Education: Perpetual Arriver

Around 9:30 one night last week, an old gentleman in evening clothes opened the door of a Manhattan hotel ballroom and started to make his way inside. At once, the 1,500 banqueters rose from their tables, and the room rocked with applause. Educator-Philosopher John Dewey nodded his white head, smiled behind his scraggly mustache as scholars and eminent professors clapped until their hands ached. Then everyone joined in a chorus of “Happy birthday to you . . .”

The ballroom guests were not alone in celebrating John Dewey’s 90th birthday. Messages had poured in from all over the world—from President Harry Truman and Prime Minister Clement Attlee, from Pandit Nehru, Historian Arnold Toynbee, Harvard’s President James B. Conant and from a hundred U.S. colleges and universities. A dozen foreign nations had planned celebrations. Friends were raising $90,000 for an educational Dewey Birthday Fund. Gruffed John Dewey when a reporter asked him what he thought of it all: “I keep thinking it’s a damned funny thing to celebrate a man’s getting to be 90.”

To the thousands who celebrated the day, it did not seem funny at all. For at 90, John Dewey was still the nation’s most noted living philosopher, who had perhaps had more influence on 20th Century America than any other thinker of his day. He had changed the lot of U.S. schoolchildren and molded the minds of their teachers. Supreme Court justices had felt his influence and so had historians, psychologists, artists and politicians. He was the philosopher of a changing America which had found Europe’s formal philosophic traditions hard to adapt to day-to-day living. As the nation grew, Dewey’s philosophy had grown with it—highly practical, preaching adjustment to change, made in U.S.A.

Hams & Cigars. John Dewey was born in Burlington, Vt., a bustling town of 15,000 whose citizens had no particular notion that young John would ever amount to so much. To them he was just the painfully bashful Dewey boy who delivered papers after school. His father, the proprietor of a grocery store (“Hams & cigars: smoked and unsmoked”), was a courtly man with a flowing beard, who quoted Milton and Robert Burns, and told of bullets whistling through his hair during the Civil War (“I always thought that that was how he got bald,” says Dewey).

In spite of his shyness, young John did well at school, and at 15 was ready to enter the University of Vermont. There he fell in love with learning, borrowed $500 from an aunt and set off for the six-year-old Johns Hopkins University for more study. “Don’t be so bookish,” Hopkins President Daniel C. Gilman warned him; “get out and see more people.” But John stuck close to his books; he had made up his mind to become a professional philosopher.

Over the years, as he moved from the University of Michigan (where he met his future wife, Coed Alice Chipman) to the University of Chicago, and finally to Columbia University, the nation began to hear of him. His students knew him as a patient scholar who sagged and shuffled when he walked, as if too deep in thought to mind where he was going. He might appear in class with his socks flapping about his ankles, or at a formal dinner party minus his dress tie. He lectured in a distracted manner, crumpling his notes into a ball and gazing into space. Students sometimes wondered whether he was lecturing or simply thinking out loud. “I think this is a little clearer to me now,” he might say, after talking for three hours straight.

His home was a busy place, filled with the clack of his own typewriter and the shrieks and whoops of his children. At night, there were long talks with such visitors as William James or Jane Addams. Usually, too, there were serialized stories which Dewey made up for the children—of the Girl with the Crockery Hair and of poor Don Misty, who evaporated in the sun and condensed in the shade, being made entirely out of mist.

But to the rest of the world, mild, drawling John Dewey became a formidable and controversial figure. On a succession of typewriters, he pecked out 45 books, hundreds of learned articles, and evolved a system of thought that was to challenge almost every traditional tenet of philosophy and education. His blunt and bulky style was never easy. “Incredibly ill written,” said Justice Holmes of one of his books. “So methought God would have spoken had He been inarticulate but keenly desirous to tell you how it was [inside the cosmos].”

Actually, John Dewey was never so much concerned with the cosmos as with man and his society. The role of the philosopher, he argued, was not to sit in “monastic impeccability” searching for eternal truth, which, as far as Dewey was concerned, he could never hope to find. Nothing irritated him so much as the “cheap intellectual pastime [of contrasting] the infinitesimal pettiness of man with the vastnesses of the stellar universe.” He saw no order in nature, and no divine plan: “Nature has no preference for good things over bad things, its mills turn out any kind of grist indifferently.”

Then was there no truth at all? Dewey found part of his answer from the American pragmatism of Charles Peirce and William James. Ideas, James had said, are not true in themselves, but only as men believe they are “profitable to our lives.” But Dewey felt that truth should be on a firmer foundation than that.

Inquiry Forever. The foundation he found was science. The philosopher, he argued, could never learn truth by intuition or revelation. Nor could he, as traditional philosophers had held, rely entirely upon his reason. For a man’s mind was a part of his body, his body a part of his world, and each part acted upon the others. In a crossfire of instincts and impulses, of social needs and demands, a philosopher must look beyond pure reason to find any sort of truth at all.

His only hope, said Dewey, was to submit his theories to the test of scientific inquiry. His laboratory was action. A theory was relatively true or false only in the light of its consequences. A goal was relatively good or bad only if the means used to achieve it brought about the desired consequences. From past inquiries, said Dewey, men have found certain standards to guide them. But no standard is absolutely or eternally true: “Morals [are] not a catalogue of acts nor a set of rules to be applied like . . . cookbook recipes.” To Dewey, there were no final answers, only “ends that are literally endless,” and an inquiry that must go on forever.

In such a world, Dewey believed, traditional education was inadequate. The school assumed that it could hand out knowledge by typing it up in little packages and passing it on each day. It made the “records and remains of the past” its main authority, forgetting that the men who wrote those records wrote them out of the needs of their time and experience.

Like adults, Dewey argued, children learned from experience, too. They did not need to be forced, nor did they have to be bribed. They were by nature curious to know, and they learned by acting within their environment as well as by studying “the funded capital of civilization.” Education, said Dewey, was “a process of living and not a preparation for future living.” The experiences of later life should be in every school for children to solve and learn from. Knowledge for its own sake was useless—”a luxury . . . nuisance . . . disturber.”

The Lost & the Saved. What have 90 years of John Dewey wrought? In education, they have led partly to a caricature of Dewey’s progressive education that sees fit to indulge every pupil’s whim at the expense of both learning and doing. But almost every U.S. public school has become Deweyized in part. In five decades the emphasis has shifted from the subject to the pupil, from rote-learning to problem-solving, from drilling to creative thinking.

In other fields John Dewey remains more controversial. He gives little quarter to religions that separate the “sheep and goats; the saved and the lost; the elect and the mass.” But not only churchmen have denounced his reliance on science as a basis for morals. Wrote the University of Chicago’s Chancellor Robert Hutchins: “Though the question ‘How do we get what we want?’ may be scientific, the moral question ‘What should we want and in what order?’ is not . . . Moral questions are not susceptible of scientific treatment . . . Mr. Dewey says you must give up philosophy and religion or you cannot truly believe in science. He requires us not merely to have faith in science, but to have faith in nothing else.”

As far as John Dewey is concerned, however, the world would have to decide the philosophical differences between him and Hutchins for itself. “Philosophy,” he once wrote, “is of account only if … it affords guidance to action.” Today, his life is full of action, and it is hard for him to remember “that I am an old man.” He remarried at 87 (his first wife died in 1927), and at 89 adopted two more children. In the past ten years he has published three books, is now at work on a fourth. “If it is better to travel than to arrive,” he says, “it is because traveling is a constant arriving, while arrival that precludes further traveling is most easily attained by going to sleep or dying.” At 90, like the perpetual inquiry he has sponsored, John Dewey is still arriving.