John Dewey was born in 1859. He was a child of pre-industrial New England, born and raised in Burlington, Vermont, where his father was a storekeeper, and where Dewey himself would grow to maturity and eventually attend the University of Vermont at age 16 (Wirth 1989). Graduating in 1879, Dewey became a high school teacher. Within three years, however, he entered into a doctoral programme at Johns Hopkins University. Dewey took only two years to complete his doctoral studies, which culminated with a dissertation on Kant’s psychology. His first academic appointment was at the University of Michigan as an instructor of psychology and philosophy. In 1884 he moved to the University of Chicago, where he put a great deal of energy into the development of a laboratory school that allowed him to test his school-related ideas against the actual experience of teaching children (see School and the Society, 1902). But in 1905, in a squabble over the leadership of the laboratory school, Dewey left Chicago for Columbia University. He remained at Columbia until his retirement and died in New York City at the age of 92.
During his long life, Dewey engaged in a philosophy that not only addressed traditional philosophic pursuits in logic, ethics, political science, religion, psychology and aesthetics, but also spoke to issues in the public arena. Dewey, for instance, had substantive things to say about issues related to the suffragette movement, labour unions, birth control, world peace, social class tensions and societal transformations in Mexico, China and Russia (Dworkin 1954). A complete corpus of Dewey’s work has been captured in a thirty-seven volume edition edited by Jo Ann Boydston (1979).
Although Dewey started his career in the field of psychology while still under the philosophical influence of German idealism, he soon came to know and appreciate the work of the American pragmatists, William James, Charles Peirce and George Herbert Mead, who inspired a social psychology that examined human behaviours. Dewey eventually made his own contributions to American pragmatism by stressing the role that the scientific method could play in improving the human condition, and by openly committing his philosophy to the values and aims of democracy. To Dewey, democracy was less of a political concept than a moral one. When married to a method of enquiry (essentially found in science), democracy represented a moral method of understanding. Dewey, in this sense, became the chief axiologist for American pragmatism, a role that likely led George Herbert Mead to observe that ‘in the profoundest sense John Dewey is the philosopher of America’ (quoted in Morris 1970:8).
Dewey’s social philosophy focused on the worth of the individual in the context of the collective, and aimed to empower the judgements of the common people. Scientific enquiry was favoured because it represented a method of deliberation that provided provisional answers to situational or emergent problems. These emergent problems comprised the main focal points for enquiry. To Dewey, problems were always seen as opportunities for growth and improvement. He believed that by subjecting the problems of the present to a method of enquiry, humanity could reconstruct and improve itself.
Dewey’s programme for American pragmatism yoked together science, democracy and education (Dewey 1916). He bridged conserving and transforming agendas by fashioning a method of understanding within a democratic ethic. He argued that education should always be responsive to the organic interplay between the nature of the learner, the values of the society and the world of knowledge embodied in organized subject matter (Tanner and Tanner 1990). Despite a variety of criticisms, some of which was overtly ideological, Dewey continues to attract a diverse scholarly audience.
Peter S.Hlebowitsh
University of Iowa
References
Boydston, J.A. (1979) The Complete. Works of John Dewey, Carbondale, IL.
Dewey, J. (1902) The School and the Society, Chicago.
——(1916) Democracy and Education, New York.
Dworkin, M. (1954) Dewey on Education, New York.
Morris, C. (1970) The Pragmatic Movement in American Philosophy, New York.
Tanner, D. and Tanner, L.N. (1990) The History of the School Curriculum, New York.
Wirth, A. (1989) John Dewey as Educator, Landam, MD.
Further reading
Dykhuizen, G. (1973) The Life and Mind of John Dewey, Carbondale, IL.
Mayhew, K. and Edwards, A. (1936) The Dewey School, New York.
Rockefeller, S. (1991) John Dewey, New York.
Westbrook, R. (1991) John Dewey and American Democracy, Ithaca, NY.
