Dewey's "Science as Method'' a Century Later: Reviving Science Education for Civic Ends

Over a hundred years ago, John Dewey delivered his now-well-known address Science as Subject-Matter and as Method to those assembled at the Boston meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in which he lamented the nearly exclusive focus on content knowledge in early-20th-century school science classrooms. This article revisits Dewey's talk and examines the development of science education in the United States in the years since that address. Dewey's critique of science education in 1909 provides fertile ground for a renewed critique of science education practices today. It is argued that there is, specifically, a need to recover the rapidly fading civic aims of science teaching, which requires greater attention to the methods of sciencethe idea Dewey highlighted so strongly back then.