John Dewey Bio, Education, Contribution to Education, Philosophy of Education, Pragmatism, Progressivism, Theory of Learning by Doing and Quotes.
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John Dewey Bio
John Dewey was an American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer whose ideas have been influential in education and social reform. Dewey is one of the primary figures associated with the philosophy of pragmatism and is considered one of the fathers of functional psychology.
A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Dewey as the 93rd most cited psychologist of the 20th century. A well-known public intellectual, he was also a major voice of progressive education and liberalism.
Although Dewey is known best for his publications about education, he also wrote about many other topics, including epistemology, metaphysics, aesthetics, art, logic, social theory, and ethics. He was a major educational reformer for the 20th century.
Known for his advocacy of democracy, Dewey considered two fundamental elements—schools and civil society—to be major topics needing attention and reconstruction to encourage experimental intelligence and plurality.
Dewey asserted that complete democracy was to be obtained not just by extending voting rights but also by ensuring that there exists a fully formed public opinion, accomplished by communication among citizens, experts, and politicians, with the latter being accountable for the policies they adopt.
John Dewey Age
John Dewey was born on October 20, 1859, and died on June 1, 1952. He died at the age of 92 years old.
John Dewey Family
John Dewey was born in Burlington, Vermont to a family of modest means. He was one of four boys born to Archibald Sprague Dewey and Lucina Artemisia Rich Dewey. Their second son was also named John, but he died in an accident on January 17, 1859. The second John Dewey was born on October 20, 1859, forty weeks after the death of his older brother.
John Dewey Wife
Dewey married Alice Chipman in 1886 shortly after Chipman graduated with her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. The two had six children: Frederick Archibald Dewey, Evelyn Riggs Dewey, Morris (who died young), Gordon Chipman Dewey, Lucy Alice Chipman Dewey, and Jane Mary Dewey.
Alice Chipman died in 1927 at the age of 68; weakened by a case of malaria contracted during a trip to Turkey in 1924 and a heart attack during a trip to Mexico City in 1926, she died from cerebral thrombosis on July 13, 1927.
Dewey married Estelle Roberta Lowitz Grant, “a longtime friend and companion for several years before their marriage” on December 11, 1946. At Roberta’s behest, the couple adopted two siblings, Lewis (changed to John, Jr.) and Shirley.
John Dewey Death
John Dewey died of pneumonia on June 1, 1952, at his home in New York City after years of ill-health and was cremated the next day. The United States Postal Service honored Dewey with a Prominent Americans series 30¢ postage stamp in 1968.
John Dewey Education
Like his older, surviving brother, Davis Rich Dewey, he attended the University of Vermont, where he was initiated into Delta Psi, and graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1879. A significant professor of Dewey’s at the University of Vermont was Henry Augustus Pearson Torrey (H. A. P. Torrey), the son-in-law and nephew of former University of Vermont president Joseph Torrey.
Dewey studied privately with Torrey between his graduation from Vermont and his enrollment at Johns Hopkins University.
After two years as a high-school teacher in Oil City, Pennsylvania and one year as an elementary school teacher in the small town of Charlotte, Vermont, Dewey decided that he was unsuited for teaching primary or secondary school. 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.
In 1884, he accepted a faculty position at the University of Michigan (1884–88 and 1889–94) with the help of George Sylvester Morris. His unpublished and now lost dissertation was titled “The Psychology of Kant.”
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 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). Disagreements with the administration ultimately caused his resignation from the university, and soon thereafter he relocated near the East Coast.
In 1899, Dewey was elected president of the American Psychological Association (A.P.A.). From 1904 until his retirement in 1930 he was a professor of philosophy at Columbia University. 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; Impressions of Soviet Russia and the Revolutionary World (1929), a glowing travelogue from the nascent USSR; 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 focuses on one particular philosophical theme, Dewey included his major themes in most of what he published. He published more than 700 articles in 140 journals and approximately 40 books.
Reflecting his immense influence on 20th-century thought, Hilda Neatby wrote: “Dewey has been to our age what Aristotle was to the later Middle Ages, not a philosopher, but the philosopher.”
John Dewey Contribution to 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), Schools of To-morrow (c1915) with Evelyn Dewey, and Experience and Education (1938).
Several themes recur throughout these writings. Dewey continually argues 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 eyes, the 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). 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 also 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”. 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 advocated for an educational structure that strikes a balance between delivering knowledge while also taking into account 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”.
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’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 American 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, 1899) and Democracy of Education (Dewey, 1916), 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, 1899; 1916).
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 the 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’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”.
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.
John Dewey Philosophy
By the turn of the century, John Dewey’s experiment in education had captured the attention of teachers at every level of the teaching system. It’s radically new teaching practices represented a turning point, not only for formal education but also for larger views of childhood learning.
Dewey came to the University of Chicago at the urging of James Hayden Tufts, a colleague at the University of Michigan who joined the Chicago faculty in 1892. Appointed to head the Department of Philosophy, Dewey’s experimentalism blended well with the views of George Herbert Mead and Tufts.
In addition to fulfilling his departmental obligations and administering the School of Education, Dewey published several books and articles on education and philosophy. The School and Society (1899) became a classic among progressive educators.
Trained as a philosopher at Johns Hopkins, Dewey was intrigued by the relationship between the individual and society. Firmly committed to a democratic outlook, he considered the school a laboratory to test his notion that education could integrate learning with experience.
The University Elementary School or Laboratory School established by Dewey grew quickly. Parents were attracted by a curriculum that emphasized the child instead of the subject matter, where the learning process was at least as important as what was learned, and where curiosity was encouraged.
Dewey’s success could not overcome his disagreements with administrators and other educators. His relationship with William Rainey Harper deteriorated as Harper’s plans to consolidate the Elementary School with Colonel Francis Parker’s Chicago Institute under the control of the University infringed on Dewey’s freedom of action.
Dewey assumed that he would be given control of the curriculum and the merged school administration, leaving the funding problems in the hands of the University. This was clearly not Harper’s view, and when controversy arose over the appointment of Alice Dewey as principal of the University Elementary School, John and Alice Dewey resigned and left for Columbia University.
Dewey’s interest in education shifted after leaving Chicago and he never again organized a school. For the next half-century, he concentrated upon philosophical issues, publishing extensively and with great influence upon political, aesthetic, ethical, and epistemological questions. He clung to his liberal humanism, eloquently defending democratic ideals during periods when the world and national events seemed to undermine the basis for his beliefs.
John Dewey Philosophy of Education
John Dewey believed that learning was active and schooling unnecessarily long and restrictive. His idea was that children came to school to do things and live in a community which gave them real, guided experiences which fostered their capacity to contribute to society. For example, Dewey believed that students should be involved in real-life tasks and challenges:
1. maths could be learned via learning proportions in cooking or figuring out how long it would take to get from one place to another by mule
2. history could be learnt by experiencing how people lived, geography, what the climate was like, and how plants and animals grew, were important subjects
Dewey had a gift for suggesting activities that captured the center of what his classes were studying. Dewey’s education philosophy helped forward the “progressive education” movement, and spawned the development of “experiential education” programs and experiments.
John Dewey Pragmatism
Dewey’s philosophy still lies very much at the heart of many bold educational experiments, such as Outward Bound.
John Dewey was a leading proponent of the American school of thought known as pragmatism, a view that rejected the dualistic epistemology and metaphysics of modern philosophy in favor of a naturalistic approach that viewed knowledge as arising from an active adaptation of the human organism to its environment.
John Dewey Progressivism
Progressivism is a constituent part of New Education, based on pragmatism, and it constituted a revolution in American education, with an outstanding specificity. It is an educational current of American origin and all the other orientations that have been profiled in the second half of the century (humanism, social meliorism, and social efficiency) have emerged as reactions reported to it.
Progressivism, an educational movement that occurred at the beginning of the twentieth century as a reaction to the traditional school in the United States of America sought to establish an educational system adjusted to the pace of the American societal development.
It was based on John Dewey’s educational theory, having as a starting point the pragmatism, a specific American philosophical current, and its variant, instrumentalism, to which John Dewey conferred the widest expression. Dewey’s work is one ‘of the most profound and comprehensive theoretical syntheses developed in this century’.
He made major contributions in almost all areas of the spirit: in philosophy (pragmatism), in pedagogy (progressivism), in logic (instrumentalism), in psychology (functionalism), in aesthetics (aesthetic naturalism), in axiology (empiric cognitivism), and so on.
Dewey was inspired by his predecessors C.S. Peirce and W. James. The rigor of Peirce’s rational realism influenced Dewey greatly, while from W. James he took the ‘doctrine of radical empiricism and the thrills of the aspiration to the universal’. The fundamental coordinates of Dewey’s work.
John Dewey Theory of Learning by Doing
Learning by doing refers to a theory of education expounded by American philosopher John Dewey. He implemented this idea by setting up the University of Chicago Laboratory School. His views have been important in establishing practices of progressive education.
‘I believe that the school must represent present life-life as real and vital to the child as that which he carries on in the home, in the neighborhood, or on the playground.‘
‘The teachers were to present real-life problems to the children and then guide the students to solve the problem by providing them with a hands-on activity to learn the solution … “Cooking and sewing were to be taught at school and be a routine. Reading, writing, and math were to be taught in the daily course of these routines. Building, cooking, and sewing had these schooling components in it and these activities also represented everyday life for the students.’
John Dewey Books
1. Democracy and Education
2. Experience and Education
3. How We Think
4. Art as Experience
5. The School and Society: Being Three Lectures
6. Experience and Nature
7. The Public and its Problems
8. Human nature and conduct
9. John Dewey on education
10. Reconstruction in philosophy
11. Works of John Dewey
12. The child and the curriculum
13. Freedom and Culture
14. A Common Faith
15. Liberalism and social action
16. Logic, the theory of inquiry
17. Moral principles in education
18. The influence of Darwin on philosophy
19. Schools of To-Morrow
20. Individualism Old and New
21. The School and Society: The Child and the Curriculum
22. Knowing and the Known
23. The essential Dewey
24. Philosophy and Civilization
25. The philosophy of John Dewey
26. The sources of a science of education
27. Creative Intelligence: Essays in the Pragmatic Attitude
28. Education today
29. Interest and Effort in Education
30. The moral writings of John Dewey
31. Creative Democracy
32. My Pedagogic Creed
33. The Ethics of Democracy
34. Die Öffentlichkeit und Ihre Probleme
35. Lectures in China, 1919-1920
36. The relation of theory to practice in education
37. Logical Conditions of a Scientific Treatment of Morality
John Dewey Quotes
1. Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.
2. Arriving at one goal is the starting point to another.
3. Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes.
4. Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.
5. The self is not something ready-made, but something in continuous formation through choice of action.
6. We only think when we are confronted with problems.
7. To find out what one is fitted to do, and to secure an opportunity to do it, is the key to happiness.
8. The belief that all genuine education comes about through experience does not mean that all experiences are genuinely or equally educative.
9. The good man is the man who, no matter how morally unworthy he has been, is moving to become better.
10. Skepticism: the mark and even the pose of the educated mind.
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