John Dewey was born forty weeks after his brother of the same name died
America's great philosopher of democracy and schooling carried a dead sibling's name: the first John Dewey died in an accident in January 1859, and the second was born that October. He decided he was no good at teaching children, then spent a lifetime reinventing how they should be taught.
Dewey grew up in Burlington, Vermont, in a family of modest means, graduated from the University of Vermont in 1879, and tried school teaching in Oil City, Pennsylvania, and Charlotte, Vermont. Concluding he was unsuited to it, he went to Johns Hopkins, studying with figures such as Charles Sanders Peirce and G. Stanley Hall, and earned a PhD in 1884 with a dissertation on Kant that has since been lost.
His 1896 paper on the reflex arc is counted as the first major work of the Chicago school of functional psychology, and he became a leading voice of pragmatism. At the new University of Chicago he founded the Laboratory Schools to test progressive teaching methods, an experiment that fed The School and Society in 1899. Clashes with the administration led him to resign, and from 1904 until retiring in 1930 he taught philosophy at Teachers College, Columbia, where he influenced Carl Rogers.
Democracy was the thread through everything. As early as 1888 he wrote that democracy and humanity's ultimate ethical ideal were, to his mind, the same thing. Full democracy, he argued, needed more than the vote; it required an informed public opinion built through communication between citizens, experts and politicians. The Public and its Problems, in 1927, answered Walter Lippmann's gloomier view of the public.
His output was vast, with more than 700 articles and around 40 books ranging over logic, art, ethics and religion; Democracy and Education in 1916 is the best known. He led both the American Psychological Association and the American Philosophical Association, helped found The New School alongside Thorstein Veblen and others, and belonged to the American Federation of Teachers for years. He died in 1952.
Source: John Dewey
