Jane Marcet's Conversations on Political Economy: a new interpretation

William Torrey Harris and John Dewey were the two most important philosophers of education in America at the fin de siècle. This paper discusses their rival idealisms through an examination of their philosophical and educational pronouncements. As I will show, both are indebted to, and align themselves with, Hegel. However, each manifests his Hegelian reading in a particular way, leading to very different consequences for education. What these manifestations are, and how two very different understandings can be drawn from a similar source, constitute the matter of the paper.