John Dewey would have liked the Common Core

At least that's what I take from Jeff Mirel's article in American Educator, "Bridging the 'Widest Street in the World:' Reflections on the history of teacher education." Mirel is an educational historian at the University of Michigan, and this pieces explains why teacher education ended up where it did--distant from disciplinary knowledge and thinking.

The twist here is that Mirel declares that Dewey was a disciplinary thinker who wanted rigorous content married to real world problems, so students could apply what they learned quickly. Dewey wasn't about learning by doing--he championed learning and then doing.

Would Dewey have liked the Common Core? My take from Mirel's piece is that Dewey would have like the push toward disciplinary rigor and the flexibility to build problem solving into the mastery of the discipline.