In this essay Thomas Fallace argues that John Dewey can best be described as a pragmatic historicist and a genetic psychologist. This means that Dewey believed that the best way to understand any idea, phenomenon, or entity is to trace its history, that the history of the individual and race pass through distinct stages of development, and that the most effective way to educate was to coordinate the form and content of these phylogenetic and ontogenetic stages to one another. Fallace demonstrates how these ideas informed both theory and practice at the University of Chicago Laboratory School.