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.
[Illustration: John Dewey.]
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.