On what is apparently a homeschooling oriented web site, which I used of necessity earlier, did find some of it, and I think this passage should be of interest:

“I do not see how any honest educational reformer in western countries can deny that the greatest practical obstacle in the way of introducing into schools that connection with social life which he regards as desirable is the great part played by personal competition and desire for private profit in our economic life. This fact almost makes it necessary that in important respects school activities should be protected from social contacts and connections, instead of being organized to create them.

The Russian educational situation is enough to convert one to the idea that only in a society based upon the co-perative principle can the ideals of educational reformers be adequately carried into operation. “

John Dewey – architect of much of modern American education.

Paragraphing introduced for clarity.

I take it that you’re assuming that grateful teachers would want to show such an informative, patriotic movie in their classrooms?

My guess if that nowadays many, perhaps most of them, would pass on what for them would be a jingoistic propaganda piece.

There is a reason why Bill Ayres quit his futile attempts at violent revolution and, instead, went into the “education” racket, spending the last few decades authoring textbooks and creating curriculums that are widely used in many teachers colleges, and creating similarly influential model K-12 curriculums and reading lists, and his effort at mass leftist indoctrination of our teachers–at undermining the system from within–has largely succeeded.

” Or had the educational system already been taken over by the left, even way back then (remember, I grew up in NYC, where the teachers’ unions were already leftist)?”

The answer is “yes”. And educational philosophy had been tending that way in the upper reaches for decades by then, if not fully implemented.

I remember as a child in 4th or 5th grade seeing what were already old books in the back of the classroom or on the teacher’s shelves by and about John Dewey.

I think one was “John Dewey Prophet of Democracy” or some such stirring title. Knowing nothing of what it said or what he stood for I only remember an image I saw and the positive feelings I had toward what I imagined as a kindly old New England individualist of the type portrayed in 1950s movies, and shown on TV a decade or more later when I was watching.

Thus it was a shock when I was in college wandering in the stacks, pausing before some some work by Grosseteste on education (“He wrote on education?” I wondered) and I spotted a book that was obviously critical of Dewey.

I could hardly look at it. It must have been written by some Jesuit Nazi. Pragmatism was as American as apple pie; as were, ipso facto, all pragmatists. Our homegrown Jamesian ideology could not be bad nor could anyone associated with it.

Later however, as I studied Marxism, I began to run across references to American Hegelians, and Dewey’s name came cropping up.

Eventually I actually read some of his philosophical works, and began to see the connection between his processual philosophy and his emphasis on socialization as the primary job of “education”.

“WTF?”

Yeah … WTF

Rorty waxing worshipful on Dewey

Let me now put some of my own cards on the table. … I think that the conservatives are wrong in thinking that we have either a truth-tracking faculty called ‘reason’ or a true self that education brings to consciousness. I think that the radicals are right in saying that if you take care of political, economic, cultural and academic freedom, then truth will take care of itself. But I think the radicals are wrong in believing that there is a true self that will emerge once the repressive influence of society is removed. There is no such thing as human nature, in the deep sense in which Plato and Strauss used this term. Nor is there such a thing as alienation from one’s essential humanity due to societal repression, in the deep sense made familiar by Rousseau and the Marxists. There is only the shaping of an animal into a human being by a process of socialization, followed (with luck) by the self-individualization and self-creation of that human being through his or her own later revolt against that very process. …

The ” … notion of a species of animals gradually taking control of its own evolution by changing its environmental conditions leads Dewey to say, in good Darwinian language, that ‘growth itself is the moral end’ and that to ‘protect, sustain and direct growth is the chief ideal of education’. Dewey’s conservative critics denounced him for fuzziness, for not giving us a criterion of growth. But Dewey rightly saw that any such criterion sould cut the future down to the size of the present. Asking for such a criterion is like asking a dinosaur to specify what would make for a good mammal or asking a fourth-century Athenian to propose forms of life for the citizens of a twentieth-century industrial democracy.

Instead of criteria, Deweyans offer inspiring narratives and fuzzy utopias. …

https://www.google.com/url?q=http://iwcenglish1.typepad.com/documents/education_as_socialization_and_as_individualization.doc&sa=U&ei=kfJcVKqHHIGtyATC34D4Cg&ved=0CDwQFjAH&sig2=FCx8ehtPd28Zmm_VKNUkTg&usg=AFQjCNGQEcm-oPHZBUxHC3l4LLFbK-naXg

Dewey:

“I believe that the only true education comes through the stimulation of the child’s powers by the demands of the social situations in which he finds himself. Through these demands he is stimulated to act as a member of a unity, to emerge from his original narrowness of action and feeling and to conceive of himself from the standpoint of the welfare of the group to which he belongs. ….

I believe that education is the fundamental method of social progress and reform.

I believe that all reforms which rest simply upon the enactment of law, or the threatening of certain penalties, or upon changes in mechanical or outward arrangements, are transitory and futile.

I believe that education is a regulation of the process of coming to share in the social consciousness; and that the adjustment of individual activity on the basis of this social consciousness is the only sure method of social reconstruction.

I believe that this conception has due regard for both the individualistic and socialistic ideals. It is duly individual because it recognizes the formation of a certain character as the only genuine basis of right living. It is socialistic because it recognizes that this right character is not to be formed by merely individual precept, example, or exhortation, but rather by the influence of a certain form of institutional or community life upon the individual, and that the social organism through the school, as its organ, may determine ethical results. …

“My Pedagogic Creed
John Dewey
The School Journal, Vol. LIV, No. 3
January 1897”
http://www.intellectualtakeout.org/library/primary-sources/my-pedagogic-creed-0

See also, the second paragraph of 2.4 of this for some insight into the development and spread of the theoretic standpoint of communal interpenetration, so popular with the left: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dewey-aesthetics/

Individuals can change themselves, but a group of slaves will always rise to the same level of excellence.

Its the What Is Wrong With Kansas meme. The left knows what is best for you, and only big goverment can provide you with what you do not know you need you big dummy. Btw, I would pay good money see Joni Ernst debate