I’m glad to know you agree with me half the time. As a Cooperstown resident and baseball fan, you’re no doubt aware that a .500 batting average is spectacular, so by that measure you’re doing pretty well.

Liam said that the theories “did not exist a half century ago,” which is obviously untrue. You’re saying that I have an obligation to respond to what Liam wish he had said, or should have said, rather than what he did say? Fine — I wish my last post had been the most brilliant and insightful essay yet written, and hereby condemn you for suggesting otherwise.

As to the question — Dewey and his ideas were very influential in his time. Your readers can decide for themselves whether the progressive education movement should be dismissed as insignificant.

First, I’m a little disappointed that Carey cited batting average and not on-base percentage, especially given our agreement on that baseball-themed value-added stuff. Since it is Induction Weekend here in the hamlet, I’ll let that pass.

But at this point, I can’t tell whether he truly misses the point or is purposely dishonest. Neither is commendable.

This is what Fordham’s Liam Julian wrote:

“Is it not true that much of this theory and methodology is a relatively modern invention, one that did not exist a half-century ago, when fine teachers surely did?”

“Much of this theory” - the bulk of what passes for required curricula in education schools, for example - is a twisted third-cousin of Dewey’s [and others'] work. The same is true of Constructivism, the current strain of which has betrayed Giambattista Vico to an embarrassing degree.

It isn’t that Carey has an obligation to divine Julian’s thoughts, though Julian’s implications were clear enough. He does, however, have an obligation to use a bit of common sense. The issue at hand is movements - and mixing a movement’s roots with its developments is usually a mistake.

In that lineage of ideas, we can say that Jesus’ life marked the beginning of Christianity about 2,000 years ago. And now some time later we have all sorts of Protestantism, we have the Roman Catholic Church, we have Eastern Orthodoxy, etc. - all of which are offshoots of the original.

But like those developments in Christianity - some stringently faithful to the original, others resembling the original in name only - Dewey’s theories, for better or worse, have inspired, grown, matured, morphed, split, mutated and back-flipped. Combine that fate with an increasingly ignorant, under-trained corp of practitioners and poor Dewey gets attached to some awfully useless modern ideas — just like Jesus, 2000 years later, gets melded in with crazies like Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church.

That is how movements work - their histories are more like back roads, with lots of dead ends, dirt paths, seasonal sections, potholes and the like, than a well-paved and maintained Interstate [except in Soviet history textbooks, where there was a convenient high-speed monorail from the past to the present].

If I were to suggest that Fred Phelps’ Westboro Baptist Church wasn’t a feature of Christianity’s margins because, after all, Jesus Christ had published the foundation of those theories 2,000 years ago, any sensible person would rightly laugh in my face - despite Jesus’ ideas being, as Carey wrote about Dewey, “very influential in his time.”

I’m also unaware of anyone who is serious about education who would call the “progressive education movement” insignificant. Baseless, suboptimal, harmful? Maybe, but those charges are all signs of its significance.

Common sense and a bit of historical/political reality win the day on this issue. It is difficult to avoid both at the same time - jig-like, I assume.

I’ll pay homage to Carey’s alma mater and call this the Susquehanna Two-Step.