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How did G. Stanley Hall influence John Dewey’s interest in psychology?
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John Dewey
John Dewey.
G. Stanley Hall played a significant role in shifting John Dewey’s academic focus. While Dewey was teaching at the University of Michigan, his interests began to move away from the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and toward the new experimental psychology being advanced in the United States by Hall and William James.1
Dewey’s exposure to Hall’s work was direct; he was among the first students to utilize the psychological laboratory that Hall established at Johns Hopkins University. This early engagement with experimental methods, combined with subsequent study of child psychology, helped shape Dewey’s later development as a pioneer in functional psychology and an influential educational theorist.213