Dewey, John (1859–1952)

John Dewey, among the 20th century's most famous and influential philosophers, was born in Burlington, Vermont, on October 20, 1859. He studied at the University of Vermont, graduating in 1879, and then after teaching high school in Pennsylvania until 1881 and in Vermont until 1882, he attended Johns Hopkins University, where he earned his PhD in 1884. In 1886, he married Alice Chipman, who died in 1927. In 1946, he married Roberta Lowitz Grant, who survived him when he died on June 1, 1952. Dewey's long life spanned the U.S. Civil War and both World Wars, not to mention countless other conflicts, industrial developments, and societal changes. His influence as a scholar has been substantial in a number of fields, including philosophy, psychology, the social sciences, and education. His work has helped focus attention on the crucial role of the dissemination of knowledge in democratic societies.

Few philosophers have had as great an impact on their societies as John Dewey. Dewey is most famous for his work in the area of education. Prior to his famous work, Democracy and Education, published in 1916, education in the United States followed the European system that was founded on what some scholars have dubbed the “banking theory” of knowledge—that is, in the old way of doing things, as an authority the teacher would deposit his or her wisdom in the empty minds of students. Creative thinking was discouraged, and challenges to authority were treated as heretical. Dewey, however, saw that people were not prepared and empowered for addressing the problems of their own environments, a problem which meant that education was generally abstract, disconnected from students' interests, and often appeared pointless. Dewey understood that in a democratic society, students needed to be guided through a process of learning to address public problems around them. Sometimes history will help us to solve problems, sometimes to create art, but the overall point of studying subject matter was to become reoriented, according to Dewey. Education should address the overall project of developing more intelligent citizens, he thought, who are more able to pursue their own goals as well as to live together harmoniously.

The great influence that Dewey's practical and democratic philosophy has had on disciplines such as education, sociology, psychology, and philosophy is rarely seen in the context of his whole body of work. Dewey came to hold the views he did about education because of how he thought about knowledge and inquiry in the first place. In the traditional approach to the subject of knowledge, an idea was understood as a picture or a mirror of the thing in the world that it represents. With that metaphor supporting all the human sciences, people sought to make more and more accurate pictures. They aimed to achieve certainty about the world using an approach to the sciences that ignored the scientists' purposes and desires. While Dewey understood and valued the avoidance of unjust or misleading bias and lack of objectivity, he recognized the unavoidable nature of inquiry as always undertaken from a given perspective—that is, following the modern insights of philosopher Immanuel Kant, Dewey noted that what we perceive in the world must be conditioned by the kind of observer who perceives it.

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