Some Inspections of the Correspondence of John Dewey during His Chicago Years (6) -Details of the Antagonism between Dewey and the Faculty of the University of Chicago School of Education : 1903-1904-

The purpose of this paper is to examine John Dewey's correspondence during his Chicago years, especially from May 1903 to January 1904. The University of Chicago School of Education was reconstituted under Dewey's secondyear of directorship. Until then, the School had been practically a two-year normal school only for elementary school teacher training, but in July 1903 it restarted as a four-year professional school of education, which included secondary school teacher training courses besides elementary ones. However, there arose a great many conflicts between Dewey and the Faculty of the School, because most of the Faculty members were the former Cook County Normal School teachers, who were put into deeply unease position under the new framework of the School of Education. Robert McCaul analyzed the course of the conflicts and he concluded that these conflicts were mostly due to Dewey's deficiencies as a school manager. His analysis was on the supposition that while Dewey was a gentle philosopher of sincerity, he could not adequately exercise his leadership as a director and consequently lost the support of the Faculty. However, we can see from his correspondence with Faculty members that Dewey was an aggressive rather than gentle person as the Director. The real cause of the conflicts between Dewey and the Faculty was that they could never understand the significances of his plan for the new framework of the School of Education as a professional school under the regime of the research university