John Dewey

• 1. Introduction

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  John Dewey was born in Burlington, Vermont, and over his lifetime he published more than 700 articles in 140 journals and roughly 40 books. In 1888, while still at the University of Michigan, he wrote a line that would organize all that output. "Democracy and the one, ultimate, ethical ideal of humanity are to my mind synonymous."

  Dewey was a philosopher, a psychologist, and an educational reformer. He ranks among the most prominent American scholars of the first half of the twentieth century. Yet he began his working life by deciding that he was unsuited to teaching children.

  Why would a man who walked away from the classroom end up reshaping how the world thinks about schools? What did he mean when he said democracy required more than the right to vote? And why did crowds in Peking turn out to hear an American philosopher lecture?

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• 2. A Reluctant Teacher

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  Oil City, Pennsylvania, was where Dewey spent two years teaching high school. After that he taught elementary school for one year in the small town of Charlotte, Vermont. Then he left for graduate study at Johns Hopkins University.

  There he worked with George Sylvester Morris, Charles Sanders Peirce, Herbert Baxter Adams, and G. Stanley Hall. He earned his Ph.D. in 1884. His dissertation, "The Psychology of Kant", criticized Immanuel Kant from an idealist position. It was never published and is now lost.

  Morris helped him win a faculty post at the University of Michigan. His first two books appeared there, Psychology in 1887 and a study of Leibniz in 1888. Both showed a commitment to British neo-Hegelianism, and in Psychology he tried to join idealism with experimental science.

  Michigan also gave him colleagues. James Hayden Tufts and George Herbert Mead were junior to him, and James Rowland Angell was his student. William James had just published his Principles of Psychology in 1890, and the group was strongly influenced by it. They began to rebuild psychology around the effect of the social environment on mind and behavior, instead of the physiological approach of Wilhelm Wundt.

  In 1894 Dewey moved to the newly founded University of Chicago, where Tufts had also gone. He invited Mead and Angell to follow. The four formed the core of what was called the Chicago group. Their approach, later named functional psychology, stressed action and application.

  The group's best-known statement was Dewey's 1896 paper in Psychological Review, "The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology". The traditional view treated stimulus and response as separate events linked like a chain. Dewey argued for a circular account, in which what counts as stimulus and what counts as response depends on how one looks at the situation. He did not deny that sensation exists. He denied that sensation, stimulus, and response were juxtaposed pieces, and he held that earlier experience enriches every new stimulation.

  The paper is regarded as the first major work of the Chicago functionalist school. A survey in Review of General Psychology in 2002 ranked Dewey as the 93rd most-cited psychologist of the twentieth century. In 1899 his peers elected him president of the American Psychological Association.

  Chicago would also give him a place to test his ideas on actual children, and that experiment began with a school.

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• 3. Learning by Doing

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  The University of Chicago Laboratory Schools were Dewey's workshop. There he could apply and test his progressive ideas about teaching method. The results fed his first major book on education, The School and Society, published in 1899. Disagreements with the university administration eventually led to his resignation, and he soon moved near the East Coast.

  His central complaint was aimed at schools that demanded mastery of facts and discipline of bodies. In his view, such schools produced passive pupils who learned docile compliance with authoritarian work and political structures. Knowledge, he argued, was being treated as a one-way delivery from expert to learner, and that stifled autonomy.

  In The Child and the Curriculum, from 1902, Dewey described two warring camps. One put the subject matter first. Its flaw, he said, was that the student sat idle. In that view, "the child is simply the immature being who is to be matured." The other camp began with the child, so that the child determined both the quality and quantity of learning.

  Dewey rejected both. He was alarmed by the "child-centered" excesses of educators who claimed to be his followers. Too much reliance on the child, he said, minimized the content and the role of the teacher. His answer was a single process. In his words, "the child and the curriculum are simply two limits which define a single process." He added an image from geometry. Just as two points define a straight line, the child's present standpoint and the facts of study define instruction.

  That balance made him one of the most famous champions of hands-on learning. He argued that knowledge cannot be gained "without the use of objects which impress the mind". Problem-Based Learning, a method used widely today, draws on his idea of learning through active inquiry.

  Education, for Dewey, was not preparation for a job. He wrote in My Pedagogic Creed, from 1897, that "to prepare him for the future life means to give him command of himself". He saw the school as a social institution through which social reform could and should happen.

  His thinking about thinking itself appeared in How We Think. There he defined reflective thought as "active, persistent, and careful consideration" of any belief or supposed form of knowledge. That consideration weighs the grounds supporting the belief and the conclusions it leads to. He used the phrase critical thinking in the first edition, though he did not coin it.

  A good school needed good teachers, and Dewey had firm views about who they were.

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• 4. The Teacher Himself

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  Dewey held that a classroom teacher does a kind of public service. In a radio broadcast in 1935 he linked the economic depression to a "lack of sufficient production of intelligence, skill, and character" in the workforce. Teachers, he believed, were the people who had to produce those three things.

  He did not ask teachers to master every subject. He asked for something narrower and deeper. A teacher, he said, ought to have "an unusual love and aptitude in some one subject." That might be history, mathematics, literature, science, or a fine art. Real love of one field, he thought, would give a feel for good information in all the others.

  Curiosity had to last a whole career. He wrote that nobody could succeed in the duties of teaching "who does not retain their intellectual curiosity intact throughout their entire career". And learning was incomplete until shared. To the natural born teacher, he said, knowledge was unfinished unless it was passed on.

  His test of teaching quality was a kind of attention. The best teachers, he explained, have "a quick, sure and unflagging sympathy" with the minds around them. They notice how a pupil's mind moves and respond to it. Dewey said this explained why some people who never studied the art of teaching were still extraordinarily good at it.

  He also worried about what the job did to people. He described "careworn teachers" with anxiety etched on their faces and "strained high pitched voices". Too many pupils, too many subjects, and mechanical rather than human adjustments, he thought, made the work a heavy tax on some temperaments. Children could sense a teacher who was no longer invested.

  For teacher training, his advice ran against the grain. A graduate who has a strong command of managing a class may look better in the first year, he conceded. But such a teacher could end up perfecting skills already held, without ever becoming, in his phrase, "an inspirer and director of soul-life". He wanted programs to produce students of teaching, people who keep studying the subject matter and the activity of the mind.

  He compared this professional spirit to the habits of law and medicine, and he put the social worth of teaching alongside the ministry and parenting. He also spread responsibility widely. He put it plainly. Intellectual responsibility "has got to be distributed to every human being who is concerned in carrying out the work in question."

  Responsibility spread among citizens was an idea he carried far beyond schools.

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• 5. The Public and Its Problems

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  Walter Lippmann published The Phantom Public in 1925, and Dewey answered it with The Public and its Problems in 1927. Lippmann pictured journalists collecting facts from experts and elites, simplifying them, and passing them to a public whose job was to react emotionally. In that model, the public could not think or act, and all thought and action belonged to the experts.

  Dewey said politics was the daily work and duty of every individual. Knowledge should come from interaction among citizens, experts, and elites, with journalism mediating. Government would not be the only party held to account. Citizens and experts would be accountable too.

  He gave a concrete definition of a public. A public is a spontaneous group of citizens who share the indirect effects of some action. Anyone touched by those consequences shares an interest in controlling them. Since every action creates unintended consequences, publics keep forming, overlapping, and dissolving.

  He wanted journalism to shift its attention from who won a given situation to alternatives, choices, consequences, and conditions. News would become a living thing that the public improved by adding to it. The "audience" would end, replaced by citizens and collaborators who did more with the news than read it. This is the root of what later became known as public journalism.

  His most quoted lines from the book are about community. "Till the Great Society is converted in to a Great Community, the Public will remain in eclipse. Communication can alone create a great community."

  Other thinkers have summarized his wider view of democracy in four points. It is an ethical ideal, not just a political arrangement. Its essence is participation rather than representation. It fits with the scientific method, in the form of self-critical communities of inquiry that revise beliefs as evidence arrives. And it should reach beyond politics into industry and society.

  In Chicago, he found a partner in Jane Addams. He served on the first board of trustees of her Hull House and backed settlement houses generally. One commentator, Stengel, summed up the pair. Addams was the maker of democratic community, and Dewey was the reflector who analyzed what she lived.

  At Hull House he saw the lack of schooling among children and among immigrant women. He rejected the idea that biology fixed a woman's place. "You think too much of women in terms of sex," he said. "Think of them as human individuals for a while." His work on democracy also reached a student named B. R. Ambedkar, who later served as Law and Justice Minister of India.

  Critics have pressed a hard question about all this: did Dewey ever produce a strategy to make it work? They argue that he never examined traditional customs in a systematic way, and that he was slow to fix the problems he described.

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• 6. The American Confucius

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  In 1919, Dewey and his wife Alice traveled to Japan on sabbatical. The Japanese welcomed them, but Dewey was blunt about the country's government. He called its path toward democracy "ambitious but weak in many respects in which her competitors are strong". He also issued a warning. If the democratic world broke its wartime promises, the result could be grim. In his words, "bureaucracy and militarism might come back."

  While in Japan he received an invitation from Peking University, probably arranged by his former students Hu Shih and Chiang Monlin. The couple reached Shanghai on the 30th of April 1919. Days later, student demonstrators took to the streets of Peking on the 4th of May. They were protesting the Allies' decision in Paris to hand German-held territory in Shandong province to Japan. The protests energized him, and he stayed in China for two years, until July 1921.

  In that time he gave nearly 200 lectures. Hundreds and sometimes thousands of people came, and Hu Shih interpreted. To his audiences Dewey stood for "Mr. Democracy" and "Mr. Science", and they hailed him as "the American Confucius". A young Mao Zedong attended his 1919 lecture at Peking University on three contemporary philosophers: Bertrand Russell, Henri Bergson, and William James.

  Meanwhile he wrote nearly monthly articles for Americans in The New Republic and other magazines. He knew about Japanese expansionism and about the pull Bolshevism had for some Chinese. He urged Americans to support China's transformation, and he urged Chinese to build it on education and social reform, not revolution.

  His advice to educators such as Tao Xingzhi was unexpected. Do not import any Western school model, he said. Use pragmatism to design your own national system. But the national government was weak and warlords held most provinces, so the suggestion won praise and little action.

  Results were patchy. Dewey's ideas had influence in Hong Kong, and in Taiwan after the nationalist government fled there. Before 1949, Confucian scholars who controlled local schools in most of China simply ignored him. Under Marxist and Maoist rule, his ideas were systematically denounced. His Chinese lectures were lost at the time and were rediscovered and published in 2015.

  In July 1934 he made another long trip, this time to South Africa with his daughter Jane. The World Conference of New Education Fellowship invited him to Cape Town and Johannesburg, and the Carnegie Foundation paid his expenses. Speakers at the same conference included Hendrik Verwoerd, who later became prime minister of the government that introduced apartheid.

  Dewey also visited Durban, Pretoria, and Victoria Falls in what was then Southern Rhodesia. He accepted an honorary degree from the University of the Witwatersrand in August 1934. The white-only governments rejected his ideas as too secular, while black South Africans and their white supporters were more receptive.

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• 7. Causes and Quarrels

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  Dewey's letters to his wife Alice during the 1894 Pullman Strike show a professor with strong feelings. Workers at the Pullman Palace Car Factory in Chicago struck after George Pullman cut wages by nearly 30 percent. He had refused to lower rents in his company town. The strike became official on the 11th of May 1894, and Eugene V. Debs's American Railway Union called a nationwide train boycott. President Grover Cleveland sent in the National Guard, and Debs was arrested.

  Dewey was angry at the press. He wrote to Alice that the only wonder was that there were not more downright socialists, given the views of the "higher classes". He added two words of his own about those classes: "damn them". He even feared that the University of Chicago was itself a capitalistic institution.

  Not every position won him allies. He supported American entry into the First World War, and Randolph Bourne, a former student, attacked him for it. Bourne's essay "Twilight of Idols" appeared in Seven Arts in October 1917 and went after Dewey's instrumental pragmatism itself.

  In 1935 Dewey joined Albert Einstein and Alvin Johnson in the United States section of the International League for Academic Freedom. In 1940 he and Horace Kallen edited a series of articles on the Bertrand Russell Case.

  His most dramatic public role came in 1937. He directed the Dewey Commission, held in Mexico, which cleared Leon Trotsky of charges brought against him by Joseph Stalin.

  In 1939 he became president of the League for Industrial Democracy, which aimed to teach college students about the labor movement. Its student branch later became Students for a Democratic Society. He defended teachers' independence and opposed a communist takeover of the New York Teachers' Union. He also sat on the early executive board of the organization that eventually became the NAACP.

  He was also an avid supporter of Henry George's plan to tax land values. As honorary president of the Henry George School of Social Science, he wrote to Henry Ford asking him to back the school.

  That same drive went into building institutions, and one of them, The New School for Social Research, still bears his mark.

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• 8. Faith, Art, and Legacy

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  The historians Charles A. Beard and James Harvey Robinson and the economist Thorstein Veblen stood beside Dewey as founders of The New School for Social Research, started in 1919. His ideas also shaped Bennington College and Goddard College in Vermont, where he served on the board of trustees. They influenced the short-lived Black Mountain College in North Carolina too, whose faculty included Buckminster Fuller, Willem de Kooning, and Franz Kline.

  His religious path ran from childhood churchgoing to atheism. Biographer Steven Clark Rockefeller traced his democratic convictions to the Congregational Church and its Social Gospel. As an adult he was secular. He was among the original 34 signatories of the first Humanist Manifesto in 1933. In a June 1930 article he wrote that humanism meant "an expansion, not a contraction, of human life".

  His book Art as Experience, from 1934, treats a work of art as inseparable from the local culture around it. Its illustrated edition drew on the collection assembled by Albert C. Barnes at the Barnes Foundation. Barnes had attended Dewey's seminar on political philosophy at Columbia in the fall of 1918.

  Dewey wrote poetry, but he could not distinguish musical pitches. One student described him as "allergic to music". He also took an interest in the work of Adelbert Ames Jr. on visual perception, and he met F. M. Alexander in New York City in 1917, later writing introductions to three of his books.

  Dewey sometimes preferred the word instrumentalism to pragmatism. He wrote at length about careless word use, and in 1949 he and Arthur F. Bentley published Knowing and the Known. It proposed three stages of describing action: self-action, interaction, and transaction. Transaction, the modern stage, avoids pointing to any ultimate or independent essence.

  His family life had its own losses. His parents, Archibald Sprague Dewey and Lucina Artemisia Rich Dewey, lost a first son also named John. He died in an accident on the 17th of January 1859. The second John was born on the 20th of October 1859, forty weeks later. In 1886 he married Alice Chipman, and they had six children. She died in 1927, weakened by malaria caught in Turkey in 1924 and a heart attack in Mexico City in 1926. In 1946 he married Estelle Roberta Lowitz Grant, and they adopted two siblings.

  He died of pneumonia on the 1st of June 1952 at his home in New York City and was cremated the next day. Schools now carry his name in Brooklyn, Green Bay, Warrensville Heights, and Denver, and Dewey University exists in Puerto Rico. In 1968 the United States Postal Service put him on a 30-cent stamp. Hilda Neatby wrote that Dewey "has been to our age what Aristotle was to the later Middle Ages, not a philosopher, but the philosopher."

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