John Dewey

John Dewey was born in Burlington, Vermont, to a family of modest means.[16] 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 October 20, 1859, forty weeks after the death of his older brother. 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[17] 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.[18][19]

John Dewey

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 His unpublished and now lost dissertation was titled "The Psychology of Kant".[20]

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 (1904).[20]

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 professor of philosophy at Teachers College at Columbia University.[21]

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 published more than 700 articles in 140 journals, and approximately 40 books. His 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;[22] 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.[23]

Art as Experience (1934), was 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 (see Transactionalism).

While each of these works focuses on one particular philosophical theme, Dewey included his major themes in Experience and Nature. However, dissatisfied with the response to the first (1925) edition, for the second (1929) edition he rewrote the first chapter and added a Preface in which he stated that the book presented what we would now call a new (Kuhnian) paradigm: 'I have not striven in this volume for a reconciliation between the new and the old' [E&N:4] [24]. and he asserts Kuhnian incommensurability:

'To many the associating of the two words ['experience' and 'nature'] will seem like talking of a round square' but 'I know of no route by which dialectical argument can answer such objections. They arise from association with words and cannot be dealt with argumentatively'. The following can be interpreted now as describing a Kuhnian conversion process: 'One can only hope in the course of the whole discussion to disclose the [new] meanings which are attached to "experience" and "nature," and thus insensibly produce, if one is fortunate, a change in the significations previously attached to them' [all E&N:10].[25]

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."[26]

The United States Postal Service honored Dewey with a Prominent Americans series 30¢ postage stamp in 1968.[27]

Dewey with his Iraqi friend and student, Nuri Ja'far, 1949.

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.[28][29] 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.[30]

Dewey married Estelle Roberta Lowitz Grant, "a longtime friend and companion for several years before their marriage" on December 11, 1946.[31][32] At Roberta's behest, the couple adopted two siblings, Lewis (changed to John, Jr.) and Shirley.[33]

John Dewey and Hu Shih, circa 1938–1942.

In 1919, Dewey and his wife traveled to Japan on sabbatical leave. Though Dewey and his wife were well received by the people of Japan during this trip, Dewey was also critical of the nation's governing system and claimed that the nation's path towards democracy was "ambitious but weak in many respects in which her competitors are strong".[37] He also warned that "the real test has not yet come. But if the nominally democratic world should go back on the professions so profusely uttered during war days, the shock will be enormous, and bureaucracy and militarism might come back."[37]

During his trip to Japan, Dewey was invited by Peking University to visit China, probably at the behest of his former students, Hu Shih and Chiang Monlin. Dewey and his wife Alice arrived in Shanghai on April 30, 1919,[38] just days before student demonstrators took to the streets of Peking to protest the decision of the Allies in Paris to cede the German-held territories in Shandong province to Japan. Their demonstrations on May Fourth excited and energized Dewey, and he ended up staying in China for two years, leaving in July 1921.[39]

In these two years, Dewey gave nearly 200 lectures to Chinese audiences and wrote nearly monthly articles for Americans in The New Republic and other magazines. Well aware of both Japanese expansionism into China and the attraction of Bolshevism to some Chinese, Dewey advocated that Americans support China's transformation and that Chinese base this transformation in education and social reforms, not revolution. Hundreds and sometimes thousands of people attended the lectures, which were interpreted by Hu Shih. For these audiences, Dewey represented "Mr. Democracy" and "Mr. Science," the two personifications which they thought of representing modern values and hailed him as "Second Confucius". His lectures were lost at the time, but have been rediscovered and published in 2015.[40]

Zhixin Su states:

Dewey was, for those Chinese educators who had studied under him, the great apostle of philosophic liberalism and experimental methodology, the advocate of complete freedom of thought, and the man who, above all other teachers, equated education to the practical problems of civic cooperation and useful living.[41]

Dewey urged the Chinese to not import any Western educational model. He recommended to educators such as Tao Xingzhi, that they use pragmatism to devise their own model school system at the national level. However the national government was weak, and the provinces largely controlled by warlords so his suggestions were praised at the national level but not implemented. However, there were a few implementations locally.[42] Dewey's ideas did have influence in Hong Kong, and in Taiwan after the nationalist government fled there. In most of China, Confucian scholars controlled the local educational system before 1949 and they simply ignored Dewey and Western ideas. In Marxist and Maoist China, Dewey's ideas were systematically denounced.[43]

Dewey and his daughter Jane went to South Africa in July 1934, at the invitation of the World Conference of New Education Fellowship in Cape Town and Johannesburg, where he delivered several talks. The conference was opened by the South African Minister of Education Jan Hofmeyr, and Deputy Prime Minister Jan Smuts. Other speakers at the conference included Max Eiselen and Hendrik Verwoerd, who would later become prime minister of the Nationalist government that introduced apartheid.[44]

Dewey's expenses were paid by the Carnegie Foundation. He also traveled to Durban, Pretoria and Victoria Falls in what was then Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and looked at schools, talked to pupils, and gave lectures to the administrators and teachers. In August 1934, Dewey accepted an honorary degree from the University of the Witwatersrand.[45] The white-only governments rejected Dewey's ideas as too secular. However black people and their white supporters were more receptive.[46]

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.[1]

While still professor of philosophy at Michigan, Dewey and his junior colleagues, James Hayden Tufts and George Herbert Mead, together with his student James 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 Wilhelm 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.

Dewey was elected president of the American Psychological Association in 1899.

Dewey also expressed interest in work in the psychology of visual perception performed by Dartmouth research professor Adelbert Ames Jr. He had great trouble with listening, however, because it is known Dewey could not distinguish musical pitches—in other words was an amusic.[47]

A 30-cents stamp of the USA figuring John Dewey (21 October 21, 1968)

Dewey sometimes referred to his philosophy as instrumentalism rather than pragmatism, and would have recognized the similarity of these two schools to the newer school named consequentialism. In some phrases introducing a book he wrote later in life meant to help forestay a wandering kind of criticism of the work based on the controversies due to the differences in the schools that he sometimes invoked, he defined at the same time with precise brevity the criterion of validity common to these three schools, which lack agreed-upon definitions:

But in the proper interpretation of "pragmatic," namely the function of consequences as necessary tests of the validity of propositions, provided these consequences are operationally instituted and are such as to resolve the specific problem evoking the operations, the text that follows is thoroughly pragmatic.[48]

His concern for precise definition led him to detailed analysis of careless word usage, reported in Knowing and the Known in 1949.

The grave of Dewey and his wife in an alcove on the north side of the Ira Allen Chapel in Burlington, Vermont. The only grave on the University of Vermont campus

Dewey sees paradox in contemporary logical theory. Proximate subject matter garners general agreement and advancement, while the ultimate subject matter of logic generates unremitting controversy. In other words, he challenges confident logicians to answer the question of the truth of logical operators. Do they function merely as abstractions (e.g., pure mathematics) or do they connect in some essential way with their objects, and therefore alter or bring them to light?[52]

Logical positivism also figured in Dewey's thought. About the movement he wrote that it "eschews the use of 'propositions' and 'terms', substituting 'sentences' and 'words'." ("General Theory of Propositions", in Logic: The Theory of Inquiry) He welcomes this changing of referents "in as far as it fixes attention upon the symbolic structure and content of propositions." However, he registers a small complaint against the use of "sentence" and "words" in that without careful interpretation the act or process of transposition "narrows unduly the scope of symbols and language, since it is not customary to treat gestures and diagrams (maps, blueprints, etc.) as words or sentences." In other words, sentences and words, considered in isolation, do not disclose intent, which may be inferred or "adjudged only by means of context."[52]

Yet Dewey was not entirely opposed to modern logical trends; indeed, the deficiencies in traditional logic he expressed hope for the trends to solve occupies the whole first part of same book. Concerning traditional logic, he states there:

Aristotelian logic, which still passes current nominally, is a logic based upon the idea that qualitative objects are existential in the fullest sense. To retain logical principles based on this conception along with the acceptance of theories of existence and knowledge based on an opposite conception is not, to say the least, conductive to clearness—a consideration that has a good deal to do with existing dualism between traditional and the newer relational logics.

Louis Menand argues in The Metaphysical Club that Jane Addams had been critical of Dewey's emphasis on antagonism in the context of a discussion of the Pullman strike of 1894. In a later letter to his wife, Dewey confessed that Addams' argument was:

... the most magnificent exhibition of intellectual & moral faith I ever saw. She converted me internally, but not really, I fear. ... When you think that Miss Addams does not think this as a philosophy, but believes it in all her senses & muscles—Great God ... I guess I'll have to give it [all] up & start over again.

He went on to add:

I can see that I have always been interpreting dialectic wrong end up, the unity as the reconciliation of opposites, instead of the opposites as the unity in its growth, and thus translated the physical tension into a moral thing ... I don't know as I give the reality of this at all, ... it seems so natural & commonplace now, but I never had anything take hold of me so.[53]

In a letter to Addams, clearly influenced by his conversation with her, Dewey wrote:

Not only is actual antagonizing bad, but the assumption that there is or may be antagonism is bad—in fact, the real first antagonism always comes back to the assumption.

Dewey founded the University of Chicago laboratory school, supported educational organizations, and supported settlement houses especially Jane Addams' Hull House.[57]

Through his work at the Hull House serving on its first board of trustees, Dewey was not only an activist for the cause but also a partner working to serve the large immigrant community of Chicago and women's suffrage. Dewey experienced the lack of children's education while contributing in the classroom at the Hull House. There he also experienced the lack of education and skills of immigrant women.[58] Stengel argues:

Addams is unquestionably a maker of democratic community and pragmatic education; Dewey is just as unquestionably a reflector. Through her work at Hull House, Addams discerned the shape of democracy as a mode of associated living and uncovered the outlines of an experimental approach to knowledge and understanding; Dewey analyzed and classified the social, psychological and educational processes Addams lived.[57]

His leading views on democracy included:

First, Dewey believed that democracy is an ethical ideal rather than merely a political arrangement. Second, he considered participation, not representation, the essence of democracy. Third, he insisted on the harmony between democracy and the scientific method: ever-expanding and self-critical communities of inquiry, operating on pragmatic principles and constantly revising their beliefs in light of new evidence, provided Dewey with a model for democratic decision making ... Finally, Dewey called for extending democracy, conceived as an ethical project, from politics to industry and society.[59]

This helped to shape his understanding of human action and the unity of human experience.

Dewey believed that a woman's place in society was determined by her environment and not just her biology. On women he says, "You think too much of women in terms of sex. Think of them as human individuals for a while, dropping out the sex qualification, and you won't be so sure of some of your generalizations about what they should and shouldn't do".[58] John Dewey's support helped to increase the support and popularity of Jane Addams' Hull House and other settlement houses as well. With growing support, involvement of the community grew as well as the support for the women's suffrage movement.

As commonly argued by Dewey's greatest critics, he was not able to come up with strategies in order to fulfill his ideas that would lead to a successful democracy, educational system, and a successful women's suffrage movement. While knowing that traditional beliefs, customs, and practices needed to be examined in order to find out what worked and what needed improved upon, it was never done in a systematic way.[58] "Dewey became increasingly aware of the obstacles presented by entrenched power and alert to the intricacy of the problems facing modern cultures".[59] With the complex of society at the time, Dewey was criticized for his lack of effort in fixing the problems.

With respect to technological developments in a democracy:

Persons do not become a society by living in physical proximity any more than a man ceases to be socially influenced by being so many feet or miles removed from others.

His work on democracy influenced B.R. Ambedkar, one of his students, who later became one of the founding fathers of independent India.[60][61][62][63]

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Dewey's educational theories were presented in My Pedagogic Creed (1897), The Primary-Education Fetich (1898), The School and Society (1900), The Child and the Curriculum (1902), Democracy and Education (1916), Schools of To-morrow (1915) 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).[64] 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, pp. 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 advocated 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" (Dewey, 1902, p. 16).

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. 217–18).[65] 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.[66]

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 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).

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.

A caricature of Dewey by André Koehne, 2006

Since the mid-1980s, Dewey's ideas have experienced revival as a major source of inspiration for the public journalism movement. Dewey's definition of "public," as described in The Public and its Problems, has profound implications for the significance of journalism in society. As suggested by the title of the book, his concern was of the transactional relationship between publics and problems. Also implicit in its name, public journalism seeks to orient communication away from elite, corporate hegemony toward a civic public sphere. "The 'public' of public journalists is Dewey's public."

Dewey gives a concrete definition to the formation of a public. Publics are spontaneous groups of citizens who share the indirect effects of a particular action. Anyone affected by the indirect consequences of a specific action will automatically share a common interest in controlling those consequences, i.e., solving a common problem.[67]
Since every action generates unintended consequences, publics continuously emerge, overlap, and disintegrate.

In The Public and its Problems, Dewey presents a rebuttal to Walter Lippmann's treatise on the role of journalism in democracy. Lippmann's model was a basic transmission model in which journalists took information given to them by experts and elites, repackaged that information in simple terms, and transmitted the information to the public, whose role was to react emotionally to the news. In his model, Lippmann supposed that the public was incapable of thought or action, and that all thought and action should be left to the experts and elites.

Dewey refutes this model by assuming that politics is the work and duty of each individual in the course of his daily routine. The knowledge needed to be involved in politics, in this model, was to be generated by the interaction of citizens, elites, experts, through the mediation and facilitation of journalism. In this model, not just the government is accountable, but the citizens, experts, and other actors as well.

Dewey also said that journalism should conform to this ideal by changing its emphasis from actions or happenings (choosing a winner of a given situation) to alternatives, choices, consequences, and conditions,[68] in order to foster conversation and improve the generation of knowledge. Journalism would not just produce a static product that told what had already happened, but the news would be in a constant state of evolution as the public added value by generating knowledge. The "audience" would end, to be replaced by citizens and collaborators who would essentially be users, doing more with the news than simply reading it. Concerning his effort to change journalism, he wrote in The Public and Its Problems: "Till the Great Society is converted in to a Great Community, the Public will remain in eclipse. Communication can alone create a great community" (Dewey, p. 142).

Dewey believed that communication creates a great community, and citizens who participate actively with public life contribute to that community. "The clear consciousness of a communal life, in all its implications, constitutes the idea of democracy." (The Public and its Problems, p. 149). This Great Community can only occur with "free and full intercommunication." (p. 211) Communication can be understood as journalism.

As an atheist[69] and a secular humanist in his later life, Dewey participated with a variety of humanistic activities from the 1930s into the 1950s, which included sitting on the advisory board of Charles Francis Potter's First Humanist Society of New York (1929); being one of the original 34 signatories of the first Humanist Manifesto (1933) and being elected an honorary member of the Humanist Press Association (1936).[70]

His opinion of humanism is summarized in his own words from an article titled "What Humanism Means to Me", published in the June 1930 edition of Thinker 2:

What Humanism means to me is an expansion, not a contraction, of human life, an expansion in which nature and the science of nature are made the willing servants of human good.[71]

Dewey's interests and writings included many topics, and according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "a substantial part of his published output consisted of commentary on current domestic and international politics, and public statements on behalf of many causes. (He is probably the only philosopher in this encyclopedia to have published both on the Treaty of Versailles and on the value of displaying art in post offices.)"[81]

In 1917, Dewey met F. M. Alexander in New York City and later wrote introductions to Alexander's Man's Supreme Inheritance (1918), Constructive Conscious Control of the Individual (1923) and The Use of the Self (1932). Alexander's influence is referenced in "Human Nature and Conduct" and "Experience and Nature."[82]

As well as his contacts with people mentioned elsewhere in the article, he also maintained correspondence with Henri Bergson, William M. Brown, Martin Buber, George S. Counts, William Rainey Harper, Sidney Hook, and George Santayana.

Historians have examined his religious beliefs.[83] Biographer Steven Clark Rockefeller traced Dewey's democratic convictions to his childhood attendance at the Congregational Church, with its strong proclamation of social ideals and the Social Gospel.[84] Historian Edward A. White suggested in Science and Religion in American Thought (1952) that Dewey's work led to the 20th-century rift between religion and science.

Dewey went through an “evangelical” development as a child. As an adult he was negative, or at most neutral, about theology in education. He instead took a meliorist position with the goal of scientific humanism and educational and social reform without recourse to religion.[85]

• Copernican Citation (1943)
• Doctor "honoris causa" – University of Oslo (1946); University of Pennsylvania (1946); Yale University (1951); University of Rome (1951)

• John Dewey High School in Brooklyn, New York is named after him.
• John Dewey Academy of Learning in Green Bay, Wisconsin is a charter school named after him.
• The John Dewey Academy in Great Barrington, MA is a college preparatory therapeutic boarding school for troubled adolescents.
• John Dewey Elementary School in Warrensville Hts., Ohio, an Eastern Suburb of Cleveland, Ohio, is named after him.
• John Dewey Middle School in Adams County in Denver, Colorado is a junior high school named after him.
• Dewey Hall, a building on the campus of the University of Vermont is named after him

Besides publishing prolifically himself, Dewey also sat on the boards of scientific publications such as Sociometry (advisory board, 1942) and Journal of Social Psychology (editorial board, 1942), as well as having posts at other publications such as New Leader (contributing editor, 1949).

The following publications by John Dewey are referenced or mentioned in this article. A more complete list of his publications may be found at List of publications by John Dewey.

• "The New Psychology", Andover Review, 2, 278–89 (1884)
• Psychology (1887)
• Leibniz's New Essays Concerning the Human Understanding (1888)
• "The Ego as Cause" Philosophical Review, 3, 337–41 (June 24, 1894)
• "The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology" (1896)
• "My Pedagogic Creed" (1897)
• The School and Society (1899)
• The Child and the Curriculum (1902)
• The Relation of Theory to Practice in Education (1904)
• "The Postulate of Immediate Empiricism" (1905)
• Moral Principles in Education (1909), The Riverside Press Cambridge, Project Gutenberg
• How We Think (1910)
• German Philosophy and Politics (1915)
• Democracy and Education: an introduction to the philosophy of education (1916)
• Reconstruction in Philosophy (1919)
• Letters from China and Japan (1920) online
• China, Japan and the U.S.A. (1921) online
• Human Nature and Conduct public domain audiobook at LibriVox, An Introduction to Social Psychology (1922) Parts 1–4
• Experience and Nature (1925)
• The Public and its Problems (1927)
• The Quest for Certainty, Gifford Lectures (1929)
• The Sources of a Science of Education (1929), The Kappa Delta Pi Lecture Series
• Individualism Old and New (1930)
• Philosophy and Civilization (1931)
• Ethics, second edition (with James Hayden Tufts) (1932)
• Art as Experience (1934)
• A Common Faith (1934)
• Liberalism and Social Action (1935)
• Experience and Education (1938)
• Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (1938)
• Freedom and Culture (1939)
• Theory of Valuation (1939). ISBN 0-226-57594-2
• Knowing and the Known (1949)
• Unmodern Philosophy and Modern Philosophy ISBN 0809330792 (Lost in 1947, finally published in 2012)[86]
• Lectures in China, 1919-1920 lost; finally published 1973; online

See also

• The Philosophy of John Dewey, Edited by John J. McDermott. University of Chicago Press, 1981.
• The Essential Dewey: Volumes 1 and 2. Edited by Larry Hickman and Thomas Alexander. Indiana University Press, 1998.
• "To those who aspire to the profession of teaching" (APT). In Simpson, D.J., & Stack, S.F. (eds.), Teachers, leaders and schools: Essays by John Dewey (33–36). Carbonale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2010.
• "The classroom teacher" (CRT). In Simpson, D.J., & Stack, S.F. (eds.), Teachers, leaders and schools: Essays by John Dewey (153–60). Carbonale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2010.
• "The duties and responsibilities of the teaching profession" (DRT). In Simpson, D.J., & Stack, S.F. (eds.), Teachers, leaders and schools: Essays by John Dewey (245–48). Carbonale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2010.
• "The educational balance, efficiency and thinking" (EET). In Simpson, D.J., & Stack, S.F. (eds.), Teachers, leaders and schools: Essays by John Dewey (41–45). Carbonale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2010.
• "My pedagogic creed" (MPC). In Simpson, D.J., & Stack, S.F. (eds.), Teachers, leaders and schools: Essays by John Dewey (24–32). Carbonale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2010.
• "Professional spirit among teachers" (PST). In Simpson, D.J., & Stack, S.F. (eds.), Teachers, leaders and schools: Essays by John Dewey (37–40). Carbonale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2010.
• "The teacher and the public" (TAP). In Simpson, D.J., & Stack, S.F. (eds.), Teachers, leaders and schools: Essays by John Dewey (214–44). Carbonale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2010.

Dewey's Complete Writings is available in four multi-volume sets (38 volumes in all) from Southern Illinois University Press:

• The Early Works: 1892–1898 (5 volumes)
• The Middle Works: 1899–1924 (15 volumes)
• The Later Works: 1925–1953 (17 volumes)
• Supplementary Volume 1: 1884–1951

The Collected Works of John Dewey: 1882–1953, The Correspondence of John Dewey 1871–1952, and The Lectures of John Dewey are available online via monographic purchase to academic institutions and via subscription to individuals, and also in TEI format for university servers in the Past Masters series. (The CD-ROM has been discontinued.)

• Caspary, William R. Dewey on Democracy (2000). Cornell University Press.
• Martin, Jay. The Education of John Dewey. (2003). Columbia University Press
• Rockefeller, Stephen. John Dewey: Religious Faith and Democratic Humanism. (1994). Columbia University Press
• Rud, A. G., Garrison, Jim, and Stone, Lynda (eds.) John Dewey at 150: Reflections for a New Century. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2009.
• Ryan, Alan. John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism. (1995). W.W. Norton.
• Westbrook, Robert B. John Dewey and American Democracy. (1993). Cornell University Press.

• Alexander, Thomas. John Dewey's Theory of Art, Experience, and Nature (1987). SUNY Press.
• Bernstein, Richard J. John Dewey (1966), Washington Square Press.
• Boisvert, Raymond. John Dewey: Rethinking Our Time. (1997). SUNY Press.
• Campbell, James. Understanding John Dewey: Nature and Cooperative Intelligence (1995). Open Court Publishing Company.
• Crick, Nathan. Democracy & Rhetoric: John Dewey on the Arts of Becoming (2010). University of South Carolina Press.
• Fishman, Stephen M. and Lucille McCarthy. John Dewey and the Philosophy and Practice of Hope (2007). University of Illinois Press.
• Garrison, Jim. Dewey and Eros: Wisdom and Desire in the Art of Teaching. Charlotte: Information Age Publishing, 2010. Original published 1997 by Teachers College Press.
• Good, James (2006). A Search for Unity in Diversity: The "Permanent Hegelian Deposit" in the Philosophy of John Dewey. Lexington Books. ISBN 978-0-7391-1061-4.
• Hickman, Larry A. John Dewey's Pragmatic Technology (1992). Indiana University Press.
• Hook, Sidney. John Dewey: An Intellectual Portrait (1939).
• Howlett, Charles F., and Audrey Cohan, eds. John Dewey: America's Peace-Minded Educator (Southern Illinois UP, 2016), pp. 305.
• Kannegiesser, H. J. "Knowledge and Science" (1977). The Macmillan Company of Australia PTY Ltd.
• Kengor, Paul (2010). Dupes: How America's Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a Century. Intercollegiate Studies Institute. ISBN 978-1-4976-2085-8.
• Knoll, Michael (2022). Beyond Rhetoric: New Perspectives von John Dewey's Pedagogy (Bern: Peter Lang). pp. 410.
• Knoll, Michael (2009), From Kidd to Dewey: The Origin and Meaning of "Social Efficiency". Journal of Curriculum Studies 41 (June), 3, pp. 361–91.
• Knoll, Michael (2014), Laboratory School, University of Chicago. D. C. Phillips (ed), Encyclopaedia of Educational Theory and Philosophy, Vol. 2 (London: Sage), pp. 455–58.
• Knoll, Michael (2014), John Dewey as Administrator: The Inglorious End of the Laboratory School in Chicago. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 47 (April), 2, pp. 203–52.
• Lamont, Corliss (1959), (ed., with the assistance of Mary Redmer). Dialogue on John Dewey. Horizon Press.
• Morse, Donald J. Faith in Life: John Dewey's Early Philosophy. (2011). Fordham University Press.
• Pappas, Gregory. John Dewey's Ethics: Democracy as Experience (2008), Indiana University Press.
• Pring, Richard (2007). John Dewey: Continuum Library of Educational Thought. Continuum. ISBN 978-0-8264-8403-1.
• Popkewitz, Thomas S. (ed). Inventing the Modern Self and John Dewey: Modernities and the Traveling of Pragmatism in Education (2005), New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
• Putnam, Hilary. "Dewey's Logic: Epistemology as Hypothesis". In Words and Life, ed. James Conant. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994.
• Ralston, Shane. John Dewey's Great Debates-Reconstructed. (2011). Information Age Publishing.
• Richardson, Henry S (1998). "Truth and ends in Dewey". Canadian Journal of Philosophy. 28 (Supplement 1): 109–47. doi:10.1080/00455091.1998.10717497.
• Rogers, Melvin. The Undiscovered Dewey: Religion, Morality, and the Ethos of Democracy (2008). Columbia University Press.
• Roth, Robert J. John Dewey and Self-Realization. (1962). Prentice Hall.
• Rorty, Richard. "Dewey's Metaphysics". In The Consequences of Pragmatism: Essays 1972–1980. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982.
• Seigfried, Charlene Haddock, (ed.). Feminist Interpretations of John Dewey (2001). Pennsylvania State University Press.
• Shook, John. Dewey's Empirical Theory of Knowledge and Reality. (2000). The Vanderbilt Library of American Philosophy.
• Sleeper, R.W. The Necessity of Pragmatism: John Dewey's Conception of Philosophy. Introduction by Tom Burke. (2001). University of Illinois Press.
• Talisse, Robert B. A Pragmatist Philosophy of Democracy (2007). Routledge.
• Waks, Leonard J. and Andrea R. English, eds. John Dewey's Democracy and Education: A Centennial Handbook (2017), excerpt.
• White, Morton. The Origin of Dewey's Instrumentalism (1943). Columbia University Press.

• Center for Dewey Studies
  • John Dewey Papers, 1858–1970 Archived 2020-03-06 at the Wayback Machine at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, Special Collections Research Center
  • John Dewey Chronology at Southern Illinois University
• Works by John Dewey at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about John Dewey at Internet Archive
• Works by John Dewey at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
• Dewey in German education – a bibliography