ABSTRACT
In an oft-quoted passage, Ellen Condiffe Lagemann once wrote "one cannot understand the history of education in the United States during the twentieth century unless one realizes that Edward L. Thorndike won and John Dewey lost". Lagemann credits Thorndike with helping to establish three important, and to her mind unfortunate, features of educational research. Fitzpatrick notes that she worked as a teacher early in her career and wrote tracts on educational reform while in exile during the prerevolutionary period. One way of freeing our thinking from the limitations of established habit and entrenched meaning, after all, is to wind back the clock to a time that predates the development of those habits and meanings. At the time of John Dewey's visit, she was the Director of Glavpolitprosnet, the Administration for the Political Education, and head of the scientific-pedagogical section of the State Academic Council.
