Dewey, John (1859–1952)

John Dewey, one of the most influential of American philosophers, made original contributions to philosophy, psychology, and pedagogy in his long career. He was also world renowned for his original thinking about education, declaring in his influential work Democracy and Education that “philosophy may even be defined as the general theory of education” (emphasis in original). Often called the philosopher of reconstruction, he reconstructed his thought slowly but steadily in his lifetime, moving from Hegelian objective idealism to experimental naturalism and pragmatism. Dewey was keenly interested in social and educational developments and thus was involved in educational reform in his lifetime. Today, more than 50 years after his death, Dewey's thought continues to inspire and provoke educational reform and dissent.

Dewey was born in Burlington, Vermont, on October 20, 1859, and died in New York City on June 1, 1952. He was the third of four sons of Archibald Dewey, a grocer who served as a quartermaster in the Civil War, and Lucina (Rich) Dewey. The Burlington of Dewey's youth was a prominent lumber depot and commercial center with a diverse population of Irish immigrants and French Canadians. Dewey graduated from the University of Vermont in 1879 and then served 3 years as a high school teacher in Oil City, Pennsylvania, and in a community just south of Burlington. He left teaching to enroll in the graduate program in philosophy at Johns Hopkins University, from which he received a Ph.D.

After having received his Ph.D., Dewey taught at the University of Minnesota and the University of Michigan, where he met his first wife, Alice Chipman. In 1894, he moved to the newly established University of Chicago. He and his wife began the Laboratory School at Chicago, and Dewey published his first major work on education, The School and Society, in 1898. In 1904 he moved to New York, where he held joint appointments at Columbia and at Teachers College until his retirement in 1930. Though he was a university professor his entire career, he was keenly interested in social activism and involved in the founding of the American Association of University Professors, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the New York City Teachers Union.

Dewey was greatly influenced by two thinkers: Charles Darwin, whose Origin of Species was published in the year of his birth, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, the German speculative [Page 271]philosopher of the late 18th and early 19th century. From Darwin he took the idea of continual growth and adaptation of natural species and used it in his philosophy. He wrote his dissertation on Kant. Although the dissertation has been lost, it appears from his publications shortly thereafter that Dewey must have turned to Hegel's critique of Kant. Hegel's logic showed Dewey the importance of contextual factors in reasoning. Dewey later naturalized Hegel's idealism by relying on Darwin's evolutionary way of thinking, grounded in empirical inquiry. His influential 1896 article “The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology” set the stage for his educational thought developed 3 years later in The School and Society and in his monumental work, Democracy and Education, published in 1916. In that 1896 article, he challenged the functionalist psychology of William James, pointing to the importance of interest and motivation, as well as context, in any learning or interaction with the world.

...