ORGANIZATION
The Laboratory School
Dewey's 1896 experimental school at the University of Chicago — the physical embodiment of his pedagogy, and the institutional precedent for the directed experiment AI-augmented education now requires.
Dewey founded the Laboratory School at the University of Chicago in 1896 as a working experiment in progressive education. Children at the school did not sit at desks receiving instruction. They cooked. They wove cloth. They built from wood. They planted gardens and harvested what they grew. These activities were not vocational training. They were not recess. They were the curriculum — occupations in Dewey's technical sense. The school was designed as a genuine experiment: it had hypotheses about how children learn, methods for testing them, and a criterion of success (the quality of growth) by which its arrangements would be evaluated. The school ran for eight years under Dewey's direction and produced both the pedagogical practice and the theoretical framework that shaped twentieth-century education.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The school was not Dewey's first attempt to translate philosophy into practice, but it was his most consequential. It operated from 1896 to 1904, enrolling roughly 140 students at its peak, with