Dewey, John

Dewey, John (1859–1952), Vermont‐born philosopher and educator, graduated from the University of Vermont (1879) and Johns Hopkins (Ph.D., 1884). He taught at the universities of Minnesota, Michigan, Chicago, and after 1904 at Columbia. While director of the University of Chicago's School of Education he founded the Laboratory School to test new educational techniques. His influence on education and thought came also from his books, teaching, and leadership of many learned societies, connection with the Socialist party, and work as adviser to foreign governments. His most important writings on education, following his Psychology (1887), include The School and Society (1899), The Child and the Curriculum (1902), Moral Principles in Education (1909), Interest and Effort in Education (1913), Experience and Education (1938), and The Public Schools and Spiritual Values (1944). Problems of Men (1946) is a collection of his essays. In these works he emphasizes the changes in educational needs due to the industrial revolution, the democratic point of view, and the concept of man as a biological entity required to adjust himself to his environment and the complex structure of modern society. His scientific realism, the basis of this attitude, springs from pragmatism, of which Dewey was the leading exponent after the death of William James.

Shifting the emphasis of pragmatic thought from religion and the will to believe to practical problems of social reconstruction, Dewey called his philosophy “instrumentalism,” and in it he holds that, since reality changes and grows, truth consists in the success with which ideas, hypotheses, and beliefs are framed for the achievement of set purposes. The only reality is experience, and knowledge is necessarily functional, not abstract or theoretical. The natural sciences have advanced through devotion to observation, experiment, and revision in light of experience; the great need is for social sciences to advance to a commensurate point, at which they may direct all knowledge to human ends, enabling intelligence to control the human and extra‐human environment. These ideas have been developed in Outlines of a Critical Theory of Ethics (1891), Studies in Logical Theory (1903), How We Think (1909), The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy … (1910), Essays in Experimental Logic (1916), Democracy and Education (1916), Reconstruction in Philosophy (1920), Human Nature and Conduct (1922), Experience and Nature (1925), The Quest for Certainty (1929), Individualism, Old and New (1930), Philosophy and Civilization (1931), Art as Experience (1934), A Common Faith (1934), Liberalism and Social Action (1935), Logic, the Theory of Inquiry (1938), and Freedom and Culture (1939). A scholarly edition of his works began publication in 1967.