In his books, lectures, and classroom experiments, American philosopher John Dewey (1859–1952) changed the face of American education and fundamentally redefined the profession of teaching. By the time of his death, Dewey was regarded as the single most influential educator in the United States and a leading public intellectual on issues of war, peace, and civil rights.
Dewey’s philosophy of education was summed up in an 1893 essay: “Cease conceiving of education as mere preparation for later life, and make of it the full meaning of the present life.”
Born in northern Vermont, Dewey was educated at public schools and the University of Vermont. He studied philosophy at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and was heavily influenced by the pragmatic philosopher William James (1842–1910). In 1894, Dewey was recruited to become the head of the philosophy department at the University of Chicago, which had been established four years earlier.
It was in Chicago that Dewey founded his famous Laboratory Schools in 1896. True to its name, Dewey intended the school to be a testing ground for his progressive theories about education, and he staffed the institution with students from the university’s department of pedagogy.
Dewey’s reforms called for teaching children by “directed living” rather than by simply drilling them with rote instruction. For instance, instead of making pupils memorize facts about the American Revolution, Dewey’s followers would encourage “hands-on learning” in which students would conduct group projects that allowed them to learn the history of the period. For Dewey, educational reform was intricately linked with his views on philosophy and politics. Only a well-educated citizenry, he believed, had the capacity to govern itself in a democratic system.
Dewey was active in politics, beginning with his support for women’s suffrage and US involvement in World War I. He drifted to the left after the war, criticized the New Deal as an inadequate response to the Depression, and opposed American involvement in World War II until Pearl Harbor. Unlike many other liberal intellectuals, however, he distrusted Communism because of its antidemocratic character.
Dewey left Chicago in 1904 and spent most of the rest of his life at Columbia University. He died of pneumonia in New York City at age ninety-two.