ABSTRACT
The Chicago World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, more provocatively known as the White City, and Hull-House, the settlement house Jane Addams founded in midst of the city's immigrant ghetto in 1889, offer a telling contrast in efforts to tame the urban wildness of the new metropolis at the turn of the 19th century. While teaching at new, research-oriented and intellectually enterprising University of Chicago, Dewey and Mead shared formative ideas with Jane Addams as they worked closely with her and her associates at Hull-House on various reform-related causes. Instrumental to the inculcation of democratic values, attitudes, and behaviors, perception actively generates experience rather than passively receiving sensory stimuli, as in consumeristic ways of looking at things. The work of Addams, Dewey, Mead, and Boyd speaks powerfully to the ongoing and tragic failure, along similar lines, of dominant system of American public education as it drains young minds of instinctual curiosity by flattening knowledge into information to be regurgitated on tests.
