John Dewey

1859–1952 · 93 years Tier II

The unmusical philosopher who could not tell one pitch from another

Portrait of John Dewey — Underwood &amp — Underwood — Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Dewey was born October 20, 1859, in Burlington, Vermont, the third of four sons of a grocer and a mother whose Congregationalist earnestness he spent much of his adult life arguing his way out of. He went to the University of Vermont at fifteen, graduated in 1879 Phi Beta Kappa, and taught high school in Pennsylvania while he decided philosophy was the thing. A journal essay he sent to the philosopher W. T. Harris, unsolicited, got him encouragement enough to apply to the new graduate program at Johns Hopkins. He earned his doctorate there in 1884 with a dissertation on Kant, already restless with the idealism he had been trained in.

He taught at Michigan through the 1880s and early 1890s, then went to the new University of Chicago in 1894 and opened the Laboratory School, where children learned by building and cooking and running a print shop instead of reciting from a primer. He left Chicago after a fight with the university president over his wife's role at the school and moved to Columbia's Teachers College in 1904, where he stayed for the rest of his working life. Democracy and Education came out in 1916. He toured China for two years starting in 1919, lecturing to crowds who called him Mr. Democracy, wrote roughly 700 articles and 40 books, and helped found the NAACP and the American Association of University Professors along the way.

His wife Alice died in 1927 after four decades of marriage and six children, one of them, a son named Morris, dead already in childhood. Dewey remarried in 1946, to Roberta Grant, forty years his junior, and adopted two more children with her. His larger contradiction is public rather than private: he spent the last decades of his career warning that "child-centered" schools built in his name had thrown out structure along with recitation, and that freedom without a plan was just another kind of chaos. The label progressive education stuck to him anyway, and so did the blame when those schools failed, for a theory he had spent chapters arguing against.

Dewey died of pneumonia in New York City on June 1, 1952, at 92, having outlived most of the movement he started. Historians of education still argue about how much of what happened in his name he actually meant. His philosophy department disciples thinned out as analytic philosophy took over American universities in the 1950s and 1960s and treated pragmatism as a historical curiosity — his standing in education never fully recovered from being blamed for both the successes and the excesses done under his flag. Later reassessments, especially from the 1980s on, have restored him as the harder and more disciplined thinker the reformers claiming him rarely were.

Lifespan

15401700180019002030

John Dewey's life against the full span of the corpus.

Notable works

University of Chicago Laboratory Schools company
Children learned by building, cooking, and running a print shop 1896
The School and Society book 1899
Democracy and Education book 1916
Human Nature and Conduct book 1922
Experience and Nature book 1925
The Public and Its Problems book 1927

Life in brief

with age at each point

October 20, 1859 aged 0 Born in Burlington, Vermont
1879 aged ~20 Graduates from the University of Vermont, Phi Beta Kappa
1884 aged ~25 Earns his PhD at Johns Hopkins with a dissertation on Kant
1886 aged ~27 Marries Alice Chipman
1894 aged ~35 Joins the University of Chicago and founds the Laboratory Schools
1904 aged ~45 Moves to Columbia's Teachers College after a break with Chicago
1919 aged ~60 Begins a two-year lecture tour of China Crowds called him Mr. Democracy.
1927 aged ~68 His wife Alice dies
June 1, 1952 aged 92 Dies of pneumonia in New York City