Books: Optimist

THE PHILOSOPHY OF JOHN DEWEY—Selected and edited by Joseph Ratner—Henry Holt ($4).

In remote countries of the world—China, Russia—John Dewey is known and revered as the wizard of education (TIME, June 4). In the U. S. this prophet is not without honor save among the vast majority of citizens who never heard of him, so inconspicuously has he undermined all philosophy, all pedagogy. Dressed in sombre prose, his sensational thinking has not gained the easy popularity of Freud’s shilling-shockers, or William James’s eminently readable volumes.

Editor Ratner does not presume to jazz up Dewey’s honest prose, but he does great service in segregating from the great mass of Dewey’s controversial writings the essence of his thought, and arranging in lucid sequence Dewey’s conception of habits, impulse, truth, in their relation to civilization.

Art—fun, play, poetry—is “repose in stimulation,” and adds deeper meanings to the usual activities of life. The fullness of life depends upon the richness of its meanings, meanings can only be expressed in symbols, and symbols are province of art.

Education is a matter of growth through practice of useful occupations rather than the acquisition of irrelevant book-learning. (Dewey’s “project method” has been grossly misinterpreted in modern schools which “let the children do what they want.”) Education must continue throughout life.

Morals: The bad man is he who is deteriorating, the good man he who is improving. But the improvement must be intelligent, or it does not qualify as virtue.

Politics: Democracy, with all its faults, is the only possible system of government that helps the individual to help himself. The day will come when the experimental methods now used in the natural sciences will also be applied to social problems..

The philosophy underlying these opinions is no pedantic metaphysics, but an essential part of everyday existence. To Dewey the world is: 1) a thinking world; 2) an evolving world of experience. Philosophy is the intelligent vision which controls experience, shaping it to desire.