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The Pointless Classroom: John Dewey, the Loss of Purpose, and the Future of Learning
Paperback
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: May 17 2026
Pages: 260
Weight: 0.78
Height: 0.55 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
The Pointless Classroom is a philosophical reckoning with the institution that shapes, and increasingly fails, every modern life. Drawing on the radical optimism of John Dewey, the American thinker who once dreamed of school as a workshop for free minds, this book traces how a vision built on trust, inquiry, and democratic participation curdled into testing, branding, theater, and bureaucratic exhaustion. Along the way it examines the betrayals of Dewey's most cherished ideas, the slow disappearance of purpose from the work of teaching, and the strange fate of children raised in a culture that prefers efficiency to meaning.
Witty, mournful, and uncompromisingly honest, The Pointless Classroom is for readers who suspect that something has gone deeply wrong with the way we learn, and who are willing to look the problem in the face.
Keywords
philosophy of education, John Dewey, future of schooling, artificial intelligence and learning, purpose in education, critical pedagogy, modern culture
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