Chapter V: John Dewey

Teacher of Teachers

If some historian should construct an intellectual weather map of the United States he would find that in the eighties the little arrows that show which way the wind blows were pointing in toward Ann Arbor, Michigan, in the nineties toward Chicago, Illinois, and in the nineteen hundreds toward New York City, indicating that at these points there was a rising current of thought. And if he went so far as to investigate the cause of these local upheavals of the academic atmosphere he would discover that John Dewey had moved from one place to the other. It might be a long time before the psychometeorologist would trace these thought currents spreading over the continent back to their origin, a secluded classroom where the most modest man imaginable was seated and talking in a low voice for an hour or two a day. John Dewey is not famous like W. J. Bryan or Charlie Chaplin. He is not even known by name to most of the millions whose thought he is guiding and whose characters he is forming. This is because his influence has been indirect. He has inspired individuals and instigated reforms in educational methods which have reached the remotest schoolhouses of the land. The first of the Dewey cyclones revolved about psychology, the second about pedagogy, and the third about philosophy.

I was a thousand miles away from the first storm center, yet I distinctly felt the vibrations. That was in the University of Kansas when the psychology class was put in charge of a young man named Templin just back from his _Wanderjahr_ in Germany. This study had hitherto belonged _ex officio_ to the Chancellor of the university who put the finishing touch on the seniors' brains with aid of McCosh. But the queer looking brown book stamped "Psychology--John Dewey" that was put into our hands in 1887 relegated the Princeton philosopher to the footnotes and instead told about Helmholtz, Weber, Wundt and a lot of other foreigners who, it seemed, were not content to sit down quietly and search their own minds--surely as good as anybody's--but went about watching the behavior of children, animals, and crazy folks and spent their time in a laboratory--the idea!--measuring the speed of thought and dissecting brains. This young man in Michigan made bold to claim psychology as a natural science instead of a minor branch of metaphysics, and he did the best he could to prove it with such meager materials as were available at the time. His "Psychology" appeared, as should be remembered, three years before the epoch-making work of James and before any permanent psychological laboratory had been opened in the United States. In taking down again my battered brown copy of Dewey's "Psychology" I am surprised to find how trite and old-fashioned some of it sounds. Although Dewey thought he had thrown overboard all metaphysics it is evident that he was then carrying quite a cargo of it unconsciously.

But the commotion started by Dewey's "Psychology" was a tempest in an inkpot compared with the cyclone that swept over the country when he began to put his theories into practice at the University of Chicago in 1894. I heard echoes of it as far west as Wyoming. The teachers who went to the summer session of the University of Chicago came back shocked, fascinated, inspired, or appalled, according to their temperaments. The very idea of an "experimental school" was disconcerting, suggesting that the poor children were being subjected to some sort of vivisection or--what was worse--implying that the established educational methods were all wrong. "He lets the children do whatever they want to do," whispered the teachers to their stay-at-home colleagues, who, like themselves, were spending their time in keeping the children from doing what they wanted to do and in making them do what they did not want to do. "He lets the children talk and run around and help one another with their lessons!" and all the teachers looked at each other with a wild surmise silent on the school-room platform. Could it be that there was a better way, that this task on which they were wearing out their nerves, trying to reduce to rigidity for five hours a roomful of wriggling children, was no less harmful to the children than to themselves? "I'd like to see John Dewey try to manage my sixty," remarks the presiding teacher as she suppresses a little girl on the front seat with a smile and a big boy on the back seat with a tap of her pencil.

As a matter of fact, the children neither studied nor did what they pleased, but the idea was that if children had a sufficient variety of activities provided they would like what they did and their activities could be so arranged as to result in getting knowledge and in forming good habits of thought. The common assumption that the main idea was to have the children do and study what they liked was a complete missing of the intellectual idea or philosophy of the school, which was an attempt to work out the theory that knowledge, with respect to both sense observation and general principles, is an offshoot of activities, and that the practical problems arising in connection with consecutive occupations afford the means for a development of interest in scientific problems for their own sake. The social grouping of children, and the attempt to get coöperative group work, was always just as important a phase as individual freedom--not only on moral grounds, but because of the theoretical conception that human intelligence developed under social conditions and for social purposes--in other words, "mind" has developed not only with respect to activity having purpose, but also social activity. These same notions of the central place of intelligence in action and the social nature of intelligence are fundamental in Dewey's "Ethics."

The real distinguishing characteristic of schools of the Dewey type is not absence of discipline but a new ideal of discipline. This is most clearly stated in one of his more recent works:

Discipline of mind is in truth a result rather than a cause.
Any mind is disciplined in a subject in which independent
intellectual initiative and control have been achieved.
Discipline represents original native endowment turned
through gradual exercise into effective power.... Discipline
is positive and constructive. Discipline, however, is
frequently regarded as something negative--as a painfully
disagreeable forcing of mind away from channels congenial
to it into channels of constraint, a process grievous at
the time, but necessary as preparation for a more or less
remote future. Discipline is then generally identified with
drill; and drill is conceived after the mechanical analogy
of driving, by unremitting blows, a foreign substance into
a resistant material; or is imaged after the analogy of the
mechanical routine by which raw recruits are trained to
a soldierly bearing and habits that are naturally wholly
foreign to their possessors. Training of this latter sort,
whether it be called discipline or not, is not mental
discipline. Its aim and result are not _habits of thinking_
but uniform _external habits of action_. By failing to ask
what he means by discipline, many a teacher is misled into
supposing that he is developing mental force and efficiency
by methods which in fact restrict and deaden intellectual
activity, and which tend to create mechanical routine, or
mental passivity and servility.--"How We Think", p. 63.

But even more revolutionary than Dewey's rejection of the strict discipline then prevailing in the schools was his introduction of industrial training as an integral part of education, not merely for the purpose of giving the pupils greater manual skill, still less with the object of improving their chances of getting a job or of making them more efficient for the benefit of the employer, but chiefly because it is only through participation in industry that one can get an understanding of the meaning of science and the constitution of the social organism. In the old days when most industries were carried on in the household or the neighborhood children learned them by observation and participation. School was then a place where this very effective form of home education could be supplemented by "book learning."

But Dewey faced frankly the fact that the house-hold arts and handicrafts had passed away for keeps, and he refused to join in the pretense that they could be profitably "revived" by the various esthetic and socialist movements of the William Morris and Ruskin type. He recognized that the machine and the factory had come to stay, and if the worker is not to become a factory machine himself he must receive in school such a broad and diversified training as will make him realize the significance of the work he does. Or as Dewey said in "School and Society" in 1899:

We sometimes hear the introduction of manual training,
art and science into the elementary, and even into the
secondary, schools deprecated on the ground that they tend
toward the production of specialists--that they detract
from our present system of generous, liberal culture. The
point to this objection would be ludicrous if it were not
often so effective as to make it tragic. It is our present
education which is highly specialized, one-sided and narrow.
It is an education dominated almost entirely by the medieval
conception of learning. It is something which appeals for
the most part simply to the intellectual aspect of our
natures, our desire to learn, to accumulate information,
and to get control of the symbols of learning; not to our
impulses and tendencies to make, to do, to create, to
produce, whether in the form of utility or art.

Mere "manual training", then all the rage, has failed, as Dewey said it would, because of its fictitious and adventitious character. His method was as different from the ordinary kind of "manual training" as hay-making is from dumb-bell exercise.

We must conceive of work in wood and metal, of weaving,
sewing and cooking, as methods of living and learning, not
as distinct studies. We must conceive of them in their
social significance, as types of processes by which society
keeps itself going, as agencies for bringing home to the
child some of the primal necessities of community life, and
as ways in which these needs have been met by the growing
insight and ingenuity of man; in short as instrumentalities
through which the school itself shall be made a genuine form
of active community life, instead of a place set apart in
which to learn lessons.

So Dewey set the children to solving the problems of primitive man and retracing for themselves the steps in the evolution of industrial processes. They picked the cotton from the boll, carded, spun it into thread and wove it into cloth on machines of their own making and for the most part of their own devising. This gave opportunity for personal experimenting and taught them history by repeating history, not repeating a verbal version of history. And the history they thus learnt was the history of the human race, not the history of some chosen people.

This recapitulation theory, like all others, has since been carried to an extreme. Acting on the idea that children normally pass through the same stages as European civilization some teachers seem to think it necessary to keep them to the chronological curriculum. So they cultivate a pseudo-savagery for a year or two, then make them pagans and later teach the ideals of the age of chivalry which are hardly less repugnant to the modern mind. So careful are they to avoid anachronism that if a boy should by any accident behave like a Christian before he reached the grade corresponding to A.D. 28 he would be likely to get a bad mark for it. So, too, I have known teachers of mathematics who would not allow their pupils to take a short cut to the answer by way of algebra unless it was in the algebra class and teachers of chemistry who would not permit the word "atom" to be mentioned in classroom until the term was half through. But such extravagances find no countenance in Dewey's writings or the examples he cites.

In the laboratory school of the University of Chicago Professor and Mrs. Dewey had for several years a free hand in developing and trying out their theories. Their aim was to utilize instead of to suppress the fourfold impulses of childhood; the interest in conversation, the interest in inquiry, the interest in construction and the interest in artistic expression. The volume in which Professor Dewey explained what he was trying to do and why, "School and Society", was first published in 1899 and has been reprinted almost every year up to the present.[1] It might well have borne the same title as Benjamin Tucker's volume on anarchism: "Instead of a Book, by a Man Too Busy to Write One." It consists of the stenographic reports of three informal talks by Professor Dewey to the parents of his pupils and the friends of his school, supplemented by some fugitive papers. Yet it has an influence comparable to no other modern book of its size unless perhaps Herbert Spencer's tract on "Education."

How far the seed was sown is shown by "Schools of To-morrow",[2] which tells of a dozen places where the ideas that were so novel and startling in the nineties are in practical operation. But it is characteristic of Dewey's self-effacement that he makes no claim for priority, and there is no hint anywhere in the volume that many of the methods described were first devised and tried out in the Dewey school at Chicago nearly twenty years ago. He gives the credit for the theory to Rousseau and the credit for the practice to Mr. Wirt of Gary, Mrs. Johnson of Fairhope, Mr. Valentine of Indianapolis, Professor Merriam of Missouri, and others.

Mr. Wirt who organized the school system of the steel city of Gary, Indiana, and who is now employed in remodeling some of the schools of New York City, owes his inspiration and ideas, as I have heard him say, very largely to Dewey.[3] The Gary system differs from the trade schools in that the industries are used for their educative value. The pupils are shifted around from one shop to another three times a year. Their tasks are artificial, symbolic or imitative, but from the fifth grade up real constructive work, for the boys making school furniture, iron castings, laying concrete, and printing; and for the girls, sewing, cooking, marketing, millinery, and laundry, and for both, gardening, pottery, designing, bookbinding and bookkeeping. Arithmetic, writing, history, and geography come in necessarily and naturally in connection with their work. Under this régime the pupils make better progress in the traditional subjects than those who devote their whole time to books. That it does not divert them from higher education is shown by the fact that one third of all the pupils who have left the Gary schools in the eight years of their existence are now in the state university, an engineering school, or a business college, a remarkable record for a population mostly composed of foreign-born steel mill laborers. All the schoolrooms are in use for something all day long, so the "peak load" is avoided and a great economy effected. The grounds and buildings also serve as community centers and the last trace of the ancient feud between "town and gown" has been wiped out.

The chief advantage which these "schools of tomorrow" have over those of the past is, in Dewey's opinion, that they come a step nearer toward giving the type of training necessary to prepare citizens for democracy. In this new book, then, he is working toward the ideal he promulgated at the beginning of his career when he entered the faculty of the University of Michigan as the youngest man ever appointed to a professorship in that institution. He sounded the note of his philosophy thirty years ago in a paper on "The Ethics of Democracy",[4] and he has never faltered in his allegiance to the high ideal he there set forth, although he has broken away from the Hegelian mode of thought he then used. The paper was written to confute Sir Henry Maine who, in his "Popular Government", argued that democracy was an historical accident and the most fragile, insecure, and unprogressive form of government. Dewey objects to his mechanical and mathematical conception of democratic government and sets forth a very different conception as the following quotations will show:

The majority have a right to "rule" because their majority
is not the mere sign of a surplus in numbers, but is the
manifestation of the purpose of the social organism.

Government is to the state what language is to the thought:
it not only communicates the purposes of the state, but in
so doing gives them for the first time articulation and
generality.

A vote is not the impersonal counting of one; it is a
manifestation of some tendency of the social organism
through a member of that organism.

The democratic formula that government derives its powers
from the consent of the governed ... means that in democracy
the governors and the governed are not of two classes, but
two aspects of the same fact--the fact of the possession by
society of a unified and articulate will.

The aristocratic idea implies that the mass of men are to be
inserted by wisdom, or, if necessary, thrust by force, into
their proper positions in the social organism....

Democracy means that _personality_ is the first and final
reality.... It holds that the spirit of personality indwells
in every individual, and that the choice to develop it must
proceed from that individual. From this central position
of democracy result the other notes of democracy, liberty,
equality, fraternity--words which are not mere words to
catch a mob, but symbols of the highest ethical idea which
humanity has yet reached--the idea that _personality_ is
the one thing of permanent and abiding worth, and that
in every human individual there lies personality.... It
means that in every individual there lives an infinite and
universal possibility: that of being a king or priest.
Aristocracy is blasphemy against personality.

Even in those days when socialism had hardly begun to be whispered, at least in academic circles, Dewey was not afraid to say that: "Democracy is not in reality what it is in name until it is industrial as well as civil and political.... A democracy of wealth is a necessity." Twenty-five years later I saw Professor Dewey giving a public demonstration of his faith in democracy when I found him marching with a small body of men at the tail end of a suffrage procession while the crowds that lined Fifth Avenue jeered and hissed at us. Who would then have thought that five years later all parties would be committed to equal suffrage and four presidential candidates would be bidding against one another for the privilege of giving the women the vote!

Education for democracy is the burden of Dewey's message to the world, and I must give one more quotation on this point:

Democracy, the crucial expression of modern life, is not so
much an addition to the scientific and industrial tendencies
as it is the perception of their social or spiritual
meaning. Democracy is an absurdity where faith in the
individual as individual is impossible; and this faith is
impossible where intelligence is regarded as a cosmic power,
not an adjustment and application of individual tendencies.

... Democracy is estimable only through the changed
conception of intelligence that forms modern science, and
of want, that forms modern industry. It is essentially a
changed psychology. The conventional type of education which
trains children in docility and obedience, to the careful
performance of imposed tasks because they are imposed,
regardless of where they lead, is suited to an autocratic
society. These are the traits needed in a state where there
is one head to plan and care for the lives and institutions
of the people. But in a democracy they interfere with the
successful conduct of society and government.... If we
train our children to take orders, to do things simply
because they are told to, and fail to give them confidence
to act and think for themselves, we are putting an almost
insurmountable obstacle in the way of overcoming the present
defects of our system and of establishing the truth of
democratic ideals.

Children in school must be allowed freedom so that they will
know what its use means when they become the controlling
body, and they must be allowed to develop active qualities
of initiative, independence, and resourcefulness, before the
abuses and failures will disappear.--"School and Society",
p. 304.

The old theory of education has been most pungently put by "Mr. Dooley", the saloon-keeper of Archey Road, in one of his monologues with Mr. Hennessy: "It don't matter much what you study--so long as you don't like it." Professor Dewey takes almost the opposite ground when he says:[5] "Interest ought to be the basis for selection because children are interested in the things they need to learn."

This, as he shows, does not mean that in the new schools things are "made easy"; on the contrary the pupils work harder because things are made interesting.

The range of the material is not in any way limited by
making interest a standard of selection. Work that appeals
to pupils as worth while, that holds out the promise of
resulting in something to their own interests, involves
just as much persistence and concentration as the work that
is given by the sternest advocate of disciplinary drill.
The latter requires the pupil to strive for ends which he
cannot see, so that he has to be kept at the task by means
of offering artificial ends, marks, and promotions, and by
isolating him in an atmosphere where his mind and senses
are not being constantly besieged by the call of life which
appeals so strongly to him. But the pupil presented with a
problem, the solution of which will give him an immediate
sense of accomplishment and satisfied curiosity, will bend
all his powers to the work: the end itself will furnish the
stimulus necessary to carry him through the drudgery....
Since the children are no longer working for rewards,
the temptation to cheat is reduced to a minimum. There
is no motive for doing dishonest acts, since the result
shows whether the child has done the work, the only end
recognized.--"School and Society."

We have then two fundamentally different theories of training, the Dooley versus the Dewey system. They are now on trial in some degree all the way up from the beginning of the primary to the end of the college.[6] One is authoritarian; the other libertarian. One cultivates obedience; the other initiative. One strives for uniformity; the other diversity. In one the impelling motive is duty; in the other desire. In one the attitude of the student is receptivity; in the other activity. In one there is compulsory coördination; in the other voluntary coöperation.

Obviously neither could be carried to an exclusive extreme, and in practice we find each more or less unconsciously borrowing methods from the others. Doubtless the optima for different temperaments, ages, and studies will be found at different points along the line connecting the two extremes. How far one may safely go in either direction is to be determined by the pragmatic test of experiment. But at present it is safe to say that the tide of reform is running in the direction Dewey pointed out a quarter of a century before, though recently a strong counter-current of militarism has set in. That Dewey is a true prophet is proved by the extent to which his ideas are being carried out in these "schools of tomorrow" that are already in existence to-day.

The third period in Dewey's life began with his appointment to the chair of philosophy at Columbia University in 1905. This relieved him of the burden of responsibility for the conduct of the laboratory school at Chicago and enabled him to concentrate his thought upon the fundamental problems of knowledge. It was then perceived that he belonged on the left or radical wing of that movement to which James applied Peirce's name of "pragmatism." But Dewey is reluctant to call himself a pragmatist, partly because of his constitutional dislike to wearing a tag of any kind, partly, I surmise, because he has an aversion to the spiritualistic tendencies of the two men who are usually classed with him as the leaders of the pragmatic movement--James of Harvard and Schiller of Oxford.

Dewey's doctrine of cognition, the theory of instrumentalism, is now to be found in two recent volumes, one technical and the other popular. The ordinary skimming reader will find the "Essays in Experimental Logic" rather hard sledding, so he will be relieved to find that it has been translated by the author into ordinary English in the little volume entitled "How We Think." This is intended primarily for teachers whose business is supposed to be that of teaching their youngsters how to think, though in reality most of their time has to be taken up with the imparting of information.

The "Ethics" of John Dewey and James H. Tufts (1908) is not only a practical textbook admirably clear in expounding the conflicting theories and eminently fair in criticizing them, but it would be useful to any reader for broadening the mind and pointing the proper way of approach to modern problems. Professor Tawney of the University of Cincinnati in reviewing it for the _American Journal of Sociology_ says: "Probably no more convincing effort to construct a system of moral philosophy by a strictly scientific method has ever been carried out."

Moral philosophers are generally disposed to keep their carefully constructed systems of ethics under a glass bell jar rather than risk the hard knocks they must receive if taken into the street and marketplace. But Dewey as a professed experimentalist could not consistently adopt this cautious method. His is no cloistered morality but a doctrine reduced from practical life and referable to the same authority for the validification of its influences. An interesting instance of the practical application of his principles is found in his essay on "Force and Coercion."[7] Here he discusses chiefly the question of the allowability of the use of force by a government as in war or by a class as in a strike and repudiates the Tolstoyan view that all use of force is wrong. On such a delicate question it would be improper for me to paraphrase his argument, so I quote instead his own summary of his conclusions:

First, since the attainment of ends requires the use of
means, law is essentially a formulation of the use of force.
Secondly, the only question which can be raised about the
justification of force is that of comparative efficiency and
economy in its use. Thirdly, what is justly objected to as
violence or undue coercion is a reliance upon wasteful and
destructive means of accomplishing results. Fourthly, there
is always a possibility that what passes as a legitimate
use of force may be so wasteful as to be really a use of
violence; and per contra that measures condemned as recourse
to mere violence may, under the given circumstances,
represent an intelligent utilization of energy. In no case,
can antecedents or _a priori_ principles be appealed to
as more than presumptive: The point at issue is concrete
utilization of means for ends.

In this essay Dewey inclines to the view that "all political questions are simply questions of the extension and restriction of exercise of power on the part of specific groups in the community", and says further that: "With a few notable exceptions, the doctrine that the state rests upon or is common will seems to turn out but a piece of phraseology to justify the uses actually made of force. Practices of coercion and constraint which would become intolerable if frankly labelled Force seem to become laudable when baptized with the name of Will, although they otherwise remain the same."

I trust that Dewey is one of "the few notable exceptions", for the quotations from his paper on the "Ethics of Democracy" which I have given on a previous page show that Dewey in his earlier years went as far as Fichte in his later years toward identifying government--and a bare majority at that--with the common will of the social organism. Such a Germanic doctrine of the power of the State could be used to justify worse things than the German Government has ever done, and it is perhaps a realization of this that has led Dewey latterly to look with more favor upon the use of force by the minority.

The proper use of force is, in Dewey's opinion, "the acute question of social philosophy in the world to-day", and "a generation which has beheld the most stupendous manifestation of force in all history is not going to be content unless it has found some answer to the question." In an article on "Force, Violence and Law"[8] he discusses the possibilities of the peace movement in the following fashion:

At various times of my life I have, with other wearied
souls, assisted at discussions between those who were
Tolstoyans and--well, those who weren't. In reply to the
agitated protests of the former against war and the police
and penal measures, I have listened to the time-honored
queries about what you should do when the criminal attacked
your friend or child. I have rarely heard it stated that
since one cannot even walk the street without using force,
the only question which persons can discuss with one another
concerns the most effective use of force in gaining ends
in specific situations. If one's end is the saving of
one's soul immaculate, or maintaining a certain emotion
unimpaired, doubtless force should be used to inhibit
natural muscular reactions. If the end is something else,
a hearty fisticuff may be the means of realizing it. What
is intolerable is that men should condemn or eulogize force
at large, irrespective of its use as a means of getting
results. To be interested in ends and to have contempt for
the means which alone secure them is the last stage of
intellectual demoralization.

It is hostility to force as force, to force intrinsically,
which has rendered the peace movement so largely an
anti-movement, with all the weaknesses which appertain
to everything that is primarily anti-anything. Unable to
conceive the task of organizing the existing forces
so they may achieve their greatest efficiency, pacifists
have had little recourse save to decry evil emotions and
evil-minded men as the causes of war.... And no league to
enforce peace will fare prosperously save as it is the
natural accompaniment of a constructive adjustment of the
concrete interests which are already at work.... The passage
of force under law occurs only when all the cards are on the
table, when the objective facts which bring conflicts in
their train are acknowledged, and when intelligence is used
to devise mechanisms which will afford to the forces at work
all the satisfaction that conditions permit.

Dewey's primary purpose has always been the development of a type of ethical thinking and a method of school training suited to the democratic and industrial society of modern America. Speaking of the mental revolution that has been effected by the advance of science he says:

Whether the consequent revolution in moral philosophy be
termed pragmatism or be given the happier title of the
applied and experimental habit of mind is of little account.
What is of moment is that intelligence has descended from
its lonely isolation at the remote edge of things, whence
it operated as unmoved mover and ultimate good, to take its
seat in the moving affairs of men. Theory may therefore
become responsible to the practices that have generated
it; the good be connected with nature, but with nature
naturally, not metaphysically conceived, and social life be
cherished in behalf of its own immediate possibilities,
not on the ground of its remote connections with a cosmic
reason and absolute end.--"Influence of Darwin", p. 55.

In the preface to the "Influence of Darwin" he quotes a German definition of pragmatism:[9]

Epistemologically, nominalism; psychologically,
voluntarism; cosmologically, energism; metaphysically,
agnosticism; ethically, meliorism on the basis of the
Bentham-Mill-utilitarianism.

Dewey, who dislikes to wear even one tag--and that a nice new clean one--naturally resents having these five old ones tied to him, so he says:

It may be that pragmatism will turn out to be all of this
formidable array, but even should it the one who thus
defines it has hardly come within earshot of it. For
whatever else pragmatism is or is not, the pragmatic spirit
is primarily a revolt against that habit of mind which
disposes of anything whatever--even so humble an affair as
a new method in philosophy--by tucking it away, after this
fashion, in the pigeon-holes of a filing cabinet....

It is better to view pragmatism quite vaguely as part and
parcel of a general movement of intellectual reconstruction.
For otherwise we seem to have no recourse save to define
pragmatism--as does our German author--in terms of the
very past systems against which it is a reaction; or, in
escaping that alternative, to regard it as a fixed rival
system making like claim to completeness and finality. And
if, as I believe, one of the marked traits of the pragmatic
movement is just the surrender of every such claim, how have
we furthered our understanding of pragmatism?

In one of his Socratic dialogues[10] Dewey brings in at the close Chesterton's flip refutation of pragmatism:

_Pupil._ What you say calls to mind something of
Chesterton's that I read recently: "I agree with the
pragmatists that apparent objective truth is not the whole
matter; that there is an authoritative need to believe the
things that are necessary to the human mind. But I say that
one of those necessities precisely is a belief in objective
truth. Pragmatism is a matter of human needs and one of
the first of human needs is to be something more than a
pragmatist."

You would say, if I understand you aright, that to fall back
upon the necessity of the "human mind" to believe in certain
absolute truths, is to evade a proper demand for testing the
human mind and all its works.

_Teacher._ My son, I am glad to leave the last word with
you. This _enfant terrible_ of intellectualism has revealed
that the chief objection of absolutists to the pragmatic
doctrine of the personal (or "subjective") factor in
belief is that the pragmatist has spilled the personal milk
in the absolutist's coconut.

It is curious to see how many different classes are now
holding up Germany as a horrible example of the dangers
of the theories they oppose. The Anglican Catholics blame
Luther for the war and look upon the prospective triumph
of the Allies as the final destruction of Protestantism
in the world. The orthodox believe that Germany got into
trouble through higher criticism. The classicists say
that she is suffering from an overdose of science. The
Absolute Idealists ascribe the bad conduct of Germany to her
desertion of Kant, Hegel, and Fichte to follow after the new
gods--or no gods--of Haeckel and Nietzsche. But Dewey, on
the contrary, holds Kant, Hegel, and Fichte responsible for
it all. "That philosophical absolutism may be practically
as dangerous as matter-of-fact political absolutism history
testifies." This is no new notion cooked up for the
occasion, like so many of them, but one which Dewey plainly
stated six years before the outbreak of the war in his
address on Ethics at Columbia University. In speaking of
Kant's denudation of Pure Reason of all concrete attributes
he said:

Reason became a mere voice, which having nothing particular
to say, said Law, Duty, in general, leaving to the
existing social order of the Prussia of Frederick the Great
the congenial task of declaring just what was obligatory
in the concrete. The marriage of freedom and authority was
thus celebrated with the understanding that sentimental
primacy went to the former and practical control to the
latter.--"Influence of Darwin", p. 65.

After the war began he expanded this idea in his McNair lectures at the University of North Carolina.[11] Because Germany has developed continuously without any decided break with its past like the French Revolution or the transplanting of Europeans to America, German thinkers have come to declare all progress as the unfolding of national life and to declare impossible the construction of constitutions such as we have in the New World. Dewey traces the intellectual process by which the German people have reached the very startling opinions they now hold as to their mission in the world as follows:

The premises of the historic syllogism are plain. First,
the German Luther who saved for mankind the principle of
spiritual freedom against Latin externalism; then Kant
and Fichte, who wrought out the principle into a final
philosophy of science, morals and the State; as conclusion,
the German nation organized in order to win the world to a
recognition of the principle, and thereby to establish the
rule of freedom and science in humanity as a whole.... In
the grosser sense of the words, Germany has not held that
might makes right. But it has been instructed by a long
line of philosophers that it is the business of ideal right
to gather might to itself in order that it may cease to be
merely ideal. The State represents exactly this incarnation
of ideal law and right in effective might.

A hundred years ago Fichte in his "Addresses to the German Nation" roused his countrymen to make a stand against Napoleon and fulfill their mission to "elevate the German name to that of the most glorious of all peoples, making this Nation the regenerator and restorer of the world." "There is no middle ground: If you sink, so sinks humanity entire with you, without hope of future restoration."

This sounds very much like what we hear in Germany to-day, although the present German Empire differs markedly in some respects from the ideal State that Fichte foresaw. It is also the same sort of language as is being used in England and the other allied countries. In fact every nation has the same sense of its historic divine mission and unique importance to the world's civilization. Certainly we cannot deny the existence of that feeling among Americans. To quote again from Fichte: "While cosmopolitanism is the dominant will that the purpose of the existence of humanity be actually realized in humanity, patriotism is the will that this end be first realized in the particular nation to which we ourselves belong, and that this achievement thence spread over the entire race."

This might seem a harmless and indeed inspiring conception of patriotism, but when the Fichtean idea of a particular State as the incarnation of the divine will is combined with the Hegelian idea of progress through conflict, it makes a fatal mixture, as Dewey shows:

Philosophical justification of war follows inevitably from
a philosophy of history composed in nationalistic terms.
History is the movement, the march of God on earth through
time. Only one nation at a time can be the latest and hence
the fullest realization of God. The movement of God in
history is thus particularly manifest in those changes by
which unique place passes from one nation to another. War
is the signally visible occurrence of such a flight of the
divine spirit in its onward movement.

This fallacious line of argument is, in Dewey's opinion, the logical outcome of the _a priori_ and absolutist metaphysics which has prevailed in Europe during the last century, and for which he would substitute the method of intelligent experimentation. He says, "The present situation presents the spectacle of the breakdown of the whole philosophy of Nationalism, political, racial and cultural," and he urges as a substitute the promotion of "the efficacy of human intercourse irrespective of class, racial, geographical and national limits." When we see the appalling results to which the doctrine of Nationalism has led, we may indeed regard it with Dewey as a logical breakdown, but I fear that actually it has become more powerful, pervading, and firmly fixed than ever through the psychological and economic experiences of the war.[12]

Doctor F. C. S. Schiller of Oxford calls Dewey's "German Philosophy and Politics" "an entirely admirable book; clear, calm, cogent, and popular without being shallow" and he further says:

Professor Dewey was assuredly the ideal person to handle
the subject. For though he had made a deep and sympathetic
study of German philosophy, he had in the end turned
away from it to become a leader in the movement which is
most antithetical to the traditionally German type of
philosophizing. It must not indeed be alleged that the
Anglo-Saxon world has a monopoly of the pragmatic habit
of mind; for all men have to act and pragmatism is only
the theoretic apprehension of the attitude which imposes
itself on every agent everywhere. But it is probably right
to regard this habit of mind as characteristically congenial
to Anglo-Saxon life, and it was a perception of this that so
infuriated our germanized professors who prided themselves
on their superiority to the vulgar practicality of the
national bent.[13]

A stranger who drops into one of Professor Dewey's classes is at first apt to be puzzled to account for the extent of his influence and the devotion of his disciples. There is nothing in his manner of delivery to indicate that he is saying anything of importance, and it takes some time to realize that he is. He talks along in a casual sort of way with a low and uneventful voice and his eyes mostly directed toward the bare desk or out of the window. Occasionally he wakes up to the fact that the students in the back seats are having difficulty in hearing him, and then he comes down with explosive stress on the next word, a preposition as like as not. His lectures are punctuated by pauses but not in a way to facilitate their comprehension. Sometimes in the midst of a sentence, perhaps between an adjective and its noun, his train of thought will be shunted off on to another line, and the class has to sit patiently at the junction station until it comes back, as it always does eventually. The difficulty of utterance in his lectures, like the tortuous style of his technical writings, results from overconscientiousness. When he misses the right word he does not pick any one at hand and go on but stops talking until he finds the one he wants, and he is so anxious to avoid a misunderstanding that he sometimes fails to insure an understanding. Talking has never become a reflex action with Dewey. He has to think before he speaks. Few professors and almost no instructors are bothered that way.

In profile Professor Dewey looks something like Robert Louis Stevenson, the same long lean face and neck and nose. From the front one would take him to be a Kentucky colonel disguised in spectacles. His long straight black hair, parted in the middle, is now getting gray, but his drooping mustaches, being twenty years younger, are still dark. His eyes are black and keen, and one can catch a twinkle in them if the lids do not drop too quick. His neck-tie is usually awry, and several thousands of orderly schoolma'ams have felt their hands itch to jerk it straight. His drawling careless tone and hesitant manner quite disguise the boldness of his thought and the logical order of its wording. Questions from the class never disconcert him, however inopportune, and the more he is heckled the better he talks.

One of his former students at Columbia, Randolph S. Bourne, gives this pen sketch of Professor Dewey:[14]

Nothing is more symbolic of Professor Dewey's democratic
attitude towards life than the disintegrated array of his
published writings. Where the neatly uniform works of
William James are to be found in every public library, you
must hunt long and far for the best things of the man who,
since the other's death, is the most significant thinker
in America. Pamphlets and reports of obscure educational
societies; school journals, university monographs, and
philosophical journals, limited to the pedant few; these
are the burial-places of much of this intensely alive,
futuristic philosophy.... No man, I think, with such
universally important things to say on almost every social
and intellectual activity of the day, was ever published in
forms more ingeniously contrived to thwart the interest of
the prospective public.

Professor Dewey's thought is inaccessible because he has
always carried his simplicity of manner, his dread of show
or self-advertisement, almost to the point of extravagance.
In all his psychology there is no place for the psychology
of prestige. His democracy seems almost to take that extreme
form of refusing to bring one's self or one's ideas to
the attention of others. On the college campus or in the
lecture-room he seems positively to efface himself. The
uncertainty of his silver-gray hair and drooping mustache,
of his voice, of his clothes, suggests that he has almost
studied the technique of protective coloration. It will do
you no good to hear him lecture. His sentences, flowing and
exact and lucid when read, you will find strung in long
festoons of obscurity between pauses for the awaited right
word. The whole business of impressing yourself on other
people, of getting yourself over to the people who want
to and ought to have you, has simply never come into his
ultra-democratic mind.

A prophet dressed in the clothes of a professor of logic, he
seems almost to feel shame that he has seen the implications
of democracy more clearly than anybody else in the great
would-be democratic society about him, and so been forced
into the unwelcome task of teaching it.

Knowing that every biographer is expected to show that the subject of his sketch got his peculiar talents by honest inheritance, I wrote to Professor Dewey to inquire what there was in his genealogy to account for his becoming a philosopher. His ancestry is discouraging to those who would find an explanation for all things in heredity.

My ancestry, particularly on my father's side, is free from
all blemish. All my forefathers earned an honest living as
farmers, wheelwrights, coopers. I was absolutely the first
one in seven generations to fall from grace. In the last
few years atavism has set in and I have raised enough
vegetables and fruit really to pay for my own keep.

John Dewey was born in Burlington, Vermont, October 20, 1859, the son of Archibald S. and Lucina A. (Rich) Dewey. His elder brother, Davis Rich Dewey, is professor of economics and statistics in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the author of the Special Report on Employees and Wages in the 12th Census as well as of many other works on finance and industry.

John Dewey went to the State University in his native town and received his A. B. degree at twenty. Being then uncertain whether his liking for philosophical studies was sufficient to be taken as a call to that calling he applied to the one man in America most competent and willing to decide such a question, W. T. Harris, afterward United States Commissioner for Education, but then superintendent of schools in St. Louis. Think of the courage and enterprise of a man who while filling this busy position and when the war was barely over started a _Journal of Speculative Philosophy_ and founded a Philosophical Society and produced a series of translations of Hegel, Fichte, and other German metaphysicians. It would be hard to estimate the influence of Doctor Harris in raising the standards of American schools and in arousing an interest in intellectual problems. When young Dewey sent him a brief article with a request for personal advice he returned so encouraging a reply that Dewey decided to devote himself to philosophy. So, after a year spent at home reading under the direction of Professor Torrey of the University of Vermont, one of the old type of scholarly gentleman, Dewey went to Johns Hopkins University, the first American university to make graduate and research work its main object. Here he studied under George S. Morris and followed him to the University of Michigan as Instructor in Philosophy after receiving his Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins in 1884. Two years later he married Alice Chipman of Fenton, Michigan, who has been ever since an effective collaborator in his educational and social work. In 1888 he went to the University of Minnesota as Professor of Philosophy but was called back to Michigan at the end of one year.

When President Harper went through the country picking up brilliant and promising young men for the new University of Chicago, Dewey was his choice for the chair of philosopher. During the ten years Dewey spent on the Midway Plaisance he had the opportunity to try out the radical ideas of education of which I have spoken. In 1904 Dewey was called to Columbia University, where he has since remained. Besides his classwork he has always been active though rarely conspicuous in many educational and social movements. One of the latest of these is the formation of the Association of University Professors, of which he was the first president.

The title of his latest volume, "Democracy and Education", gives the keynote of his philosophy and the aim of his life. In a recent article[15] he puts it in these words:

I am one of those who think that the only test and
justification of any form of political and economic society
is its contribution to art and science--to what may roundly
be called culture. That America has not yet so justified
itself is too obvious for even lament.. .. Since we can
neither beg nor borrow a culture without betraying both it
and ourselves, nothing remains save to produce one.. ..
Our culture must be consonant with realistic science and
with machine industry, instead of a refuge from them....
It is for education to bring the light of science and the
power of work to the aid of every soul that it may discover
its quality. For in a spiritually democratic society
every individual would realize distinction. Culture would
then be for the first time in human history an individual
achievement and not a class possession.

HOW TO READ DEWEY

As has been said previously, Dewey's writings are scattered far and wide in various periodicals and educational series. He has never been able to say "no" to any struggling journal of socialism or school reform that begged him for an article although it meant no pay, little influence, and speedy oblivion for his contribution. The graduate student of twenty-five years hence who undertakes to get a Ph.D. by making a complete collection of Dewey's works will earn his degree. The main principles of Dewey's philosophy, imparted viva voce to successive generations of students, have never been printed in a complete and systematic form, though his ideas have interfused the schools of the country through the teachers he has trained and the educational books he has written.

The nearest thing to a short cut to Dewey's philosophy that he has given us is "How We Think" (Heath, 1910), and with this the reader may well begin. "Essays in Experimental Logic" (University of Chicago Press, 1916) requires for its complete comprehension some knowledge of current controversies in philosophy. But the review of James's "Pragmatism", contained in the chapter "What Pragmatism Means", will be of interest to any reader seeking an answer to that question.

His epoch-making work, "The School and Society" (University of Chicago Press, first edition 1899, second edition 1915), has by no means lost its value although much that was prophecy then is now fulfilled. Most readers will be more interested in the fulfillments as described in "Schools of Tomorrow" (Dutton, 1915). This contains, besides the description of the new schools by his daughter, Evelyn Dewey, several chapters by Professor Dewey on the theory and aims of the educational movement they represent. A more complete and systematic exposition of the principles of education under modern conditions is to be found in his most recent book, "Democracy and Education" (Macmillan, 1916). Professor Moore of Chicago who reviews this volume in the _International Journal of Ethics_ (1916, p. 547) says of it: "The thinking world has long since learned to expect from Professor Dewey matters of prime importance. Of the general significance of this, volume it is perhaps enough to say that, in the reviewer's opinion, it is the most important of Professor Dewey's productions thus far. In defiance of possible imputations of chauvinism, the reviewer will also say that it would be difficult to overstate its import and value for all students of education, philosophy, and society."

The volume clumsily entitled "The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy and Other Essays in Contemporary Thought" (Holt, 1910) contains, besides the anniversary address which gives it its title, ten essays chiefly concerned with the exposition and defense of Dewey's form of pragmatism, "immediate empiricism." "German Philosophy and Politics" (Holt, 1915) is discussed in the preceding pages. Dewey's "Psychology" (Harper, 1886) has largely lost its interest through the rapid advance of the science and the altered viewpoint of the author. The "Ethics" which he wrote in collaboration with Professor Tufts I have previously mentioned (Holt, 1908).

The practical applications of Dewey's philosophy to current educational and public questions may best be found in the brief and popular articles that he contributed frequently to _The New Republic_ (New York) in 1915-1916. His professional contributions to logical theory and epistemology appear mostly in the fortnightly organ of the philosophical department of Columbia University, the _Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods_.

A volume of eight essays on the pragmatic attitude was published in January 1917 by Henry Holt under the title of "Creative Intelligence." The leading essay on "The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy" is by John Dewey.

Besides the articles to which reference has been made in the footnotes of the preceding pages the following writings of Dewey should be mentioned: "Science as Subject-matter and as Method", the vice presidential address of the section on education of the Boston meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1909, (in _Science_, January 28, 1910); "The Problem of Truth", George Leib Harrison lectures before the University of Pennsylvania, 1911 (in _Old Penn Weekly Review_), "Maeterlinck" (_Hibbert Journal_, vol. 9, p. 765) and "Is Nature Good?" (_Hibbert Journal_, vol. 7, p. 827); "The Existence of the World as a Problem" (_Philosophical Review_, vol. 24, p. 357); "Darwin's Influence upon Philosophy" (_Popular Science Monthly_, vol. 75, p. 90); Presidential address to the American Association of University Professors (_Science_, January 29, 1915); "Professional Spirit Among Teachers" (_American Teacher_, New York, October, 1913); _The International Journal of Ethics_ published "Force and Coercion" (vol. 26, p. 359); "Progress" (vol. 26, p. 311); "Nature and Reason in Law" (vol. 25, p. 25); "History for the Educator" and other articles appeared in _Progressive Journal of Education_, Chicago, 1909; "Voluntarism in the Roycean Philosophy" in the _Philosophical Review_, May, 1916; "Logical Foundations of The Scientific Treatment of Morality" in the Decennial Publications of the University of Chicago.

A criticism of Bergson by Dewey under the title of "Perception and Organic Action" may be found in the _Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods_, November 21, 1912. Professor Wilhelm Ostwald, who, as I said in my chapter on him, has devoted much attention to educational reforms, includes a sketch of Dewey by Franz Ludwig in the series on _Moderne Schulreforme in Das Monistische Jahrhundert_ of May 31, 191-5. For a criticism of Dewey's social philosophy see the articles by Lester Lee Bernhard of the University of Chicago in _American Journal of Sociology_.

No biography of Dewey has yet been written and none ever will be if he can prevent it. H. W. Schneider of Columbia University has prepared a complete bibliography of Dewey's writings, not yet published.

[1] The University of Chicago Press published a second edition of "School and Society", revised and enlarged, in 1915.

[2] "Schools of To-morrow", by John Dewey and Evelyn Dewey (Dutton), 1915.

[3] Doctor Georg Kerschensteiner who founded the famous "workshop schools" of Munich also acknowledges his indebtedness to Dewey.

[4] No. I of Series 2 of Philosophical Papers of the University of Michigan, 1887.

[5] "Schools of To-morrow", p. 301.

[6] See the admirable article in _Atlantic Monthly_ of November, 1908, by President Pritchett of the Carnegie Foundation, contrasting Harvard and West Point, "The College of Freedom and the College of Discipline."

[7] _International Journal of Ethics_, vol. 26, p. 359-367.

[8] _The New Republic_, January 22, 1916.

[9] To get the full force of this portentous definition one must read it in the original: _Gewiss ist der Pragmatismus erkenntniss-theoretisch Nominalismus, psychologisch Voluntarismus, naturphilosophisch Energismus, metaphysisch Agnosticismus, ethisch Meliorismus auf Grundlage des Bentham-Millschen Utilitarismus._

[10] "A Catechism Concerning Truth" in "The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy and Other Essays."

[11] Published as "German Philosophy and Politics" (Holt), 1915.

[12] "German Philosophy and Politics" is sympathetically reviewed by Professor Santayana in the _Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods_ for November 25, 1915. The same Journal reprints (vol. XII, p. 584) a criticism appearing in _The New Republic_ (vol. IV, p. 234) by Professor Hocking of Harvard, who thinks that the fault of the Germans is being too pragmatic. Professor Dewey's reply is published with it. See also Dewey's admirable analysis of the national psychology of Germany, France, and England in his article "On Understanding the Mind of Germany", _Atlantic_, vol. 117, p. 251.

[13] _Mind_, April, 1916.

[14] _The New Republic_, March 13, 1915.

[15] _The New Republic_, July 1, 1916.