A PREHISTORY OF EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY IN THE UNITED-STATES - 1861 TO 1914

In this article, James Kaminsky describes what he calls the "pre-history" of educational philosophy - that period before the discipline was established, when Americans were reacting to the economic and social changes associated with industrialization and urbanization. According to Kaminsky, the early stages of this discipline involved the social reform movement of the 1890s, populism and progressivism, the history of social science, American literary history, muckraking, Hull House, the English intellectual Herbert Spencer, and, of course, the intellectual work of john Dewey. What was radical and new in the pre-history of educational philosophy was not its methodologies or intellectual concepts, but rather its alliance with the complex forces of social reform that were emerging as the United States entered the twentieth century.