Dewey the prophet?

I've been wanting to read Dewey since I started graduate school and have finally got around to it - we're reading excerpts from "How We Think" in the Philosophy of Education class I am taking. So far I have not been disappointed. His thinking about teaching anticipated some of the common contemporary critiques of the current accountability-driven testing regime and the current reform efforts to push towards more conceptually grounded instruction. A few highlights:

• “The operation of the teacher’s own mental habit tends . . . to make the child a student of the teacher’s peculiarities rather than of the subjects that he is supposed to study. His chief concern is to accommodate himself to what the teacher expects of him, rather than to devote himself energetically to the problems of subject-matter. “Is this right?” comes to mean “Will this answer or this process satisfy the teacher?” - instead of meaning, “Does it satisfy the inherent conditions of the problem?”"

• “Sheer imitation, dictation of steps to be taken, mechanical drill, may give results most quickly and yet strengthen traits likely to be fatal to reflective power. The pupil is enjoined to do this and that specific thing, with no knowledge of any reason except that by doing so he gets his result most speedily; his mistakes are pointed out and corrected for him; he is kept at pure repetition of certain acts till they became automatic. Later, teachers wonder why the pupil reads with so little expression, and figures with so little intelligent consideration of the terms of his problem. In some educational dogmas and practices, the very idea of training mind seems to be hopelessly confused with that of a drill which hardly touches mind at all . . ”
  
  
• “No one other thing, probably, works so fatally against focusing the attention of teachers upon the training of mind as the domination of their minds by the idea that the chief thing is to get pupils to recite their lessons correctly . . . Their is no great difficulty in understanding why this ideal has such vogue. The large number of pupils to be dealt with, and the tendency of parents and school authorities to demand speedy and tangible evidence of progress, conspire to give it currency . . . Knowledge of subject-matter - not of children - is alone exacted of teachers by this aim; and, moreover, knowledge of subject-matter only in portions definitely prescribed and laid out, and hence mastered with comparative ease. Education that takes as its standard the improvement of the intellectual attitude and method of students demands more serious preparatory training, for it exacts sympathetic and intelligent insight into the workings of individual minds, and a very wide and flexible command of subject-matter - so as to be able to select and apply just what is needed when it is needed.”