“John Dewey was accused of destroying American discipline in 1896 after opening a classroom where children cooked meals, built furniture, argued loudly, and learned more than any textbook could control.

John Dewey did not stumble into controversy. He engineered it.

At the University of Chicago in the 1890s, Dewey was a respected philosopher watching schools train obedience instead of intelligence. Rows of desks. Memorization. Silence mistaken for learning. He believed this model did not just fail children. It trained citizens to accept authority without judgment.

So he did something professionally reckless. He built the Laboratory School.

There were no rigid lessons. Children learned math by running a store, science by cooking, history by building tools. They moved. They spoke. They failed in public. Dewey treated mistakes as data, not disobedience. Knowledge came from experience, not recitation.

The backlash was immediate.

Parents complained that their children were not being “controlled.” Newspapers mocked the school as chaotic. Colleagues warned Dewey he was undermining civilisation itself. Education leaders accused him of replacing rigour with play. What terrified them was not disorder. It was autonomy.

Dewey doubled down.

In 1916, he published Democracy and Education, arguing that schools were not preparation for life. They were life. If students learned obedience in school, they would accept injustice in society. If they learned inquiry, cooperation and consequence, democracy had a chance to survive.

That idea made him dangerous.

For decades, Dewey was dismissed as idealistic. Systems preferred efficiency. Standardisation expanded. Testing replaced thinking. Dewey’s warnings sat ignored while classrooms became quieter and less curious.

Then the economy changed.

Repetition stopped paying. Problem solving did. Collaboration mattered. Creativity became currency. Education reformers rediscovered Dewey and realised he had described the modern world before it existed. Project-based learning. Experiential education. Critical thinking. Civic engagement. The language changed. The architecture was his.

Dewey lived long enough to see partial vindication and permanent resistance. He understood why. Education systems reflect what societies fear. In his era, they feared independent minds.

John Dewey was not trying to make children behave better. He was trying to make authority earn obedience. That distinction unsettled institutions then and still does now.”

More than a century after John Dewey’s experiment, Kenya is trying to replicate the same under the Competency-Based Education (CBE). Previously, it called Competency-Based Curriculum (CBC).

• A Tell Media report / Source: History Addicted