A Vermont Boyhood and an Unlikely Vocation
John Dewey was born in Burlington, Vermont, in 1859, the son of a grocer, and grew up in a college town without any obvious sign that he would become, by the middle of the twentieth century, the most influential philosopher the United States had produced. He earned his undergraduate degree at the University of Vermont in 1879 and spent a few restless years teaching high school, unsure whether philosophy could be an actual profession rather than a private enthusiasm. A set of essays he sent, half on speculation, to the journal “Journal of Speculative Philosophy” persuaded him otherwise: the editor wrote back encouragingly, and Dewey enrolled at the newly founded Johns Hopkins University, one of the first American institutions built explicitly on the German research-university model. There he fell under the influence of George Sylvester Morris, a philosopher trained in Germany and steeped in Hegelian idealism, and of G. Stanley Hall, a pioneer of the new experimental psychology. Those two influences — a metaphysics of organic wholes and a hands-on science of mind — would spend the next twenty years working themselves out in Dewey’s writing, sometimes at war with each other, eventually fusing into something neither of his teachers would have fully recognized.
Ann Arbor and the Idealist Apprenticeship
Dewey took his doctorate in 1884 and followed Morris to the University of Michigan, where he taught philosophy and psychology for most of the next decade, save for a single year on loan to the University of Minnesota. These were his formative and, in retrospect, most conventionally academic years. He published his first book, “Psychology,” in 1887, and his second the following year: “Leibniz’s New Essays Concerning the Human Understanding,” a “critical exposition” written for a series Morris was editing on the German philosophical classics. It is a young man’s book in the best sense — confident, exhaustively argued, unmistakably Hegelian in its assumption that a philosophy proves itself by how completely it can unify nature and spirit, mechanism and purpose. Dewey would spend much of his later career quietly walking back the more rigid parts of that idealism, but the habits of mind it gave him — a suspicion of rigid dualisms, an insistence that ideas be judged by what they hold together rather than by formal consistency alone — never left him. At Michigan he also began a lasting collaboration with the young psychologist George Herbert Mead, who would follow him to Chicago and become one of the founders of American social psychology.
The Turn Toward Pragmatism
In 1894 Dewey moved to the University of Chicago to chair its department of philosophy, psychology, and pedagogy, and it was there that the transformation Michigan had only hinted at became complete. Exposure to Darwin’s account of adaptive, changing organisms, to William James’s “Principles of Psychology,” and to the daily, concrete problem of how children actually learn pushed Dewey away from static idealist categories and toward what he and his Chicago colleagues came to call instrumentalism: the view that ideas are tools for solving real problems in an unfinished, evolving world, not mirrors held up to a fixed rational order. He tested the theory literally, founding the University of Chicago Laboratory School in 1896 as a place where educational philosophy could be checked against the actual behavior of children rather than argued from an armchair. The school became internationally known, drawing visitors from Europe and Japan, and it gave Dewey the material for a stream of essays that would eventually define progressive education as a movement.
Democracy as a Way of Life
A conflict with University of Chicago president William Rainey Harper sent Dewey to Columbia University in 1905, where he remained on the faculty until 1930 and stayed intellectually active for decades after. It was at Columbia that he wrote the books that made his name a household word among American educators and, eventually, American readers generally: “How We Think” (1910), “Democracy and Education” (1916) — his most comprehensive statement of learning as a social and experimental process rather than the memorization of fixed facts — and, later, “Experience and Nature” (1925) and “Art as Experience” (1934). He traveled to advise educators in Japan, China, Turkey, and Mexico, wrote for popular outlets like “The New Republic,” and became a public intellectual on questions well beyond the classroom, from labor rights to the founding of what became the American Civil Liberties Union. By the time he died in 1952, at ninety-two, Dewey had shaped not only American philosophy but American schooling itself, and the pragmatist tradition he helped build — alongside Charles Sanders Peirce and William James — remains one of the country’s few homegrown contributions to world philosophy. The patient, idealist-trained young professor who wrote a book about Leibniz’s quarrel with Locke in 1888 is not the Dewey most people know today, but he is unmistakably the same mind, still working out, six decades early, what it would mean for a philosophy to actually hold together.