Education 1

  

John Dewey has had a profound impact on Western education. His theories on the nature and purpose of education have shaped not only the American educational system but other Western Schools of education. You will:

• Explain what Dewey considered to be the purpose(s) of education
• Analyze at least three principles of Dewey’s philosophy and their influence on education
• Assess how these principles align with the principles of an IB education

3-4 pages in APA format. At least 2 sources. 

 

Philosophical Inquiry in Education, Volume 28 (2021), No. 3, pp. 222-236

Was Dewey (Too) Modern? The Modern Faces of
Dewey

ILYA ZRUDLO
McGill University

Although John Dewey continues to be a source to which scholars look in order to address contemporary social and
educational issues, others have suggested that Dewey may be too implicated in the project of modernity to be acceptable in
educational theory and practice today. To what extent Dewey was modern, and what we make of the question of his
modernity, depends on our reading of Dewey and on our understanding of modernity more generally. I will argue that a broad
reading of both Dewey and modernity helps us avoid treating Dewey either as education’s saviour or as inimical to our present
purposes. First, I examine Dewey’s own conception of modernity and then broaden its scope by bringing into view four aspects
of Western modernity: economic modernization, the struggle for justice, individualism, and naturalism. Second, I show how
Dewey can and has been read as representing one or more of these aspects, but also from the perspective of one or more of these
aspects. This generates what I will call Dewey’s four “faces”: Dewey as engineer, Dewey as activist, Dewey as Romantic, and
Dewey as naturalist. This mapping offers a way of making more sense of the diverse readings of Dewey that exist in the
secondary literature. Finally, I make a case for Dewey’s ongoing relevance because of his capacious view of the goods of
modernity and his distinctively educational philosophy.

Scholars continue to read John Dewey as a source of inspiration for addressing contemporary social
and educational issues (e.g., Stitzlein, 2019). However, David Waddington (2020) has recently suggested
that Dewey may be too involved in the project of modernity to be acceptable in educational theory and
practice today. The basic problem is familiar: there is a broad and growing consensus, particularly in
educational studies, that there were and are major ethical, political, and epistemic problems with some
of the frameworks for thought, feeling, and action that emerged in Western Europe over the past few
centuries and gradually spread outwards. These frameworks generated (and continue to generate)
immense suffering and injustice through, for example, colonialism and imperialism. They also in many
cases legitimated (and continue to legitimate) the worst kinds of prejudices and the systematic
destruction of the environment. In a word, the so-called Enlightenment had a dark side. Many scholars
have dedicated and are dedicating their energies to surgically removing the influence of guilty modern
ways of being and doing from educational theory and practice. This is an ongoing and significant
project. Quite naturally, all this raises questions about Dewey: How implicated was Dewey in “the
modern project”? Are we, say, perpetuating various forms of injustice associated with modernity by
applying his ideas to education? Or can he help us overcome the modern injustices currently plaguing
society? Given that Dewey is one of the most famous and influential philosophers of education (if
seldom read comprehensively), these questions are significant for the field of education as a whole.

Of course, our judgement about “Dewey’s modernity” depends on how we read Dewey and
what we understand by “modernity” more generally. In fact, there is a sense in which this question –
particularly in its categorical formulation; that is, was Dewey modern or not – is driven by a narrow
reading of Dewey and a superficial understanding of modernity. Over the course of this essay, I will
show that a “broad reading” (i.e., a more comprehensive and just reading) of both Dewey and
modernity helps us avoid treating Dewey either as the saviour of contemporary education or as inimical

Ilya Zrudlo 223

to our present purposes. There are genuine tensions in his work that derive in part from modernity, but
we have much to learn about how he juggled these tensions – he is far from irrelevant to contemporary
educational theory and practice. A second advantage of the kind of broad reading I am recommending
here, which pays special attention to the complex theme of modernity, is that it can help make better
sense of the diverse array of interpretations regarding Dewey that exist in the literature. This is in part1
because both Dewey’s cheerleaders and critics are for the most part also steeped in modernity, which
colours their own readings of Dewey in certain ways. Carefully exploring the question of Dewey’s
modernity, then, also offers an illuminating perspective on the landscape of the secondary literature.

To accomplish these aims, I first examine Dewey’s own conception of modernity, compare it
with the sources Waddington uses, and then broaden the scope of discussion by drawing on Charles
Taylor’s work (1989). This brings out four aspects of Western modernity: economic modernization, the
struggle for justice, individualism, and naturalism. Second – and this part constitutes the bulk of my
paper – I show that Dewey can and has been interpreted as “representing” one or more of these
aspects, but that these aspects also constitute “lenses” through which Dewey has been read. This
dynamic generates what I will call Dewey’s four “faces”: Dewey as engineer, Dewey as activist, Dewey
as Romantic, and Dewey as naturalist. There are superficial versions of each of these faces (masks, as it
were), but more sophisticated versions do tell us something important about Dewey, including his
strengths and limitations – even if they are ultimately partial. A Deweyan attitude of reconstruction
towards his own work naturally suggests itself. My mapping thus helps make sense of some of the
tensions in Dewey’s work; but it also offers a way of organizing the incredible variety of interpretations
of his legacy. Finally, I reinforce the case for Dewey’s ongoing relevance to educational theory and
practice, with reference to his capacious view of the goods of modernity and his distinctively
educational philosophy.

Dewey on Modernity and Broadening Modernity

What did Dewey himself have to say about modernity? For Dewey, modernity was essentially related to
the remarkable advances in methods in the natural sciences that had occurred in previous decades and
centuries. The process of modernization implied extending those methods into all other areas of
human life, including morality and philosophical reflection upon value. Modernity was therefore an
unfinished project: “The genuinely modern has still to be brought into existence” (Dewey, 1948, p.
273). Philip Deen (2019) argues that Dewey’s theory of modernity is similar to Habermas’ in that both
are hopeful that reason can be used to resolve the contradictions of modernity and improve the
condition of the world. They are also both wary of crude instrumental reason serving capital, which
they argue is one of the chief problems of the modern age.2 I want to retain from Dewey this notion
that we are still in the modern period, which I think is convincing, and which Dewey and Habermas
share with Charles Taylor (1989) and other theorists of modernity. Because he saw modernity as an
unfinished process, Dewey thought that humanity was in a major period of transition (Fairfield, 2009,
p. 261).

Now, Waddington (2020) labels Dewey a paradigmatic modern thinker. He does this by showing
that Dewey’s thought matches with two influential accounts of modernity: one from Albert Borgmann
(1992) and the other from Jean-Francois Lyotard (1984). For Borgmann (1992), modernity involves the
domination of nature, methodological universalism, and ambiguous individualism. Waddington (2020)

1 Another reason for the staggering diversity of readings of Dewey is surely the sheer volume of Dewey’s corpus,
which makes it relatively easy to find support for a vast range of interpretations.
2 There are of course important disanalogies between their thought, one of which is that Habermas follows a
Kantian differentiation of reason into three domains (techno-scientific, moral-practical, and aesthetic), while
Dewey holds a more undifferentiated but expansive conception of reason (Deen, 2019).

224 Philosophical Inquiry in Education

finds Dewey particularly aligned with the two first elements of Borgmann’s conception of modernity:
Dewey cited Bacon’s writings on the domination of nature approvingly and thought the scientific
method should be applied to all affairs of human life (pp. 33–34). For Lyotard (1984), modernity has to
do with two metanarratives: the right of all to scientific education for liberation and the belief in a
unified system of knowledge. Again, Waddington (2020) finds aspects of Dewey’s thought that show
his agreement with these two metanarratives (pp. 35–36). Dewey, then, Waddington concludes, is
committed to the modern project.

I want to suggest that while Dewey’s own conception of modernity, as well as ones employed by
Borgmann and Lyotard, offers certain insights, it is somewhat partial, and this obscures the debate
about the relationship between Dewey and modernity. Charles Taylor’s (1989) work on modernity can
help us here in two ways. First, it helps make sense of the somewhat confusing back and forth between
pro- and anti-modernity positions. Second, it helps bring into focus a broader range of imperatives that
drive Western modernity – some of which are absent from Dewey’s explicit writings about the nature
of modernity, as well as from the writings of some “postmodernists.”

Taylor (1991) remarks that “Modernity has its boosters as well as its knockers” (p. 11). The
“boosters” often have a nice, perhaps too-rosy picture of modernity in mind, while the “knockers” are
fighting, not quite a strawman, but a somewhat debased version of modernity. Dewey can, in a sense,
be seen as a kind of booster of one aspect of modernity – say, the advent of modern science.
Borgmann and Lyotard, on the other hand, could be interpreted as knockers of one or more aspects of
modernity, including some version of the aspect that Dewey has in mind.

Taylor also helps us keep a broader set of modern goods in view. Lyotard, for example, is clearly
motivated by a very acute, modern sense of justice. Taylor would likely point out that his sense of
justice has clear roots in modernity itself, and that his struggle for justice is in fact an essentially modern
project. Modernity is not only about the advent of modern science, then; it is also about the struggle for
justice. What complicates matters further is that some of the applications of modern science have led to
massive injustices on an unprecedented scale. This is just one example of the contradictions that arise
between two aspects of Western modernity. In fact, there are of course more than two major aspects.
For the purposes of this essay, I want to distinguish between four aspects of Western modernity:
economic modernization, the struggle for justice, Romantic individualism, and naturalism.

Briefly, economic modernization captures Borgmann’s reference to the domination of nature and
to methodological universalism, but refers more broadly to a conception of the world that places
economic activity and efficiency at its centre and is concerned with endowing individuals with the
practical skill of problem-solving, among others. The struggle for justice refers to the emergence and
promotion on a wide scale of a certain understanding of a family of concepts, such as liberty, equality,
democracy, and justice, and of practices and institutions that are meant to embody them. Romantic
individualism is concerned with the feelings of the individual, with their authentic freedom and self-
expression. Finally, the sensibilities associated with naturalism involve a kind of reverence for nature, as
the object of either Romantic or scientific piety and awe. There are no doubt other ways of dividing up
Western modernity, and perhaps there are even other aspects, but already this four-fold picture gets us
beyond the relatively narrow conceptions offered by Dewey and upon which Waddington relies.3

I want to suggest that these four aspects of Western modernity shape Dewey himself, as well as
historical and contemporary readings of his work. Applying this four-fold picture to Dewey’s writings
and to the secondary literature on him will help us get a better sense of the relationship between Dewey
and modernity, and offer some insight into how we should approach him today.

3 I offer a similar four-fold account of Western modernity, but in more detail, in a forthcoming article in
Educational Theory, entitled “A Transitional Conception of Modernity for Education.”

Ilya Zrudlo 225

Mapping Out the Different Faces of Dewey

In his celebrated history of competing efforts to reform the American curriculum between the end of
the nineteenth century and the middle of the twentieth, Herbert Kliebard (2004) identifies four
“interest groups”: the humanists, who were trying to retain some version of the traditional academic
curriculum; the social efficiency group, who were concerned with making education more efficient and
tailoring it to the workforce needs of society; the social reconstructionists, who emphasized the radical
role of education in the transformation of society; and the child development reformers, who
promoted a child-centred pedagogy. Kliebard’s interest groups resonate with the aspects of Western
modernity that I distinguished above: economic modernization is related to the social efficiency group;
social reconstruction could be seen as part of the broader struggle for justice; and Romantic
individualism is clearly connected to the aims of the child development group. Kliebard would
probably have included naturalism among the ideas associated with the child development group, but I
have separated it out.4

Now, Dewey’s academic career spans almost the entirety of the 65-year period Kliebard (2004)
reviews in his book (1893–1958; Dewey began writing in the 1880s and passed away in 1952). But
where does he fit in this categorization of interest groups? In the preface to the first edition of his
book, Kliebard mentions that he was initially “puzzled as to where [Dewey] belonged in the context of
the interest groups” (p. xix). He eventually decided that Dewey “did not belong in any of them and that
he should appear in the book as somehow hovering over the struggle rather than as belonging to any
particular side” (ibid).

I agree with Kliebard that Dewey does not fit neatly into any of the four interest groups, which
persist today under different guises. However, he is often taken to be a member of one or more of the
latter three groups (social efficiency, social reconstruction, or child development). Those who take
Dewey to fall into one or more of these three groups sometimes do so in order to bolster the efforts of
those groups, with whom they themselves also identify. For example, a social reconstructionist might
read Dewey as a social reconstructionist, recruiting Dewey to his team; such a reader would
recommend Dewey to us as a solution to problems besetting modern education. Alternatively,
educators may take Dewey to be a member of one of these groups as a way of blaming him (and the
group in question) for the current (sorry) state of education. For instance, people have read Dewey as a
mere promoter of social efficiency and thereby blame him (and others of his ilk) for current neoliberal
trends in education; for these readers, Dewey is of no use to modern education and may even be
harmful to read. We have, then, both boosters and knockers of Dewey – but they often have different
Deweys in mind, and sometimes they have a rather superficial version of him in their sights.

My thesis here is that, while Dewey does not fit neatly into any of the three groups (or four
aspects of Western modernity), his work reflects elements of each. Depending, then, on what features
of Dewey’s work one focuses on, or what one assumes about modernity, one will see a different
Dewey. I show below that there are four modern “faces” of Dewey – Dewey as engineer, Dewey as
activist, Dewey as Romantic, and Dewey as naturalist – each of which offers some genuine insight into
his position, but none of which is complete by itself.

Dewey As Engineer

Dewey wrote a great deal about the scientific method, about experimentation, and what he called the
method of intelligence, and argued that we needed to extend these ways of being, doing, and knowing
to other realms beyond science and industry, in order to increase “social control” (Dewey, 1916/2001,
p. 38). Education, of course, should strengthen the ability of students to think, a process which was

4 David Labaree (2004) identifies “pedagogical naturalism” as one of the core elements of progressive, child-
centred education (pp. 138–140).

226 Philosophical Inquiry in Education

described in Dewey’s popular text How We Think (1910/1997). One of the ways in which schools could
do this, he argued, was by means of teaching children through occupations: a kind of learning by doing.
This would also help them better understand some of the profound industrial developments of modern
society. On one occasion, he said that “We may fairly enough call educational practice a kind of social
engineering” (Dewey, 1929, p. 39).5

This is one of the faces of Dewey: “Dewey as engineer.” It is, of course, a rather selective reading
of Dewey, but it exists, and it has both boosters and knockers. Among the boosters, we have a number
of early twentieth-century educators concerned with social efficiency, some of whom would later be
labelled “administrative progressives” (Tyack, 1974). One of these was Paul Hanna, one of the
founding members of the John Dewey Society, who produced a very successful series of social studies
textbooks (Condliffe-Lagemann, 2002; Stallones, 2002; Tanner, 1991). It appears that Hanna’s
textbooks replaced the more social reconstructionist–aligned texts that had been in circulation.
Waddington (2020) describes Hanna as a “socially conservative” (p. 27) administrative progressive; a
fan of Dewey, then, but one who seems to have selectively drawn on Dewey largely for his own
purposes. John Rudolph (2005) has also shown how publishers of school science textbooks drew on
How We Think, particularly Dewey’s famous list of steps in the process of thinking in order to illustrate
the scientific method. Henry Cowles (2020) argues that these authors ended up largely simplifying
Dewey’s account of thinking, reducing the scientific method to a linear series of steps.

Others share this reading of Dewey as engineer, but, instead of championing him, are critical of
his work (the “knockers”). Eamonn Callan (1990), for example, has argued that Dewey may have been
insufficiently (or intermittently) critical of corporate capitalism, since he “stressed the value of
education in improving productivity and creating more discriminating consumers” (p. 89). In Callan’s
view, due to ambiguities and tensions in Dewey’s own writings, it is quite legitimate to conclude that
one of the main purposes of education for Dewey was to prepare an adaptable workforce by endowing
students with qualities needed by corporations, such as initiative and industry. The focus Dewey placed
on occupations, Callan suggested, was in part in order to foster some of these qualities of the adaptable
employee. Waddington (2008), however, has disputed these claims. He has argued that Callan’s
arguments rely on questionable textual evidence and that there are many indications that Dewey was not
a partisan for corporate America. While there is some truth to Callan’s account, then, it may lack
nuance.

Is “Dewey as engineer,” then, a myth? Are the boosters and knockers of this “face of Dewey”
simply bad readers? “Dewey as engineer” is not, in fact, a myth, but more of a caricature. And, like any
caricature, it emphasizes certain elements that can genuinely be found in the original. And some of
these elements are good, while others are less desirable. With regard to the positive elements, one
example can be found in Waddington’s discussion of Callan’s arguments. Waddington (2008) concedes
Callan’s point that Dewey felt that students should develop qualities such as initiative and industry,

5 The context of this quote, which is pulled from The Sources of a Science of Education (1929), is a broader discussion
of the relationship between education, as an art and science, to other sciences, such as psychology and sociology.
Dewey is comparing education to engineering in the sense that engineering is also an art and science that draws
from other sciences (physics, etc.) to refine its practice (e.g., to build better bridges). If one reads a little further, it
becomes immediately clear that Dewey does not have a mechanistic conception of educational practice (or
engineering) in mind; that is, he is sharply critical of formulaic recipes for educational practice. And yet, that
Dewey unflinchingly used a term like “social engineering” to describe education makes it easy for selective readers
to see this particular “face.” In “Education as Engineering” (1922a), he also compared education and engineering,
but his focus here is the disanalogy between the two: namely, that engineering relies on well-established sciences,
whereas education’s “source sciences” are at a much earlier stage of development. In this context, then, Dewey
warns against approaching educational practice in the same way as engineers today approach their work.
However, it is important to note that, even here, his concern is not with engineering per se – he has only praise
for the art and science of bridge-building – but with the immature state of education and its source sciences,
which means that treating it as a kind of engineering is premature.

Ilya Zrudlo 227

along with creativity and cooperation, all of which might be useful to employers, while pointing out
that even if these qualities are compatible with corporate goals, this does not mean Dewey shared those
goals (p. 61). I would add that those same qualities are in fact desirable aims of education – though not
the only ones, of course. In fact, if education today is to help students address contemporary challenges
(e.g., the environmental crisis), surely it needs to endow them with many of the qualities of a hard
worker: diligence, perseverance, initiative, resourcefulness, etc. One needs these kinds of qualities to be
a good worker, yes, but also to be good at nearly anything worthwhile. In this sense, we need Dewey
the engineer.

On the negative side, while there is little to no evidence that Dewey was an uncritical supporter
of laissez-faire capitalism, there is a more subtle form of materialism at work in his thought. The so-
called London School philosophers of education – for example, R. S. Peters, Paul Hirst, etc. – were the
most sensitive to this flaw in Dewey, though it must be said that some of them exaggerated this
problem or dismissed Dewey too swiftly as a result. Their basic contention was that Dewey did not give
objects of knowledge enough independent value and that, perhaps as a consequence of this, he over-
emphasized method. While they acknowledged and agreed with many of his critiques of foundationalist
epistemology, they worried that a purely pragmatic theory of knowledge did not contain the resources
required to effectively help us understand how students and objects of knowledge might effectively
interact. “The object must be left room to do its part” (p. 14), as Anthony Quinton (1977) put it in an
essay on Dewey’s theory of knowledge.6 Regarding method more specifically, Hirst (1974) had the
following to say: Dewey “considered the methods of enquiry found in science to be the foundation of
all knowledge and thus wanted above all that pupils should master, not a subject, but the fundamentals
of scientific method as he saw these” (p. 129). Hirst continued: “But if we take a wider view of what is
to be learnt, even within science, we may well question whether the methodology of scientific
discovery, assuming there is such a thing, should provide the bases of a general teaching method”
(ibid).

More recently, Paul Fairfield (2009) has echoed the concerns of the London School, but in the
context of a more charitable reading of Dewey. Fairfield points out that, especially later in his career,
Dewey certainly emphasized the importance of educational content. It was not all about method for
Dewey, though certain passages can certainly be read in this way. Nevertheless, Fairfield (2009) still
perceives a lingering tendency in Dewey – perhaps especially in his early writings – to overemphasize
scientific method in his account of experience (pp. 82–83) and to collapse all thinking into scientific
thinking (pp. 134–136). In order to remedy these deficiencies, he suggests supplementing Dewey’s
thinking with insights gleaned from Hans-Georg Gadamer and Martin Heidegger. Fairfield thinks it a
pity that these thinkers did not interact with one another, since he sees many affinities between
pragmatism and phenomenology. Gadamer’s insights help broaden Dewey’s concept of experience,
emphasizing the responsiveness side of it, while Heidegger helps us consider a more diverse range of
ways of thinking, all valid, but some of which cannot be placed under the umbrella of experimental
inquiry.

There is, then, a degree of truth in the portrayal of Dewey as “engineer.” And this face of
Dewey’s comes with both strengths and weaknesses. But it is far from Dewey’s only face.

Dewey As Activist

The second face of Dewey is Dewey as activist. The organizing concept of his activism was, of course,
his rather peculiar notion of democracy, which famously takes as its criteria the following two
questions: “How numerous and varied are the interests which are consciously shared? How full and

6 Paddy Walsh (1993) offers a version of this critique. He points out that if Dewey insists that objects of
experience can have no value independent of ourselves, then “whence, in particular, the principle of impartiality
that is implicit in is support for democracy?” (p. 109).

228 Philosophical Inquiry in Education

free is the interplay with other forms of association?” (Dewey, 1916/2001, p. 87). For Dewey, social
and political modernization was an ongoing process of democratization. In this sense, the democratic
revolution was very much still a work in progress, which education should serve. He writes the
following in 1937:

The end of democracy is a radical end. For it is an end that has not been adequately realized in
any country at any time. It is radical because it requires great change in existing social
institutions, economic, legal and cultural. A democratic liberalism that does not recognize these
things in thought and action is not awake to its own meaning and to what that meaning
demands. (Dewey, 1937/2021, p. 22)

The boosters of Dewey the activist find solutions to modern social and political problems in his
writings. Robert Westbrook (1993), for example, charts Dewey’s increasingly participatory democratic
ideas over the course of his life, and recommends this vision to contemporary thinkers. For Westbrook,
Dewey is the American philosopher of participatory democracy. Though he cautions against “an
uncritical or wholesale recovery of Dewey’s philosophy,” he concludes his book by stating that “we
could do worse than to turn to John Dewey for a full measure of the wisdom we will need to work our
way out of the wilderness of the present” (p. 552). More recently, Sarah Stitzlein (2019) has drawn on
Dewey’s pragmatist conception of hope, arguing that it should be taught in schools in order to cultivate
hopeful citizen-activists who can contribute to addressing the contemporary crisis of democracy. For
these boosters, Dewey’s thought is immensely relevant to our struggles today to bring about a more just
and democratic society.

As for the knockers, they exist along the entire political spectrum. Conservatives have long
painted Dewey as a kind of radical socialist, or at least as an enemy of old-fashioned liberalism
(Waddington, 2008, p. 51). Rawlsian liberals have also taken issue with him, arguing, for example, that
his vision for democracy cannot be taught in public schools because it amounts to a comprehensive
doctrine, and therefore teaching it would amount to coercion by suppressing reasonable pluralism
(Aikin & Talisse, 2017, pp. 100–108).7 In a similar vein, Callan (1981) argues that Dewey’s philosophy
of education is ultimately illiberal because he does not “adequately appreciate the value of human
individuality” (p. 175). Further left, there are many who feel Dewey is not enough of an activist or cannot
help us out of our current political crisis, because he is, for example, insufficiently attentive to vital
social issues such as racism (e.g., Peters, 2020).

Again, these divergent readings of “Dewey as activist” tell us something about the readers
themselves, while also revealing certain tensions in Dewey’s account – tensions that are deeply
ingrained in Western modernity. The boosters of Dewey as activist tend to be attracted to his relative
emphasis on the collective – that we need to learn to work together cooperatively and to deliberate with
one another – and his concomitant condemnation of the “old” individualism – sometimes associated
with corporate capitalism. Knockers, on the other hand, have worries about the character of the social
unity that Dewey envisions. Does he mean uniformity? Aren’t difference and even conflict an essential
part of social and political life? What about the freedom of the individual or the rights of various
minority groups?

It would be difficult to argue that Dewey wanted to supress individuality as such. A cursory look
at an essay such as “Individuality in Education” (1922b) cures one of such an impression, which some
of Dewey’s critics may harbour. He called the principle of individuality “the measure of whatever is
elevating in the rank of life in spiritual, moral and intellectual beings” (p. 171). Dewey abhorred
uniformity and was a relentless critic of the way in which schools fostered it, even inadvertently,
imposing a single and rigid way of doing things on all pupils. He exhorted teachers to pay attention to

7 I should note that Aikin & Talisse (2017) do, however, find some insights worth preserving in Dewey’s political
theory. They are not, therefore, proper “knockers” in a strict sense.

Ilya Zrudlo 229

the unique individuality of each student as opposed to imposing a single method on all (see, for
example, “The classroom teacher,” 1922c, pp. 180–189). And yet, he thought that true individuality
(which was not to be confused with conceit or doing whatever one pleases) could only be fostered in a
truly social context: “Only in social groups does a person have a chance to develop individuality”
(Dewey, 1922b, p. 176). He goes on: “In the community life of the ideal sort, the family marked by a
spirit of unity, the town, or the nation, the more you have of real social unity the more diversity, the
more division of labor, and the more differentiation of operation there is” (ibid, p. 176). As many have
pointed out, Dewey’s “organic” strategy for reconciling the individual and the collective is partially a
result of his somewhat naturalized Hegelianism (e.g., Feinberg, 1993).

Richard Bernstein (2010), following Westbrook, argues that Dewey eventually moved beyond the
Hegelian image of the harmonious social organism, incorporating struggle and conflict into his picture
of social progress. Bernstein describes Dewey’s position as a middle way between a naïve or hegemonic
commitment to frictionless organic totality and an all-out agonism that cannot interpret social life as
anything but a naked contest of wills (pp. 84–85). Feinberg (1993), however, insists that there remain
tensions in Dewey’s thought between his residual Hegelian commitment to individual self-realization
through social cooperation and the political thought and action of the New Left. I agree with Feinberg
here that these tensions are real. At issue are fundamental questions about the purpose or aim(s) of
justice and the kind of unity we envision moral and social progress is directed at – questions that
Dewey said little about.

Dewey’s wariness about “ends,” and his focus instead on “method” (notice Dewey the engineer
intruding), complicates matters. It is an open question whether the ends pursued by contemporary
activists are compatible with Dewey’s notion of “ends-in-view” and his emphasis on method. Kliebard
(2004) gets to the heart of the issue in the following passage:

For both Dewey and Bode, the road to social progress was much more closely tied to the
ability of the schools to teach independent thinking and to the ability of students to analyze and
to address social problems than it was to an organized effort designed to redress predetermined
social evils. (p. 166)8

And yet, Dewey did, in a sense, “predetermine” some “social evils” in his own writings – for
example, the “old individualism” of corporate capitalism. This is part of his attraction for the boosters.
As for the knockers, some feel that he should have been even more circumspect (if their sense of
justice is more attuned to pluralism and liberty), while others argue that his list of social evils is timid
and incomplete, showing an inadequate commitment to social justice.

On the one hand, Dewey seems to offer certain ideas and tools that can fuel activism. On the
other hand, his muteness on certain questions sometimes makes him an inconsistent or unreliable ally.
He placed his hope in certain methods (scientific, democratic) that would lead to moral and social
progress but was relatively vague when it came to describing what progress would consist of. In this
sense, he is quintessentially modern: firmly committed to and hopeful about progress but worried that
substantive accounts of the ends we seek might rigidify into oppressive certainties. The latter sensibility
is often labelled postmodern, but, at least in Charles Taylor’s analysis of Western modernity, it is better
understood as a quintessentially modern concern, stemming from our modern sensitivity to injustice –
in this case a kind of epistemic injustice, in which our professed certainties prevent further inquiry and
progress, and impose limits on freedom of thought and action.

8 Boyd Bode was a disciple of Dewey’s from Ohio State University (Kliebard, 2004, p. 164). Fairfield (2009)
echoes this same idea: that Dewey was more interested in teaching students to think independently than
inculcating them into a particular ideology (pp. 233–256).

230 Philosophical Inquiry in Education

I have pointed out two tensions in Dewey’s work, emblematic of Western modernity, that are at
play in the differing readings of Dewey as activist: the tension between the individual and the collective
and the tension between a positive conception of progress and the fear of certainties.

Dewey As Romantic

Romanticism did not enter explicitly into Dewey’s conception of modernity, which was more focused
on science, industry, and democracy. And yet, he was astutely aware of it and at times discussed it in his
writings – sometimes favourably, at other times critically (e.g., Dewey, 1925/1958, pp. 117–118). For a
number of reasons, which I will explore below, he has often been classified as a Romantic. This is yet
another face of Dewey’s.

From early on in Dewey’s career until today, there have been boosters and knockers of a rather
superficial version of Dewey as Romantic. The familiar account states that Dewey’s pedagogy is child-
centred, that he thought educational content should not be imposed on children, that we should instead
base it on their needs and interests, and that educators should take into account the whole child.
Passages such as the following are often held up (out of context) in this connection:

The child’s own instincts and powers furnish the material and give the starting point for all
education. Save as the efforts of the educator connect with some activity which the child is
carrying on of his own initiative independent of the educator, education becomes reduced to a
pressure from without. (Dewey, 1897/2018, p. 36)

Isolating such passages from their immediate context makes Dewey appear completely in line

with the typical rallying cries of progressive educators, the roots of which can be traced back to
Romanticism (Labaree, 2004, pp. 140–141). This superficial version of Dewey as Romantic is embraced
by some and criticized by others. In reality, this superficial version is a very bad caricature of Dewey’s
actual views, especially as laid out in Experience and Education (1938), which was written partially in
response to what Dewey saw as certain extremes to which child-centred progressive education had
gone. In fact, Dewey was wary of Romantic tendencies in education from the very outset of his career
(Waddington, 2010).

However, we cannot brush away the reading of Dewey as Romantic. There is some truth here –
it is genuinely one of Dewey’s faces – but we need to look to more sophisticated readings of Dewey in
order to get there. Though there are several (e.g., Goodman, 1990), I will focus on Naoko Saito’s
(2005) since she is more explicitly concerned with education.

Saito (2005) argues that there is a “recessive, Emersonian dimension in Dewey’s pragmatism” (p.
3), which she brings out more explicitly and fully by putting Dewey into conversation with Emerson
himself and Stanley Cavell. She acknowledges some of the typical critiques of Dewey’s pragmatism
(e.g., that it is overly optimistic and therefore naïve, that it is too reliant on narrow techno-scientific
rationality, and that it is too naturalistic to serve as a guide for education) but then goes on to argue that
Dewey offers a vision of Emersonian moral perfectionism that is a viable path for education, even in
our neoliberal age. Emersonian moral perfectionism involves a kind of self-reliance that is not selfishly
individualistic but rather relies on an openness and receptivity to the other. From this perspective,
“education is the patient process of the conversion of the human spirit” (p. 142). Saito argues that
Dewey’s conception of intelligence was broader than scientific problem-solving and can be better
characterized as creative intelligence (p. 146). Saito argues for a “transcendence from within” (p. 161),
which involves rediscovering our personal “gleam of light” – a recurring metaphor in her book.

What is attractive in Saito’s reading is what is brought out by the focusing of our attention on the
“aesthetic” side of Dewey, which we find especially in Art as Experience (1934b) and in Experience and
Nature (1925), but also in earlier work, such as the essay “Imagination and Expression” (1896). In many
ways, this side of Dewey is in tension with Dewey as engineer, and, as we will see below, with Dewey as

Ilya Zrudlo 231

naturalist. The notion of “responsiveness to the other,” which Saito maintains can be found in Dewey,
is particularly valuable for education. It helps remedy some of the concerns of the London School,
which I mentioned above, that Dewey did not give objects of knowledge themselves enough reality –
that is, did not leave enough room for the element of receptivity that is necessary for learning to occur. In
other words, the image of the Baconian scientist, intent on social efficiency and control, is now
moderated or complemented via Dewey the Romantic artist, alive to the currents of nature within and
without. Questions no doubt remain about the compatibility of these two images, but it is clear that this
element of responsiveness is a strength.

As for limitations, I will mention only one here. While Saito draws our attention to the Romantic
in Dewey, she retains the Deweyan worry about fixed ends. Emersonian moral perfectionism, following
Cavell, “is characterized by ‘goallessness’; it refuses final perfectibility” (2005, p. 53). While I readily
agree that we should think of perfectionism as an infinite process, which will never reach final
perfectibility, I wonder whether it is possible to still hold onto the notion of perfectionism without
some teleological or quasi-teleological idea of perfection as the “goal,” or perhaps the “direction,” even
if perfection is ultimately unattainable. Iris Murdoch (1970) suggests the following in this connection:

The idea of perfection moves, and possibly changes, us (as artist, worker, agent) because it
inspires love in the part of us that is most worthy. One cannot feel unmixed love for a
mediocre moral standard any more than one can for the work of a mediocre artist. The idea of
perfection is also a natural producer of order. In its light we come to see that A, which
superficially resembles B, is really better than B. And this can occur, indeed must occur,
without our having the sovereign idea in any sense “taped.” In fact it is in its nature that we
cannot get it taped. This is the true sense of the “indefinability” of the good; which was given a
vulgar sense by Moore and his followers. It lies always beyond, and it is from this beyond that it
exercises its authority. (pp. 60–61)

It seems to me that Dewey was worried that the “authority” exercised by a “good” envisioned as
“external” would become tyrannical. But this only happens if we become possessed by the hubris that
we can “tape” the good, as Murdoch puts it, or define it fully and completely. That is the road to the
foundationalism that Dewey rightly abhors.

I want to suggest that Dewey as Romantic was in fact sensitive to the idea of perfection. He
struggled for pages and pages in his later works to try to articulate the mechanism through which we
are drawn forward by this sensitivity, without trying to cede any ground to the foundationalist. But the
full acknowledgment of what this sensitivity entails leads one inevitably to the conclusion that there
exist “objects” outside of oneself that exert a rational and moral influence upon us. This conclusion
does not sit very well with at least some versions of pragmatism, nor Dewey’s naturalism, to which I
now turn.

Dewey As Naturalist

Darwin’s influence on Dewey is pervasive. This influence is at the root of the fourth face of Dewey:
Dewey as naturalist. Though the precise nature of Dewey’s naturalism is difficult to pin down, we can
easily point to some of its telling features: his insistence that we should understand human beings and
society as continuous with nature, therefore urging that the scientific method be employed to study the
former as well; his refusal to countenance any kind of dualisms in reality (e.g., the dualism of mind and
body); the naturalistic piety that emerges from A Common Faith (1934a; see, for example, p. 53); and, as
has been mentioned already, his suspicion of the existence of anything – be it God, Plato’s Forms,
natural laws, etc. – transcending “nature” (i.e., supernatural), or perhaps “experience.” Here is a short
passage (among many) in which Dewey describes a few elements of his version of naturalism:

232 Philosophical Inquiry in Education

“Naturalism” is a word with all kinds of meanings. But a naturalism which perceives that man
with his habits, institutions, desires, thoughts, aspirations, ideals and struggles, is within nature,
an integral part of it, has the philosophical foundation and the practical inspiration for effort to
employ nature as an ally of human ideals and goods such as no dualism can possibly provide.
(Dewey, 1930/1984, p. 74)

There are many boosters of Dewey as naturalist among philosophers, Richard Rorty being one of

the most well-known, though most of these thinkers are interested in epistemology or philosophy of
mind. In relation to education specifically, Eilon Schwartz (2010) has offered a spirited reconstruction
and defense of Dewey’s Darwinism. Part of his reconstruction involves recovering what he sees as a
quasi-Aristotelian strand in Dewey’s thinking, in which “the good” for human beings has to do with
what is good for us as a species: a kind of harmonious and evolving development of our natural
instincts into habits that are conducive to growth and the social cohesion of the whole.9 The emphasis
here is on the element of sociability in our nature – this element is what is “fit” at this stage in our
development as a species. Though Dewey was wary of any form of essentialism when it came to human
nature, he was certainly emphatic that we are ultimately social beings. Our good, then, is found in our
identification with the greater whole of which we are a part: the human collective, but also more
broadly with nature itself. Education should help children develop this identification, which is
ultimately the democratic ideal. In doing so, culture was not an enemy, but an ally: a rich deposit of
habits that had evolved over time and should be mined for gems that are of use today. This, in any
case, is Schwartz’s take.

While acknowledging that Dewey was a naturalist, other scholars take issue with this element of
his thought. Some have pointed out, for example, that despite his naturalism, Dewey “was notably
insensitive and unresponsive to the environmental discourse of his own time” (Thompson & Piso,
2019, p. 717). Another important critique is that Dewey is simply inconsistent: that he is not enough of a
naturalist or did not carry his naturalism to its logical conclusion. These critics take issue with what they
see as Dewey’s lingering anthropocentrism. David Blacker (2019), for example, suggests that Dewey’s
secular humanism is “an apotheosis of anthropocentrism that seems subject to a flaw as deep as that of
which it accuses religion: it does not account for its own normative underpinnings” (p. 169). Blacker
points out that it is arbitrary for Dewey, given his commitment to naturalism, to “single out ‘humanity’
as the primary object of moral concern” (p. 170). Blacker seems to be more inclined towards the kind
of post-humanist naturalism that widens the circle of moral concern to include animals, plants, and
nature as a whole. One issue here, of course, is the very definition of naturalism as a position and what
it entails precisely.

Once again, both boosters and knockers offer relevant insights. Blacker is right that if we hold
Dewey strictly to (at least some versions of) naturalism, he may become inconsistent, unable to justify
his moral focus on humanity (and his relative neglect of environmental issues). I think Schwartz knows
this, and that is why he tries to detect and amplify an Aristotelian element in Dewey – a kind of
evolving, species-level telos that can ground educational aims. One of the important strengths in
Schwartz’s account is his foregrounding the idea of sociability and the need for us to develop, through
education, a commitment to the well-being of the whole.

Schwartz’s Dewey offers important insights. But even if we brush off Blacker’s critique,
important issues remain, one of which I will mention here. Feinberg (1993) notes that Dewey operated
under the assumption that there was a fundamental continuity between nature and ethics. He goes on
to say that “it is not clear whether [Dewey] has reduced ethics to nature or elevated nature to ethics” (p.
204). I think Dewey tried to do both, elevating nature above a crude, reductive materialism, but also
reducing ethics to a strictly this-worldly enterprise. I agree that we should avoid placing a disenchanted
nature and a purely supernatural ethics in opposition to one another. The Deweyan insight that ethics is

9 This could also be seen as a Hegelian motif, given Hegel’s indebtedness to aspects of Aristotle’s thought.

Ilya Zrudlo 233

not “supernatural” – in the sense that it is not “unreal” or divorced from everyday reality – is a helpful
one. However, there are dangers associated with the naturalization of ethics. For example, we may
inadvertently distort the extent to which acting ethically may in some cases demand that we resist
aspects of our nature – say, our self-centred inclinations. There is not much room in Dewey’s picture
for the existence of, for instance, what Murdoch (1970) called our “fat relentless ego” (p. 52). True, the
communitarian character of Dewey’s social philosophy may guard against some of the intrusions of this
ego, but it seems to me that Dewey’s conceptual tools – though admittedly very good at excising
certain pernicious dichotomies – are somewhat clumsy instruments when it comes to understanding the
inner dimension of our ethical lives (Schwartz, 2010, p. 74). I wonder, for instance, how Dewey would
parse “purity of intention,” an obviously important dimension of our ethical lives.

Reading Dewey Today

I have argued that Dewey has at least four faces: the engineer, the activist, the Romantic, and the
naturalist. Each of these faces has been celebrated and critiqued. Sometimes, the commentary is
directed at a rather superficial version of the “face” – at a caricatured mask, as it were. More
sophisticated defenders and critics of Dewey, however, are able to move beyond these superficial
versions and point to true strengths and weaknesses in Dewey’s account. Some of these weaknesses, I
want to suggest, arise from the difficulties associated with bringing together the various faces, which
can be conceived of as aspects of Western modernity. It is hard to combine, for example, Romantic
transcendentalism with pragmatism and naturalism. And yet I think this is what Dewey was, in a sense,
after: he was trying to blend together important ideas he inherited from Western modernity, plus a few
of his own convictions, into a coherent whole. Does this mean Dewey is of no use to us today, as we
struggle under the weight of myriad problems, many of which appear to derive more or less directly
from Western modernity? Again, we need to avoid the extremes of the boosters and the knockers.
Dewey is neither our saviour, nor is he at the heart of the problem.

I will offer two reasons here why I think Dewey is still important to engage with today in
philosophy of education: (1) his capacious vision of the diversity of goods that we should keep in view
in educational theory and practice, and (2) his distinctively educational philosophy.

Dewey’s Capacious Vision of the Goods of Western Modernity

Charles Taylor (1989) complains that “Modernity is often read through its least impressive, most
trivializing offshoots” (p. 511), and that this kind of reading “distorts” (ibid). Critics may point, for
instance, to a superficial version of Dewey the engineer and throw him in with the neoliberals. This
distorts Dewey. Taylor suggests that “we have to avoid the error of declaring those goods invalid
whose exclusive pursuit leads to contemptible or disastrous consequences” (ibid). There may be certain
ideas or values (or “goods,” in Taylor’s terminology) that Dewey emphasized which, if exclusively
pursued, would certainly lead to negative consequences. For example, his placing value on the child’s
experience can certainly lead to well-known extremes in progressive education if pursued exclusively
(extremes which he himself pointed to in Experience and Education). But this only shows, Taylor argues,
that the good in question “needs to be part of a ‘package,’ to be sought within a life which is also aimed
at other goods” (ibid). Sometimes we feel that we are caught in a dilemma, between what are perceived
as rival goods. “But a dilemma doesn’t invalidate the rival goods. On the contrary, it presupposes
them” (ibid).

Dewey is so interesting, and still very relevant today, in part because he tends to avoid this trap
that Taylor highlights: of invalidating seemingly rival goods. His Hegelian instinct to overcome various
dualisms is part of this. That he brings together so many different goods is one reason why there are so

234 Philosophical Inquiry in Education

many contradictory readings of Dewey (i.e., the various faces). Many readings will focus on how Dewey
took up one particular set of goods, without paying much attention to his inclusion of others. But
Dewey had a capacious vision of the various goods that an adequate philosophy of education needs to
take up or keep in view. Bringing all of these pieces together into a coherent “package” is, of course, no
easy task. And Dewey did not do this perfectly, as my analysis above suggests. No doubt, there are
certain goods that fall outside even Dewey’s capacious vision (e.g., our responsibility for the natural
environment), and there may be better ways of bringing them together coherently (e.g., the idea of
“growth” has its limitations). Nevertheless, we can certainly learn a great deal from his attempt.

Dewey’s Distinctively Educational Philosophy

A second reason why Dewey should still retain an important place in educational theory is that his
philosophy as a whole is distinctively educational. Dewey (1916/2001) famously wrote that “If we are
willing to conceive education as the process of forming fundamental dispositions, intellectual and
emotional, toward nature and fellow-men, philosophy may even be defined as the general theory of
education” (p. 336). Philip Kitcher (2019), commenting on this passage and related ones, suggests that,
for Dewey, “The end result of philosophical practice is to be the translation of its deliverances into
educational insights, so that contemporaries … may re-form their fundamental dispositions for the
better and so that the children of the future may have greater opportunities for living valuable lives” (p.
8).

That Dewey even paid attention to education makes him somewhat of an anomaly. In general,
the Anglo-American philosophical tradition, particularly its dominant, analytic strand, has sorely
neglected education. After pointing out a few notable exceptions (R. S. Peters, etc.), David Bakhurst
(2020) suggests a number of reasons for this neglect: (1) the lingering influence of early modern
individualistic approaches to mind that downplayed the role of socialization; (2) a dichotomy between
the conceptual and the empirical, education being relegated to the latter sphere; (3) the popularity of a
pernicious form of naturalism that reduces education; (4) over-specialization among philosophers,
which makes them wary of a naturally interdisciplinary field such as education; and (5) the male-
dominated nature of the field, which might cause disinterest in the development of children (p. 256).
Dewey, on the contrary, criticized individualistic approaches to epistemology and philosophy of mind,
wove the conceptual and practical together in his conception of experience, set aside reductive forms of
naturalism, wrote in every major area of philosophy, and took great interest in the growth of children.
That Dewey did not succumb to any of these prejudices marks him out.

Beyond simply addressing the topic of education or applying some philosophical concepts to the
field of education, Dewey conceived of philosophy itself as intertwined with education. The concept of
education was, for Dewey, immensely central to philosophical reflection. In a similar vein, Bakhurst
(2020) argues that “It is hard to see how we can do epistemology, metaphysics and ethics – that is to
say, do philosophy – without having education in view” (p. 257). Further, drawing on the work of Russian
philosopher Evald Ilyenkov, he states that “‘education’ is the name not of some merely contingent
process of the transmission of knowledge and skills, but of a constitutive element of the human life-
form” (p. 257). I think Dewey would agree; and again, this view marks him out. While Bakhurst argues
that this insight has long been neglected due to the above-mentioned prejudices, he mentions that
things are beginning to change for the better. He suggests that “the time is ripe for a renewed
conversation between philosophers of education and those in the ‘mainstream,’ who are beginning to
perceive the philosophical importance of education” (p. 258). I think that Dewey, with his distinctively
educational philosophy, is an important reference point in this “renewed conversation.”

Ilya Zrudlo 235

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Kevin McDonough for guiding me through some of the literature on Dewey and for working
through an initial outline with me, and David Waddington for his generous feedback on an earlier version of the paper.
I am also grateful to have received useful comments from two anonymous reviewers, which helped strengthen the
article.

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About the Author

Ilya Zrudlo (ilya.zrudlo@gmail.com) is a PhD candidate in the Department of Integrated Studies in
Education at McGill University. His research explores the moral and political dimensions of modern
education. His interests include the philosophy of education, moral education, and youth and
community development. ORCID iD: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7787-9226.

European Journal of Education Studies
ISSN: 2501 – 1111

ISSN-L: 2501 – 1111

Available on-line at: www.oapub.org/edu

Copyright © The Author(s). All Rights Reserved 1

Published by Open Access Publishing Group ©2015.

dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.2009706 Volume 1│Issue 1│September 2015

JOHN DEWEY –

PHILOSOPHER AND EDUCATIONAL REFORMER

Kandan Talebi

Lecturer, Faculty of Education, Taiz University, Yemen

Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.”

John Dewey

Abstract

John Dewey was an American philosopher and educator, founder of the philosophical

movement known as pragmatism, a pioneer in functional psychology, and a leader of

the progressive movement in education in the United States.

Keywords: John Dewey, educational reform, functional psychology, pragmatism

Introduction

John Dewey was born on October 20,

1859, in Burlington, Vermont. He

graduated with a bachelor’s degree from
the University of Vermont in 1879. After

two years as a high-school teacher in Oil

City, Pennsylvania and one teaching

elementary school in the small town of

Charlotte, Vermont, Dewey decided that

he was unsuited for employment in

primary or secondary education. After

studying with George Sylvester Morris,

Charles Sanders Peirce, Herbert Baxter

Adams, and G. Stanley Hall, Dewey

received his Ph.D. from the School of Arts & Sciences at Johns Hopkins University. His

unpublished and now lost dissertation was titled “The Psychology of Kant.”

http://www.oapub.org/edu

http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.2009706

Kandan Talebi –

JOHN DEWEY, PHILOSOPHER AND EDUCATIONAL REFORMER

European Journal of Education Studies – Volume 1 │ Issue 1 │ 2015 2

He started teaching philosophy and psychology at the University of Michigan in

1884. In time, his interests progressively moved from the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm

Friedrich Hegel to the new experimental influences on psychology of G. Stanley Hall

and the pragmatist philosopher and psychologist William James. Additional study of

child psychology encouraged Dewey to develop a philosophy of education that would

encounter the requests of a new dynamic democratic society.

In 1894, he joined the faculty of philosophy at the University of Chicago, where

he further promoted his progressive pedagogy in the university’s Laboratory Schools.
In 1904, Dewey left Chicago for Columbia University in New York City, where he spent

the majority of his career and wrote his most famous philosophical work, Experience

and Nature (1925).

His succeeding writing, which comprised articles in popular publications,

treated subjects in education, aesthetics, politics, and religion. John Dewey also wrote

about many other topics including experience, nature, art, logic, inquiry, democracy,

and ethics. He served as a major stimulus for various allied philosophical movements

that designed the thought development of 20th century, including empiricism,

humanism, naturalism and contextualism. He ranks among the highest thinkers of his

age on the subjects of pedagogy, philosophy of mind, epistemology, logic and

philosophy of science, social and political theory. Being one of the leading psychological

and philosophical figures of his time, he was elected as the president of the American

Psychological Association and president of the American Philosophical Association in

1899 and 1905 respectively. Dewey published more than 700 articles in 140 journals and

approximately 40 books in his lifetime.

The main theme underlying Dewey’s philosophy was his belief that a democratic
society of informed and engaged inquirers was the best means of promoting human

interests. As Dewey himself stated in 1888, while still at the University of Michigan:

“Democracy and the one, ultimate, ethical ideal of humanity are to my mind

synonymous.”

Known for his advocacy of democracy, Dewey believed that two fundamental elements,

schools and civil society, to be major elements deserving consideration and

reconstruction in order to encourage experimental intelligence and plurality. Dewey

affirmed that complete democracy was to be gained not just by extending voting rights,

but also by ensuring that among voters exists a fully formed public opinion

accomplished by communication between citizens, experts, and politicians, with the

latter being accountable for the policies they adopt.

Life and works

In 1894, Dewey joined the newly founded University of Chicago (1894 1904) where he

developed his belief in Rational Empiricism, becoming associated with the newly

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emerging Pragmatic philosophy. His time at the University of Chicago resulted in four

essays collectively entitled Thought and its Subject-Matter, which was published with

collected works from his colleagues at Chicago under the collective title Studies in

Logical Theory (1903).

During that time, Dewey also initiated the University of Chicago Laboratory

Schools, where he was able to actualize the pedagogical beliefs that provided material

for his first major work on education, The School and Society (1899). Divergences with

the administration ultimately triggered his resignation from the University, and soon

thereafter, he relocated near the East Coast.

In 1899, Dewey was designated president of the American Psychological

Association. From 1904 until his retirement in 1930, he was professor of philosophy at

both Columbia University and Columbia University’s Teachers College.

In 1905, he became president of the American Philosophical Association. He was

a longtime member of the American Federation of Teachers.

Along with the historians Charles A. Beard and James Harvey Robinson, and the

economist Thorstein Veblen, Dewey is one of the founders of The New School. Dewey’s

most significant writings were “The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology” (1896), a critique of

a standard psychological concept and the basis of all his further work; Democracy and

Education (1916), his celebrated work on progressive education; Human Nature and

Conduct (1922), a study of the function of habit in human behavior; The Public and its

Problems (1927), a defense of democracy written in response to Walter Lippmann’s The

Phantom Public (1925); Experience and Nature” (1925), Dewey’s most “metaphysical”

statement; Art as Experience (1934), Dewey’s major work on aesthetics; A Common

Faith” (1934), a humanistic study of religion originally delivered as the Dwight H. Terry

Lectureship at Yale; Logic: The Theory of Inquiry” (1938), a statement of Dewey’s

unusual conception of logic; Freedom and Culture” (1939), a political work examining

the roots of fascism; and Knowing and the Known” (1949), a book written in conjunction

with Arthur F. Bentley that systematically outlines the concept of trans-action, which is

central to his other works. While each of these works emphases on one particular

philosophical theme, Dewey included his major themes in most of what he published.

Reflecting his immense influence on 20th-century thought, Hilda Neatby, in

1953, wrote:

“Dewey has been to our age what Aristotle was to the later Middle Ages, not a

philosopher, but the philosopher.”

At the University of Michigan, Dewey published his first two books, Psychology

(1887), and Leibniz’s New Essays Concerning the Human Understanding” (1888), both of

which expressed Dewey’s early commitment to British neo-Hegelianism. In Psychology,

Dewey attempted a synthesis between idealism and experimental science.

While still professor of philosophy at Michigan, Dewey and his junior colleagues,

James Hayden Tufts and George Herbert Mead, together with his student James

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Rowland Angell, all influenced strongly by the recent publication of William James’

Principles of Psychology (1890), began to reformulate psychology, emphasizing the

social environment on the activity of mind and behavior rather than the physiological

psychology of Wundt and his followers.

By 1894, Dewey had joined Tufts, with whom he would later write Ethics (1908), at

the recently founded University of Chicago and invited Mead and Angell to follow him,

the four men forming the basis of the so-called “Chicago group” of psychology.

Their new style of psychology, later dubbed functional psychology, had a

practical emphasis on action and application. In Dewey’s article “The Reflex Arc Concept

in Psychology” which appeared in Psychological Review in 1896, he reasons against the

traditional stimulus-response understanding of the reflex arc in favor of a “circular”

account in which what serves as “stimulus” and what as “response” depends on how one

considers the situation, and defends the unitary nature of the sensory motor circuit.

While he does not deny the existence of stimulus, sensation, and response, he disagreed

that they were separate, juxtaposed events happening like links in a chain. He

developed the idea that there is a coordination by which the stimulation is enriched by the

results of previous experiences . The response is modulated by sensorial experience.

Education and teacher education

Dewey’s educational theories were presented in My Pedagogic Creed (1897), The

School and Society (1900), The Child and the Curriculum” (1902), Democracy and

Education (1916) and Experience and Education (1938). Several themes repeat

throughout these writings. Dewey recurrently claims that education and learning are

social and interactive processes, and thus the school itself is a social institution through

which social reform can and should take place. In addition, he believed that students

thrive in an environment where they are allowed to experience and interact with the

curriculum, and all students should have the opportunity to take part in their own

learning.

The ideas of democracy and social reform are continually discussed in Dewey’s

writings on education. Dewey makes a strong case for the importance of education not

only as a place to gain content knowledge, but also as a place to learn how to live.

In his opinion, the main purpose of education should not revolve around the

acquisition of a pre-determined set of skills, but rather the realization of one’s full

potential and the ability to use those skills for the greater good.

He notes that:

“…to prepare him for the future life means to give him command of himself; it means so

to train him that he will have the full and ready use of all his capacities”

(My pedagogic creed, Dewey, 1897)

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In addition to helping students realize their full potential, Dewey goes on to

acknowledge that education and schooling are instrumental in creating social change

and reform.

He notes that:

“…education is a regulation of the process of coming to share in the social consciousness;

and that the adjustment of individual activity on the basis of this social consciousness is

the only sure method of social reconstruction”.

In addition to his ideas regarding what education is and what effect it should have on

society, Dewey had specific notions regarding how education should take place within

the classroom. In The Child and the Curriculum (1902), Dewey discusses two major

conflicting schools of thought regarding educational pedagogy. The first is centered on

the curriculum and focuses almost solely on the subject matter to be taught. Dewey

argues that the major flaw in this methodology is the inactivity of the student; within

this particular framework, “the child is simply the immature being who is to be matured; he is

the superficial being who is to be deepened” (1902, p. 13). He argues that in order for

education to be most effective, content must be presented in a way that allows the

student to relate the information to prior experiences, thus deepening the connection

with this new knowledge.

At the same time, Dewey was alarmed by many of the “child-centered” excesses of

educational-school pedagogues who claimed to be his followers, and he argued that too

much reliance on the child could be equally detrimental to the learning process. In this

second school of thought,

“…we must take our stand with the child and our departure from him. It is he and not

the subject-matter which determines both quality and quantity of learning”

(Dewey, 1902, p. 13 14)

According to Dewey, the potential flaw in this line of thinking is that it minimizes the

importance of the content as well as the role of the teacher.

In order to rectify this dilemma, Dewey encouraged for an educational

framework that strikes a balance between distributing knowledge while also

considering the interests and experiences of the student.

He notes that:

“…the child and the curriculum are simply two limits which define a single process. Just

as two points define a straight line, so the present standpoint of the child and the facts

and truths of studies define instruction”

(Dewey, 1902, p. 16)

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It is through this reasoning that Dewey became one of the most famous proponents of

hands-on learning or experiential education, which is related to, but not synonymous

with experiential learning.

He argued that:

“…if knowledge comes from the impressions made upon us by natural objects, it is

impossible to procure knowledge without the use of objects which impress the mind”

(Dewey, 1916/2009, pp. 217 218)

Dewey’s ideas went on to influence many other influential experiential models and

advocates. Problem-Based Learning (PBL), for example, a method used widely in

education today, incorporates Dewey’s ideas pertaining to learning through active

inquiry.

Dewey not only re-imagined the way that the learning process should take place,

but also the role that the teacher should play within that process. Throughout the

history of “merican schooling, education’s purpose has been to train students for work
by providing the student with a limited set of skills and information to do a particular

job. The works of John Dewey provide the most prolific examples of how this limited

vocational view of education has been applied to both the K-12 public education system

and to the teacher training schools who attempted to quickly produce proficient and

practical teachers with a limited set of instructional and discipline-specific skills needed

to meet the needs of the employer and demands of the workforce.

In The School and Society (Dewey, 1976) and Democracy of Education (Dewey,

1980), Dewey claims that rather than preparing citizens for ethical participation in

society, schools cultivate passive pupils via insistence upon mastery of facts and

disciplining of bodies. Rather than preparing students to be reflective, autonomous and

ethical beings capable of arriving at social truths through critical and intersubjective

discourse, schools prepare students for docile compliance with authoritarian work and

political structures, discourage the pursuit of individual and communal inquiry, and

perceive higher learning as a monopoly of the institution of education (Dewey, 1976;

1980).

For Dewey and his philosophical followers, education stifles individual

autonomy when learners are taught that knowledge is transmitted in one direction,

from the expert to the learner. Dewey not only re-imagined the way that the learning

process should take place, but also the role that the teacher should play within that

process.

For Dewey,

The thing needful is improvement of education, not simply by turning out teachers who

can do better the things that are not necessary to do, but rather by changing the

conception of what constitutes education

(Dewey, 1904, p. 18)

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Dewey’s qualifications for teaching a natural love for working with young children, a

natural propensity to inquire about the subjects, methods and other social issues related

to the profession, and a desire to share this acquired knowledge with others are not a

set of outwardly displayed mechanical skills. Rather, they may be viewed as

internalized principles or habits which work automatically, unconsciously (Dewey, 1904,

p. 15).

Turning to Dewey’s essays and public addresses regarding the teaching

profession, followed by his analysis of the teacher as a person and a professional, as

well as his beliefs regarding the responsibilities of teacher education programs to

cultivate the attributes addressed, teacher educators can begin to reimagine the

successful classroom teacher Dewey envisioned.

Professionalization of teaching as a social service

For many, education’s purpose is to train students for work by providing the student
with a limited set of skills and information to do a particular job. As Dewey notes, this

limited vocational view is also applied to teacher training schools who attempt to

quickly produce proficient and practical teachers with a limited set of instructional and

discipline skills needed to meet the needs of the employer and demands of the

workforce (Dewey, 1904). For Dewey, the school and the classroom teacher, as a

workforce and provider of a social service, have a unique responsibility to produce

psychological and social goods that will lead to both present and future social progress.

As Dewey notes:

“The business of the teacher is to produce a higher standard of intelligence in the

community, and the object of the public school system is to make as large as possible the

number of those who possess this intelligence. Skill, ability to act wisely and effectively in

a great variety of occupations and situations, is a sign and a criterion of the degree of

civilization that a society has reached. It is the business of teachers to help in producing

the many kinds of skill needed in contemporary life. If teachers are up to their work, they

also aid in production of character”

(Dewey, TAP, 2010, p.p.241-242)

According to Dewey, the emphasis is placed on producing these attributes in children

for use in their contemporary life because it is:

…impossible to foretell definitely just what civilization will be twenty years from now

(Dewey, MPC, 2010, p. 25)

However, although Dewey is steadfast in his beliefs that education serves an immediate

purpose (Dewey, DRT, 2010; Dewey, MPC, 2010; Dewey, TTP, 2010), he is not ignorant

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of the impact imparting these qualities of intelligence, skill and character on young

children in their present life will have on the future society. While addressing the state

of educative and economic affairs during a 1935 radio broadcast, Dewey linked the

ensuing economic depression to a lack of sufficient production of intelligence, skill and

character Dewey, T“P, , p. 4 of the nation’s workforce.
As Dewey notes, there is a lack of these goods in the present society and teachers

have a responsibility to create them in their students, who, we can assume, will grow

into the adults who will ultimately go on to participate in whatever industrial or

economical civilization awaits them. According to Dewey, the profession of the

classroom teacher is to produce the intelligence, skill and character within each student

so that the democratic community is composed of citizens who can think, do and act

intelligently and morally.

A teacher’s knowledge

Dewey believed that the successful classroom teacher possesses a passion for

knowledge and an intellectual curiosity in the materials and methods they teach. For

Dewey, this propensity is an inherent curiosity and love for learning that differs from

one’s ability to acquire, recite and reproduce textbook knowledge.

“No one, can be really successful in performing the duties and meeting these demands [of

teaching] who does not retain [her] intellectual curiosity intact throughout [her] entire

career”

(Dewey, APT, 2010, p. 34)

According to Dewey, it is not that:

…the teacher ought to strive to be a high-class scholar in all the subjects he or she has to

teach, rather, a teacher ought to have an unusual love and aptitude in some one subject:

history, mathematics, literature, science, a fine art, or whatever

(Dewey, APT, 2010, p. 35)

The classroom teacher does not have to be a scholar in all subjects; rather, a genuine

love in one will elicit a feel for genuine information and insight in all subjects taught.

In addition to this propensity for study into the subjects taught, the classroom

teacher:

…is possessed by a recognition of the responsibility for the constant study of school

room work, the constant study of children, of methods, of subject matter in its various

adaptations to pupils

(Dewey, PST, 2010, p. 37)

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For Dewey, this desire for the lifelong pursuit of learning is inherent in other

professions (e.g. the architectural, legal and medical fields; Dewey, 1904 & Dewey, PST,

2010), and has particular importance for the field of teaching.

As Dewey notes:

…this further study is not a side line but something which fits directly into the

demands and opportunities of the vocation

(Dewey, APT, 2010, p. 34)

According to Dewey, this propensity and passion for intellectual growth in the

profession must be accompanied by a natural desire to communicate one’s knowledge
with others.

There are scholars who have [the knowledge] in a marked degree but who lack

enthusiasm for imparting it. To the natural born teacher learning is incomplete unless
it is shared

(Dewey, APT, 2010, p. 35)

For Dewey, it is not enough for the classroom teacher to be a lifelong learner of the

techniques and subject-matter of education; she must aspire to share what she knows

with others in her learning community.

A teacher’s skill

The best indicator of teacher quality, according to Dewey, is the ability to watch and

respond to the movement of the mind with keen awareness of the signs and quality of

the responses her students exhibit with regard to the subject-matter presented (Dewey,

APT, 2010; Dewey, 1904).

As Dewey notes:

“I have often been asked how it was that some teachers who have never studied the art of

teaching are still extraordinarily good teachers. The explanation is simple. They have a

quick, sure and unflagging sympathy with the operations and process of the minds they

are in contact with. Their own minds move in harmony with those of others, appreciating

their difficulties, entering into their problems, sharing their intellectual victories”

(Dewey, APT, 2010, p. 36)

Such a teacher is genuinely aware of the complexities of this mind to mind transfer, and

she has the intellectual fortitude to identify the successes and failures of this process, as

well as how to appropriately reproduce or correct it in the future.

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A teacher’s disposition

As a result of the direct influence teachers have in shaping the mental, moral and

spiritual lives of children during their most formative years, Dewey holds the

profession of teaching in high esteem, often equating its social value to that of the

ministry and to parenting (Dewey, APT, 2010; Dewey, DRT, 2010; Dewey, MPC, 2010;

Dewey, PST, 2010; Dewey, TTC, 2010; Dewey, TTP, 2010). Perhaps the most important

attributes, according to Dewey, are those personal inherent qualities which the teacher

brings to the classroom. As Dewey notes, “no amount of learning or even of acquired

pedagogical skill makes up for the deficiency” (Dewey, TLS, p. 25) of the personal traits

needed to be most successful in the profession.

According to Dewey, the successful classroom teacher occupies an indispensable

passion for promoting the intellectual growth of young children. In addition, she knows

that her career, in comparison to other professions, entails stressful situations, long

hours and limited financial reward; all of which have the potential to overcome her

genuine love and sympathy for her students.

For Dewey,

“One of the most depressing phases of the vocation is the number of care worn teachers

one sees, with anxiety depicted on the lines of their faces, reflected in their strained high

pitched voices and sharp manners. While contact with the young is a privilege for some

temperaments, it is a tax on others, and a tax which they do not bear up under very well.

And in some schools, there are too many pupils to a teacher, too many subjects to teach,

and adjustments to pupils are made in a mechanical rather than a human way. Human

nature reacts against such unnatural conditions”

(Dewey, APT, 2101, p. 35)

It is essential, according to Dewey, that the classroom teacher has the mental propensity

to overcome the demands and stressors placed on her because the students can sense

when their teacher is not genuinely invested in promoting their learning (Dewey, PST,

2010). Such negative demeanors, according to Dewey, prevent children from pursuing

their own propensities for learning and intellectual growth. It can therefore be assumed

that if teachers want their students to engage with the educational process and employ

their natural curiosities for knowledge, teachers must be aware of how their reactions to

young children and the stresses of teaching influence this process.

The role of teacher education to cultivate the professional classroom teacher

Dewey’s passions for teaching a natural love for working with young children, a

natural propensity to inquire about the subjects, methods and other social issues related

to the profession, and a desire to share this acquired knowledge with others are not a

set of outwardly displayed mechanical skills. Rather, they may be viewed as

internalized principles or habits which work automatically, unconsciously (Dewey, 1904,

p. 15).

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According to Dewey, teacher education programs must turn away from focusing

on producing proficient practitioners because such practical skills related to instruction

and discipline (e.g. creating and delivering lesson plans, classroom management,

implementation of an assortment of content-specific methods) can be learned over time

during their everyday school work with their students (Dewey, PST, 2010).

As Dewey notes:

“The teacher who leaves the professional school with power in managing a class of

children may appear to superior advantage the first day, the first week, the first month, or

even the first year, as compared with some other teacher who has a much more vital

command of the psychology, logic and ethics of development. But later progress may
with such consist only in perfecting and refining skill already possessed. Such persons

seem to know how to teach, but they are not students of teaching. Even though they go on

studying books of pedagogy, reading teachers journals, attending teachers institutes,
etc., yet the root of the matter is not in them, unless they continue to be students of

subject-matter, and students of mind-activity. Unless a teacher is such a student, he may

continue to improve in the mechanics of school management, but he cannot grow as a

teacher, an inspirer and director of soul-life”

(Dewey, 1904, p. 15)

For Dewey, teacher education should focus not on producing persons who know how

to teach as soon as they leave the program; rather, teacher education should be

concerned with producing professional students of education who have the propensity

to inquire about the subjects they teach, the methods used, and the activity of the mind

as it gives and receives knowledge. According to Dewey, such a student is not

superficially engaging with these materials, rather, the professional student of

education has a genuine passion to inquire about the subjects of education, knowing

that doing so ultimately leads to acquisitions of the skills related to teaching. Such

students of education aspire for the intellectual growth within the profession that can

only be achieved by immersing one’s self in the lifelong pursuit of the intelligence, skills
and character Dewey linked to the profession.

As Dewey notes, other professional fields, such as law and medicine cultivate a

professional spirit in their fields to constantly study their work, their methods of their

work, and a perpetual need for intellectual growth and concern for issues related to

their profession. Teacher education, as a profession, has these same obligations (Dewey,

1904; Dewey, PST, 2010).

As Dewey notes:

“An intellectual responsibility has got to be distributed to every human being who is

concerned in carrying out the work in question, and to attempt to concentrate intellectual

responsibility for a work that has to be done, with their brains and their hearts, by

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hundreds or thousands of people in a dozen or so at the top, no matter how wise and

skillful they are, is not to concentrate responsibility–it is to diffuse irresponsibility”

(Dewey, PST, 2010, p. 39)

For Dewey, the professional spirit of teacher education requires of its students a

constant study of school room work, constant study of children, of methods, of subject

matter in its various adaptations to pupils. Such study will lead to professional

enlightenment with regard to the daily operations of classroom teaching.

As well as his very active and direct involvement in setting up educational

institutions such as the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools (1896) and The New

School for Social Research (1919), many of Dewey’s ideas influenced the founding of

Bennington College and Goddard College in Vermont, where he served on the Board of

Trustees.

Dewey’s works and philosophy also held great influence in the creation of the

short-lived Black Mountain College in North Carolina, an experimental college focused

on interdisciplinary study, and whose faculty included Buckminster Fuller, Willem de

Kooning, Charles Olson, Franz Kline, Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, and Paul

Goodman, among others. Black Mountain College was the locus of the “Black Mountain

Poets” a group of avant-garde poets closely linked with the Beat Generation and the San

Francisco Renaissance.

References

1. John Dewey, How we think (1910)

2. Haggbloom, Steven J.; Warnick, Jason E.; Jones, Vinessa K.; Yarbrough, Gary L.;

Russell, Tenea M.; Borecky, Chris M.; McGahhey, Reagan; et al. (2002). “The 100

most eminent psychologists of the 20th century”. Review of General Psychology

6 (2): 139 152. doi:10.1037/1089-2680.6.2.139.

3. Alan Ryan, John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism, (1995) p 32

4. Violas, Paul C.; Tozer, Steven; Senese, Guy B. School and Society: Historical and

Contemporary Perspectives. McGraw-Hill Humanities/Social

Sciences/Languages. p. 121. ISBN 0-07-298556-9.

5. Bio of Dewey from Bowling Green State University

6. Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in the United States.

New York: Farrar, Staus and Giroux, 2002.

7. Hilda M. Neatby, So Little for the Mind (Toronto: Clarke Irwin & Co. Ltd., 1953),

pp.22 23.

8. John Dewey, Harriet Alice Chipman Dewey Letters from China and Japan. New

York,: E.P Dutton, 1920; rpr. Project Guttenberg

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European Journal of Education Studies – Volume 1 │ Issue 1 │ 2015 13

9. Field, Richard. John Dewey in The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Northwest Missouri State University UTM.edu The University of Tennessee at

Martin Retrieved 29 August 2008.

10. Dewey, John (1938). Logic: The theory of Inquiry. NY: Holt, Rinehart, and

Winston. p. iv.

11. John Dewey, Arthur Bentley, (1949). Knowing and the Known. Beacon Press,

Boston.

12. John Dewey, Arthur Bentley, (1949). Knowing and the Known. Beacon Press,

Boston, p107-109.

13. John Dewey, Arthur Bentley, (1949). Knowing and the Known. Beacon Press,

Boston, p121-139.

14. “The Problem of Logical Subject Matter”, in Logic: The Theory of Inquiry 1938

15. Louis Menand. The Metaphysical Club p. 313

16. Dewey, J. (1902). The child and the curriculum. Retrieved from

http://books.google.com/books

17. Dewey, J. (2009). Democracy and education: An introduction to the philosophy

of education. New York: WLC Books. (Original work published 1916)

18. Savery, J. R. (2006). Overview of Problem-based Learning: Definitions and
Distinctions. Journal of Problem-based Learning, 1(1).

19. Dewey, J. 1927. The Public and its Problems. Henry Holt & Co., New York. pp

126.

20. Jump up ^ John Corcoran. Conditions and Consequences. American Philosophy:

an Encyclopedia. 2007. Eds. John Lachs and Robert Talisse. New York:

Routledge. Pages 124 7.

21. The Cambridge Companion to Dewey, edited by Molly Cochran. Cambridge

University Press, 2010. Page xvii.

22. “Dewey’s Political Philosophy” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

23. F. M. Alexander Constructive Conscious Control of the Individual, E. P. Dutton

& Co., 1923 ISBN 0-913111-11-2

24. Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dewey

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dewey