JOHN DEWEY

John Dewey

Dewey in 1902

Born October 20, 1859Burlington, Vermont

Died June 1, 1952 (aged 92)New York

Era 20th-century philosophy

Region Western Philosophy

School Pragmatism

Main interests Philosophy of education, Epistemology, Journalism, Ethics

Notable ideas Reflective ThinkingAmerican Association of University ProfessorsInquiry into Moscow show trials about TrotskyEducational progressivism

Influenced by• Plato · Rousseau · Kant · Hegel · Peirce ·James · Ladd  · Ward · W

undt

Influenced• Veblen · Santayana · Kaplan · Hu Shih · Hook ·Young radicals · Greene · Putnam · Chomsky  ·Habermas · Rorty

· West · Durkheim

INTRODUCTION John Dewey (October 20, 1859 – June 1, 1952) was an American philosopher, psychologist and educational reformer whose ideas have been influential in education and social reform. Dewey was an important early developer of the philosophy of pragmatism and one of the founders of functional psychology. He was a major representative of progressive education and liberalism.Although Dewey is known best for his publications concerning education, he also wrote about many other topics, including experience, nature, art, logic, inquiry, democracy, and ethics.In his advocacy of democracy, Dewey considered two fundamental elements—schools and civil society—as being 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 effective communication among citizens, experts, and politicians, with the latter being accountable for the policies they adopt.

John Dewey (1859–1952) was a pragmatic philosopher, psychologist, and educator commonly regarded as the founder of the progressive education movement. Dewey was born in Burlington, Vermont on October 20, 1859. His father was a grocer and Civil War Veteran, his mother a strong-willed evangelical Congregationalist noted for her work with the city's poor. John was a shy and self-conscious boy, and as a man, he never entirely lost these qualities. In 1875, he enrolled in the University of Vermont where he took his BA degree. Although his interest in philosophy emerged as an undergraduate, he was uncertain about his future. He taught high school for two years in Oil City, Pennsylvania, and then one more year back in his hometown of Burlington where he arranged for private tutorials in philosophy with his former teacher H. A. P. Torry.

DEWEY’S QUOTES“We naturally associate democracy, to be sure, with freedom of action, but freedom of action without freed capacity of thought behind it is only chaos”

“Conflict is the gadfly of thought. It stirs us to observation and memory. It instigates to invention. It shocks us out of sheeplike passivity, and sets us at noting and contriving.”

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

CONCEPT OF JOHN DEWEYPhilosophy of education can refer to either the academic field of applied philosophy or to one of any educational philosophies that promote a specific type or vision of education, and/or which examine the definition, goals and meaning of education.

As an academic field, philosophy of education is "the philosophical study of education and its problems...its central

subject matter is education, and its methods are those of philosophy". "The philosophy of education may be either the philosophy of the process of education or the philosophy of the discipline of education. That is, it may be part of the discipline in the sense of being concerned with the aims, forms, methods, or results of the process of educating or being educated; or it may be metadisciplinary in the sense of being concerned with

the concepts, aims, and methods of the discipline." As such, it is both part of the field of education and a field of applied

philosophy, drawing from fields of metaphysics, epistemology, axiology and the philosophical

approaches (speculative, prescriptive, and/or analytic) to address questions in and about pedagogy, education policy,

and curriculum, as well as the process of learning, to name a few. For example, it might study what constitutes upbringing

and education, the values and norms revealed through upbringing and educational practices, the limits and

legitimization of education as an academic discipline, and the relation between educational theory and practice.

Recent editions of Dewey's writing :

The Collected Works of John Dewey, 1882-1953.

37 volumes. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967-1987.The Early Works, 1882-1898. The Middle Works, 1899-1924. The Later Works, 1925-1953.Electronic edition of the Collected Works on CD-ROM, published by Intelex in its Past Masters Collection. 

The Correspondence of John Dewey. 3 volumes. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999-2004.Available on CD-ROM, published by Intelex in its Past Masters Collection. Volume 1: 1871-1918; Volume 2: 1919-1939; Volume 3: 1940-1953.   The Essential Dewey. Two volumes. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998.Vol. 1, Pragmatism, Education, Democracy. Vol. 2, Ethics, Logic, Psychology The Moral Writings of John Dewey, rev. ed. Edited by James Gouinlock. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1994. 

CONTRIBUTIONSHis Lasting InfluenceDewey made seminal contributions to nearly every field and topic in philosophy and psychology. Besides his role as a primary originator of both functionalist and behaviorist psychology, Dewey was a major inspiration for several allied movements that have shaped 20th century thought, including empiricism, humanism, naturalism, contextualism, and process philosophy. For over 50 years Dewey was the voice for a liberal and  progressive democracy that has shaped the destiny of America and the world.Dewey ranks with the greatest thinkers of this or any age on the subjects of pedagogy, philosophy of mind,  epistemology, logic, philosophy of science, and social and political theory. His pragmatic approaches to ethics, aesthetics, and religion have also remained influential.Dewey's stature is assured as one of the 20th Century's premier philosophers, along with James, Bradley, Husserl, Russell, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Sartre, Carnap, and Quine.

A Philosopher's FaithInspired by John DeweyMy person returns to unwind all its threads,Woven by language into the habits of heads;An old wearied head must bow down one final eve,But my lively thought shines in cloth I helped to weave.

Your gift by my leave is but some seeds yet to grow,Whose value was found in times of need long ago;Sow all of these seeds in our vast garden with care,Protect and defend the greater harvest to share.

To view such swift change, see truths melt under new suns,To watch how scared souls kept on refining their guns;My nation was home despite such strife with no cease,My freedom was here while humbly searching for peace.

By trial did I live, by more trial find my thought’s worth,My death you will get if you conceive no new birth;No life without doubt, for the best fail now and then,No rest for my faith, that each new day tests again.

CONCLUSIONhe turn-of-the-century John Dewey was an advocate of a conception of a new education, of experience-based forms of learning which sought to form habits of inquiry and co-operation that would secure a democratic life. His question in "The educational situation: as concerns the elementary school" was why the then-curriculum was not clearly changing in the new ways -- despite the earnest and persistent advocacy of this new, progressive, vision of education by educational leaders, the development of new subjects and new ways of learning and teaching, and the near-total acceptance of the desirability and necessity of the "reform," at least among the "leaders" of teachers. The task Dewey undertook in this essay was to spell out his understanding of this problem, this "situation." In this article I will draw on my reading of this essay to ask (1) How our understanding of the problem of curriculum change or "reform" has shifted, changed, and/or developed when compared to the understanding Dewey offered a century ago? and (2) What might the conclusions of a reflection on this question mean for our contemporary understanding of curriculum theory and research and of the theory-practice relationship? My claim will that Dewey’s conclusions around the educational situation of the school still hold in virtually every respect."The educational situation: as concerns the elementary school" begins with a trenchant analysis, best expressed in Dewey’s own words, of a disjunction which had emerged within educational discourse in the 19th century between "theory" and "practice."2