DEWEY, JOHN ) , American philosopher, psychologist and educator, was born in Burlington, Vt., on Oct. 2o, 1859. He graduated at the University of Vermont in 1879 and at Johns Hopkins university in 1884. Then he went West, and taught philosophy at the universities of Minnesota (1888-89), Michigan (1889-94) and Chicago (1894-1904). It was as director of the School of Education at the last institution that he first won national fame; he established an experimental school and carried out the ideas of the "new pedagogy." It was in this experience that he came to formulate principles of demo cratic and occupational instruction which have revolutionized educational practice in America, and influenced many teachers in Europe and Asia. For two years he lectured on education and philosophy at the University of Peking; and the Turkish Govern ment engaged him to draw up a report on the reorganization of its national schools.
Dewey's outlook on education reflects the industrial revolution and the development of. democracy; it reacts strongly against the classical approach and authoritarian methods of aristocratic days when education consisted in learning how to talk about things rather than how to do them. The exodus from the field to the factory, the multiplication of machinery and the growing com plexity of urban life, required a new curriculum, teaching through practice the arts and discipline of the industrial life. This plea for practicality formed a naturally systematic whole with Dewey's "instrumental" logic, and his lifelong effort to free American philosophy from its sterile preoccupation with German epistemol ogy. In developing his thought out of the German idealism which marked the idealism of his early period—a change due largely to the influence of William James—he retained from it an endur ing sense of the value of intelligence.
The starting-point of his system of thought is biological: he sees man as an organism in an environment, remaking as well as made. Things are to be understood through their origins and their functions, without the intrusion of supernatural consider ations; even the Schopenhauerian Wale and the Bergsonian Elan vital are mystical phrases, which the philosopher will avoid. The only reality is experience; and all experience is of objects in re lation. It is true that things are known only as known; but this knowledge, to be real, must be functional rather than conceptual ; it must see not so much the abstract nature of the thing, as its actual operations and relations in the world of our living ex perience. Thought is an organ of response, it is an instrument of behaviour, rather than of knowledge in the older sense ("know ledge about") ; every idea, to have meaning, must be a way of dealing specifically with actual stimuli and situations. (Here Dewey anticipated "Behaviourism," without falling into its ex aggerations.) Thinking begins not with premises, but with diffi culties; and it concludes not with a certainty but with an hypoth esis that can be made "true" only by the pragmatic sanction of experiment. An idea, then, is true in proportion as it is an effective instrument in the illumination of experience and the realization of desire. Thought should aim not merely to "under stand" the world, but to control and refashion it ; the Spencerian definition of education as the adaptation of the individual to his environment must be replaced by the practice of education as the development of all those capacities in the individual which will enable him to control his environment and fulfil his possibilities.
Further, since the individual is to live in a society, he is to be studied as a citizen (actual or potential) growing and thinking in a vast complex of interactions and relationships, not as a solitary "self" or "soul." Through education, training, and sug gestion of a thousand kinds, he is made in the image of his fellows; and his thinking is largely their thinking through him. If this reduces his uniqueness, it extends the limits of his possible development far beyond those within which it was confined by the old theory of unchangeable heredity. Faith in education as the soundest instrumentality of social, political and moral recon struction is justified by this malleability of the instincts, and this illimitableness of human growth.
Our difficulties to-day, Dewey believes, are the difficulties of a Chaotic adolescence, and the disproportion between our powers and our wisdom. "Physical science," he writes, in a passage that has influenced much later thinking, "has for the time being far outrun psychical. We have mastered the physical mechanism sufficiently to turn out possible goods; we have not gained a knowledge of the conditions through which possible values become actual in life, and so are still at the mercy of habit, of haphazard, and hence of force. . . . With tremendous increase in our control of nature, in our ability tq utilize nature for human use and satis faction, we find the actual realization of ends, the enjoyment of values, growing unassured and precarious. At times it seems as though we were caught in a contradiction; the more we multiply means the less certain and general is the use we are able to make of them." (Influence of Darwin on Philosophy, p. 71.) The task of remaking man to a mental and moral level com mensurate with the enlarged and intricate world in which his inventions have enveloped him lies upon democracy and educa tion. Democracy not merely in voting but in opportunity equal to all, in education through comradely occupation, in industry through the replacement of autocracy with voluntary association, in foreign relations through the replacement of war with con ference and law. And education not in theory but in specific and experimental thinking; our social ills are to be handled no longer with majestic abstractions like Individualism and Socialism, competition and cooperation, dictatorship and democracy, but with restricted enquiries, specific analysis, careful formulation, patient experimentation, and piecemeal renovation. We must attack the enemy as Napoleon did—in sections and detail.
The great need, then, is intelligence, and Socrates was not far wrong in counting this as the highest virtue. And again, not in tellectuality, which is just the opposite of specific and realistic thought ; but that flexibility of mind which can readjust past ex perience to novel stimuli and purposes. There is no absolute good here, no summum bonum; the ethical aim must vary with time and person and place, and only intelligence can specifically and transiently determine it. One thing alone seems universally good, and that is growth. "Not perfection as a final goal, but the ever enduring process of perfecting, maturing, refining, is the aim in living. . . . The bad man is the man who, no matter how good he has been, is beginning to deteriorate, to grow less good. The good man is the man who, no matter how morally unworthy he has been, is moving to become better. Such a conception makes one severe in judging himself and humane in judging others." (Reconstruction in Philosophy, p. It was not till Dewey came in 1904 to join the department of philosophy at Columbia university, that his influence began to reach out from pedagogy to the philosophical and social thought of his time. His classes became the meeting-place of alert stu dents from every part of America; and though he had none of the arts of the popularizer, he left upon many of these students a profound and permanent influence. Through them, as well as through his own writing and speech, he has been one of the great sources of the realistic and experimental mood of the growing American mind.
Dewey's publications include Leibnitz's Essays Concerning the Human Understanding (Chicago, 1888) ; Psychology (New York, 1887) ; Outlines of a Critical Theory of Ethics (Ann Arbor, 1891) ; The Study of Ethics (1894) ; The Psychology of Number, with Jas. A. McLellan (New York, 1895, 1896 and 1909) ; Interest as Related to Will (Bloomington, 1896) ; "Interpretation of the Culture-Epoch Theory," Natl. Herbert Soc. Yearbook (Bloomington, 1896) ; My Pedagogic Creed (New York, 1897) ; The Significance of the Problem of Knowledge (Chicago, 1897) ; The Educational Situation (Chicago, 1902) ; Logical Conditions of a Scientific Treatment of Morality (Chi cago, 1903) ; Studies in Logical Theory (Chicago, 1903-09) ; "The Philosophical Work of Herbert Spencer," Philadelphia Review, vol. xiii., No. 2, pp. (1904) ; The Relation of Theory to Practice in the Education of Teachers (Chicago, 1904) ; The Child and the Cur riculum (Chicago, 1906) ; The School and the Child (London, 1907) ; Ethics, with James H. Tufts (New York, 1908) ; Ethics (New York, 1908) ; "Does Reality Possess Practical Character ?" in Essays Philo sophical and Psychological, in Honor of Wm. James (1908) ; Ethical Principles Underlying Education (1909) ; Moral Principles in Education (Boston, 1909) ; The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy (New York, 191o) ; How We Think (Boston, 1910) ; Educational Essays (191o) ; Interest and Effort in Education (1917) ; The School and Society (Chi cago, 1915) ; German Philosophy and Politics (1915) ; Schools of To morrow, with Evelyn R. Dewey (New York, 1915) ; Democracy and Education (1916) ; Essays in Experimental Logic (Chicago, 1916) ; Creative Intelligence (1917) ; Enlistment for the Farm (Ig17) ; Recon struction in Philosophy (192o) ; Letters from Japan, with Alice Chip man Dewey, edit. by Evelyn Dewey (192o) ; Human Nature and Con duct (1922) ; supplementary essay by John Dewey in Chance, Love and Logic, by Chas. S. S. Peirce, edit. by Morris R. Cohen (1927) ; Democracy and Education (1927) ; Experience and Nature (Chicago, 1925) ; The Public and Its Problems (1927) ; The Quest for Certainty See L. P. Boggs, Ueber John Dewey's "Theorie des' Interesses and seine Anwendung in der Padagogik (19o1) ; D. Loring Geyer, The Pragmatic Theory of Truth as Developed by Peirce, James and Dewey (1916) ; Wm. James, Pragmatism (1907) ; A. Webster Moore, Pragmatism and Its Critics (191o) ; D. T. Howard, John Dewey's Logical Theory (New York, 1918) ; L. M. A. N. van Schalkwijk, De Sociale paedagogiek van John Dewey (192o) ; The Philosophy of John Dewey, selected and edited by Joseph Ratner (New York, 1928) ; E. E. Slosson, Six Major Prophets (Boston, 1917) ; W. David Frank, Time Exposures (New York, 1926) ; M. H. Thomas and H. W. Schneider, Bibliography of John Dewey (1929). (W. Du.)