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à| John Dewey was a philosopher, psychologist, and educator. As
an educator he is famous for his system of teaching through
experimental observation (progressive system in education); as
a philosopher he is known for the new development which he
gave to James's Pragmatism. Dewey and his colleagues formed
a strong pragmatic center at the University of Chicago, and
when Dewey moved to Columbia University, he created a
strong pragmatic center there. In these two universities many
philosophers received their training.

à| Dewey was born in Burlington, Vermont on October 20, 1859,

the son of a grocer. Since early in childhood, Dewey had
chores to do around the house and learned to regard them as a
natural part of life. When he had to go to school, however, he did not show much
enthusiasm. He preferred to learn from direct contacts with life, finding them much more
exciting than the school work regarded by him, as by most of his boyhood friends, as
boring and of little practical value. This experience impressed him deeply and determined
all his subsequent views on the function of education.

à| Dewey graduated from the University of Vermont in 1879 and received his Ph.D. from
Johns Hopkins University in 1884. One of his teachers was G. Stanley Hall, a founder of
experimental psychology; another was Charles Sanders Peirce. Dewey, however, was
particularly disposed to German philosophic thought, especially the unifying, organic
character of the Idealism of Hegel, in contrast to British Empiricism. Dewey first taught
philosophy at the University of Michigan (1884-88), and then at the University of
Minnesota (1888), and subsequently returned to Michigan (1889-94). In 1894 he became
chairman of the department of philosophy, psychology, and pedagogy at the University of
Chicago.

à| In 1899, Dewey was elected president of the American Psychological Association, and in
1905 he became president of the American Philosophical Association. He taught at
Columbia University from 1904 to 1930 and was professor emeritus from 1930 to 1939.
Dewey lectured in Japan and China from 1919 to 1921, and visited schools in the USSR
in 1928. He wrote for the general public on social problems and critical issues
confronting American industrial democracy. He was a participant and leader in many
liberal causes, in civic organizations, and in national affairs and was a founder of the
New School for Social Research (1919) in New York City.

  

à| His principal works of philosophical interest are:
How We Think, Essays in Experimental Logic;Reconstruction in Philosophy; and
Experience and Nature. Dewey also wrote: The School and Society; Human Nature and
 Conduct; Logic: The Theory of Inquiry: Ethics; Theory of Valuation; Art as Experience;
Studies in Logical Theory; Democracy and Education; and The Quest for Certainty


  

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à| Dewey's educational theories were presented in My Pedagogic Creed (1897), TheSchool

and Society (1900), The Child and the Curriculum (1902), Democracy and Education
(1916) and Experience and Education (1938). Throughout these writings, several
recurrent themes ring true; 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.

à| In twentieth century, the term "progressive education" has been used to describe ideas
and practices that aim to make schools more effective agencies of a democratic society.
Although there are numerous differences of style and emphasis among progressive
educators, they share the conviction that democracy means active participation by all
citizens in social, political and economic decisions that will affect their lives. The
education of engaged citizens, according to this perspective, involves two essential
elements: (1). Respect for diversity, meaning that each individual should be recognized
for his or her own abilities, interests, ideas, needs, and cultural identity, and (2). the
development of critical, socially engaged intelligence, which enables individuals to
understand and participate effectively in the affairs of their community in a collaborative
effort to achieve a common good. These elements of progressive education have been
termed "child-centered" and "social reconstructionist" approaches, and while in extreme
forms they have sometimes been separated, in the thought of John Dewey and other
major theorists they are seen as being necessarily related to each other.

à| These progressive principles have never been the predominant philosophy in American
major theorists they are seen as being necessarily related to each other. education. From
their inception in the 1830s, state systems of common or public schooling have primarily
attempted to achieve cultural uniformity, not diversity, and to educate dutiful, not critical
citizens. Furthermore, schooling has been under constant pressure to support the ever-
expanding industrial economy by establishing a competitive meritocracy and preparing
workers for their vocational roles. The term "progressive" arose from a period (roughly
1890-1920) during which many Americans took a more careful look at the political and
social effects of vast concentrations of corporate power and private wealth. Dewey, in
particular, saw that with the decline of local community life and small scale enterprise,
young people were losing valuable opportunities to learn the arts of democratic
participation, and he concluded that education would need to make up for this loss. In his
Laboratory School at the University of Chicago, where he worked between 1896 and
1904, Dewey tested ideas he shared with leading school reformers such as Francis W.
Parker and Ella Flagg Young. Between 1899 and 1916 he circulated his ideas in works
 such as The School and Society, The Child and the Curriculum, Schools of Tomorrow,
and Democracy and Education, and through numerous lectures and articles. During these
years other experimental schools were established around the country, and in 1919 the
Progressive Education Association was founded, aiming at "reforming the entire school
system of America."

à| Led by Dewey, progressive educators opposed a growing national movement that sought
to separate academic education for the few and narrow vocational training for the masses.
During the 1920s, when education turned increasingly to "scientific" techniques such as
intelligence testing and cost-benefit management, progressive educators insisted on the
importance of the emotional, artistic, and creative aspects of human development--"the
most living and essential parts of our natures," as Margaret Naumburg put it in The Child
and the World. After the Depression began, a group of politically oriented progressive
educators, led by George Counts, dared schools to "build a new social order" and
published a provocative journal called The Social Frontier to advance their
"reconstructionist" critique of laissez faire capitalism. At Teachers College, Columbia
University, William H. Kilpatrick and other students of Dewey taught the principles of
progressive education to thousands of teachers and school leaders, and in the middle part
of the century, books such as Dewey's Experience and Education (1938) Boyd Bode's
Progressive Education at the Crossroads (1938), Caroline Pratt's I Learn from Children
(1948), and Carlton Washburne's What is Progressive Education? (1952) among others,
continued to provide a progressive critique of conventional assumptions about teaching,
learning and schooling. A major research endeavor, the "eight-year study," demonstrated
that students from progressive high schools were capable, adaptable learners and excelled
even in the finest universities.

à| Nevertheless, in the 1950s, during a time of cold war anxiety and cultural conservatism,
progressive education was widely repudiated, and it disintegrated as an identifiable
movement. However, in the years since, various groups of educators have rediscovered
the ideas of Dewey and his associates, and revised them to address the changing needs of
schools, children, and society in the late twentieth century. Open classrooms, schools
without walls, cooperative learning, multiage approaches, whole language, the social
curriculum, experiential education, and numerous forms of alternative schools all have
important philosophical roots in progressive education. John Goodlad's notion of
"nongraded" schools (introduced in the late 1950s), Theodore Sizer's network of
"essential" schools, Elliott Wigginton's Foxfire project, and Deborah Meier's student-
centered Central Park East schools are some well known examples of progressive reforms
in public education; in the 1960s, critics like Paul Goodman and George Dennison took
Dewey's ideas in a more radical direction, helping give rise to the free school movement.
In recent years, activist educators in inner cities have advocated greater equity, justice,
diversity and other democratic values through the publication Rethinking Schools and the
National Coalition of Education Activists.
à| Today, scholars, educators and activists are rediscovering Dewey's work and exploring its
relevance to a "postmodern" age, an age of global capitalism and breathtaking cultural
change, and an age in which the ecological health of the planet itself is seriously
threatened. We are finding that although Dewey wrote a century ago, his insights into
 democratic culture and meaningful education suggest hopeful alternatives to the regime
of standardization and mechanization that more than ever dominate our schools.


  


à| Pragmatism is recognized as "the first indigenous movement of philosophical thought to

develop in the United States". Its precepts began to be developed in the 1880s and were
explicated by John Dewey.
à| Dewey's pragmatic philosophy was, according to Sidorsky, "a monument to that period in
American culture which made possible a confident, optimistic vision of the potential
application of the methods of the sciences to the dominant traditions of philosophy and
the major institutions of society".
à| He brought pragmatism to maturity by focusing on the pragmatic method of inquiry as an
ever-ongoing, self-correcting, and social process. Dewey used the scientific method as a
paradigm of controlled and reflective inquiry, and referred, in various works, to his
version of pragmatism as "instrumentalism" and "experimentalism."
à| Dewey combined Peirce's community-sense of inquiry with the affective elements of
James's work. Furthermore, Dewey added a historical consciousness he inherited from his
study of G. W. F. Hegel (1770±1831). As a result, Dewey's version of pragmatism
deemphasized knowledge and belief as the sole ends of inquiry, and instead sought to
combine intelligent reflection with intelligent action.
à| Dewey's instrumentalism is a theory of the process of the transformation of an inchoate,
problematic situation into a coherent unified one where knowledge is the product of
inquiry and the means, or instrument, by which further inquiries may be made. Dewey's
fallibilism, inherited from Peirce, holds that no belief, view, or claim to knowledge is
immune to possible future revision. Whereas Peirce's fallibilism emphasized the
revisability of scientific theories, Dewey sought to advocate the ways in which ongoing
communication among diverse persons and experiences may inform and refine each
other. Knowledge, for Dewey, was the product of inquiry, built out of the raw materials
of experience. Knowledge, or "warranted assertability," is not a private
à| Although Dewey's work fell "out of fashion" in the second half of the twentieth century,
interest in Dewey and pragamatism has revived recently, particularly as expressed by the
contemporary American philosopher Richard Rorty.