John Dewey's First Classroom

The philosopher who would reshape American education began his career in a small Oil City high school. John Dewey graduated from the University of Vermont in eighteen seventy-nine and came to Oil City, Pennsylvania, for his first two years of teaching. He was twenty years old.

Those years of working with real students in a real classroom helped crystallize ideas he would spend the rest of his life developing: that learning should be grounded in experience, that schools should train citizens rather than just fill minds with facts. Dewey went on to the University of Chicago and then Columbia, where he became the most influential American philosopher of the twentieth century. The progressive education movement, experiential learning, and the very idea that schools should foster democracy all trace back in part to what Dewey began thinking about while teaching teenagers here in western Pennsylvania.