John Dewey
John Dewey was a prominent American philosopher and educator, born in 1859 in Burlington, Vermont. He is widely recognized for his significant contributions to progressive education and philosophy, particularly through his development of instrumentalism and functionalism, which sought to apply pragmatism to real-world issues. Dewey's early life was shaped by a supportive family environment and a blend of religious and secular influences, which eventually led him to question traditional beliefs and embrace a more scientific approach to understanding human experience and society.
After completing his education at the University of Vermont and Johns Hopkins University, Dewey became a well-respected figure in academic circles, holding positions at the University of Michigan and later at Columbia University, where he established the Laboratory School to promote progressive educational methods. His writings, including influential works such as "The School and Society" and "Experience and Nature," emphasized the importance of scientific inquiry and the interplay between society and education.
Throughout his career, Dewey remained an active participant in social reform movements and advocated for democracy, individual self-realization, and a more equitable society. His legacy is evident in contemporary educational practices and democratic ideals, and he is often regarded as America's national philosopher, influencing both philosophy and education well into the twentieth century. Dewey passed away in 1952, leaving behind a rich body of work that continues to resonate with educators and philosophers today.
John Dewey
- Born: October 20, 1859
- Birthplace: Burlington, Vermont
- Died: June 1, 1952
- Place of death: New York, New York
American philosopher
In his intellectual concerns and educational interests, Dewey significantly shaped the roles of philosophy, education, and social reform in the United States. With Charles S. Peirce and William James, he was instrumental in forming the philosophy of pragmatism.
Areas of achievement Philosophy, education, psychiatry and psychology, social reform
Early Life
John Dewey (DEW-ee) was born in Burlington, Vermont. His mother, née Lucina Artemisia Rich, was twenty years younger than his father, Archibald Dewey, who owned a grocery business in the community. John was the third child in a family of four. Although the Civil War separated the family for six years when Archibald enlisted in the army, by 1866 they had returned to Burlington, where Archibald entered the cigar and tobacco business.
In the years that followed, John Dewey grew up in a middle-class world where the native-born Americans and Irish and French Canadians shaped his early social experiences. His parents encouraged his wide-ranging reading and his outdoor activities. His mother’s evangelical piety, however, influenced Dewey’s values well into adulthood. On the whole, his childhood was a pleasant one, and his parents were warm and supportive, although his mother’s pietistic worrying about Dewey’s behavior upset him.
After a good high school education in the classics, Dewey entered the University of Vermont. In addition to the classical curriculum, he took biology courses and read widely in the literature of the emerging Darwinian controversies. His interests were moving him toward the study of philosophy. What he read and what he had experienced in his young life contributed to the philosophical issues of dualisms such as body and soul, flesh and spirit, and nature and mind, but Dewey wanted a unity of knowledge that overcame such divisions. In the meantime, he was graduated from the University of Vermont in 1879. For the next two years, he taught high school in Oil City, Pennsylvania, a community much in flux from the rapid growth of the oil business.
At Oil City, two events greatly shaped Dewey’s life. First, Dewey’s religious doubts (or fears) came to seem foolish to him. He felt a oneness with the universe, and although he continued attending church for the next dozen years, he had left the religious faith and practice of his parents. Over the course of his long and productive life, after his abandonment of evangelical Christianity, Dewey embraced the absolute idealism of philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), with its emphasis on the unity of existence. Later, Dewey accepted humanistic naturalism, with its continuity of nature and humanity drawn from the thought of Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) and William James (1842-1910).
In 1882, Dewey entered Johns Hopkins University for graduate study in philosophy. A serious but sly student, Dewey was quietly exploring the relationship between religion and morals in late nineteenth century American life. At Johns Hopkins, Dewey accepted neo-Hegelianism. Dewey and his whole intellectual generation were seeking something new, something to explain life, a transformation of values. His fully developed naturalism was, however, in the future. He had begun the transformation of his religious beliefs by ruling out the supernatural but placing its values into the natural. In time, as a philosopher, Dewey placed in the natural world a faith that had previously been assigned to a coming Kingdom of God.
In 1884, he joined the Department of Philosophy at the University of Michigan. During the next four years, he broadened his interests in social affairs and educational matters, and he wrote and published. He also married, in 1886, Harriet Alice Chipman, a bright and capable woman who encouraged Dewey in pursuing his ideas. Wife, mother, and critic, she was a source of encouragement until her death in 1927.
Psychology, Dewey’s first book, was published in 1887; it combined empirical psychology with German metaphysical idealism. After a year at the University of Minnesota, he returned to Michigan as chair of the Department of Philosophy. Until 1894, when he went to the University of Chicago, Dewey built up the department’s faculty and cut his final ties to organized religion. His interests became increasingly secular. He accepted an appointment at Chicago as chair of the Department of Philosophy, Psychology, and Pedagogy. Within two years, he established the Laboratory School, which provided the institutional expression of progressive education. He expressed his ideas in The School and Society (1899), but he did not neglect his other interests; he wrote Studies in Logical Theory (1903). At Chicago, Dewey was active in academic, civic, and reform matters. A brilliant group of scholars were on the faculty at that time. Unfortunately, both Dewey and his wife, who held an appointment in the school of education, resigned because of a misunderstanding over the terms of her position.
Life’s Work
Dewey joined the Department of Philosophy at Columbia University in 1904, where he taught until 1930. His greatest achievements and contributions were before him. By 1910, he had sketched out his mature philosophy. Although scholars disagree about the relative influences of Hegel and Charles Darwin, the judgment here is that Dewey never completely divorced himself from their influences. His philosophy was a fusion of Hegelian idealism and Darwinian naturalism, expressed in a context of reform for industrial America. Ideas had significant consequences for human life; they were instruments to shape the world and place values, albeit human ones, into human affairs. As part of the natural world, all human activity, including the use of intelligence, was a process that existed in nature and not in an independent (or dualistic) mode of being. As a biological function, reflective intelligence meant that, by naturalistic metaphysics, people adapt to environmental situations. His 1896 essay “The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology” is indicative of his functionalism in psychology and instrumentalism in philosophy. From physical to mental, continuity was the key concept. Language, in conjunction with other cultural elements (and here the anthropologist Franz Boas influenced Dewey’s thinking), contributed to the cultural transformation from the biological to the logical.
Science, or the scientific method, was the basis of Dewey’s message. Within ten years, he published four major books: Reconstruction in Philosophy (1920), Human Nature and Conduct (1922), Experience and Nature (1925), and The Quest for Certainty (1929). In these books, Dewey argued that scientific truth was an instrument to control and direct human experience or culture. Means and ends were one in nature and in society, particularly a democracy. A reconstructed philosophy, “active and operative,” was relevant to the twentieth century by reorganizing the environment. By scientifically removing specific trouble areas, human happiness and productivity would increase. He wanted a rational and critical mediation between the self and other human beings as expressed in Individualism, Old and New (1930).
During his years at Columbia, Dewey was active in reform movements and public lectures in the United States and abroad. As the years passed, the honors increased; he became America’s national philosopher. As one historian remarked, he was the “guide, the mentor, the conscience of the American people . . . for a generation no major issue was clarified until Dewey had spoken.” Dewey continued to write and lecture after his retirement in 1930. He was a real intellectual presence during the New Deal, World War II, and afterward. His political activities often drew criticism, and traditionalists saw dire social consequences in his progressive educational ideas. After his first wife died in 1927, he married Roberta L. Grant in 1946. Suffering from complications of a broken hip, Dewey died on June 1, 1952. His ashes are now buried on the campus of the University of Vermont.
Over the course of his long life, Dewey wrote forty books and seven hundred articles on a wide range of subjects. In 1959, under the editorial leadership of Jo Ann Boydston, the Center for Dewey Studies at Southern Illinois University began an ambitious program to publish his complete works.
Significance
Dewey is a major presence in American history. Many formal expressions such as lectureships, institutes, and university buildings bear his name. A society and foundation were established to help spread Dewey’s ideas on democracy and educational reform. His portrait was included in the U.S. Postal Service’s Prominent Americans series.
As a philosopher, Dewey was the creator of instrumentalism, his version of William James’s pragmatism, applied more directly and completely to the industrial problems of the United States. His work made pragmatism an operative concept in American politics. His efforts, particularly late in the nineteenth century, in contributing to the concept of functionalism earned for him a permanent place in the development of American psychology. Although he was often criticized for the excesses of progressive education, his educational writings contributed to the reform of American public schools. Finally, his writing and teaching, particularly in the first half of the twentieth century, made him a leading American liberal. Concerned always about individual self-realization and reconstruction of American society for a just life for all, Dewey practiced in his own life what he advocated for others.
Bibliography
Bernstein, Richard J. John Dewey. New York: Washington Square Press, 1966. The best brief account of Dewey’s philosophy, critical but sympathetic.
Boydston, Jo Ann, ed. Checklist of Writings About John Dewey: 1887-1973. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1974. A publication from the Center for Dewey Studies, this bibliography graphically illustrates the massive impact of the philosopher’s ideas on American life.
Cahn, Steven M., ed. New Studies in the Philosophy of John Dewey. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1977. A first-rate collection of essays by the leading scholars of Dewey’s philosophy. They represent some of the best writings about him.
Conkin, Paul K. Puritans and Pragmatists. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976. In discussing eight eminent American thinkers, this book provides a solid, albeit technical, account of Dewey’s place in American thought.
Johnston, James Scott. Inquiry and Education: John Dewey and the Quest for Democracy. Albany: University of New York Press, 2006. Johnston interprets Dewey’s philosophy, focusing on his ideas about inquiry, growth, community, and democracy.
Kuklick, Bruce. Churchmen and Philosophers: From Jonathan Edwards to John Dewey. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985. A major interpretative study with an emphasis on the continuing theological influences on American philosophical thought.
Marcell, David W. Progress and Pragmatism: James, Dewey, Beard and the American Idea of Progress. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1974. A good account about the development of twentieth century reforming liberalism and Dewey’s contributions.
Menard, Louis. The Metaphysical Club. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1872, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., William James, and Charles Sanders Peirce met to develop a philosophy of pragmatism. The book traces how these ideas would later play a prominent role in American life.
Popp, Jerome A. Evolution’s First Philosopher: John Dewey and the Continuity of Nature. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007. Describes how Dewey adapted Charles Darwin’s theories of natural selection to create a new philosophy of meaning.
Simpson, Douglas J. John Dewey Primer. New York: Peter Lang, 2006. Simpson examines Dewey’s continuing significance as a critic of education, describing the relevance of his views about reflective thinking on both educational theory and practice.
Related Articles in Great Events from History: The Twentieth Century
1901-1940: 1907: Publication of James’s Pragmatism; November 7, 1914: Lippmann Helps to Establish The New Republic; 1916: Dewey Applies Pragmatism to Education; 1925: The City Initiates the Study of Urban Ecology; May, 1926: Durant Publishes The Story of Philosophy.