John Dewey Research Paper

As a student at the University of Vermont in Burlington, he found a mentor, H. A. P. Torrey, who nourished his interest in philosophy. After graduation in 1879, Dewey spent 2 years teaching at the high school at South Oil City in Pennsylvania, and for one year taught at an elementary school in a small town in Vermont. He continued studying philosophy in private tutorial, and in 1882, enrolled at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. There, he gravitated quickly to G. S. Morris, a neo-Hegelian. Hegel’s ideas had a liberating effect on Dewey’s thought. The religious teachings that he was brought up with were trans- formed into the Hegelian view of cultural institutions as agents of an objective mind that through them shapes the mental life of individuals. Morris let Dewey teach his undergraduate class, secured a fellowship for him, and offered him a position as instructor at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor where he had moved in 1884, the year of Dewey’s Ph.D. exam. During the following decade, Dewey stayed at the University of Michigan (except for 1888, the year spent at the University of Minnesota), where he was promoted to full professor, and wrote articles on psychology and ethics. In 1886, he married Alice Chipman, a strong personality with a secular humanist background. A formative influence—next to Morris’ and to that of William James that mainly came by correspondence—was his friendship with G. H. Mead.

The exchange began in Ann Arbor and continued during the decade in Chicago, lasting until Mead’s death in 1931. Mead’s scholarship in physiology surpassed that of Dewey, and Mead’s concept of psychology—based on a view of the organism that is interacting with its environment—was integrated by Dewey into his own transactional theory.

He accepted the offer to head the department of Philosophy, Psychology, and Pedagogy at the University of Chicago in 1894. The city of Chicago, teeming with European immigrants, full of destitute people as well as of people of means and goodwill, appeared to Dewey like one big social experiment. He worked closely with Jane Addams of Hull House, a social settlement; with Ella Flagg Young, District Superintendent of Chicago Schools; and with Francis Parker, principal of the Cook County Teachers’ Training School. In 1896, at the request of parents who were willing to pay for most of the school’s maintenance, he founded the Laboratory School that quickly became known as the Dewey School. The school’s curriculum centered on ‘occupations’ that engaged pupils’ minds and hands in activities such as sewing, weaving, cooking, building, growing corn, etc. A debate society complemented the syllabus for fifth- and sixth-graders. What made the school unique was not so much the emphasis upon the priority of the manual to the conceptual as the attempt to realize the idea of school as a community, in which both teachers and students were stakeholders.

Dewey’s book School and Society (1899)—probably his most widely read book, with translations into a dozen languages—consists of talks he gave to raise money for the Laboratory School. In 1897, he had published a brief text, My Pedagogic Creed, that not only reflects his idea of the Laboratory School but holds much of his later more explicit writing on education in a nutshell.

Dewey’s time in Chicago came to an abrupt end in 1904 when the University’s president merged the Laboratory School with the Chicago Institute for Teacher Training, dismissing Dewey’s school’s teachers and his wife, who acted as principal, without prior notice or consultation with Dewey. He resigned immediately and found the position as professor of philosophy at New York’s Columbia University that he would hold from 1904 through his retirement in 1930, until his final resignation of all duties in 1939, at age 80.

Courses he had taught in Chicago were published in New York (How we Think, 1910; Human Nature and Conduct, 1922), and his major work on philosophy of education, Democracy and Education (1916) is a fruit of Dewey’s involvement with schools and philosophy of education in Chicago.

In New York, Dewey was engaged with philosophy at Columbia and education at Teachers’ College, and quickly he became involved in various political activities, not only as president of the American Association of University Professors and functions in the American Federation of Teachers, but also as leading contributor to The Republic, a magazine promoting liberal views, and as president of the People’s Lobby and Chairman of the League for Independent Political Action. His travels and consultant activities in Japan (1919), China (1919–1921), Turkey (1924), and Mexico (1926) extended his influence, and a series of lectures on a variety of topics resulted in major publications (Tokyo University 1919: Reconstruction in Philosophy; Carus lectures at Columbia 1923: Experience and Nature; Gifford lectures in Edinburgh 1929: The Quest for Certainty; Terry lectures at Yale 1934: A Common Faith).

John and Alice Dewey had six children, three boys, one of whom had died in 1895 on a sojourn in Italy, and three girls. In 1904, on their second trip to Europe, another boy died, and even though the Deweys adopted later, on that same tour, an Italian orphan who was eight years old like their lost son, they never came to accept these deaths.

Alice died after long illness in 1927; John Dewey was married again in 1946, at age 87, to Roberta Grant, and the couple adopted two children. In 1949, when he was 90 years old, Dewey published a book that he had written together with Arthur Bentley, Knowing and the Known, a study in epistemology.

2. Experience The Connecting Agent Of Dewey’s Life And Work

One of the more unusual features for a philosopher’s biography is the close connection between Dewey’s intellectual and actual life.

In politics, he tried his hand at founding a third party, at editing a newspaper devoted to ‘thought news,’ and at heading the Outlawry of War Movement (‘That war be outlawed and declared a crime’). In his fifties and sixties, he traveled widely not only to spread his ideas, but also to help install systems of education in Turkey, Mexico, the Soviet Union; his sojourn in China lasted over two years. At age 78, he chaired the committee to investigate Leon Trotsky (an investigation at Trotsky’s own request, in Mexico, into accusations by Stalin’s courts in Moscow).

Looking back at 80, he wrote: ‘I reached fairly early in the growth of my ideas a belief in the intimate and indissoluble connection of means used and ends reached. I doubt if the force of the idea in the theory of social action would have come home to me without my experience in social and political movements, culminating in events associated with my membership in the Trotsky Inquiry Commission’ (Jane Dewey 1939).

As for education, having been a schoolteacher himself and having run the Laboratory School in Chicago, he points to the interaction between thoughts and actions: ‘The idea that lay back of my educational undertaking was a rather abstract one of the relation of knowledge and action. My school work translated this into a much more vital form’ (Jane Dewey 1939).

In the field of aesthetics and the fine arts, he had worked with Albert C. Barnes, the millionaire collector who befriended him and introduced him to the art of French postimpressionism; Dewey dedicated his book Art as Experience (1934) to him.

As for metaphysics, his concept of unity of the ideal and the actual that he named ‘God’ (A Common Faith), appears to have been backed by personal experience. During his sojourn as a young man in South Oil City, he had experienced a mystic oneness with the universe, and he would later declare: ‘I’ve never had any doubts since then, nor any beliefs. To me faith means not worrying … ’ (Dykhuizen 1973).

His first years as a young instructor at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor had impressed on him the actual attainability of a cooperative community and the experience of personal growth within a democratic atmosphere, with encouragement of freedom and individual responsibility, and the immediate acceptance as an adult responsible member of the faculty. This experience may well have contributed to the formulation of his later visionary concept, presented in The Public and Its Problems (1927), of democracy as ‘the great community.’

He himself summed up the mutual enforcement of idea and action throughout his experience in the autobiographical notes that he added to his daughter Jane’s account of his life: ‘My belief in the office of intelligence as a continuously reconstructive agency is at least a faithful report of my own life and experience’ (Jane Dewey1939).

3. Contribution

The upshot of Dewey’s work can be described as the subordination of philosophy to life, a contribution to the project of intellectualization of practice. Since intelligence—the assessment of the possibilities inherent in a given situation—is a tool for the solution of practical problems, Dewey referred to his brand of pragmatism as ‘instrumentalism’: like the wings of a bird and the fins of a fish, human intelligence is an instrument for survival, but unlike the other creatures’ physical features, the human mind is capable through the powers of community to promote life’s quality itself, not unlike a process of evolution directed by intelligent action.

One of the most obvious principles in Dewey’s philosophy is his exposure of dualisms as artificial alternatives that have become barriers to the kind of intelligence needed to promote the process of experience, e.g., the separation between science and morals appeared scandalous to him, a roadblock on the path to progressive application of intelligence. The method of scientific inquiry developed and employed successfully in modern times provides a model for inquiry into social affairs to the degree that it is an application of reason against that of myth; analogously, intelligence must be applied in the social realm to develop a methodology for the resolution of the problems of men and to facilitate social reconstruction.

His dictum, that philosophers should turn away from the problems of philosophy and instead should turn to the problems of men, is another way of saying that traditional philosophy is concerned with questions that result from views framed in terms of alternatives which do not relate. As he states in an essay, The Influence of Darwinism on Philosophy (1909): ‘But in fact intellectual progress usually occurs through sheer abandonment of questions together with both of the alternatives they assume—an abandonment that results from their decreasing vitality and a change of urgent interest. We do not solve them: we get over them. Old questions are solved by disappearing, evaporating, while new questions corresponding to the new attitude of endeavor and preference take their place’ (Middle Works 1973–1983).

With regard to politics, Dewey maintained that the majority of men and women could and should become active participants in the decision-making processes that govern and shape their lives. He urged the development of a society that facilitates individual growth through participation in community life. Integration of self-realization and the social to form a common good is the major ethical postulate entwined with such an instrumentalization of the political. In The Public and Its Problems (1927), Dewey answered an analysis of the political situation in the USA in the years after World War II by Walter Lippmann, The Phantom Public (1925). Lippmann, a democratic realist, had shown that self-government and the idea of participatory democracy fell short of the reality of a population largely manipulated by propaganda, and he proposed the establishment of an elite ruling class to identify and serve the public interest. Dewey, while accepting the factuality of Lippman’s analysis, did not subscribe to his proposal, but suggested instead the continued pursuit of the idea of a great community, especially through the means of education. His idea of the fullest possible liberation of the potentials of human experience allowed for no other social frame- work than that of participatory democracy. And for Dewey, the school as the ‘church of democracy’ is to provide the actual experience for achieving the ‘great community’ through its model as ‘embryonic society.’

Probably, Dewey is known best for his contributions to educational thought. At the core of his philosophy of education is the concept of experience as an ongoing process with no externally identifiable aim. ‘ … education is a constant reorganizing or reconstructing of experience. It has all the time an immediate end, and so far as activity is educative, it reaches that end—the direct transformation of the quality of experience’ (Democracy and Education 1916, Middle Works 1973–1983). This concept was opposed to teleological concepts of education dominant in countries with an idealistically inclined tradition such as Germany or Japan, and at the same time provided the foundation for an interchange of participatory democracy and education as its exercise in embryonic form.

In Experience and Education (1938), Dewey emphasizes the need for a theory of education. Such theory is not a system or an application of static principles. It is entirely subservient to practice and should, in Dewey’s words, be ‘a light to the eyes and a lamp for the feet’; it might be described as a framework to facilitate a plan of action, or as a set of principles to interpret an experience’s educational function.

Dewey elaborates two such principles of experience, that of continuity and that of interaction. He reminds educators to avoid the opposite pitfalls of overindulging children and of subjecting them entirely to external demands. Proponents of progressive education who promoted a child-centered approach had claimed Dewey as provider of the philosophical foundation for their sentiment, and W. H. Kilpatrick, an influential representative of that school, had declared the project method as Dewey’s brainchild. But Dewey, while sympathetic to the idea of a participatory approach to education, would not want to see the curriculum content in terms of knowledge and competence buried underneath project-learning for its own sake. Continuity of experience, as he explained in 1938, requested the educator to transfer ‘the vested capital of civilization’: ‘The mature person, to put it in moral terms, has no right to withhold from the young on given occasions whatever capacity for sympathetic understanding his own experience has given him’ (Experience and Education, Later Works 1981–1991). In The Quest for Certainty (1929), Dewey gives an account of cultural history that exposes the tradition of bad metaphysics in philosophy which seeks to establish a realm of certainty protected from the precariousness of human experience in a world of unavoidable uncertainty. While early religion attempted an alignment with the powers of destiny, philosophy—its inheritor—sought access to knowledge of the immutable, to the certainty provided by everlasting values and principles. Both religion and philosophy distinguished between skills and technical knowledge that eased the circumstances of everyday existence, and the superior knowledge connected to the higher order of absolute certainty in terms of truth, goodness, and beauty. The sciences that developed in the seventeenth century effectively replaced the qualitative view of nature with one describing it in terms of mathematical relationships. But instead of using that knowledge as an instrument in the service of liberating experience, scientists engaged in a quest for certainty on their own by redescribing reality in scientific terms, as if ‘the findings of science are a disclosure of the inherent properties of the ultimate real’ (The Quest for Certainty, Later Works 1981–1991). Thereby, another dualism was generated: that between scientific procedure with the resulting quantitative description of relationships in nature, and that of the appreciation of qualities and values in experience. Dewey demonstrated how these dualisms dissolve as one turns away from the fixation on certainty in the name of reason and turns instead to intelligence as a means of assessing the possibilities inherent to a situation.

With The Quest for Certainty, Dewey aimed at a destruction of the history of philosophy in order to gain plausibility for democracy as the social arrangement with the greatest potentials for the full realization of society’s capacities.

In Art as Experience (1934), Dewey stresses the continuity of all experience. The aesthetic is that part of experience that is identical with the form that separates an experience from the ongoing flow of ordinary experience. It is of a satisfying quality for its consistent movement toward an intended end, which makes it self-sufficient and lifts it out of the stream of the ordinary, at the same time. An agreeable meal, an intelligent conversation, a talk professionally delivered, a well-conducted concert, a well-played game, etc. all qualify as an experience. As for art, the artist clarifies and intensifies an object’s traits in such a way that a new experience results. He does so in a process that requires his attention to the medium he is working with, and the beholder of the finished work appreciates it only to the degree that he goes through the same processes that the artist went through when making the object. By describing art this way, by identifying the aesthetic as part of experience accessible to all, Dewey claims that the removal of the arts from the ordinary lives of the common people, its relegation to museums and to private collections of the wealthy has to be understood as symptomatic of the dualism that separates the aesthetic from the quotidian and is at the roots of the divisions of society.

Like the aesthetic, the religious offers an aspect of consummatory experience. Dewey had hinted in the final chapter of Reconstruction in Philosophy (1920) at a ‘natural piety’ that transcends the denominational and liberates the potentials of religious belief. In 1934, he delivered a series of lectures to extend and clarify his position, which were published under the title A Common Faith. He draws a distinction between the religious as disposition and religions as sets of rituals and dogmatic beliefs; he shows the realm of the religious to be the kind of belief that is not in competition with the kind of knowledge achieved through application of research and reason; organized religion, however, has interfered with the progressive expansion of knowledge. Dewey sketches the contour of a natural piety that takes humans to be part of nature and seeks its cooperation not without a just and dignified attitude. Experience of the religious culminates in the unification of the ideal and the actual, i.e. the realization of our most inclusive moral convictions in a given situation, through which an all-pervasive unity may be glimpsed momentarily that aligns human purpose and nature.

Dewey’s studies of various fields are all contributions to the foundation of a framework for social life that facilitates the liberation of human potential. Against the separation of experience and dualistic views, he promotes the unifying moments in experience and the resolution of dualism; against concepts of certain truth and the eternal, he emphasizes the contingent and the present in the situation at hand; instead of the closed-down (e.g., Marxist ‘law of the laws of history’) and shut-off, he points out the continuous and the transactional; against reifications of language and reason, he demonstrates their instrumentality; and instead of leaning to romantic pessimism, he puts a premium on cautious optimism in matters concerning human beings and the universe.

4. Relevance For Contemporary Social Sciences

A renewed interest in Dewey is indicated by the number of doctoral dissertations, which doubled during the 1990s from an average seven at US universities in the early years to an average 15 for each of the later years. At the same time, the tone of studies on Dewey appears to have changed. An observation that might be symptomatic: Westbrook (1991) follows Dewey for the most part, but is still critical of his emphasis on education to reach the goal of participatory democracy; Eldridge (1998) attacks Rorty for misreading Dewey on scientific method, Niebuhr for misconstruing Dewey’s metaphysics, and Westbrook for prioritizing political action over cultural development.

The explanation of Russel’s and Horkheimer’s reproach of Dewey’s pragmatism as curious misunderstanding has become a common feature in the literature of the nineties; the fierce Marxist–Leninist critique of Dewey’s philosophy during the Soviet era is no longer an issue, other than a footnote, and the neo-Thomist repudiation of Dewey’s secular philosophy is no longer even mentioned.

At the same time, several tendencies in the development of philosophy have helped facilitate a renewed interest in Dewey’s philosophy. The rejection of ‘great tales’ in French postmodernist philosophy, the promotion of pluralistic views by proponents of constructivism, have exposed the untenability of philosophy’s claim of a relationship with the immutable, for their part. One of the most influential thinkers of the 1980s and 1990s, Richard Rorty, has combined these sentiments and applied them in his reformulation of the contributions of philosophy. His Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) can be read as mirroring Dewey’s Quest for Certainty. He claims to be ‘Deweyan’ and comments explicitly on Dewey’s writings. While this claim has been disputed by Westbrook (1991) and Eldridge (1998), Rorty’s influence on contemporary thought has contributed to a renewed interest in Dewey’s work.

There is renewed interest in Dewey’s theory of democracy. Westbrook, in his seminal study (1991), has made explicit the relevancy and actuality of the Lippmann–Dewey debate for American democracy at the end of the twentieth century, and the time of that study’s publication and its wide reception coincided with a similar appeal for the systematic pursuit of community by a group of philosophers (e.g., M. Dancer) and sociologists (e.g., R. N. Bellah) referred to as ‘communitarians.’ Perhaps it is indicative of a renewed influence of Dewey’s concept of ‘great community’ that J. Habermas closed a review of the publication in German, after 70 years, of Quest for Certainty, expressing the wish: ‘He (Dewey) would be the better patron for the Berlin Republic.’

Bibliography:

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