Dewey, John (1859–1952)

John Dewey was an educator, pragmatic and reconstructive philosopher, psychologist, and founder of the progressive education movement. His educational theories and practices in particular were groundbreaking, including support of teacher-student interaction, reflection and experience, and integration with community and democracy.

After obtaining a teacher of philosophy degree at the University of Vermont, Dewey began his educational career by working as a school teacher for several years and then enrolled in the graduate program in philosophy at Johns Hopkins University. There, Dewey studied with George Sylvester Morris, a Hegelian philosopher who became his mentor. He also worked with Stanley Hall, an important experimental psychologist who stressed application of scientific methodology to the human sciences.

After graduation, Dewey was hired into the University of Michigan department of philosophy. There he became increasingly interested in social, political, and economic issues, diverging from idealist philosophy and moving toward pragmatism, struggling with religious issues, and philosophizing about the social nature of the mind and self. In 1886, Dewey married Alice Chipman and gradually began a shift of interests toward public affairs, social justice, and education, focusing on unity of theory and practice.

Dewey moved to the University of Chicago in 1894, as head of the department of philosophy, psychology, and pedagogy, becoming ever more involved in the philosophy of education. He defined the most significant problem of education as the harmonizing of individual traits with the social and moral, underscoring the need for improved theory of schooling and practice to address this problem. Emphasis on the connection of subject matter to the needs, interests, and cognitive development level of students was one of the most novel and enduring of Dewey's ideas. Dewey emphasized attention to both the cognitive and the moral and was strongly opposed to rote learning of facts. Dewey was one of the first educators to actively integrate experience with education.

Dewey founded the experimental University Laboratory School, known as the Dewey School, with the purpose of conducting educational experiments to develop and test educational theories;a platform for reform of pedagogical methods. The Laboratory School was all theory based and flexible in organization, structure, and opportunities. Students were grouped by interests and abilities and exposed to broad and varied curricula and methods. As one example, children learned science by investigating scientific processes as they took place during normal, participatory daily activities that they performed in their classes as experiments, true examples of learning by doing. Unfortunately, administrative difficulties resulted in the closure of the school after 7 years, well before Dewey was able to complete his experimentation.

Educational experimentalism was an underlying theme for much of Dewey's work from this time on. He viewed education as an endless and never fully generalizable experiment. Dewey preferred an educational approach that broadened intellect and developed problem-solving and critical-thinking skills, in direct contradiction to the traditional, back-to-the-basics, memorization-oriented educational programs. [Page 452]In Chicago, Dewey also had the opportunity to work with many of the top American philosophers of the time and became involved with the political and social issues of the day, including immigration, urbanization, the labor movement, and technology.

...