John Dewey's contribution to educational thought and practice has been identified with child-centered schooling: the problem he is thought to have addressed was how to eliminate rote teaching and learning and adapt instruction to students' interests. Some applaud this while others consider it a disaster. But Dewey was no less dismayed than his critics about what passed for child-centered education. Though he was repelled by rigid, rote teaching and learning, the problems he worried most about did nor arise in schools and reached far beyond education. They included the growth of industrialism, increasing economic inequality and the political inequality that resulted from concentrations of wealth and poverty, and the collapse of organic communities as social bonds were torn by capitalist economic relations. These were the problems that Dewey sought to solve in School and Society and much other writing. In that volume he sketched a scheme in which schools would create a counterculture that would correct the human and social devastation of industrial capitalism. The power of the new scheme would arise from a new system of curriculum and instruction that rooted academic learning in scientific, social, and technical problem solving and required democratic social relations. These countercultural agencies would make over American society by making over its children. The schools he proposed were not child-centered in the conventional sense, for Dewey had very firm ideas about what students should learn, and he sketched a psychology of work and learning that he thought would guarantee students' fascination with school. His proposals were child centered chiefly in the sense that children's schooling would be the key to social, political, and cultural renewal. But Dewey never tried to solve the problem of how such countercultural institutions could thrive in the society they were to make over.
