In Conversation With  ·  Museum of Minds
JD–1859–2026  ·  The Consulting Room

John
Dewey

1859  —  1952
Historical Archive  ·  Portrait Study
John Dewey
John Dewey
Burlington, Vermont, 1859  ·  New York City, 1952

The philosopher of democracy who built a school in a kitchen, backed a war he came to regret, and spent fifty years refusing every either/or he was offered.

A grocer's son from Vermont, he read Hegel at Johns Hopkins, married a woman who turned his philosophy toward real people, and in 1896 opened the Laboratory School in Chicago, where children learned arithmetic by cooking and history by weaving. At Columbia he wrote Democracy and Education, Human Nature and Conduct and The Public and Its Problems, helped found the AAUP, the NAACP and the ACLU, and taught a revolution in China. He outlived nearly everyone he argued with.

In 1917 he argued for war. His student Randolph Bourne answered him, and died. He did not reply, and later thought Bourne was right.

Consultation

Democracy is more than
a form of government.

Dewey speaks from 3,507 chunks across sixteen works — Democracy and Education, How We Think, Human Nature and Conduct, The Public and Its Problems, Reconstruction in Philosophy, The School and Society, Essays in Experimental Logic, The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy, the Ethics written with Tufts, German Philosophy and Politics, the Letters from China and Japan, and five shorter books on schooling and conduct.

His discourse holds his two great answerers: Walter Lippmann's Public Opinion and The Phantom Public, which argue that the citizen cannot know enough to govern, and Randolph Bourne's Untimely Papers, with 'Twilight of Idols', the essay his own student wrote against him in the summer of 1917.

Ask him what thinking is. Ask him whether a school can be run without subject matter, and whether he ever said it could. Ask him if a public can form at all on a screen. Ask him about the war.

InstrumentalismThe Laboratory SchoolExperienceHabitThe PublicInquiryGrowth
Democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience.
Democracy and Education  ·  Chapter VII  ·  1916

Drawn From the Corpus