicles for both accessing
knowledge and expressing what has been learned. They
offer an opportunity to experience life and learn about one’s
self and others. Hanahau‘oli believes that by virtue of thefact that the arts are an expression of self and culture, they
are a worthy areas of study. Even more than that, they alsooffer children alternative ways of expressing their learningand validate individual strengths.
A project involving the visual arts teacher and a parent
who works with mosaics offered the Kulaiwi children
an opportunity to express their learning by creating an
accurate, wall-sized mural depicting the ocean zones
and creatures that inhabit them. Serving as docents forvisitors, children explained the nature of the mural and theinterdependence of the creatures and their environments.
Not only did they become knowledgeable about the ocean
itself, but they also learned the mosaic processes required
for the mural creation. Teachers often encourage children to
demonstrate their learning through visual representations,recognizing the unique skills of some and the limitations
that verbal responses may have as reliable measures fordetermining what a child has learned.
By placing emphasis on the whole child other areas ofdevelopment and potential interest are opened up, such as

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Educational Perspectives v Volume 47 v Numbers 1 and 2

foreign language, music (instrumental and vocal), physicalskills, and shop. It is important to note that, in alignment
with Dewey’s thinking, the shop (called Physical WorldLab) supports children’s learning in the use of manual skills
and tools—not simply for utilitarian purposes but moreas “mental training” to use the eye and hand to express
ideas of the mind (Tanner, 1997, p. 153–57). Besides being
exposed to potential areas of interest and capitalizing onchildren’s strengths, studying these various subject areas
also helps them to recognize and integrate the connections
between disciplines.
A unique feature of Hanahau‘oli is the RPM(Rhythms, Patterns, and Movement) program in which themusic, French Language, and physical education teachers
team up to help children see the intersections of all threesubjects. Most often their work emphasizes answers to thequestion—“What will you do with the things you know
and know how to do?” Children are given opportunities
to apply what has been learned in each subject area as
they plan for performances, demonstrate content learningfrom unit studies, and utilize creative thinking by
employing their collaboration skills. Projects can range
from choreographing routines for the Holiday Program
to designing a Medieval Fete and sharing what has beenlearned while studying about shelters. No matter what the
project is, the work includes the following: collaborativeplanning, dealing with increasing levels of complexity, andusing thinking skills (application, analysis, and synthesis)
as children “repurpose” what has been learned by putting
it together in new and creative ways. The “whole child”
element that is involved in these efforts comes as a result ofoffering new opportunities for the children to discover waysof learning and expressing ideas. In addition, it encourages
those whose natural skills reside in one of these disciplines
with opportunities to excel, to lead, and to feel theirworth, which provides a further example of respect for theindividual within a social context.
The emphasis upon creative activity can be interpreted
to support, as Laurel Tanner notes in Dewey’s Laboratory
School, Dewey’s assertion in Moral Principles in Education(1909): “’. . . every method that appeals’ to the child’s‘capacities in construction, production, and creation, marks
an opportunity to shift the center of ethical gravity froman absorption which is selfish to a service which is social.’”(Dewey, 1909, p. 26 in Tanner, 1997, p.36).

Intrinsic Motivation
The child’s own instinct and powers furnish the material andgive the starting point for all education. (Dewey, 1897 in
Dworkin, 1959, p.20).
According to Dewey, student interest is a key factor
in planning for instruction and the curriculum. It offers
the motivation for learning and the satisfaction of having
one’s questions answered following inquiry. This does not
imply, like the more child-driven approach of A. S. Neilat Summerhill, that children should be allowed to decide
what and when to study something. Rather, it recognizes
that as a teacher plans, she needs to consider the context inwhich she is teaching and the children in her classroom.
At Hanahau‘oli, this approach ensures that even when thesame thematic units are taught over time, they will always
be different and adapted to the group of children engaged ina lesson—the differences shaped by both the developmental
stage and experiences and interests of the current group.
Dewey valued the authority of the teacher as aknowledgeable individual whose experience equips her todetermine what is important to learn from a conceptual andthematic vantage. At the same time, he argued that children
need to be drawn into the planning. One means to achieve
this is for the teacher to “interpret the child’s interests”
and because of her experience open opportunities for the
potential of that interest to be maximized or expanded.
At Hanahau‘oli, children are invited into this process asteachers explore what the children already know about a
topic, the questions they have, and what they might like tolearn. Utilizing that information to guide planning ensuresthat children have a voice in the direction of the curriculum,
which is vertically organized around conceptual themes toenhance and extend understanding as the children mature.
Identifying what children already understand informs
instructional planning as teachers seek to build children’s
understanding without judging the validity or accuracy of
their efforts. Teachers then question the children to help
clarify their thinking and utilize what they hear to frame
activities and instruction. For example, a topical unit aboutfood for younger children at Hanahau‘oli included a subunit
about plants and their needs. Children seemed to “have thewords” to identify those needs—water, sunlight and air—so
the teachers took the opportunity to ask two questions topromote further inquiry: “How do you know? and How
can you find out if that is true?” The children proceeded toJohn Dewey in Hawai‘i

identify explorable questions (Do plants need air to survive?
Do plants need light from the sun?). They were then divided
into six investigation groups to make “thoughtful guesses”
and set up their investigation plans. Teachers respectedchildren’s plans and offered guidance when a group found it
needed support. The most interesting results were derived
from plans that initially did not work and from the further
inquiry and questions the revisions produced. Children
guided this work by determining the interest groups andthe questions to pursue, and they did this within the larger
context of a unit designed around food as a basic need andthe intended learning outcomes that were related to plants asa primary source of food and an integral part of food chains.
This unit took advantage of children as natural scientists
and yielded “control” of the unit to the children by building
upon their interests and understandings. (Inouye & Ross,
2009, p. 21–25).
Projects like this amount to what Alfie Khon describes
as “taking the child seriously.” He notes that, “progressive
educators take their cue from the children—and areparticularly attentive to differences among them” (2008, p.
21). Thus, the curriculum at Hanahau‘oli is designed withthe cooperation of the children, and teachers are alert to theidea that children’s questions, knowledge, and experiences
may take them in unexpected but valuable directions.

Afterthoughts: The Progressive School in the
Twenty-first Century

John Dewey’s understanding of the nature of learning andinstruction continues to have relevance today and inform
both best practices and curricular focus. Despite the bias reflected in this manuscript in favoring progressive education,
it seems evident that educators who support the emphasis on
Twenty-first Century Skills will find the progressive tradition informative and instructive as the focus of educational
reform shifts from teaching to learning. Current opinion
that twenty-first century learners need to be effective andinteractive communicators, creative problem solvers, collaborative team members, and critical thinkers harkens
back to the outcomes that Dewey sought at his University
Lab School—goals shared with other progressive educatorsof his era. Seeking to provide learning opportunities thatdevelop democratic citizens capable of working together tosolve problems and improve the quality of life is the goalof progressive education whether at the local, national, or

41

global level. And, it remains so today, albeit under the guiseof sustaining international competitiveness—a value that is
not reflective of Dewey’s thinking.
The twenty-first century curriculum is emerging
as one that requires interdisciplinary thinking, thematicorganization, and project-based learning that is informedby research. It is a curriculum that is connected to thecommunity, both local and global, and extends beyond theclassroom walls. It incorporates higher order thinking skills
and multiple literacies, including familiarity with the useof technology. Skills and content are integrated and bothare taught for application rather than simply as ends inthemselves. The concept of knowledge is expanded beyond
the memorization of facts to include the use of facts todemonstrate understanding. Teachers are urged to replace
traditional means of assessment with more authentic methods that requires students to use what they have learnedin real contexts and often with a target audience in mind.
This emphasis views learning rather than teaching as theprimary goal of education. The teacher becomes a facilitatorof that learning by creating the opportunity for it to occur,knowing her students well enough to match their needs,
and stretching them to meet challenges. Learners are active
participants in their learning and not passive recipients; thegoal being to create independent, self-directed individuals
who are resourceful and find learning a natural part of daily
life both in and out of school. Schools that subscribe to
the progressive tradition can serve as models of the type oflearning and instruction being called for by those espousing
twenty-first century skill development. As Kohn notes, they
are the characteristics that define a progressive school.
…it is the office of the school environment to balance
the various elements in the social environment, andto see to it that each individual gets an opportunity
to escape from the limitations of the social group inwhich he was born, and to come into living contact
with a broader environment.” (Dewey, 1916, p. 20).
Among the literacies being sought are those madepossible and important because of the digital age in which
we live. They range from basic literacies such as criticalreading and persuasive writing to visual, informational, andcultural literacy—all made more urgent by the expanding
connectedness resulting from a rapidly changing technological world. Both progressive schools and more traditional

42

Educational Perspectives v Volume 47 v Numbers 1 and 2

schools need to consider the impact upon learning that
digital advances make possible. The question becomes,“How do we think about these changes within the context
of schooling and educating?”
For many, this has become a question about how tointegrate technology into the curriculum and the learning
process. While this is a valid question to consider, it may not
be the central question that John Dewey, if he were around
today, would urge schools to think about. Rather, he mightask schools to consider what the impact of technology isupon society, both its positive and negative effects and its
potential to improve the quality of life. Dewey understoodthat technology is in a continuous state of evolution andchildren must experience an education that recognizes thatevolution. This conclusion can be extrapolated from his
observations about the Industrial Revolution in The School
and Society, “The change that comes first to mind. . . is theindustrial one—the application of science resulting in thegreat inventions that have utilized the forces of nature ona vast and inexpensive scale: the growth of a world-wide
market as the object of production, of vast manufacturing
centers to supply this market, of cheap and rapid means ofcommunication and distribution between all its parts. . . .
One can hardly believe that there has been a revolution in
all history so rapid, so extensive, so complete” (Dewey, 1899,
in Dworkin, 1959, p. 35).
Understanding the influence of industrial change wasan important part of Dewey’s Laboratory School curriculum
for children, and the technological inventions that comprisethe dominant features of our digital age will continue to beso for the curriculum of the future. Within today’s context,
I would venture to assume that Dewey would urge schools
to find the balance between direct encounters with theworld, both human and physical, and expanding students’
understanding by using technological tools in their projects.
Technology supports the progressive tradition when it
enhances a “hands-on” approach involving human interactions. A frog dissection app, a virtual tour of the Ko‘olau
Mountains, a “face-time” interview with an Arctic explorer
or a Hōkūle‘a sailor are all examples of experiences thatenhance understanding and bring resources to the child thatmight not otherwise be available to them.
Equally important is an emphasis upon the social
impact of technology. Digital citizenship and responsible useof digital tools that encourages informed and discriminating

use of technology and which supports positive interactions
among students are essential when educating children aboutsocial effects. It is also important to educate families about
how to responsibly model and teach their children about thevalue and public nature of digital communication. Futureissues to keep in mind in this ever-changing world are
the impact of technology on brain development, the valueof family life and activities, and the balance for childrenthat comes from needing “green time” outdoors and themoderate use of tech tools during free time.
At Hanahau‘oli, we know that our children will
face a high-tech future. It is a change that connotes the
progressive nature of life. Dewey recognized that education
is a process of living, and he believed you cannot forecast
what the world will be like for the next generation. We at
Hanahau‘oli similarly believe that schools cannot prepare
children for a predictable set of circumstances for their
future. Our goal is to give the child, to use Dewey’s words,“command of himself ” which is achieved through an active
social and physical education that empowers them to discover how the world works—through creative activity andlearning the worth of individual contributions in collective
efforts. (Dewey, 1897, in Dworkin, 1959, p. 21–22).
This approach prepares our graduates to be prepared
for life through learning in the moment. In Democracy
and Education (1916), Dewey writes that “Where schools
are equipped with laboratories, shops and gardens,
where dramatizations, plays and games are freely used,
opportunities exist for reproducing situations of life andfor acquiring and applying information and ideas incarrying forward of progressive experiences” (Dewey, 1916,
p.161–61). Thus, education becomes a balance between
the “real” world and the “virtual” world, where children
utilize technology to enhance their learning by offeringexperiences they might otherwise not have and explore
questions derived from their inquiries. It is an educationthat allows children to visit places and for teachers to bringplaces to children that they cannot experience directly.
Digital tools provide these opportunities; and as children
explore and use them, they must also come to understandtheir impact upon the individual as a member of society. At
the same time, it is important to recognize that, at times,“unplugging” will be necessary as research indicates that
opportunities to “play” without direction is essential fordeveloping creative thinking.

John Dewey in Hawai‘i

Progressive schools, by their very nature, need to respond to changing societal conditions. Within that context,
learning guided by the teachings of John Dewey will not
only make the progressive tradition sustainable but also
make it increasingly relevant in a future that will increasingly make demands on students to possess the knowledge
to respond to change effectively and productively.
REFERENCES

Cooke, S. Judd. (1964). Sincerely Sophie. Honolulu: Tongg PublishingCo., Ltd.
Dewey, J. (1916/1944). Democracy and education. New York: The Free
Press.
Dewey, J. (1897). My pedagogic creed. The School Journal, LIV(3), 77–80.
In Dworkin, M. S. (1959). 19–32.
Dewey, J. (1899). The school and society. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press. Chapters I, II, III. In Dworkin (1959). 33- 90.
Dewey, J. (1902). The child and curriculum. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press. In Dworkin, M. S. (1959). 91–111.
Dworkin, M. S. (1959). Dewey on education: selections. New York:
Teachers College, Columbia University.
Hanahau‘oli School Board of Trustees, “Hanahau‘oli School Mission,”(2010).
Inouye, L., & Ross. S. (2009). Natural scientists: Children in charge. In
R. E. Yager, (Ed.), Inquiry: The key to exemplary science (pp. 15–28).
Arlington, VA: NSTA Press.
Kohn, A. (2008). Progressive education. Independent School, 67(3),19–28.
Metiri Group & North Central Regional Educational Laboratory (dateunknown). Twenty-First Century Skills. Retrieved from http://
enGauge.ncrel.org.
Palmer, L. (1968). Memories of Hanahau‘oli: The first fifty years.
Honolulu, HI.
Peters, R. G. (2003–10). Head of School’s Messages. Stepping Stones.
Honolulu: Hanahau‘oli School.
Tanner, L. N. (1997). Dewey’s laboratory school: Lessons for today. New
York: Teachers College Press.

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Educational Perspectives v Volume 47 v Numbers 1 and 2

From School-Culture-to-Family-Culture: Ref lections
on Four Generations of a Deweyan Educationin Hawai‘i
Amber Strong Makaiau
with
Linda Summers Strong

In 1918, my great great aunt,
Sophie Judd Cooke foundeda small progressive school in
Honolulu. Her brother Henry
named it Hanahau‘oli School,
which means joyful work school.
In her memoir she gives an account of its beginnings,

Since Dewey’s “green light,”
four generations of myimmediate family have attended
Hanahau‘oli School, which, tothis day, continues to carry on
the vision of Dewey (1916;1938)
and other progressive educators
who dedicated their lives tomaking “a child’s school life
I attended a series of lectures
more meaningful” (Palmer,
for mothers on ‘Literature for
1968, p. 1).
Children,’ given at Washington
In this essay my mother,
Place by Mrs. Goodrun ThorneLinda
Summers Strong andThomsen of the Francis Parker
School in Chicago. These
I ref lect on the impact oftalks were fascinating to me,
Hanahau‘oli School’s Deweyan
and I was happy to meet Mrs.
approach to education on theThorne-Thomsen and got todevelopment of our family’sknow her quite well. I discussed
culture. We start with memories
my particular situation as to my
Sophie Judd Cooke, Hanahau‘oli Schoolof my grandmother, Catherine
children’s education with her andfounder (Courtesy of Hanahauoli School)
she suggested that I start a little“Cappy” Cooke Summers, whoschool of my own and invite other children to join.
attended Hanahau‘oli School in the 1920s. Then weThis idea appealed to me, so we moved the homerecount our own experiences at the school, which werenext door to us on Makiki Heights, which we hadremembered over a series of dialogues and inquiries
recently bought, down to an empty lot on Makiki
that we engaged in with one another over the pastand Nehoa Streets…Our school was ‘progressive’couple of months. Finally, we share observations of myin every sense of the word. We tried new methods
and broke with the stilted formal type of instruction
daughter, Catherine “Cappy” Kala‘iopua Makaiau, who
which was common at that time…we persisted, andis currently attending Hanahau‘oli School as a junior
I note that many of the methods—of correlatingkindergartner. At the end of the essay, my mom andthe work and ‘learning by doing’—have been widely
I comment on the special role that women played in
adopted in the public schools. Our crowning event
progressive era education reforms, including the ways
was when Dr. John Dewey, who had advocatedin which the women in our family have integrated athis theory of teaching, and Mrs. Dewey, came tovisit our school and gave us the ‘green light.’ This
Deweyan approach to teaching and learning into our
gratified us! (Cooke, 1964, pp. 78–79)
family culture.

John Dewey in Hawai‘i

45

Cappy Cooke Summers

When we started to think back on my grandmother’s
experiences at Hanahau‘oli School my mom remembered hermother telling her “they didn’t know what to do with me.”
When she asked her mother what she meant by this, mygrandmother explained that over the course of her time at
the school, some years she was promoted to the next grade
and other years she was “placed back” a grade. I asked mymom what my grandmother thought about this, and she said
that she got the feeling that my grandmother didn’t take it
personally because she knew that the school was doing its
best to accommodate her specific learning needs. Overall,
we remembered my grandmother having really fond memories of her time at Hanahau‘oli School.
Among these memories were her warm recollectionsof her teachers. My mom recalled that one of my grandmother’s teachers was Caroline Curtis. Miss Curtis wasa deeply respected storyteller and writer who brought her
knowledge of ancient Hawaiian legends into the classroom.
My mom shared with me that she once asked her mother
why Miss Curtis often mistakenly called my mom by mygrandmother’s name, and my grandmother told her thatMiss Curtis had also been her teacher.
As my mom and I did more research about the origins
of Hanahau‘oli School we realized the significance of thismemory. Mrs. Gudrun Thorne Thomsen, the lecturer
who originally persuaded Sophie Judd Cooke to start
Hanahau‘oli School, was also a renowned storyteller.
Thorne Thomsen, who had a strong influence on
the development of storytelling in [American public]
libraries, believed that imaging exercises and listening to oral literature prepared children for reading…
This insight into the relationship of oral literature,
imaging, and reading, shared by Gurdun Thorne
Thomsen, Francis Parker, and John Dewey, was lostfor many years while schools emphasized the technical aspects of reading (Greene, 1996, pp. 18–19).
Storytelling, and its role in the development of children’s
literacy, was not lost at Hanahau‘oli School during my
grandmother’s era. In fact, listening to Miss Curtis re-tell
Hawaiian myths right before naptime was one of my mom’s
warmest memories of her time at Hanahau‘oli School.

Linda Summers Strong

Before my mom entered the third grade, her family moved
from Kailua on the windward side of the island. At that

Cappy Cooke Summers, studied at Hanahauoli, and herdaughter, Linda followed in her footsteps. (This picture,taken by a press photographer, appeared in a local
newspaper sometime during late 1950’s)time, my grandmother had to make decisions about where tosend her three daughters to school, and my mother remembers my grandmother telling her that she was a “Hanahau‘oli
child” and that “she would be happy there.” Later in her life,
my mother recalls my grandmother sharing with her the
belief that Hanahau‘oli School isn’t for every child, but in thecase of my mother it was an ideal learning environment.
When I asked my mother to think back on her
experiences at the school she remembers clearly how each
grade level had a unique and distinguished focus of study.
In third grade the students studied ancient Hawai‘i. They
made kapa, learned chants for Makahiki, and, throughstorytelling, learned ancient Hawaiian myths. In fourth
grade the students studied pioneers and Native Americans,and missionaries and whalers in Hawai‘i. The fourth graders
also ran the school store, which “sold” classroom materials
to the students and teachers in the other classrooms. On adesignated day, student representatives from each class would
come with a list of supplies that they needed to purchase. The
fourth grade students would take inventory of the students’46

Educational Perspectives v Volume 47 v Numbers 1 and 2

list, add up the bills, distribute merchandise, and makethe business transactions. In fifth grade students studied
the Greeks and other ancient civilizations. The students
represented various Greek city-states and competed in theirown Olympic Games. My mother remembers how the olive
branches, which were used in the Olympic awards ceremony
were harvested from her grandmothers’ house.
In sixth grade the students studied medieval history,
explorers, and inventors. They made books and learned
about calligraphy. As a part of the curriculum, the sixth
graders also gave a gift to the school. In my mother’s case,her class wanted to buy a movie projector costing one
hundred dollars. They spent the entire year planning andcarrying out various activities to raise the money. They soldlabels and stationary, painted stilts for a Junior Achievement
Club, collected silver and gold to redeem for cash, and had
every student in the class enter an essay-writing contest
with the hopes of winning a cash prize. When they finallypurchased the movie projector they invited eachclass at Hanahau‘oli School to come and view movies intheir classroom.
Another lasting impression on my mother was shopclass. What she liked the most about shop was making
things. She recalls how she used wood to build a stool, adollhouse, and a “crazy critter” that was made up of thescraps of past projects. The shop students also worked inclay, sewed on a treadle machine, wove on a table loom,
created block prints, and learned how to hand bind books.
They engaged in seasonal projects such as painting Ukrainian Easter eggs, constructing crèches for Christmas, andmaking kapa for Makahiki. And in all of her recollectionsof shop class, my mother’s most vivid memories were ofMiss Ramey, her shop teacher, a woman of many talents
who also tended to the school’s beehive. At the end of eachshop class my mother remembers how clean-up was always
part of the lesson, and to this day she thinks about thisritual as she cleans up her own art studio.
Rituals, traditions, and events are an integral part oflife at Hanahau‘oli School. My mother remembers morning
flag, reciting St. Francis’ canticle to the sun, Friday assemblies, Christmas carols, the school fair, annual visits to the
Honolulu Museum of Art, stepping stones, and shaking thehand of the principal when the school bell was rung at theend of each day. These same rituals, traditions, and events
are a lasting part of my memory of the school as well.

Amber Strong Makaiau

When I think back to my days at Hanahau‘oli School, I
instantly remember singing and “learning by doing.” I canremember word-for-word all of the songs that we learned
during music class. Not only were the songs fun to sing, forthe most part they all had lessons embedded in them. For
example, I learned about the history of slavery in America
and the 1960’s civil rights movement through AfricanAmerican spirituals and songs like “Abraham, Martin &John.” I vividly remember singing these songs during Friday
assemblies, where the students who were chosen to lead theassembly each week would stand in front of the entire student
body, faculty, and parents with the lyrics so that everyone in
the Hanahau‘oli School community could participate.
Like my mother, I also remember acting out a Greek
Olympics, Greek oratory, Hawaiian Makahiki, medieval
feast, and a number of other dramatic plays like the story
of Helen Keller’s life. On each of these occasions we would
research the history of the event, read about the people andcultures through literature and informational text, plan out
how we would enact the event, designate roles and responsibilities for everyone in the class, create traditional costumes,
design artistic backdrops and props, and then carry out theevent in front of our school community. In addition, we
would document the event through reflective writing and art.
I have particularly strong recollections of using thisprocess to study endangered species in the sixth grade. We
started by researching endangered species in the library, andthen we used our findings to construct models of endangered
species habitats in a blended art and science class. Then webuilt wooden masks of the different endangered species that
we were studying in shop class. We wore the masks in amusical production about endangered species that we put onfor the entire school. We also created our own chapter of theWorld Wildlife Fund, which we had weekly bake sales for sothat we could send our raised donations to the headquartersof this international organization. To this day, I often think
about the impact that this interdisciplinary approach toteaching and learning had on my current abilities to thinkcreatively, make connections, and see the big picture.
I also think about Hanahau‘oli School’s emphasis onlearning how to learn. One of my most enduring memories isconnected to the school library and learning how to conduct“independent” research. In every grade level we would selectinquiry topics that we were interested in and that related

John Dewey in Hawai‘ito the theme of our classroom studies. Then we would ask
questions, and learn how to pursue our questions by finding
resources in the school library. Within the library we were
given a quite workspace of our very own where we could immerse ourselves in all of the information that we gathered.
We were taught to challenge our thinking, open up the
topic, and pursue further questions as a part of the inquiry
process. We learned how to analyze and organize all of theinformation we gathered, outline our findings, and developa piece of writing that we could share with the class.
The heart of my experiences at Hanahau‘oli School
was learning how to balance my individual interests withthe goals of our community of learners. I also learned how
important music, art, and drama are to learning about math,science, English, and social studies. I developed a voice, andwas frequently told that what I had to say was important aslong as I was mindful of my peers and teachers. Hanahau‘oli
School gave me the tools to be self-reflective and connected
to others. Most importantly, through my experiences at
Hanahau‘oli School, I learned to love learning.

Cappy Kala‘iopua Makaiau

This year, my daughter began her journey at Hanahau‘oli
School, and although it has only been a couple of months
since the school year started, I can already identify theways in which Hanahau‘oli School is inspiring her own
love of learning. Since starting at the school, my daughterhas become fanatical about illustrating, narrating (shehas someone else write her words onto the pages), and assembling “books” of her very own. Not only have I enjoyedseeing the ways in which her teachers at the school havenurtured her interest in book making, but I’ve also seen
how they have introduced her to new language to help her
articulate her thinking about the bookmaking process. Shetalks continually about “new ideas” for her next books, andthis language comes from the “idea box” that she has in herclassroom, in which students are encouraged to use theirideas to create things out of recycled objects. This is just one
example of how Hanahau‘oli School has stayed true to its
student-centered origins.
I have also observed other ways in which the school has
maintained its progressive roots. Each day that my daughter
comes to school she is expected to mark her own attendanceby writing her name and moving a small yellow version ofherself to a board at the front of the classroom. These two

47

actions, although they may seem simple demonstrate how
she is learning how to write and count by doing authentic
and meaningful activities in her pre-kindergarten classroom.
She has also been encouraged to learn through playand creative work. This past summer the class read books
about bears, and in one of the stories the bear traveled tothe moon. The class was then encouraged to use their own
imaginations to go on their own adventure to the moon.
They constructed a large spaceship out of cardboard, as well
as space gear. They practiced shape recognition and fine
motor skills as they cut out shapes, squares and circles todecorate the rocket ship. Then, during dramatic play they
acted out their trip to the moon, and played with “moonsand” on the playground. Through classroom initiatives andexperiences like these, my daughter is experiencing “joyous
work,” which is teaching her, in turn, that learning is fun.

Progressive Education and Feminist Pedagogy

In her book about Hanahau‘oli School, Louisa F. Palmer, aformer principal of the school, explains how innovations in
education, and how a school based on Dewey’s educational
philosophy, are not always easy to put into practice.
To break with tradition has always been a difficult
thing to explain. Words have many different meanings to people. To label work at this new school in1918 as ‘joyous work’ immediately meant only play
to many, as well as the lowering of academic standards. And when phrases like self-expression, creative
work, and freedom were added, this immediately wastranslated by the school’s critics as ‘children doing
as they please, no discipline, etc.’ The idea was not
yet accepted that school work utilizing a child’s realinterests and abilities gave him the motive power todo his best. Few could conceive that a child’s school
should be, not a thing apart, but a vital element ofyouth and growth-‘a process of living and not simply apreparation for future living’-as Dr. Dewey expressed
it in My Pedagogic Creed. (Palmer, 1968, p. 15)
As I reflected with my mother on our family’s history at
Hanahau‘oli School, I couldn’t help but think about the boldways in which Sophie Judd Cooke had helped to break the
tradition of male dominated educational leadership that waspervasive in the United States at the turn of the century.
With further research, I learned that she was not alone.
There were a number of other women in the early 1900’s
who were female founders of innovative progressive schools

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Educational Perspectives v Volume 47 v Numbers 1 and 2

and leaders of “educational organizations and movements,
including public school districts, teacher unions andmuseums” (Sadovnik & Semel, 2002, p. 1). Although they
didn’t get as much press as other progressive era reformers
like Dewey, these women had a profound impact on thedevelopment of child-centered approaches to education in
the United States.
For example, contemporary scholars in feminist
pedagogy point out the ways in which these women helped
to introduce into the field of education new styles of school
administration. They explain how the research, includingcase studies of women educational leaders during theProgressive Era suggests “female pedagogy and leadershipare more humane, less authoritarian, more democratic, andmore concerned with caring and relationships than abstract
goals” (Sadovnik & Semel, 2002, pp. 2–3). In light of thisresearch, I often wonder if part of Hanahau‘oli School’s
success in effectively translating a Deweyan approach toeducation from theory to practice was due to the fact thatmy great great aunt was a woman of her time.

From School-Culture-to-Family-Culture
In her memoir, Sophie Judd Cooke wrote,

I believe a valuable thing in life is to develop a child’s
initiative. At Hanahau‘oli there are opportunities todevelop individual and group initiatives in various
projects. A well known math teacher at Punahou
called me aside once and told me that on the firstday of school at Punahou, she could always note a
Hanahau‘oli School child by his or her initiative ingoing to find out where his classes were to be held,
instead of wandering around bewildered (Cooke,
1964, pp. 78–79).
This quote resonated with my mother and I as webegan to think about the lasting impact of Hanahau‘oli
School’s Deweyan approach to education on thedevelopment of our family’s culture. In addition tocultivating a multicultural home life which is full of song,art, inquiry, community service, and projects in which
we are constantly engaged in the business of “learning by
doing,” we believe that it is Hanahau‘oli School’s cultureof student-driven initiatives that has become the defining
characteristic of our home culture.
This is reflected in both the small and large actionsof our daily lives. For example, just last month I was incharge of Halloween decorations for my son’s classroom,
and instead of buying them from Walmart I felt compelled
to hand-craft an intricately designed Halloween bat foreach student in the class. When I was a teenager, and I
wanted a “cool” vest like all of the other girls at school, mymom got out the sewing machine and taught me how to
sew the garment myself. And I will never forget how mygrandmother, as she was trying to figure out how ancient
Hawaiians made cordage, sat with me on our front lanai,
and taught me how to make a bracelet by braiding coconut
and horsehair. Common phrases in our family are “wecould make that,” or “we can do that” which often leads to
a new endeavor that everyone is invited to engage in.
This is especially true on a larger scale. In the past
three generations, the women in my family have carriedout this sense of initiative in the larger community. My
grandmother was an archeologist who was originally led
to the field by her curiosity of Ulupo heiau, a Hawaiian
temple located near her home in Kailua. In my memoryof her, she always had a question that was driving her
archeological inquiries, and during our time on Moloka‘itogether, she would take the entire family along to find thespecial pōhaku or fishpond that she was currently studying.
Fueled by her own sense of wonder and inquisitiveness,my grandmother went on to write a number of influential
books about Hawaiian sites, fishponds, cordage, and thehale pili at Bishop Museum.
My mother, an art educator at an all-girls school
dedicated her career to focusing on women artists
because she recognized that they were sorely absent inhigh school art history programs at the time. When
asked to reflect on her life in the classroom, my motherbelieves that her Hanahau‘oli education has been a major
influence on how she teaches art, including her desire
to design projects where everyone is able to participate
and experience success. In recent years my mother has
dedicated her time to reviving the Honolulu Museum ofArt’s Lending Collection—a project that has inspired me
to work alongside her to find new ways that we can support
teachers in integrating the arts of diverse cultures into theirteaching across all subject areas.
When I reflect on this collaboration with my mother,
I realize that much of my career in education has been
dedicated to giving students in Hawai‘i access to the typeof education that I was given the privilege of experiencing

John Dewey in Hawai‘iat Hanahau‘oli School. This includes my work withphilosophy for children Hawai‘i (p4cHI), which practices
an approach to teaching and learning that transforms
traditional classrooms into intellectually safe communities
of inquiry. When my daughter was only a year-and-a-half
old I would take her with me to practice p4cHI withstudents and teachers at Waikīkī Elementary School. I
realize that she probably won’t remember sitting in a circle,
asking questions, and thinking with the students during
those p4cHI sessions, but I’m assured that she will have
similar types of experiences as she engages in discussion
around the dinner table at home and in her classrooms withher peers and teachers at Hanahau‘oli School.
At the very end of her chapter about the origins ofHanahau‘oli School in her memoir, Sophie Judd Cooke
writes, “I hope Hanahau‘oli will be my ‘monument’ when
I pass out of the picture” (Cooke, 1964, pp. 80). From myperspective, not only has Hanahau‘oli School memorialized
the incredible legacy of my great great aunt’s vision forprogressive education in the community at large, but
it has also helped to shape the culture of her family infuture generations. In our case, Hanahau‘oli School andits Deweyan approach to education has empowered thewomen in our family to use the initiative that was fosteredin each us at Hananhauoli School to create a home lifethat is characterized by genuine inquiry, a love of the arts,
creativity, a sense of responsibility to the community, thehonoring of tradition, and a drive towards innovation. It
has also helped to ensure that the lives that we live at home
are mirrored in the lives that we lead as educators in thecommunity. As time marches forward and the lives of future
generations, like my daughter, unfold, I am encouraged
that the role of education in our family will continue to be“a process of living and not a preparation for future living”(Dewey, 1897, p. eighty-seven).

49

REFERENCES
Cooke, S. J. (1964). Sincerely Sophie. Honolulu, HI: Tongg
Publishing Co., LTD.
Dewey, J. (1897) My pedagogic creed. School Journal, 54, 7780. Retrieved from http://dewey.pragmatism.org/creed.
htm
Dewey, J. (1916; 1938). Democracy and education: An
introduction to the philosophy of education. New York, NY:
The Free Press.
Dewey, J. (1929). Experience and education. New York, NY:
MacMillan.
Greene, E. (1996). Storytelling: Art and technique. West Port,
CT: Greenwood.
Palmer, L. F. (1868). Memories of Hanahau‘oli: The first fifty
years. Honolulu, HI:
Hanahau‘oli School.
Sadovnik, A. R., & Semel, S. F. (Eds.). (2002). Founding
mothers and others: Women educational leaders during the
progressive era. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Educational Perspectives v Volume 47 v Numbers 1 and 2

Re-reading Dewey Through a Feminist Lens
Mary Vorsino
I wanted to begin this feminist inspection of Deweyan
thought with something real, tangible, and in my backyard.
Something that I could see and touch. Something that lived
and breathed both theory and praxis. And so it was that I
found myself at Palama Settlement on a muggy, summerday, looking for John Dewey in its hallways. For many in
Honolulu, Palama Settlement is a landmark. Its distinctive,
early twentieth century white clapboard buildings stand incontrast to its younger neighbors, mostly squatty, concrete
walk-ups and public housing complexes. Over its 118-year
history, Palama Settlement has grown, struggled, and transformed. It has intersected with and changed for the betterthe life stories of generations of urban Honolulu residents(among them, two Hawaii governors), all in fitting with its
greater social service mission to offer a hand up to those in
need. The settlement was and is a place for recreation, forhealth care, and for education; it was and is a community
gathering place.
Palama Settlement grew out of Palama Chapel, foundedin 1896, and was part of America’s Settlement House
Movement, arguably one of the greatest social services
reform efforts in modern America (Nishimoto, 2000). The
movement traces its roots to 1889, when Jane Addams andEllen Gates Starr founded Chicago’s Hull House out of aphilanthropic drive to give low-income immigrants fromneighboring communities philanthropic assistance rather
than charity (Daynes & Longo, 2004). Hull House, which
now operates as a museum, created Chicago’s first publicplayground and first kindergarten and offered everythingfrom English classes and day care services to an employment
bureau. It was revolutionary and a working, thriving,organic example of the power of pragmatic philosophy put
into practice.
John Dewey made his first visit to Hull House three
years after it opened its doors, as he prepared to take aposition at the University of Chicago (Daynes & Longo,
2004). He later told Addams of that visit, “I cannot tell
you how much good I got from the stay at Hull House.
My indebtedness to you for giving me insight into mattersthere is great. ... Every day I stayed there only added to
my conviction that you had taken the right way” (qtd. in
Daynes & Longo, 2004, p. 9). Eventually, Dewey becamea pillar at Hull House, lecturing at its club, teaching at its
university extension, and serving on its board of trustees.
At the same time, settlement houses began to pop up acrossthe nation—by 1900, there were one hundred scatteredacross the United States, by 1910, there were more than four
hundred (Nishimoto, 2000).
Addams’ influence on Dewey—and Dewey’s
influence on Addams—has been the subject of scholarly
work, and their shared interests and philosophicalapproaches are worth noting given Addams’ role as afounding mother of American pragmatist thought and asa thought leader in the more recent emergence of feminist
pragmatism. Dewey saw Hull House (along with subsequent
settlement houses) as a model of the many educationaland societal ideals he wrote prolifically about—the powerof enriching community education programs, of service
learning, and of the notion of a school as “social center” orcommunity settlement. It is instructive, therefore, to (re-)
consider Dewey’s work in light of Addams’ considerable
imprint on pragmatism. Indeed, there has been muchwork in recent decades to recover the role of women like
Addams in the pragmatic tradition and to look anew at
the considerable contributions of the Settlement House
Movement.
However, I do not discuss Addams’ collegial
relationship with Dewey—or the Settlement House
Movement more broadly—to elicit a conclusion. Rather, I
believe Palama Settlement, Hull House, Addams—they
all provide portals through which to begin to explore thegrowing thought gardens of feminist pragmatism. After all,it is Dewey’s proximity to the practical—the applied—withsuch social projects as Hull House and his own lab schoolthat make him a particularly appealing figure to feminist
theorists, including pragmatists. Dewey did not lock himself
up in the ivory tower, but sought out venues with whichto bring (his) philosophy to practice. Likewise, feminist

John Dewey in Hawai‘i

researchers are concerned with disseminating theory into
the public sphere and making it real—with consciousness
raising and by seeking social justice.
It is also worth noting that in this brief review I am not
explicitly seeking to assist in the work of unearthing thevoices of women pragmatists of Dewey’s day—or consider
their impacts per se on Dewey and his writings (though theirwhispers no doubt will be heard in these pages). Rather,
I am interested in keeping those potential influences
front-of-mind while presenting modern feminist re-readingsof Dewey, constructing a narrowly-focused and succinct
literature review of thinkers who have donned a feminist
lens to analyze Dewey’s approaches to education, learning,and democracy or to employ Dewey’s works in theorizing on
gender and education and on gender in society. In this piece,
I first explore Dewey as both an ally and a problematic
figure in feminist literature and then investigate the broader
sphere of feminist pragmatism and two central themes
within it: valuing diversity and diverse experiences andproblematizing fixed truths.
Given all that, you might still be puzzled about mydecision to begin this paper on the doorsteps of Palama
Settlement. I can’t offer an academic answer. Rather, I
visited Palama Settlement for more egotistical reasons: I
was there for inspiration; for a taste of Dewey. I wanted tosee a settlement house up close and here. When I visited
Palama Settlement, a group of teens was gathered in theparking lot during a break, laughing and snapping selfies
with their smartphones. Paula Rath, great-granddaughterof the settlement’s first head worker and a volunteer at thesettlement, tells me the teens attend high school equivalency
diploma classes at the nonprofit. “They’re given a second
chance here,” she says. She then leads me to the settlement’s
archives, a small room crammed with annual reports,
photos, newspaper clippings, and annuals. More in-depth
articles could be written on Palama based on that treasure
trove of material, and perhaps they will be. But in my shortvisit, I only had time to pick through the top layers ofPalama’s history. After reading through annual reports, I
came across a passage that helped inspire me in my scholarly
pursuit—a passage that I believe underscores the best of
Palama Settlement. I found it in the settlement’s 1921
annual report, in which first head worker James A. Rath,
Sr., writes about the settlement’s progress over the preceding
twenty-five years:

51

To attempt to detail all the activities started or inprogress would take up more spaces than is wise in areport. … Every new phase of work was introduced in
response to a need or a demand by the people of Palama1.
Our neighbors at first did not always appreciate what
was being done. They were not used to Americansocial ideals and were somewhat suspicious of theirneighbors and what to them seemed “their fads.” Norwere the Palama neighbors the only ones to view the
new features introduced as fads; a large number of
those living Waikiki of Nuuanu stream were inclined
to the same opinion and were far from enthusiastic in
their support. It was in the midst of this sort that thefirst nurse entered upon her work (Palama Settlement,
1921, p. 7).
And therein lies the beauty of the settlement houses thenand now—their attentiveness to community needs. Theiroverarching goal always: To seek social justice one person
and one community at a time.

Dewey as Feminist AllyWas Dewey a feminist? It is a playful and a deliberately
provocative question, but perhaps worth asking nonethelessas part of an effort to contextualize feminist re-readingsof Dewey. Weiler (2006) argues that Dewey’s (public andprivate) actions and writings on women and gender werecomplicated. He supported women’s suffrage and coeducational
experiences, appeared to believe women and men should betreated as equals, and respected the opinions of many female
colleagues—all progressive positions for his time. Further,as Seigfried (2002) notes, Dewey’s philosophy was a philosophy of emancipation from prejudice, aligned then withother emancipatory philosophies that work to undo, question, or
overturn oppressions.
And yet, in his canonical writings on dualism, Dewey
never criticized society’s hierarchal juxtaposition of maleand female (as superior-inferior), at least not explicitly, eventhough he wrote at length about other aspects of social
identity (Weiler, 2006). For feminist theorists, the relative
absence of gender in Dewey’s discussions on diversity is
problematic. Weiler (2006) goes as far as to consider it a
“fatal weakness” in his work. She argues, Dewey accepted
gender divisions as always already constants and failed to see,for example, the patriarchal structures of the very university
systems where he spent his time and made his name. In
fact, Seigfried (2002) argues, Dewey appeared wholly

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Educational Perspectives v Volume 47 v Numbers 1 and 2

uninterested in unpacking the role of power in humanaffairs. She points to a passage in Democracy and Education,in which Dewey criticizes Aristotle’s philosophicalseparation of that which is intellectual and that which ispractical. Dewey attributes this flawed dualism to Aristotle’s
time and place, writing when most men and all women
performed what was menial labor and were used as a means
to intellectual ends. To end the separation of intellectualand practical, Dewey urges the development of curriculumthat uses intelligence and theory as “a guide of free practicefor all.” To this, Seigfried counters: “Both his genetic
account of the origin of the separation of theory and practicein the inequalities of class and gender and his liberatory
intent to transform education to be inclusive are feminist
positions worth developing. They are insufficient, however,insofar as they fail to name the patriarchal appropriation ofslave and women’s labor as one of exploitation or oppression
or to follow up by exploring how the working classes andwomen are affected by such oppression” (2002, pp. 56–57).
Indeed, Dewey stops short of examining the underpinnings
of exploitation, oppression, and prejudice. In the absenceof such an inspection, how can we truly understand how to
overcome the separation of theory and practice?
At the same time, it cannot be ignored that Dewey
was clear on the importance of women’s experiences and on
the necessity of a diversity of voices to a vibrant democracy
and to fulfilling educational experiences. It was Dewey
who said, “But when women who are not mere students
of other persons’ philosophy set out to write it, we cannot
conceive that it will be the same in viewpoint or tenor
as that composed from the standpoint of the different
masculine experience of things” (qtd. in James, 2009).
James, who analyzes Dewey through a black feminist lens,argues that Deweyan philosophy values the “revision of
old ideas” with new experiences, as part of a process ofresisting stagnation “so commonly found in philosophicaland scientific problems” (2009, p. 98). Applying this toblack feminist social theory (or other critical approaches)offers the potential for—and the necessity of—a scholarshipthat is rich with the experiences of minorities, and of otherun-heard/under-heard communities.
Thus, despite a lack of explicit discussions in Dewey’s
work around women, gender roles or patriarchy, there’s
little doubt that Dewey’s work provides ample material for
feminists, who seek to not only disrupt and dismantle sex-

ism but to place value on the experiences and contributionsof women. Central to both pragmatism and pragmatist
feminism is the practical use of philosophical ideals or approaches (Whipps, 2013). As James (2009) notes, feminists
need not employ Dewey to justify the importance of theirwork, but can consider him “a powerful ally in the construction of theory” (p. 94).

Critique of a priori theory and knowledge

Feminist critiques of a priori knowledge are grounded in alarger project to end traumatic silencing of de-privileged/oppressed voices and to deconstruct the false barrier between
theory and practice (praxis). As Duran (2001) writes, in“A Holistically Deweyan Feminism,” feminists and Dewey
are aligned in railing against “rationalists” and in valuing
experience when considering how we know what we know,
together providing “arable soil for the development of theories that can be tied to actual modes of human living andendeavor” (p. 280). Indeed, Dewey dedicated considerable
real estate in his prolific works to the primacy of experienceand to appreciating diverse ways of knowing the world. He
considered the mathematical, the scientific, the everyday,
the utilitarian, and the instrumental as “points along a continuum,” Duran (2001) writes, and appreciated a discourseof relevance in his philosophy that sought not only to comeout of people’s lives, but to apply to them. Duran continues:“Dewey provides us with a platform for a modest feminist
epistemology, because such an epistemology cannot function with the logically airtight and no-holds-barred kindof theorizing that has been so characteristic of twentiethcentury theories of knowledge. The gynocentric emphasison connectedness and the world of having-and-doing, as
opposed to the world of divorced speculation, is completely
consistent with much of what Dewey does” (p. 282).
Thayer-Bacon (2003) further pursues Deweyan
epistemology, writing that modern pragmatists are“qualified relativists” who maintain that all inquiry isrooted in culturally-bound philosophical assumptions. No
one is free of those bonds; no one is objective; no one canphilosophize from nowhere. However, Thayer-Bacon (2003)
writes, “We can compensate for our cultural embeddedness
by opening our horizons and including others in ourconversations” (p. 419). We can acknowledge and embrace
our own experience in order not to be blinded by it. ThayerBacon (2003) turns to Dewey’s Democracy and Education

John Dewey in Hawai‘ito underscore her point, noting that Dewey described
experience as something that can be active or passive,
something that we do or something that is done to us. In
Chapter Eleven, Dewey writes, “The connection of thesetwo phases of experience measures the fruitfulness or valueof the experience. ... Experience as trying involves change,
but change is meaningless transition unless it is consciously
connected with the return wave of consequences whichflow from it” (p. 351). Experience for Dewey, then, is about
learning and growing; it is about making and re-making
connections in the world. Knowledge and experience do
not occur in vacuums, but are relational.
Feminist theory embraces a similar notion ofexperience in seeking to counteract/deconstruct hegemonic
institutions. Qualified relativism, Thayer-Bacon argues,
offers us a panoramic view of “communities-always-in-themaking” where we are embedded, limited, and embodied,but where we are also “striving to communicate with aplurality of others” (2003, p. 429). Qualified relativism also
provides a locus from which to question assumptions ofman-made constructs and frameworks as natural or always
already in existence. Thayer-Bacon eloquently enunciates
this notion: “Feminists as qualified relativists begin andend with experience. This is because in an androcentric
world much of what women experience remains unnamed
and cannot be reduced to its articulated meanings. … For
feminists, the indeterminacy of experience is what makes‘experience’ so important to their world” (p. 428).
Such an epistemology is non-dualistic (something
Dewey would approve of) in that it considers theborderlands of conflicting difference as important sites
for negotiation and growth, rather than as entry points fordominance and assimilation. Perhaps more fundamentally,
pragmatism and feminist pragmatism are of the body. Thatis, experience is em-bodied, lived, and relational. Sullivan(2001) compares the pragmatist tradition of “transactional
knowing” through lived experience to what she calls a“pragmatist-feminist standpoint theory,” an epistemology
which considers diverse transactions/relationships thatinvolve both the physical self and the social environment.
In this way, pragmatist-feminist standpoint theory,
Sullivan writes, incorporates “multiple marginalized
perspectives” and learns the greatest lesson of earlier
feminist theory that, in activating one group of women,silenced another.

Problematizing ‘Truths’

53

In “Where are the Pragmatist Feminists?” Seigfried (1991)
writes about Dewey’s allegiance to disruption—to problematizing “truths” and questioning positivist notions ofconstants or the way things are. She argues, “Whereas contemporary philosophers often privilege physics as the mostrational model of science, one which should be imitated byphilosophers, pragmatists consistently use biological models
and examples from ordinary experience and the humansciences. Pragmatism’s pervasive metaphors are often as
characteristic of women’s experiences as of men’s. Dewey’s
are organic and developmental; many were drawn fromhis involvement with early childhood education” (1991, p.
13). Later, in the introduction to Feminist Interpretations ofJohn Dewey, Seigfried (2002) points to Dewey’s criticism
of the (still-popular) notion of philosophy as unbiased or
objective. Indeed, Dewey unabashedly accused some of theworld’s most revered thinkers—Aristotle and Plato among
them—of “insecurity, on the grounds that they have ‘professed complete intellectual independence and rationality’while generating systems ‘in behalf of preconceived beliefs’”(Seigfried, 2002, p. 6).
Problematizing alleged constants is vital to feminist
and/or pragmatist theory in two central ways: It allows
for questioning the notion of seemingly natural hierarchal
and hegemonic frameworks, which oftentimes are used tosolidify patriarchy; and it gives voice to theories that chipaway at positivist conceptions of our societies, our systems,
and our social relationships, dominant representations ofwhich so often fail to take into account the experiences ofthe oppressed or non-dominant classes. Importantly, as
Thayer-Bacon (2003) notes, Dewey rejected any theoryof truth, and argued that more important than agreeing
on any universal constant was devoting critical inquiry to
the process by which we examine epistemic claims. Suchinquiry allows us to recognize our own central role inconstructing the experiments, the labs, and the scientists
by which we test and consider truth. Likewise, pragmatist
feminists place quotation marks around knowledge tosignify its fallibility, its fluidity, and its subjectivity andconcern themselves instead with the forces of power at playin knowledge creation and construction (Thayer-Bacon,
2003). “They turn to pluralism to help us compensate
for our individual and social limitations,” Thayer-Bacon
writes. “They turn to others to help us become more aware

54

Educational Perspectives v Volume 47 v Numbers 1 and 2of the power structures within dominant discourses
and to help us find ways to subvert and change thesestructures” (2003, p. 434). And they make way/makespace for a diversity of women’s voices in philosophy, in
education, in politics as a way of not only offering nuanceand context through lived experience, but of challenging
phallogocentric theories of knowledge.

community always already in formation and, one can hope,helping to offer support to important community projects,
like Palama Settlement.

Finding Dewey

Dewey, J. (1997). Democracy and education: An introduction to the philosophy of education. New York: Free Press.

As a student of feminist critical theory (with much yet
to learn), I must admit to being somewhat taken aback tofind such a rich and resourceful friend in John Dewey (awhite man of privilege writing at the turn of the twentiethcentury). I concur with Duran (2001), who in closing her
presentation of what a “holistically Deweyan feminism”
might look like, she quipped that the greatest task for the
feminist seeking to appropriate Dewey is not the work oftheorizing or of picking and choosing themes to explore,
but the breadth and richness of Dewey’s writings. Indeed,pragmatist feminists have much to mine as they seek tofurther Deweyan thought, make it their own or weave it
into broader feminist projects.
They also have real-life examples of his theories
in practice. They have places like Palama Settlement,
forever woven into the fabric of cities and of people’s lives.
I went to Palama Settlement because I wanted to makeDewey real. I did not hear his name there; I did not walkthrough a John Dewey Hall or a wing bearing his name,but I found him in its programs, in its mission, in its
strong links to social justice everyday and in every whichway. Dewey’s notions of experience and of knowledgemaking and knowledge-makers make him particularly
appealing not only to pragmatist feminist theorists but
to those seeking to address oppression, poverty, andother social injustices. His philosophy allows for diverse
ways of knowing the world and interacting with it, andfor an appreciation of a multiplicity of experiences—for
a pluralism that appreciates, acknowledges, and gives
space to women; to racial minorities; to lesbian, gay,bisexual, transgendered, and questioning peoples; to those
who are oppressed, silenced or othered; to underserved
neighborhoods and their all-too-often forgotten peoples.
Deweyan philosophy, pragmatism, and pragmatist
feminism place experiences in the here and the now andin the real, offering a blueprint for forming a relational

REFERENCES

Daynes, G., & Longo, N. (2004). Jane Addams and the origins ofservice-learning practice in the United States. Michigan Journal ofCommunity Service Learning, 5–13.

Duran, J. A. (2001). Holistically Deweyan Feminism. Metaphilosophy,
32(3), 279–292.
James, V. (2009). Theorizing black feminist pragmatism: Forethoughtson the practice and purpose of philosophy as envisioned by black
feminists and John Dewey. Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 23(2),92–99.
Nishimoto, W. (2000). The progressive era and Hawai‘i: The early
history of Palama Settlement, 1896–1929. The Hawaiian Journal of
History, 34, 169–184.
Palama Settlement. (1921) 1921 annual report of Palama Settlement.
Honolulu, HI: Author.
Seig fried, C. (1991). Where are all the pragmatist feminists? Hypatia, 6(2),
1–20.
Seigfried, C. H. (2002). Feminist interpretations of John Dewey. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.
Sullivan, S. (2001). Living Across and Through Skins: Transactional Bodies,
Pragmatism and Feminism, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Thayer-Bacon, B. (2003). Pragmatism and feminism as qualified relativism.
Studies in Philosophy and Education, 22, 417–438.
Weiler, K. (2006). The historiography of gender and progressive education in the United States. Paedagogica Historica, 42(1&2), 161–176.
Whipps, Judy. (2013). “Pragmatist Feminism,” The Stanford Encyclopediaof Philosophy (Fall 2013 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), Accessed
online at <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2013/entries/femapproach-pragmatism/>.

ENDNOTES
1

Italics are my own.

John Dewey in Hawai‘i

55

John Dewey, An Appreciation
Robert W. Clopton,

Chair of the Department of History and Philosophy of Education
Presidential Address, Phi Kappa Phi, May 8, 1962
Robert Walter Clopton1 (1906–1981) was professor of education in the College of Educ tion at
the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa from 1943 to 1967 and co-editor with Tsuin Chen Ou of
Dewey’s Lectures in China.2 A thermofax copy of his previously unpublished address was sent toRoberta Dewey in a letter on May 24, 1962 (Potter & Williams, 2000).3

It is not surprising that in the year that you chose a professorof education as your president you should find that the subject of the annual Presidential address is John Dewey. Deweyis identified in the public mind chiefly as an educational
philosopher—and, I might add at the very beginning, I haveseen him shocked, distressed, and even (sweet-tempered as
he normally was) angry at some of the sorts of educational
philosophy popularly attributed to him.
But it is not so much about Dewey as a philosopher ofeducation that I speak tonight, as about an indefatigable
student of life whose interests ranged, like those of Aristotle,
over the spectrum of human experience and whose curiosity
and incisive intelligence led him into analyses of an almost
incredible variety of human problems.
His fellow philosophers have recorded their appreciationof an indebtedness to John Dewey’s penetrating insights
and original observations in fields as widely separated (inthe popular mind) as psychology, ethics, aesthetics, logic,
epistemology, sociology, theory of science, politics, andjurisprudence (Dewey is quoted less frequently perhaps, butmore accurately by Justices of the Supreme Court than bycertain schools of educationists).
Dewey was born in 1859—the year in which Darwin’s
Origin of the Species was published, and two years before
the outbreak of the War Between the States. When hereached the age of seventy in 1929, his admirers planned agreat birthday celebration, at which leading philosophers ofthe day expressed their appreciation of his contributions. In
the following decade Dewey continued his explorations into
and assessment of human experience, and produced some of
his most significant works—at an age normally thought of asa time for “retirement.” Again on his eightieth birthday there
was a celebration, with tributes in the form of learned papers

by his colleagues and admirers. But even at eighty Dewey
could not “retire” from the market place of ideas, and continued to write and publish, so that when he reached ninety,
there was no need for the celebrants to go back and plow thesame ground they had plowed in 1929 and 1939. Few men
indeed have so enriched their culture in the ninth decadeof life as Dewey did. He was still pounding out material ofimportance on his trusty old Remington a few days before his
death in 1952, four months short of his ninety-third birthday.
When Dewey first came to Hawai‘i in 1899 to teachin one of the earliest summer schools held for public school
teachers, I was not, unfortunately, around to meet him,
enjoy his dry humor, and profit from his wisdom. At thistime he was still a young man, not quite forty years old, butalready an established and nationally respected figure, bothin philosophy and in education, although obviously he had
not achieved the preeminence that was to become his in the
Fifty-three years of life which then remained ahead of him.
Dewey’s lectures to Hawai‘i’s teachers in the summerof 1899, set in motion a “grass-roots” surge of educational
reform; and if there had been even a modicum of forwardlooking leadership, Hawai‘i might well have become ademonstration center for the nation in elementary school
theory and practice. But that’s another story.
The next time Dewey came to Hawai‘i (for any morethan a day’s stopover while his ship was in port) was someFifty-two years later, in 1951, when he and his family spent
several months at the Halekulani—and came within an aceof buying a home on the slopes of Diamond Head. Somefour years or so earlier, at a youthful eighty-seven, Dewey, formany years a widower, had taken unto himself a bride; andthe couple had adopted two Belgian war-orphans, who werestill of elementary school age during their Hawaiian visit.

56

Educational Perspectives v Volume 47 v Numbers 1 and 2(Shortly after he arrived, as we walked across the Halekulani
grounds, he remarked to me, “They tell me that the Halekulani is for two classes of people: the newly-wed and thenearly-dead. Seems to me they should give me a discount,since I belong in both categories.”)
Having been greatly influenced by Dewey’s writings,
especially those in education, and knowing that he was oneof the truly great figures of this century, I was naturally
excited at the news that he was to be in Hawai‘i for an
extended stay. I thought of meeting the ship on which the
Deweys were arriving, but concluded that there would
be so many other and much more important people on
hand that I’d be in the way, so I didn’t go. I did, hopingthat it wouldn’t be regarded as presumption on the part ofan unknown faculty member in a small university, write
Mrs. Dewey a note, expressing the hope that I might beprivileged to meet Professor Dewey at a time when it would
be least inconvenient for him. The very next day my phone
rang, a pleasant voice announced, “This is Robbie Dewey. I
have your nice note here. Could you drop by this afternoon
for a drink?” It was as simple as that.
All the misgivings I’d had about being presumptuous,
about forcing my way in on the attentions of a man who
had long since been a figure of world importance, were dissipated within the first few minutes; and by the time we hadtalked about topics of common interest for two hours (which
seemed no more than ten minutes), I felt as though I had
known John Dewey for half a lifetime. After that I saw him
frequently—at his hotel, in my home, or when we went out
together for meals at one or another restaurant in town. Verysoon a feeling of warm friendship developed. I cannot truthfully say that it replaced my feelings of awe and admiration;
but it grew up alongside that awe and admiration. Very few
experiences in my life have meant quite so much to me as
the knowledge that this great philosopher had accepted me
as his friend.
An anecdote will throw some light on the simple
sincerity of this great man. My daughter, who at the time
was a student in University High School, bought a book as
a birthday gift for Adrienne, the older of the two Dewey
children, and after an early supper at home, she and I drove
down to the Halekulani to deliver it. Mrs. Dewey had justput the children to bed, and she and Mr. Dewey were on
their way to dinner. Looking for a change in menu, they
asked us to recommend a restaurant. When we found thatthey hadn’t yet been to the Willows, we asked them to get in
the Hillman and go along with us (not mentioning that we’dalready had our meal). Over the dinner table conversation
was vigorous—as it always was with Dewey—and before we
realized how much time had passed the waitress was jittering
around in the background, giving me the signal that she
wished we’d get out so that they could close.
After we dropped the Deweys at the hotel, near midnight, and as Bets and I drove toward Diamond Head, shecame up with the remark, “Gee, Pap, I used to think that you
were sort of smart.”“Well, thank you,” I came back; “just what was it thatdisillusioned you?”“Aw, Pap, that wasn’t what I meant. I don’t really think
you’re dumb; it’s just that I never heard anybody talk who
could make things—important things—sound so clear as
Mr. Dewey made them sound. Once I got used to the way
his dental plates clicked together, and when I’d listened longenough so that I wasn’t bothered by the way he mumbled
his words, so that I could concentrate on what he wassaying, it was beautiful! Mr. Dewey may be sort of old, but
his mind clicks, and you can understand what he’s talking
about—things that have always, up to now, been so vague
and hard to get hold of. You could just see the ideas coming
to life and growing as he talked! I’ll never forget this evening
as long as I live!”
My daughter’s response to John Dewey’s unique charm
made me think of a comment by Irwin Edman, eminent
American philosopher, who was first a student and thena colleague of Dewey at Columbia University. I have been
unable to locate the article in which I ran across Edman’s
account, but I recall it vividly enough to be able to paraphrase
it accurately enough for our purposes. Edman was writingof Dewey’s “classroom manner,” and of the fact that many
students who had enrolled in his classes attracted by the
magic of his fame were bitterly disappointed at his rambling
and apparently incoherent delivery, and discouraged at
the difficulty they encountered in following his train ofthought. Certainly Dewey was no showman; he frequently
didn’t enunciate distinctly; and it was often true that thematerials of his lectures struck the uninitiated as being sadly
disconnected. (Dewey would undoubtedly have received an“unsatisfactory” rating on the forms used at the Universityof Hawai‘i on which students record their judgements of
their instructors!)

John Dewey in Hawai‘i

But Edman went on to say that in every class there werealways two or three men, at the least—and he numberedhimself among these—who were thrilled at the opportunityof being present as Dewey, ambling and weaving back andforth in the front of the lecture hall, tackled an idea, took itapart, worked with it, rearranged the parts of it, and cameup with a concept that was excitingly novel. As nearly as
I can recall, Edman described this experience as “the opportunity of being present as intelligence became visible andaudible,”—an appraisal not so different from my daughter’sdelighted exclamation that “You could just see the ideas
coming to life and growing as he talked.”
When he wrote, Dewey’s passion for exact expression,
his insistence upon introducing qualifying clauses whichwere intended to prevent misconstruction of the idea he
was presenting—and then of qualifying these clauses withfurther qualifiers, and often these with still further qualifiers, gave much of his writing a heavy, turgid, Germanic
quality. Once when confronted with the complaint that his
philosophy was couched in a jargon unintelligible to many
literate people Dewey replied, “Let some of these young
men explain me: it will make a career for them.” It did.
(Edman, 1955, p. 24).
I found some delightful comments by Dewey himself
on the question of his style in an autobiographical chapter
which he contributed to Contemporary American Philosophy, edited by George P. Adams and William PepperellMontague. At this time Dewey was seventy years old; thischapter was later reprinted in The Saturday Review in theissue devoted to Dewey’s ninetieth birthday, in October,
1949. After discussing Hegel’s influence on both the styleand content of his early writing, Dewey went on to recall
that when, in his very early writing, his interests were moretheoretical and his presentation schematic, “writing wascomparatively easy; there were even compliments upon theclearness of my style.” But as he became more and moreconcerned with “the pressure of concrete experiences” hewas forced to seek for “an intellectual technique thatwould be consistent and yet capable of flexible adaptation to
the concrete diversity of experienced things.” He admits thathe continued to experience difficulty in trying “to satisfy
these two opposed requirements, the formal andthe material.
“For that very reason I have been acutely aware, toomuch so, doubtless, of a tendency of other thinkers and57

writers to achieve a spacious lucidity and simplicity by themere process of ignoring considerations which a greaterrespect for concrete materials of experience would haveforced upon them” (Dewey, 1949).
In point of actual fact, I (and, I suspect, quite a numberof other students of Dewey) have become so accustomed to
the “lumbering and bumbling” of his style that I don’t mind
it at all; and, being as deeply committed in my faltering
way as Dewey was to the proposition that philosophy must
deal with--or at least show applicability to—man’s concrete
experiences in and of his world, I find real enjoyment in
the precision he reached by his insistence upon qualifying
his statements to the point that an honest, thoughtful andcareful reader can hardly misread his intent. I am the firstto admit that Dewey isn’t easy to read; it is quite possible tofail to grasp the point he’s making; it is frequently necessary
to re-read a paragraph or a passage several times, or to backup and re-read a previous paragraph in order to follow his
train of thought; but I am convinced that only the carelessreader, or the one who is captive to his own misconceptions,can misread Dewey—that is to say, read into his statements
those things which he never intended to say. I must confess,
however, that there seem to be a good many people around
who are careless readers, or who are so bound within the webof their preconceptions that they do manage to misinterpret
passages which to me seem exceedingly precise and unmistakable—either that, or (as I sometimes suspect), they “quote”
or refer to what Dewey is alleged to have said, without
having consulted the sources to which they claim to refer.
In this connection I am reminded of a situation which
has recurred at least a dozen times. Usually when some educational controversy was raging, one or another of my friendson the university faculty would tackle me at the lunch table
or a cocktail party with some such remark as “Clopton, in
certain respects you give the appearance of being a reasonably intelligent man. I don’t see how a fellow like you can goalong with this guy Dewey when he says that...” and thensome prime idiocy that Dewey never said, usually that noneof the many educators who are students of his writing eversaid, but that some critic has said that Dewey said.
I learned a long time ago that refutation is a weakweapon, especially in such informal situations. Try to proveto a man that he’s wrong, and he ends up convinced that he
was right all the time—and further, that you are a nitwit
who can’t stand to have his foolishness shown up. So when

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Educational Perspectives v Volume 47 v Numbers 1 and 2

I’m challenged this way, I don’t even try to argue that Dewey
didn’t make, and couldn’t have made, the statement attributed to him. Instead, I reach for my pen and a piece of paper,and tell my friend, “I don’t recall coming across anything likethat in my reading of Dewey, but he wrote so prodigiouslythat I still haven’t managed to read everything he wrote. I’dlike to check back on the context of your quotation, and findthe connection in which Dewey said that. If you’ll give me
the source, I’ll go right on over to the library and check itout, and then report back to you.”
You can imagine how many times even the title of abook has been forthcoming in response to this gambit!
Not once.
There seems to be a widespread impression that John
Dewey was a revolutionary philosopher—that he set out to(and many believe, succeeded) turn the world of philosophy
upside down. It is true that revolutionary consequences
resulted from his formulations, his insights, his unremitting
insistence upon his conviction that the worth of an idea ismeasured in its consequences.
Most familiar is the effect he had on education—not in
America alone, but in China, in Japan, in Russia, in Turkey
directly; and throughout most of the rest of the world by extension. Edman notes that everything that is associated withthe transformation of education from mere passive learningof the three R’s to education as shared living, everything thatis associated with the modern trend in education, the emphasis on education as social and as an experience of shared life
. . . is directly or obliquely the consequence of Dewey’s ideas.
(Edman, 1955, pp. 23–24).
But Dewey did not invent—and never laid claim tohaving invented—the ideas which bid fair to revolutionize
educational practice. Educators who had died before Dewey
was born had worked their way laboriously toward partial
insights which parallelled those which Dewey expounded.
Pestalozzi, among others, had emphasized the social andexperiential nature of education, and founded schools which
demonstrated his beliefs—and which served as patterns foreducational experimentation both in America and in Europe.
Fröbel had valid insights which approach Dewey’s ideas—but
the heavy mysticism of his formulations militated against
their having the widespread influence which Dewey’s ideas
were to have a century later.
Dewey’s thinking had revolutionary consequences inother areas of life than education. While it is impossible to

make a mathematical assessment of the extent of Dewey’s
direct influence on the social and political (and economic)changes associated with Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New
Deal, it is a matter of common agreement that many of therevolutionary changes of this period reflect ideas which
Dewey had long been expounding, especially during thetwenties. In dozens of articles in some of the most influential
journals of the period Dewey had developed his thesisthat the traditional American “rugged individualism” wasnot only outmoded, but actually inapplicable in a modern
technological society and had advanced an alternative
definition. In 1930 a number of these articles were collected
and published in a volume, Individualism, Old and New. The
events of the following decade proved that Dewey was not
only a penetrating analyst of the current scene, but a prophetof things to come. His effect on socio-politico-economic
thinking was at least as profound and as far-reaching as his
effect on educational practice.
Edman asserts that “to Dewey’s inspiration may becredited the whole tendency of modern legal thinking toturn from abstract principles to the estimation of law interms of the consequences of law on human lives.” (1955, p.
23) Judges, including justices of the Supreme Court ranging
from Benjamin Cardozo to Oliver Wendell Holmes havetestified to Dewey’s influence on legal and judicial thinking,and have credited him with a significant role in the unprecedented change in the judicial climate which has occurred in
the last three or four decades.
Dewey had a dedicated interest in the American
labor movement (he was not only a powerful polemicist
and astute theoretician in the cause of labor, but an active
participant, being a member, and at times an officer in theAmerican Federation of Teachers). Eminent labor leaders,
Walter Reuther among others, have attested to Dewey’s richcontribution in the development of organized labor.
In the realm of philosophy itself—“technicalphilosophy“—the impact of Dewey’s contribution has been
revolutionary. Generally acclaimed as “the philosopher’s
philosopher,” Dewey is credited with the formulation andvalidation of a new method of philosophical inquiry. His
little volume, Reconstruction in Philosophy, a slight revision ofa course of lectures delivered at the Imperial University ofTokyo in 1919, is recognized not only as a milestone, but asa turning point, a signal for a new direction, in the history ofphilosophical thought.

John Dewey in Hawai‘i

But revolutionary as have been the consequences ofDewey’s thought, he did not originate—and I repeat—did
not claim to have originated—anything wholly novel. In a
peculiar sense, Dewey was the instrument of the comingof age, the reaching of fruition, of a tradition that might besaid to be indigenous in American life. Through his skill
at exposition and his sheer intellectual power, he brought
to the level of philosophical respectability and the professional acceptance of his fellow philosophers the practice ofapplying a strictly empirical method to the problems of life
and of judging the worth of ideas by their consequencesin human experience. This practice is as old as the ancient
Greeks—and undoubtedly even centuries older. Everygeneration has contained non-conformist thinkers who,
refusing to be bound by the intellectual fashions of theirtimes, have insisted on applying a rule-of-thumb logic to the
problems they encountered, and on making their judgmentswith reference to observed or anticipated consequences inhuman experience. Early in the history of America there
was evidence that Americans were destined ultimately tobuild a theoretical structure, to raise the empirical approach
to life to the level of respectable philosophical method.
One such evidence is the tremendous influence of the
Englishman John Locke on American political and social
thought in the 18th century. Jefferson’s letters and speeches
are peppered with evidences of this American preference forthe practical and the pragmatic. Samuel Johnson, an earlyAmerican philosopher and first president of King’s College(which was to become Columbia University) wrote that philosophy should be considered “not as a system of curious andidle speculations, but as a practical principle of discipline
firmly possessing the heart and incessantly exerting itself inthe life.” (Samuel Johnson qtd. in Schneider, 1930).
This American drive toward the empirical and thepractical motivated philosophers who preceded Deweyon the scene—Josiah Royce, Charles Peirce, and William
James. Some of their contemporaries—professional
philosophers steeped in the classical tradition—sneered that
Royce, Peirce, and James weren’t “real philosophers”—butit has been many years indeed since such an allegation has
been made.
Dewey followed upon, expanded, clarified, andamplified the contributions of these men, and of theirpredecessors and lesser contemporaries. He was distinctly
in and of the American tradition. His contribution was not59

nearly so much innovation as it was the skillful formulationand powerful demonstration of a method, a rationale for theempirical investigation and appraisal of ideas. If hisReconstruction in Philosophy is, as I have indicated, amilestone and signpost on the road philosophers travel, his
Logic, the Theory of Inquiry, published twenty years later, is amanual of navigation without which few contemporary philosophers would venture into still unexplored philosophicalseas. I believe that it is not an overstatement to summarize
by saying that Dewey’s major contribution was to makeexplicit and philosophically workable that which had always
been inherent and implicit in the liberal American tradition.
The undeniable power of Dewey’s formulations has wonfor him and for his position the respectful attention even of
those who disagree with him most wholeheartedly. In fact,
it is doubtful that there is any philosopher of this century
who enjoys such universal respect and admiration fromhis fellow philosophers of all shades of persuasion as does
Dewey. (And, it might be added here, Dewey himself, while
entirely capable of making a vicious left-jab at an idea which
he found dishonest, a position which he found specious, aconclusion which he believed inconsequential, never, so far
as I can ascertain, stooped to argumentum ad hominem,
and never failed in good nature, courtesy, and considerationof his opponents as persons. To the end of his life heentertained both personal affection and professional regard
for men who, in the arena of ideas, were his outspoken andindefatigable opponents; and they, in their turn, indicatedtheir admiration and affection for Dewey.)
Indeed this affection and admiration sometimes getsout of bounds. There have, unhappily, been those who havesought to apotheosize Dewey and who constitute themselves
his “disciples.”When I run across a “Dewey disciple,” I know without
the need to make any further investigation that I’ve found a
person who has failed to understand the thesis that stands
at the center of all Dewey’s writing. In a method which
insists that any idea must be subject to re-examination whencircumstances warrant, and that all ideas must be appraised
and reappraised with reference to their consequences in human experience, there can be no place for a “master” whose
teachings are to be “believed in.” In such an approach to life,
there is no place for discipleship.
The existence of “disciples” and the adulation they
insisted upon heaping upon their idol was perhaps the heavi-

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Educational Perspectives v Volume 47 v Numbers 1 and 2

est cross Dewey had to bear in his later years. It grieved him thatpeople could so completely misunderstand what he had laboredso arduously and over so long a period to make unmistakably
clear. I recall an occasion on which Mrs. Dewey was commenting heatedly on the crass misrepresentations of one of Dewey’s
philosophical positions which were contained in a series ofarticles that were appearing at the time. John raised his handand motioned for Mrs. Dewey to calm down. “You know by thistime, Robbie,” he mumbled, “that I don’t worry about what myenemies say about me.” Then he added, almost in an undertone,“But God protect me from my friends!”
It is only these self-appointed “disciples” who assume that
Dewey provided a system of final answers for our problems—oreven that he gave final and definitive form to the method bywhich we investigate them. Dewey himself would be the first to
insist that human experience has not been—and probably cannot
be—codified to the extent that final, or even continuously workable, answers are possible. About a year ago there was an article
in the Saturday Review by Professor Jerome Bruner of Harvard,
entitled “After John Dewey, What?” And while parts of thearticle suggested that Professor Bruner had failed to grasp thefull import of Dewey’s position on certain educational issues, no
one who knows Dewey—and Dewey himself least of all—could
quibble with the argument that the emerging educational
scene involves conditions with which Dewey did not deal in his
writings, and that there is need for some rather drastic revisionin educational theory, and for a vigorous and original attack on
problems which are baffling in the extreme. It is certainly nodishonor to Dewey to admit that we need to confront problems
with which he did not concern himself. It is not even dishonor
to him to entertain the hypothesis that the very method of
inquiry which he elucidated may need to be reconstructed, oreven superseded. But I submit that a better method is not likely
to be evolved except by those conversant with and practiced in
the method which he advanced, so that their innovations, likehis own, can be evolutionary, built upon what is sound in our
tradition as he built upon what was sound in his tradition.
I wish there were time for me to talk about Dewey’s trips
to, and influence upon education, thought, culture, and social
institutions in, Russia, Japan, Turkey, China, Mexico, and othercountries. Perhaps some of you heard Dr. Hu Shih’s Tuesday
evening address three years ago this summer, in which hecredited Dewey with being the instigator of the intellectual
renaissance which has swept China. I hope that many of you
will have the opportunity in the future to read the doctoral

dissertation which one of my former students will be writing
next year, in Japan, in which he plans to assess Dewey’s
influence of Japanese education.4
I wish there were time for me to take up Dewey’s
magnificent role in the investigation of the charges against
Leon Trotsky; his fierce and fearless polemics at the timeof the Stalinist purges in Moscow; his constant and tirelessinvolvement in local and national politics; his thoughtful
and influential practical and theoretical contributions tointernational relations. I wish I could go more deeply into therevolution that he brought about in aesthetic theory and art
criticism. I wish I could share with you the charm that shines
through the long and thoughtful letters which he so generously
showered upon correspondents in all walks of life. I could
speak on Dewey for five hours—and we have not even minutes
remaining. I hope I have helped some of you (understand) the
many-sided greatness, the courage, the incalculable influence(of Dewey) upon our world and mind of our age, our time.

REFERENCES

Dewey, J. (1949, October 22). “The philosopher-in-the-making,”
Saturday Review, 36, 9–10.
Edman, I. (1955). John Dewey, His contribution to the American
tradition. New York, NY: Bobbs-Merrill Co., Inc.
Schneider, H. W. (1930). “The prospect for empirical philosophy,” inJohn Dewey, the Man and his Philosophy; Cambridge: Harvard
University Press.
Potter, R. E., & Williams, R. (2000). Two progressives: Profiles ofRobert Walter Clopton and Hubert Victor Everly. Educational
Perspectives, 33(2), 12–14.

ENDNOTES
1John Dewey, Lectures in China, 1919–1920. (1973). Edited andtranslated by Robert W. Clopton and Tsuin-Chen Ou. Honolulu:
University of Hawai‘i Press.

2

Letter 18462. Robert Clopton to Roberta Lowitz Grant Dewey, May
24, 1962. “If I thought that the attached after dinner speech would
ever see the light of print, I’d wait and send you a reprint for your collection of articles about and tributes to John. Since publication is suchan extremely remote possibility, however, I’m sending you a thermofax
copy, in the hope that it may prove a pleasant reminder your stay in
Hawai‘i more than a decade ago.”

3

Victor N. Kobayashi, (1964). John Dewey in Japanese Educational
Thought. Ann Arbor, Michigan: Comparative education dissertation
series (University of Michigan. School of Education) ; no. 2.

4

The text is added here by the editor of this journal, as some text fromthe original copy is missing.

John Dewey in Hawai‘i61

Pacific Commercial Advertiser

Synopses and Summaries of Dewey’s 1899 Lectureson the Life of the ChildIn the summer of 1899, Dewey gave two series of talks at Honolulu High School on Tuesday
and Friday evenings from 8:00 to 10:00. The first set of five lectures was entitled “The Life of theChild;” the second set, “Movements in Nineteenth Century Thought.”
The first talk of the lecture series was delivered on the evening of Tuesday, August 15, 1899,
in front of a large audience. Dewey’s topic for the first lecture was “A Study of the Child.” The
Honolulu Star (August 16, p. 8) noted that “nearly all the teachers of the summer school were in attendance.” Unfortunately, neither a synopsis nor a summary of the first talk was published, though
all the later talks, in both series, were reported in full by the Pacific Commercial Advertiser. Due toinsufficient space in this issue of the journal, we are unable to include summaries and synopses ofthe second set of lectures. However, we are including all the available material for the first series,
as these represent Dewey’s ideas on education. The more academic, general interest topics of thesecond set of lectures are available via the Library of Congress website, Chronicling America.

LECTURE I. Tuesday, August 15, 1899
A Study of the ChildLECTURE II. Friday, August 18, 1899
Imagination and Association

No synopsis or summary was provided in the PacificCommercial Advertiser. However, some idea of the content
of this lecture may be gained by a reading of his essays on
the topic of child study published in Dewey’s Collected
Works, notably in “The Interpretation Side of Child Study”
which was first published in Transactions of the Illinois
Society for Child Study II (July 1897), 17–27 and republishedin John Dewey, The Early Works, 1882–1898, 211–221.
Child study is most closely associated with the work of thepsychologist G. Stanley Hall. Dewey was critical of Hall’s
approach, finding it overly concerned with the collectionof bits of data and inclined to view the child as an objectof study. Dewey was scornful that tallying observations
about children could lead to anything pedagogically useful.
For Dewey, child study, if it was to be meaningful, wasconcerned with the activities of the child—that is, withthe social practices that engaged them and in which they
participated as agents. In School and Society, which he published shortly after his visit to Hawaii, Dewey showed how
the child’s engagements in such practices could be guided
or directed in ways that developed their skills and enlarged
their understanding.

SYNOPSIS OF LECTURE
Pacific Commercial Advertiser, August 18, 1899, p. 9
DR. JOHN DEWEY
Synopsis of his Second Lecture
There is no charge for admission to the university extension
course of lectures at the High School by Dr. John Dewey,
the second of which takes place this evening at 8 o’clock.
In dealing with “The Life of the Child,” the lecturer thisevening will confine himself to early childhood, play andimagination. The following synopsis, together with questions and exercises suggested thereby, being furnished forthe guidance of those who attend:
1. When the range of associations and suggestions is
extended, imagination becomes more active, and,for a while (generally from about the twenty-fourth
month on) is practically dominant. The child gets a new
stimulus.
2. The essence of imagination is not unreality, but simply
an extension of ideas: also a greater freedom: curiosity;sees the whole in a part.

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Educational Perspectives v Volume 47 v Numbers 1 and 2

3. Images show themselves in play. The difference between
healthy and unhealthy imagination. Suggestibility inchildren. Children’s “lies.” Through action the childrealizes his imagery. Through it also he puts greater
meaning into all his activity. Play and work.
4. The intellectual, practical and social education in play.
It builds up and organizes a world of things and people.
Growth in range and complexity.
QUESTIONS AND EXERCISES:
1. Give instances of dramatic plays. Of cases where thechild dramatically assumes and tries to live out someother personality.
2. Show value of suggested imagery in controlling a child’s
emotions, like anger, fear (diverting attention); in suggesting an occupation.
3. What is the danger if a child’s imagination is renderedinert? If it becomes to phantastic (sic) and lively?
What sort and amount of stories are best to secure theright measure?
4 Do you think the imagination most needs arousing
or directing?
5. Spontaneous drawings of children as exhibitions ofmental traits.
SUMMARY OF LECTURE II
Pacific Commercial Advertiser, August 19, 1899, pp. 1 & 3Imagination and Association: The Natural Inheritancesof the Child Finally Dominating His Later Actions
Professor Dewey of the University of Chicago gave thesecond lecture of the University Extension course at theHigh School last evening. The subject dealt with playand imagination as developed in early childhood and its
influence on the life of the future man. He dwelt mostinterestingly on the phases of imagination and association
which are the natural inheritances of the child, finallybecoming the dominating features controlling his later
actions. Professor Dewey is strong in the belief that far frombeing unreal, the child’s imagination is as strong reality as
the reality which exists in the adult mind. Following out
this line of thought he said: “The child forms an association
with the objects themselves, so that everything which thechild reacts is to it a bundle of suggestions to act or respondto in a certain way. To give a familiar illustration: the ballis something to throw, the door is something to be opened
and shut, the paper is something to hold before the eyes
and go through the motion of reading, and thus the childforms an association with the object itself which must bereacted out. A slight digression from the main subject is notaltogether out of the way, which is to notice what is now
recognized as one of the fundamental principles of action
everywhere; the tendency of every idea entertained by themind is to find some outlet for it; we see a door, but it does
not occur to us adults to open or shut it, simply by seeing it,
and yet it is safe to say there is a slight reaction upon seeing
something which we are not accustomed to, and, being a
new idea, there is a tendency in our mind to react [to] it.
There are persons who cannot see certain things or go tocertain places without making certain motions. In criminals
this power, this motive power comes out very strongly. For
instance, persons who shock the community by murdering
their own children; the only explanation is that they haveheard voices telling them to do it; in some cases it is the
Lord’s voice, and in others, the devil’s voice, but it was somevoice telling them to commit the deed; to them they heard
the thing said; they have the idea in their minds, and it has
to get itself out; it reacts. In hypnotizing people, or, as it issometimes called, animal magnetism, the same thing comesout. The ordinary restrictions which are acting within us all
the time in our normal condition are removed, when thispower of animal magnetism or what is popularly called thepower of one person’s will over another is simply a relapse ofthis condition of ordinary restriction. It is suggested to sucha person under hypnotic power that he is drowning, andhe will throw himself on the floor and go through all the
movements of swimming.
“There is no such a thing as passive ideas—an inert
passiveness. This becomes very relevant to the subjectof child-imagination and play. There is nothing more
helpful in giving an insight to a child’s mind than thatof a system of habitual customs and restraints; passive
mobility is, in a large measure, due to the fact that hisplay and imagination are controlled so largely by his
physical surroundings and conditions, encroaching upon
his perceptions and observations. That point, of course,
makes a natural introduction of imagery in the child’smind. The child simply does things with objects that he isJohn Dewey in Hawai‘i

accustomed to seeing done, and he does this with literalobjects themselves. The child sees the door opened andshut, and he begins to open and shut the door; he has thenpassed the period of imagination. I saw a child once pickup a watch-chain which happened to fall to the groundin such a shape as to form in the child’s imagination thehammock, and the reaction caused the child to swing thechain as he had seen the hammock swung: That was thefirst idea, which presented itself to the child’s mind; andthe reaction came at once. He was just beginning to comeinto the period of imagination when he could see otherobjects which reverted him back to some other object, andin the form of some literal reaction. There comes a period
in the life of every child about two or two and a half years
old when they perceive this analogy in practically all objects
and a practical reaction to them in that way. A child saw
a finger crooked into just such a shape, that the child said
it was a typewriter, and this position; there was merely inthe way the finger was held which the child had seen in
the act of manipulating a typewriter, and this position of
the finger had only the one idea to the child—the ideaof a typewriter. On the one hand there is no principle inthis development; it is merely activity; what characterizes
it is simply that the idea is freer in imagery, more flexible
and more plastic than other suggestions would be. It is thething or the something which suggests itself to the child’s
mind, rather than the literal presence presented by it. If achild sees an act of pouring something into a cup, it is forhim simply to react by doing the same thing; he sees a leaf
which suggests to him the cup, and his imagination runs toplay in this matter and proceeds to fill the leaf. The act initself is very commonplace, were it not for the fact that, it is
the aptitude of the child to make something big out of thematter, although oftentimes fantastic, unreal.
“What characterizes the imagination is that it
affects the unreal and not the real. In the child, it is nota thing which is fantastic, but to the contrary, it extends
tremendously the mental side of the child’s development
and brings out the many ways in which the child reacts
upon suggestions to its mind, and if it was not for this playand imagination, it is safe to say the child would come toa very abrupt end. Every child presents a case of arrested
development if the play and imagination are removed. It
is the bridge by which he passes over from this almost
psychological development; if this development is arrested,63

the use of things which he sees about him would notextend beyond his range of powers of seeing things. The
adult has a world of activity, occupations, professions,vocations and the like; the world of activity in the child lies
in his powers of imagination to do things which he sees in
the adult to perform, and if it were not for the occupationsand vocations of the adult, these little baby forms ofactivity it can readily be seen what a bad outlet for play andimagination there would be for the child. The imagination
comes in the child in a vicarious way and does for it what
the occupations of the adult do for him—extend his mental
development. The child, in his play of imagination, is afather, or a mother, or a soldier; he entertains the idea
in a vicarious way from what he has seen, and re-acts allthese things, and in this way gets a tremendous pre-denythat the purely fantastical and absolutely make-believe
imagination does not form an important part of the child’sdevelopment. Some children have a good deal of it, but,after all, that is not the main thing for us to bear in mind
and that through these mediums the child gets acquainted
with the realities of things, and so builds up for himself amimic world, and to him it stands for the whole world.
“One of the chief representatives of children andchild-study in the United States has made a collectionof the acts and development of children in this regard,
wherein the clouds, rain, thunder, lightning form an
important part in suggestibility; these objects have been,of considerable force in the child’s knowledge of making
up myths through the natural forms and forces which
present themselves. He personates the clouds and thunderand makes up stories about them; most children do so who
have a stimulus of activity, but the average, or normal,
child is not altogether taken up with these spontaneous
myths and their making. It is through these more average,commonplace things that the great development of thechild comes. Froebel was the first one to absolutely
recognize the play form in child as an important element of
the child’s development, for it is at this period of the child’slife that the natural and normal means of development,
not only of knowledge but of character begin to makethemselves felt.
“After all, the main thing from the first two or three
years of the child’s life is that he should not be surfeitedby mere physical conduct; he wants to see some meaning
to all things and he gets this through his imagination.

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Educational Perspectives v Volume 47 v Numbers 1 and 2

Of course, the child reacts or acts what his imaginationsuggests because he likes to do it. Put a child to washingdishes; he will do it for the reason that it suggests play
to him; could we see what is passing in the child’s mind
during this operation, we would have revealed to us alittle world of fantasy; it is the inner side of the child’s
mind reacting the imagination it has received in thewashing of the dishes, which is most important, and not
the literal act. When action becomes play with the child,
it is equally true that his feelings and his imaginations,
to be free and thoroughly healthy from any considerationof the morbid ought to find outlet in activity, or in otherwords, in play.
“In the continual telling of stories to a child, theimagery side of its mind becomes its safety valve for thereaction. Naturally, all a child’s thoughts lie so muchnearer to his feet and hands to express things; the childwishes to act out the stories which it hears, and hence its
power to assimilate them and reproduce them in someform of activity. When the child becomes surfeited withstories, and cannot reproduce them, he is getting mental
dyspepsia. If too many suggestions are brought into thechild’s mind, his later period is anticipated and he iscalled a blasé child. In some a craze for excitement ofsome kind or other is found, and they become dependent
upon this excitement, just as an adult, becomes dependent for a stimulant of an intoxicating sort.
“It is through the suggestion of imagery that theskillful teacher can always control the child during allthese earlier years of his life. That is the rule by which
the child’s activities are directed. A little boy fell downon the pavement while running, striking himself badly;
another small boy saw the episode and said: ‘Did you
break your glasses?’ The injured boy stopped crying at
once and put up his hands to his head. This action was achange from reality to imagery and was followed at onceby a change of action, and it was a manifestation of thechild’s powers of self-control. If any one had called theattention of the child to his powers of control, he would
not have put them to any use; it was the mental change
which brought his will power into play. Suggest to acrying child that a big man, or a soldier does not cry, andthe image appeals to the child’s mind, and the change
causes him to forget to cry.

“The faculty of telling ‘lies’ is oftentimes brought
about in children by an excitable imagination, andnot from any real desire to distort the truth. Toomuch vivacity plays an important part, in telling‘lies.’ Some of the eases of this class of children aretransitory and the best way is to leave the child alone
and let him discern between fact and fancy.”

LECTURE III. Tuesday, August 22, 1899
Later Childhood: Interest and Attention
SYNOPSIS
Pacific Commercial Advertiser, August 21, 1899, p. 9
Dr. John Dewey Will Talk on Later Childhood
In the third lecture of the University Extension Course Dr.
John Dewey will speak on later childhood, with especialreference to the development of interest and attention. The
following syllabi of the third lecture should cause increased
interest to be taken in “The Life of the Child” as portrayedby Dr. Dewey:
1 The seventh year marks a transition, physically andmentally. Child becomes conscious of more remoteends or purposes, and of adjusting means to them.
Plays change to games: rules, etc. Child is controlled bythought, not simply by image.
2 Intellectual effects: is move interested in achievement,
in making, not simply doing. Great motor outburst.
Danger of ignoring this. Importance of connecting
imagination with it. Two types of children. Child thus
develops interests; more or less permanent lines ofimagery which he is interested in realizing. Childhoodin literature: Stevenson and Kenneth Graham.
3. Interest in symbols and in their interpretation also
develops generally between eighth and ninth years.
Beginnings of consecutive attention. Relation of imagery to attention and reasoning. Active inquiry.
4. Change in moral attitude. Self-will more conscious andassertive when child is aware of purposes. Formation of
executive habits.

John Dewey in Hawai‘i

QUESTIONS AND EXERCISES:
1. Is interest destructive of effort and serious work? Ismaking use of interest the same as indulging a child?
2. Different forms of selfishness in children and their
psychological explanation? Ways of dealing with it?
3. What ways can be suggested of utilizing games andvarious forms of motor activity for educational purposes?
4. Collect instances of children’s games, and try to show
the psychological principle of each.
SUMMARY OF LECTURE III
Pacific Commercial Advertiser, Aug 24, 1899, p. 2
ON CHILD HABITS
Dr. Dewey Speaks on Transition Period
Takes Place Between Seventh and Eighth Year-Intellectual
Development
Professor Dewey’s lecture at the High School on Tuesday
evening was largely attended, considerable interest being
taken in his talks upon the intellectual and moral development of children. He lays particular stress upon the factthat from his observation of children and their habits andreceptive abilities, the element of arithmetical and symbolicstudies should not be attempted until the ninth year of
their lives, as it is not until that age is reached that they arereally capable of interpreting the meaning of such studies,
and, therefore, realizing any particular benefit from such
instruction. He also states his belief that this age of thechild makes the period of its moral change, as the child thenbecomes fully aware of a purpose and its probable results,
and that these moral forces, if acted upon in a positive manner, create habits of orderly discipline. Continuing on thisline of thought, the Doctor said: It is between the seventhand eighth years of a child’s life that a transition takes place,mentally and physically. About the seventh year is the age
selected by physicians, anatomists and psychologists asmarking the period of the change or development. It is worthy to note that this is the time selected for the beginningof the school period of the child’s development in most of
the civilized countries, a recognition that the child is at thatage ready for something in the nature of regular, conscious
instruction and discipline, morally, intellectually and physically. Intellectually this period begins to show the results of65much that has been given traditionally to the child in thesixth year, results which show that this premature training,
traditionally, has been a waste of energy, that much of thetechnical work which has been thrust upon the child, ought
to be postponed until the seventh year.
What is the character of this change, and the natureof the change? Some of its outward symptoms are plain
enough; at this period of transition children are not quiteso agreeable to grown people as they were when three orfour years younger, and are not so convenient as playthingsfor grown people, in that they do not lend themselves toour amusement as they did in former years. What wasformerly referred to as cute and cunning comes to us asunpleasant, rather disagreeable and importuning at thislater age. The naive, spontaneous eagerness becomes atthis time to be a lack of regard for other people, and welook upon it as deliberate selfishness. The doings of thechild which before were thought cunning and cute are
now regarded as tendencies toward being disrespectful tohis elders. The child has, of course, been naughty before
this—rebellious—but they have been merely outward signs
which would quickly pass over; but at six and seven it often
seems to us as if they were making themselves antagonistic
to our wishes for the mere desire of antagonizing. In a great
many ways, their unconscious ways and naiveté give way toa more deliberate and more conscious attitude. However,in fact, we do not find that the child is really any worse
than before, but is simply more conscious of himself, of his
aims and purposes, and he has become less governed by thesuggestion of his imagination. Having aims and purposesof his own which he wishes to carry out, it is inevitablethat he should run at cross purposes to the aims of grownpeople. The child has begun to live less in the immediate
present; and has commenced to form vague plans, andwishes to regulate his so that he may carry out these plansfor himself. I once saw about a dozen children one day,most of them between the ages of six and seven, and someolder, playing for the first time the game of ‘hide and seek’;
it was quite interesting to see these children assortingthemselves out into two groups: when the one who was
blinded gave the signal to ‘hunt,’ some of them just went
ahead and did what they had started to do, in that they had
started in one direction to hide, whether it was wise or not,as far as absolutely getting out of sight was concerned andgetting caught; this was among the younger ones; the more

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Educational Perspectives v Volume 47 v Numbers 1 and 2

mature children managed their conduct so as to carry out
the purposes of the game—not to get caught. Now thatgame which I happened to see was to me really a scientificmeasurement of the abilities of children of different ages; itproved that mere physical exuberance of simply running tohide was not enough for these older children, for they saw
the point of the game to be arrived at, saw some result aheadof them, and directed their conduct on the basis of a certain
degree of skill. This illustrates the transition between theintellectual and moral life of the child at this age, or period.
Speaking generally, the plays of the child give way to games
which partake of the nature of instruction; the game always
has some end to be reached, or goal, or some destination
is to be gained, and for this there have to be certain rules;
when the child feels the need or demand for having somefairly definite point ahead of him, he consequently feels
the need of having some kind of rules or regulations to
successfully reach this desired end.
“But before this period, if you introduce rules into
their play it proves a great annoyance; it is a bore to themand they lose all interest; they simply want to follow thesuggestion of the imagination; they want it variable; ifthey do follow rules, they simply follow the habit they haveformed of playing a certain thing in a certain way and which
their imagination suggests no new way of playing. After thetransition period, skill in playing games begins to appeal tothem: skill as a thing by itself or power to achieve, has no
meaning; you cannot present a motive to the child by saying‘If you do it this way you will be able to do better next time.’
but there are certain ranges of skill which appeal to themand they can feel the force of it. The child sets considerable
store by his power to mimic; if he plays he is building ahouse, he wants to build a big house, for in that he gets a
sense of largeness; if he plays at Indians, he has his mimic
weapons and everything in that line which gives him asense of power, things which give him the sense of having
ability to achieve, and prevailing upon those with whom hecomes in contact that he is a somebody and capable of doing
great things.
“In the seventh year we find that children’s ideas ofresults are, of course, out of all proportion to what they
can actually do. In many cases they often conceal theirtrue abilities, because they fear the possibility of ridicule.
However, we find they plan the most impossible things. A
boy of seven we find planning to make a steamboat, andhow he is going to run it; also another planning how tomake a balloon, how he will steer it and make it go up or
down; another planning to build a theater, stage and all,and even planning to be an actor; the more imaginative
ones plan things which are of course ludicrously all out of
proportion for their ability to achieve the desired end. Now
it is that very disproportion between the things which are
imagined and the capacity for achievement which makeit such a critical period. The main and most importantquestion is to bring these two elements nearer together;
how to cultivate the child’s imagination without destroying
the imagination, until it comes within the range of reality
and possibility. On the other hand, quite often we findthat in passing from five to eight years that the youthfulingenuity of imagination has entirely been wiped out andthe child seems to have fallen into a rut: the reason for thisis that the child’s power of imagination is not taken holdof and he is not given any outlet whatever for it, and as hegrows older he realizes that he cannot do the things whichwere thought of in his earlier years; no avenue or channelof performance is open, and his originality dies out, fromlack of cultivation; in fact, he degrades his thinking to his
actual achievements.
Other children who retain this originality, in spite oflack of advantages or outlets, conceal their powers, become
highly absorbed in themselves and they eventually leada double life, and there is a point reached when its mind
becomes morbid and unreal, the result of the child living
in a world of vast achievements, doing wondrous things,
creating its own world, a morbid world existing in its mind.
“There is another thing which of course accompanies
this period of development, and that is (the) training anddiscipline. The child of five and six is extremely active andis generally more affected by discipline than at the age ofseven and eight. There is a certain physical lawlessness
at this latter age; the child cannot always do the thing hewishes to do, and if curbed in his desires is likely to commit
some mischief, and often to this to direct attention tothemselves and cause one to feel that they are somebody,even it they have to resort to mischief. When a child cando things in which he sees certain results accruing and theyfind that the same results are usually produced, from certain regulations or methods, an equation between the thingwhich the child has in mind and his ability to execute; if hetakes certain materials in hand and he finds that there areJohn Dewey in Hawai‘i

certain laws outside of his own powers to execute, in orderto bring out certain results and he finds that he has to do
things in a certain way, the failure of results as followed out
by himself becomes a discipline to him and forces upon him
the necessity of using a different order or method to produce
the required results. I am extremely hopeful that good results in discipline may be reached when people at large havethoughtfully and seriously begun to find occupations andpurposes for children at this period which will bring themout of chaotic habits and meaningless desires to orderly anddisciplined habits.”

LECTURE IV. Friday, August 25, 1899
Adolescence and Emotions
SYLLABUS
Pacific Commercial Advertiser, August 25, 1899, p. 10
FOURTH LECTURE
Dr. Dewey on The Life of the ChildThe fourth lecture of the University Extension course by
Dr. John Dewey on “The Life of the Child” will be devoted
to the period of the child’s life in which the emotions, selfconsciousness and adolescence show themselves. His lecture
tonight will embrace the following topics:
The dependence of emotions upon expression of
impulses. James theory of the emotions. Illustrated in thecase of anger, fear, worry and calm, etc.
Value of emotions, as reservoirs of energy to be directed
toward ends; abused when merely indulged. Danger insimply pressing them. Emotions to be considered psychologically first, morally afterwards.
Large emotional outburst accompanies adolescence;
new aesthetic and moral interests. General consciousness of
obligation and beauty. Moral reawakening.
New personal and social consciousness. Selfconsciousness increases because youth looks at himself fromstandpoint of his relation to others. Accompanying change
in intellectual attitude; interest in generalizations and laws.
QUESTIONS AND EXERCISES:
1. Is there any danger of premature moral and religious
instruction?

67

2. What are the different causes of anger in little children?
What possible element of good is there in each, andhow can it be brought out?
3. Make a list of the different sources of fear and frightin children. See if any cause can be found for them inancestral experience. Methods of dealing with fears.
4. Write out reminiscences or any special, moral or aesthetic experiences of youth.
SUMMARY OF LECTURE IV
Pacific Commercial Advertiser, Aug. 26, 1899, p. 2
FOURTH LECTURE
Most Interesting of the Series in Subject and Detail
THE PERIOD OF ADOLESCENCE
Particularly Favorable to Religious Awakening and for
Confirmation in the Churches
The fourth of Professor Dewey’s lectures on “Child Life”
was presented last evening at the High School. By far it
was the most interesting of the series thus far, in subject
and detail. The lecture dwelt with the impulses and emotions which come into the youth’s mind during the periodof adolescence, and the feeling of consciousness as given
expression in his feelings toward others. The emotions bringabout a moral awakening and mark a change in his intellectual attitude. Continuing generally along these subjects,
the Professor said:“This particular period is generally known as theperiod of adolescence, and comes at about the age of 13.
Before touching upon this feature, I wish to speak of theemotions in general. Adolescence is perhaps more irregularin its manifestations, and it is not quite possible to fix upon
any one phase which is the most important, but there is alarge mental change connected with this period, a decidedchange in disposition, especially in the social feelings. The
simplest statement we find of all our activities is that they
are responses or adjustments to stimuli. Each one of us is
a force into which is continually streaming an indefinite
number of stimuli, and the conduct consists in responding
to this stimuli in such a way as to successfully maintain any
act of ours. My ability to stand on this floor is dependent
upon the stimuli which comes from contact with the soles of
my feet and other articles which come to the eye; if one ofthese stimuli is diseased my ability to retain my equilibrium

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would be affected. Take a wood-engraver, for instance; see
how every motion he makes is a response to the stimuli as
he works upon the wood. Our muscular system is to takehold of these stimuli in a regular way that we are perfectly
adjusted. As to the bearing of that upon the emotions,
Professor James of Harvard has advanced the suggestion that
our emotions are accompaniments with the responses which
we make to the stimuli; only in this case-we have to thinkof the responses not only of the muscles, but also all of theinternal organs, the breathing, etc.
“Some one told me today that a physician told herthat if she could notice herself, for instance at a lecture,
she would probably find that she was holding her breath
unconsciously, and that if she only knew it, there was a greatloss of energy in doing that. On the other hand, if she wereto keep on breathing normally she would not find herself
losing any energy. Then with the emotions there are changes
in the circulation of the blood. We blush under certain
circumstances; we grow white with fear, showing that thereaction extends to the circulation as well as to the muscles.
Children, too, have a heavy feeling in the pit of the stomach
when saddened or greatly depressed. If you take the terms
for joy, or elation, most all of them show a superabundanceof energy. Mr. James’ theory is that our emotions are theway, really, in which we feel. He says, and violently, too,that we do not run away because we feel afraid; we feel
afraid because we run away. That we do not strike because
we are angry; we are angry because we strike. You can seethat a person feels afraid when he doesn’t run away. In thisway a gross response and movement of the whole body issuppressed, but you find the movement of the muscles showsa changed breathing, a change of feeling even in the pit of
the stomach. The theory seems paradoxical in the extreme,
but you will see there is a “good deal of truth in it. If you
notice yourself walking along a dark street at night and you
hear a noise suddenly that noise is a stimulus. Walking in
the dark, where you cannot see, the stimulus has an effectwhich it would otherwise not have. Prof. James wrote anarticle in one of the magazines a short time ago pointing outthat the nervous drain on the average American is due to thefact that he never quite relaxes himself, his nervous tension,at any time completely. When you feel worried, if you takegreat pains to unravel your brow, you will be surprised tofind how much of the mental worry and depressions goesalong with the unraveling. In substance, then, emotion isdue to the change in the breathing apparatus, blood activity,
due to the activity which responds to the stimulus given.
“When one gets to doing something habitually and we
do it without thinking and without fear, the habitual activity
is automatic, but any disturbance in it, any difficulty comingin, or in other words, any break in the habit occurring, whicharouses or excites us, emotion comes. Now when we have an
emotional outburst accompanying adolescence great changes
can be looked for in our character. At this period there are
new stimuli coming into the system with great force, andthere are no habitual or fixed modes of response to these.
The chief stimulus which comes at this time in the physicalsystem is that accompanying sexual maturity; it means a
modification of all the other forms of emotion known to thechild; the whole physical growth is changed at this period;
with the coming of puberty a tremendous growth occurs; it
is not only in the growth itself, the increase in height andweight, but the structure of the system changes; the large
trunk muscles begin to grow, and the youth has entered onthe ‘awkward age’; they seem over-grown. All this means astirring up, then, of the physical system and the receptionof a new stimuli and sense of reaction. The new impulses ofsex which dawn at this period are the ones which make him
become a member of the race of human kind and announce
his sex. It is not surprising, then, at this time that there isa tremendous reconstruction going on in the entire mental
and moral make-up of the youth, as well as in the physical.
That seems to be the explanation as far as it can be given of
the change which comes at this time the awakening of theintellectual impulses which make the individual an organic
member of the human race and with the life of humanity as
a whole. It is not strange that he feels different to himself
and to others, and takes on new characteristics and a changeof methods.
“I heard a teacher once say that when a boy or girl began
to take great interest in themselves, in their clothes, as far
as making an ‘appearance’ before others was concerned,
because they were thinking what some of the other sex
would think of them, it was then time for them to study
technical grammar. That simple statement illustrates thecharacter of the change which is going on, that is, the social
accompaniments of this change. Vague longings come atthis time; the child before this has perhaps ends and aims inthe sense that he sees certain results, but the normal youth
doesn’t have ideas he doesn’t have aspirations at large. Now,

John Dewey in Hawai‘iwhether, every youth has these vague aspirations, I cannot
say, but it is certainly characteristic of the average youth tohave these longings, to have these ideas of a general nature,
which would include a great variety of minor details. They
partake largely of the inner nature of the youth and not of
the outward; he may want to be a soldier or a lawyer, but it
is only a physical thing which he has in mind. On the other
hand, the other side of his nature being taken possessionof by these longings, it is liable to create a romantic spirit.
This is the period when the youth is continually runningaway from home, and the sea seems to possess the greatest
attraction to him; it seems to present an unbounded expanse
and is generally in greatest contrast with his life at home.
The youth feels that the life at home has restrictions andrestraints, which do anything but satisfy these longings
which have come up in him.
“Now another side of this same experience of being
filled with large ideals is seen in religious affairs. Somestudents in the United States have taken the pains to collecta large amount of statistics of this joining the church, andit was found that this period of adolescence is particularly
favorable to religious awakening—a sense of sin; an introduction into religious life seems a realization of somethinglarge and infinite and unbounded. They also find that thisis the period for confirmation in the churches.
“There is an esthetic awakening which is also characteristic of this period of the child’s life. A woman told meof a walk she took with about a dozen children whose ages
run from 12 to 15; first she took them through the streets
purposely, and then took them along the side of a river,teeming with beauty at every point; when she came backshe asked them what was the thing that had most impressed
them; they were divided as to whether it was a donkey cart
or a bunch of bananas hanging up in a store; there was
not a single child who alluded in the most remote way toanything in the nature of natural beauty. The average boy orgirl doesn’t care much for beauty as a thing by itself.
“Now with the age of adolescence if there is any artistic
beauty dormant in the youth, it comes out, and consequently
a new form of literature is accessible to him. Most boys
profess a contempt for poetry, except perhaps in the formof narrative. Of course, if it is a story by Walter Scott it
appeals well to him. The average child has no interest in
the generalization of principles as principles, no more thanin ideas as ideas. He may be interested in rules, but that is69

different from a law of principle. Now, when he begins to
see a larger world and he begins to see himself as a memberof the larger world, then he can hardly help being interested
in generalization of principles. It seems obvious to me thatwhen a person begins to think of himself in his relations tohome and society there comes a tremendous change in hislife and methods of thinking.
“In three directions, then, the ethical, esthetic and intellectual, we find the awakening to larger interests and a larger
meaning of things, so that the machinery of habits which has
been formed may now be taken possession of, and illuminated and expanded by these larger ideal considerations whichhave come into view. Two things seem quite obvious to me.
In them first place, the emotions are a great wakening; it isthe emotions which keep our life from becoming mechanicaland routine. It is the emotion which gives us force, vivacity
and the power of our ideas. We may have two ideas of true
worth, but yet one remains a piece of dead information; takefor instance, the law of gravitation: we believe that it is true,and yet it is but a fact to us; it would have no great bearing
in our lives. We have another idea, not a fiftieth part of theintellectual worth of the other one, but we have perhaps been
so stirred by the emotions caused by the idea, that it becomesa controlling power in our lives. The emotions are merely thereservoirs of energy in us.”LECTURE V. Tuesday, August 29
General Principles of Growth

SYNOPSIS
Pacific Commercial Advertiser, August 29, 1899, p. 5
THE FIFTH LECTURE
End of the First Course on The Life of the ChildAt the High School this evening Dr. John Dewey will deliver
the last of the first series of five lectures in the University
Extension Course on “The Life of the Child.” His subject
will be “General Principles of Growth,” and the following isa syllabus of the lecture:
1. The law of periodic growth. Successive instincts andpower present themselves, reach their height and wane.
Each must be utilized as it appears. Great importanceof child study to detect these successive eras of interest.
Faults of former education in endeavoring to anticipate
later stages instead of making full use of earlier ones.

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2. Experience is got through expression of impulses andinstincts. It is the part of educators, whether parents orteachers, to afford the proper conditions and materials in which these powers may exhibit themselves.
Tendency to substitute accumulated experience of others for conditions which will control and direct child’s
own experience.
3. Growth may be measured through formation of habits.
Habits not formed by bare repetition, but through positive achievement or success,” based on original impulse.
Habits not equivalent to routine, but imply power toadapt themselves to new conditions and purposes. Most
important habits are those of directing the attention.
Relation of habit to character.
4. Growth as summed up in character involves (1) force,or strength of purpose and execution; (2) delicacy orsusceptibility of emotion; (3) good judgment selectionof values.
QUESTIONS AND EXERCISES:
1. How can the individuality of childhood be preserved
without tending to develop self-conceit, self-will, etc.?
2. What do you think, psychologically, of the doctrine of“breaking the will?”
3. Give some account, from reminiscence or observation,of the effects of punishment.
4. Give examples, in our present system of instruction, oftendency to substitute experience of others for child’s
own experience, and the effects which result.
5. What part can music, or art play in the mental andmoral growth of the child?
SUMMARY OF LECTURE V
Pacific Commercial Advertiser, August 30, 1899, p. 3
DEWEY LECTURES
End of the first Series Last Night
Next Course Will be on “The Development of Thought in
the Nineteenth Century”
The series of lectures upon “The Life of the Child” wasbrought to a close by Professor Dewey, before an interested
audience at the High School last evening. This, however,does not end the Doctor’s mission in Honolulu, as on Friday
evening next he will begin a new series of lectures, the title
being “The Development of Thought in the NineteenthCentury.” The object of this course is to present the influences which literature and advanced thought have had in thedevelopment of the nation.
In last evening’s lecture Professor Dewey laid considerable stress upon the formation of habits in a child, and theidea that habits are not formed by a constant repetition of
doing the same thing over and over again, but by an original
impulse which brought positive success at once.
“Now with the changing which is occurring in a child;
we cease to consider the child as preparatory to somethingelse, or, in other words, a preparatory to the adult life. Oneof the most popular books ever written for children wasentitled ‘Little Men and Little Women,’ and yet they are
not small, reduced copies, smaller sizes of adult life; it is nottrue that physically children are ‘little men and little women’;they are different in structure: it would be truer to conceive
them as a different species altogether. When we follow out
the idea of Mrs. Minsell, when she quotes that our ancestors
looked upon children as a preparation merely for adult life,
and of childhood having its own worth and value, having its
forms for itself, one thing that becomes of great importanceto us is to discover when the various impulses and instincts
and interests in point of view in the child begin to show
themselves, and then to ripen and then to pass away. Professor James has said that the instincts are implanted for thesake of giving rise to habits; that is, there is a period in which
the instinct shows itself and may be transformed and becomea permanent habit; but if the instinct is not utilized at theproper moment, it is destined to pass away. It is not possible
ever to fully make up for any loss of development in a child;there is a moment when the iron is hit, and if we do not
strike at that particular moment, we do not get the desired
result in the child. There are certain powers in a child, but ifthey are attempted to be developed simultaneously the childwould be driven like four horses abreast. Now, the present
idea is, as I have just been saying, that the instincts rise andripen and pass away.
One of the main purposes of our study of childhood is tobe able to detect the signs of the appearance of any particularinstinct or impulse in order that we may make permanent, or
continuously operative, whatever there is of good in it, andweed out whatever does not tend in the right direction.

John Dewey in Hawai‘i“That periodic development of characteristic tastes is
one of the chief things which we have to bear in mind. I
tried to bring out in some of the preceding thoughts whatsome of these characteristic ideas were. The principle stillholds true, and there would be more reason for us to deeply
consider the development of the child in order to find out
the proper time to facilitate the development of the instincts
and impulses.
“It does not follow that we should always encouragethem, but it remains for us to find some direction in which
they can become developed, if for the good. The one great
point is the general machinery of development. Some years
ago I happened to sit in a railroad car with a laboring man,evidently a grist-miller, and formed a conversation with him.
He told me more or less of his work, and about his repairing
grist-mills. He, in turn, asked me what was my calling; I
tried to tell him, but, of course, he did not understand whata psychologist was, but I told him it dealt with the mind.
He replied very promptly, ‘What is the good of that?’ I was
rather at a loss to reply to him, but it happened that he had
told me of his family affairs more or less and of some trouble
with his wife, and as I reflected upon the matter I told himthat I was dealing in one kind of machinery my machinery
was the mind, and that if we could not get it in goodworking order and have the friction removed that society
was machinery, and if we did not understand the cogs andwheels, we could not keep it all going right; and I drew acomparison between my own machinery and the machinery
which he ordinarily handled, and in the end I believe that I
justified my vocation and ‘calling’ in his eyes.
“It suggests a certain point of view. In one way the mind
is a machine, and may be considered as a grist-mill, or any
loom, or self-binding reaper. It has a certain structure of its
own which controls its work, and it is literally true, I think,that a smooth working thereof is dependent upon our mastery of this machinery. Of course, most of our mastery comesto us in everyday life, but at all events our theoretical life canhelp it out. The same as a man who operates a loom; he may
be proficient in all its practical workings, and yet when itgets out of order, or some delicate fixture is misplaced, one
who has a theoretical knowledge of its workings has to becalled in to fix it aright. Now, fortunately, the general working of this machinery of the mind is so plain and simple thatit can be easily understood—one can get an outlined idea ofthe structure of the machine in a very easy way. All we have71

to start with is certain active impulses, instincts and tendencies; we talk about sensations, but after all, sensationsof life would be of no value to us, if there were no impulses
or instincts or appetites back of it. The eye is to be thoughtof, not as a receiving organ, but first as an active organ, thesame as the hand as a grasping or a reaching-out organ. We
should never succeed in seeing anything if our eyes were
not continually searching out something, roaming about;
we might have all the sensations we have got now, but if itwere not for a reactive tendency the whole world would be
an absolute blur to us—a mental cloud.
“We begin with certain instincts and impulses. Now
if these express themselves as they show themselves, theycome into contact with outward conditions; they run
up against something. The child reaches out, and as hereaches out he grasps; he feels something; it may be roughor smooth, hot or cold, large or small; now his impulse
has taught him something; the burnt child grasped fire.
At first he is controlled by his active impulses; if he sees abright light he reaches for it; he gets his finger burnt; now
the next time he dreads the fire; he directs his activity ina different way. True, from contact he gets his sensations
about objects, and as he gets that he derives new tendencies, so the next time he acts, he acts somewhat differently
in his active impulses. Now this continual outflow of theactive impulses, with the continual return of sensations
or ideas, which he got through activity, constitutes in a
general way, the scheme of the working of this machine.
Where every act which is put forth under normal conditions it modifies future activity. That is what we mean byforming habits.
“We cannot mold the child literally from without as
to its habits; we have got to find something in which thechild co-operates with the tendencies to which we wish to
mold it. As to habits, a child, for instance, is kept figuringsums at school, but as a matter of fact, most persons when
they get into business later on in life learn their arithmetic
then; in the case of the child it is literally shoved into him,
because it is said that by repetition, by doing the samething over and over again, he will become proficient; if thechild has anything in mind or anything to gain by any particular figuring that has any connection with anything hewants to do himself, he makes real use of it, and he doesn’t
wait until he is grown up; it becomes a part of his working
capital and something, then, which he cannot lose. He

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doesn’t store up muscle in his arm to use some twenty years
later on; he has a use for it while he is gaining it.
“A word about habits and their formation. The old, oldtheory is that having formed a habit by repeated repetitions,
you finally have the habit firmly fixed upon you. To thecontrary, repetition is a consequence of the formation of ahabit, and not the source. If a child repeats a thing twenty
times in a blundering way he has not got the habit right; hehas a bad habit; but if he has the habit formed right away,
he will have more stimulus about acquiring good habits; if achild’s reading is confined to reading certain sentences, byconstantly repeating the same sentences over and over again
for the sake of learning to read, what habit can be got by therepetition of such nonsense? Nothing. If he is given a new
sentence in reading he gets a new idea of the world, and his
habits for observation are thereby quickened. We lose moretime in this one respect than in any other one thing. As arule, this just doing a thing over and over again means that
we are simply trying to make good by sheer nonsense forsome lack of original experience.