The most effective curriculum for such a school would attend seriously to the present interests of children, not as a motivational strategy but as a way to teach the essential relationship between human knowledge and social experience. Dewey severely criticized public schools for silencing or ignoring student interests and experiences, using artificial language (perhaps about some vague future) that only served to alienate students, over-relying on testing to assess student learning, differentiating students according to their presumed ability to partake in mental or manual learning instead of offering both to all, and isolating subjects from one another instead of uniting them around students’ lived experience with knowledge. Rather than blaming students for their passivity, Dewey focused attention directly on the pedagogy of schools.