There Are No Schools in Utopia: John Dewey’s Democratic Education

“The most utopian thing in Utopia is that there are no schools,” writes John Dewey (1933/1989, 136). With these words, Dewey opened his talk to kindergarten teachers on April 21, 1933 at Teachers College, Columbia University. Published a couple days later in the New York Times under the title, “Dewey Outlines Utopian Schools,” we find Dewey in this little-discussed talk fancifully imagining himself among the Utopians—somehow transported from the economically depressed United States of the 1930s to Utopia, where the economy of acquisition is nothing but a memory.1 Finding himself in Utopia, Dewey, of course, asks about the schools, quizzing the Utopians on everything from their pedagogy to their educational goals. What he discovers is a radical critique of education as it was (and still is) often practiced. The emphasis on standards and the competitive and punitive systems of examinations that enforce them appear deeply misguided to the Utopians. They contend that it is our economic system and its emphasis on “personal acquisition and private possession” that has reduced education to the mere acquisition of facts, necessary for the further acquisition of things. According to the Utopians, once their acquisitive economy had passed away, education itself was transformed, liberated in a way that enabled teachers to concentrate their attention on identifying and developing the unique capacities of each student. Instead of a single-minded focus on delivering the facts of the curriculum, the Utopians were able to see the child as the gravitational center of the educational enterprise. The contemporary conversation about education in America, and in many other western educational contexts, could not be further from this vision. American society is more driven by acquisition than ever, and its children are exposed to an unprecedented onslaught of advertising aimed at training them in the practice of consumption.2 In school, the same children are scrutinized by high-stakes, standardized examinations that stand as the goal and measure of learning. Education itself—in