Beyond Rhetoric: New Perspectives on John Dewey’s Pedagogy by Michael Knoll, Bern: Peter Lang, 2022

If you were to ask me whether John Dewey was an educator, I would answer yes without hesitation. My affirmative answer would be based largely in Dewey’s own arguments about the intertwining of education, philosophy, and democracy. As he sought to analyze, share, and negotiate educational ideas and democratic ideas (not, by the way, ideas about education, nor ideas about democracy), Dewey was both doing philosophy and doing education in a hoped-for democratic world. But were you to ask me whether Dewey was a pedagogue, a shaper and a student of educational practice, I would say no just as quickly. This failed high school teacher never claimed pedagogical props for himself, though he was generous in acknowledging and learning from the many (mostly women) pedagogues who took his ideas seriously and attempted to make practical sense of them while also always revising them. This distinction, between educator and pedagogue, is on my mind as I review Michael Knoll’s Beyond Rhetoric: New Perspectives on John Dewey’s Pedagogy. Knoll, a German educator, has written a deeply and broadly researched collection of essays on Dewey’s pedagogy that offers, as the subtitle promises, “new perspectives.” In Beyond Rhetoric, Knoll wants to complicate the record with respect to the value of Dewey’s pedagogical achievements. That strikes me as worthwhile, though not as important in the long run as considering if and how Dewey’s body of work (largely philosophical) is, in the end, educative – including educative with respect to the project of formal education or schooling. Knoll’s collection has relatively little to say about Dewey as educator in the broad sense I introduce above. I am of two minds about the value of Knoll’s critique of Dewey as pedagogue, recognizing the importance of his new perspectives, while being skeptical about just what these new perspectives amount to. He maintains that the University of Chicago Lab School, the site where handpicked educators worked out Dewey’s ideas, did not fully reflect Dewey’s theorizing about education or about democracy. I think that is accurate, but perhaps not particularly surprising in light of Dewey’s pragmatist and inquiry-oriented approach to theory and practice. He maintains that Alice and John Dewey mismanaged the Lab School leading to its demise and the Deweys’ departure from Chicago for New York City and Columbia University in 1904. I suspect that managerial ineptitude (and/or neglect) is part of the picture, but think that Knoll’s position represents an oversimplified view of university politics. He maintains that the Deweys intended to whitewash the record of the Lab School in order to maintain their place in educational history. As an educator who has worked in the difficult domain of school transformation, I can think of other reasons for offering a first-hand perspective on their experience of the Lab School, ones that are more constructive and less self-serving. In any case, Knoll’s main intention is to “lay the groundwork for clarifying a question that has been largely neglected or insufficiently addressed, namely, why did Dewey’s educational theory fail to gain general acceptance either in his Laboratory School or in the public-school system, past and present” (p. 26). I am less inclined than Knoll is to focus on Dewey’s limitations as a pedagogue, largely because Dewey’s educational ideas about teaching, learning, and schooling so often capture the imagination – though not the institutional practice – of American educators who are pedagogues. There is something both tantalizing and promising in the various pedagogical efforts he promoted and called attention to (not just the Lab School), not because those efforts instantiate a prescribed formula for success, but because they percolate …