Idealism and enthusiasm for teaching may have been lost to routine. Teaching may have become merely a job, a living. If so this book may unsettle your outlook: it is concerned with directing and encouraging young teachers to flesh out higher teacher expectations at the core of the teaching practice. Although not a technique book, as such, growing in craft and character while providing effective, high-level academic instruction is integral to its purpose. It is not a purely read-and-heed book so much as a challenge to self-assessment while still a guide with examples to reconsider the practice to which you were originally drawn and to find new life in your original movitations to teach.

Should you become a public school teacher? This book will be an honest and helpful guide that will allow you to make that decision by giving you a realistic introduction to the profession. Do not be surprised by a dense school bureaucracy that seems unresponsive to its teachers and administrators. Pre-warned is pre-armed. Learn of the dependencies among administrators, students and teachers. Learn how to establish a positive and empowering attitude that can give you the rewards of teaching from the first day you enter the classroom and minimize any aggravation in sensing that you are swallowed up by the local educational bureaucracy that is unrelenting in its seeming attempts to stifle successful teaching. This book can help to establish confident and informed expectations for a public institution that deserves dedicated and idealistic workers, who have their feet firmly planted in the practice, love the profession, are excited about the subject material, find support from fellow teachers and enjoy teaching the student body that makes this job, for the right persons, second to none.

John Dewey, through his philosophy, pedagogy and social commentary was to lead America into a daily practice of unchaperoned inquiry, into issues of epistemology and morality, through a methodology called pragmatism. The systemic framework erected for his philosophy provided for unity through inclusiveness, and for expression through use of his pragmatic language. "'How can one grant individuality to man in freedom, free from coercion, without reaping a harvest of extreme and disruptive behavior?' That is the question that animates this earnest and searching critique of John Dewey's philosophy -- a critique that ranges across all aspects of Dewey's pragmatism, from epistemology to education. The result is a book that is as remarkable for its fair-minded attempt to grasp the nuances of Dewey's thinking as for its indictment of his malign influence on public education in America." -- Richard Dagger, University of Richmond Great ideas, and great reforms, play themselves out over time with immense consequences, often unforeseen by the reformer. So it has been with John Dewey's reforms of American education. The particular contribution of J. D. Stewart is that he gives us testimony from the front lines, from many years experience teaching in the schools, about the impact of Dewey's ideas and reforms, and he is able to show us, from close study of Dewey's works, and his experience in the 'trenches' why the unintended consequences of Dewey's ideas and reforms was to make America's schools fail those who depend most on education to salvage their lives and hopes. William R. Marty, Emeritus Professor of Political Science, University of Memphis

Modern public education has embraced the curriculum as the tool for certifying diplomas. Unfortunately, required classwork is merely the icing on a pedagogical cake, which remains not fully baked. For the foundation tools of deeper learning which help initiate, potentiate and give broader significance to studied information are not in the modern recipe. Without a more meaningful approach to scholarship than accumulating objective data, much of public school instruction remains methodologically questionable. This book is concerned with co-requisites of true education, the organizational tools and forms that shape genuine learning and remain available to be used when needed over a lifetime and after much curricular input has been lost from memory. These learning tools are being lost from public school practice despite having been venerated, some even from ancient times. These tried and true practices must be returned to the classroom. Students deserve to receive not only the curriculum but an education of the mind.

Something has happened to our understanding of others. We have lost the value of interrelationships, concern and care. A sort of social autism has replace the gentility and civility which was once the mark of our good people who saw others as more than communal objects. Our communities have also changed having become utility institutions that are tasked with getting what we need or want. Text, tweet and, with all the forms of communication available to us, it seems that asking for sacrificial assistance from others is only manifest within mutual needs relationships. We are in a perpetual competition and covet the ascendency over others. Others have been lost from our lives. True proximity and mutual concern, which once openly bound us to one another, is being lost, and, through this neglect, each of us thereby forfeits our distinctiveness. We no longer draw identity from being communal people and often aggressively rebuke those that we do not need. This book is concerned with attitude and some of the manifestations of this breach in communal life and how we may restore ourselves and others that have been lost.

American public education has had a long and failed run at providing exemplary education for all students. The system needs reconstruction not more reformation. In order to produce a truly democratic school, the public school needs to be protected from the three factors that have guaranteed failure for over two centuries: a remote authority, cultural intrusion and student-individual incursion. In the proposed New School, defenses against this triadic attack would be swift and replaced as necessary, immediately provided and never caused to outstay usefulness. This of course could only be accomplished by and for each school setting its own defensive rules, rules established to allow for an exemplary education for all students. Any suggestion of blanket rulings only points out that the boards and district bosses have little to no understanding and are not concerned with specific school needs. The New School would protect students from an education corrupted by culture influences and the degeneracy of a ephemeral student-individualism sporting borrowed identity. The New School would be run from within, this worthy school would be the result of reconstruction to replace a school ideology which has long lost the educational struggle to educate our children.

The attitude and practices of a good teacher are unmistakeable, and a progression to this exemplary status should be the ultimate goal of every public school instructor. The beginning teacher needs to know how to negotiate the public school mine fields, and become a better teacher. Every teachers' goal should be to finally become one who not only continues to improve each lesson in each unit of every course but to work systematically to prevent students from falling through the cracks while always teaching on a very high level using the mental tools that will allow students to learn deeply and on their own for a lifetime. This book is about teaching and learning that can connect a teacher to the bedrock of education and professional authenticity. Beginning and negotiating the public schools as a new teacher, adopting a dedication to learning and teaching, far beyond that which is required, and educating students' minds: these are the essential components of the teaching trilogy.