John Dewey with his family, New York, 1950
CREDIT: AP Photo/John Rooney
JOHN DEWEY died in 1952, but conservatives still blame him for destroying the nation’s public education system. In mid-2011, conservative blogger Frank Miele described Dewey as “the socialist educator and philosopher who wrought a revolution by insisting that we teach children what they want to learn instead of what they should learn.” Conservatives view Dewey as the father of “progressive education,” which they define as schools without a standard curriculum or rules for student behavior, thus inviting chaos, lack of respect for teachers, and a “do your own thing” morality.
Dewey was the most influential philosopher of the first half of the 20th century. In 1950, historian Henry Steele Commager wrote, “It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that for a generation no major issue was clarified until Dewey had spoken.”
Dewey’s ideas about learning and schools have little in common with what conservatives think of today as “progressive” education. He did not believe that schools should primarily be “child-centered,” permitting students to study whatever interested them. He believed that all students should learn history, science, math, and other traditional subjects, but that they should be taught in ways that piqued their curiosity and that taught them to enjoy learning as a way to solve problems.
Unfortunately, most public schools at the time resembled the ones Dewey had attended (and did not like). They emphasized rote learning, memorization, and recitation. Teachers were primarily disciplinarians who motivated students by fear and humiliation. They taught by drilling knowledge into students, who were expected to be, in Dewey’s words, “ductile and docile.” There were no clear standards to determine who was and was not qualified to teach.
In contrast, Dewey believed that education should help students develop their full potential as human beings. He argued that schools and the curriculum should evolve along with new scientific discoveries and new ideas. In The School and Society (1899), Dewey wrote that students learn best in an environment of “embryonic community life, active with types of occupations which reflect the life of the larger society, and permeated throughout with the spirit of art, history, and science.”
Teachers, Dewey believed, should constantly innovate. Not only did they have to master their subject areas, but they also had to be familiar with the emerging field of child psychology and practiced in creative classroom techniques. Most important, according to Dewey, schools should promote democracy by teaching students how to analyze and solve problems, to engage in class discussions, and to learn by experience—not just memorize. Schools should be vibrant laboratories where students learn how to learn, not just what to learn.
Over a long career, in forty books and hundreds of articles, Dewey wrote about aesthetics, logic, and epistemology, but his major influence was on ideas about education and democracy. A psychologist as well as a philosopher, he was a leader of a new American-based school of philosophy called pragmatism, which challenged the then-mainstream Platonist view that civilization’s core ideas were fixed. Dewey believed that philosophy should address real-world problems.
Dewey grew up in Burlington, Vermont, the son of a shopkeeper who recited Shakespeare and Milton around the house. After graduating from the University of Vermont in 1879, he taught school in Vermont and Pennsylvania and then went to graduate school in philosophy at Johns Hopkins University. His mentors at Johns Hopkins emphasized new German scientific research methods as the best way to arrive at the truth. They also embraced new techniques in psychology, pioneered in Europe, that involved observing human behavior.
After getting his Ph.D. in 1884, Dewey briefly taught at the University of Michigan, where he met his wife, Alice Chipman, who had also been a schoolteacher. She got Dewey interested in the practical problems of public education. Dewey was a founding member of the Michigan Schoolmasters Club, a joint project of college and high school teachers. As he traveled around the state monitoring the quality of college preparation courses, he developed his ideas about ways to improve teaching and learning.
Dewey was recruited to teach at the newly founded University of Chicago. While there he created a “laboratory school” where he could test his ideas about education. It opened its doors in 1896 with 16 elementary students and two teachers in three rooms. By 1903 it had 140 students, twenty-three teachers, and ten graduate assistants.
The school was based on Dewey’s view that students learn best while engaged in activities that require them to solve problems on their own and with other students. In this way, each student is a member of the “community,” with roles, tasks, and responsibilities. At Dewey’s school, students learned about reading and math by engaging in projects such as cooking and crafting. The children planted a garden, which provided a practical way to learn about soil chemistry, botany, the role of farming in human history, and the physics of light and water.
As the students got older, the curriculum became more complex and abstract, but the underlying philosophy remained the same. Dewey’s educational theories mirrored his political and social views. Dewey did not want to educate children to become passive cogs in the existing industrial and political order. For Dewey, a vibrant democracy required active citizens who did more than vote periodically, who could solve problems in their communities and workplaces. Thus, progressive education was integral to progressive politics.
Throughout his career, Dewey led by example, writing essays for the New Republic and The Nation and lending his voice and influence to building a progressive movement. He became a trustee of Hull House soon after it opened. He enjoyed exchanging ideas with Jane Addams, Alice Hamilton, and other Hull House leaders, whose ideas about “learning by doing” and engaging citizens in changing society mirrored his.
When Dewey moved to teach at Columbia University, he continued to speak out frequently for workers’ rights, women’s rights, and civil rights. His wife was an active feminist and influenced Dewey’s thinking. One day he joined a women’s suffrage parade. Someone handed him a picket sign and he began marching down Fifth Avenue. He was puzzled by the laughter of people as he walked past them until he looked at the placard. It read, “Men Can Vote. Why Can’t I?”
Soon after Dewey and others founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909, Alice invited a group of African American women to their apartment to support them and to enlist them in the women’s suffrage crusade. Hearing about the meeting, the building owner sent Dewey a letter forbidding any more integrated gatherings in the apartment. The NAACP promptly organized a meeting at the Ethical Culture building to protest the landlord’s bigotry. Dewey’s involvement in the American Association of University Professors (he was its first president in 1915), the New York City Teachers Union (1916), and the American Civil Liberties Union (in 1920) was motivated by his concern over the arbitrary and unjust firing of professors and teachers for expressing their views on social and political issues. In 1900, for example, economist Edward Ross lost his job at Stanford University because Jane Lathrop Stanford, the widow of the university’s founder Leland Stanford, did not like his views on immigrant labor and railroad monopolies. In 1917, during World War I, Columbia University’s board passed a resolution that imposed an oath of loyalty to the US government on the faculty and student body. Although Dewey ultimately supported Woodrow Wilson’s war policy, he worried that the war was leading to dangerous restrictions on free speech and academic freedom. When the war ended, the United States fell into the hysterical Red Scare, including the infamous Palmer Raids, which jailed and deported leading socialists and other radicals, including Eugene Debs. Frustrated by the failure of the League of Nations, Dewey later joined the movement to outlaw war and establish a world court to settle international disputes.
As early as 1933 Dewey warned about the rise of Nazism. In 1936 he was one of eighteen philosophers who boycotted a meeting of the German Philosophical Association in Berlin. Although Dewey harshly criticized capitalism for “stunting” workers by denying them a share in controlling their work, he condemned Marxism, Stalinism, and communism for violating individual freedom.
In the 1940s a backlash began against Dewey’s “learning by doing” ideas, which had influenced public education and teacher training. Columbia University president Nicholas Butler and University of Chicago president Robert Hutchins, among others, sought to redesign their curricula to emphasize traditional learning and focus on “great books.” Dewey countered, “President Hutchins calls for liberal education of a small, elite group and vocational education for the masses. I cannot think of any idea more completely reactionary and more fatal to the whole democratic outlook.”
After Dewey died, at the age of ninety-two, conservatives during the Red Scare and the McCarthy era began to link his progressive education ideas with communism. In 2005, the right-wing magazine Human Events ranked Dewey’s Democracy and Education number five on its list of the “Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries,” sandwiched between The Kinsey Report and Das Kapital.
More fitting was the long obituary in the New York Times of June 2, 1952. It said, “His convictions were those of an essentially honest man, and although he might well have sat back to criticize the general order of things, he took an active part in the attempt to create a third political party, to lend his voice and influence to help the down-trodden, to do away with oppression in this country and elsewhere, and to strive for a finer universal education.”