Education: Dewey at 80

One Indian summery evening last week 1,000 people gathered in Manhattan to praise “America’s greatest philosopher.” It was John Dewey’s 80th birthday, and many distinguished men and women—among them Chinese Ambassador Hu Shih, Charles Beard, Mrs. Eugene Meyer, Fiorello LaGuardia—had come to his party. Nine organizations, including the Progressive Education Association and American Philosophical Association, had arranged to honor him. Honor him they did, with oratory and applause. But Dr. Dewey heard them not. He was not in Manhattan, not in Chicago, not in any of a dozen other places where Dewey birthday meetings were held. Painfully modest Dr. Dewey had hidden himself on a daughter’s ranch in Greencastle, Mo.

Although he is one of the most famed modern philosophers and has soapboxed for innumerable causes, few people know John Dewey. To his intimate friends he is a sweet and lovable character. His absentmindedness is fabulous. He sometimes shows up a week late for appointments, goes to the wrong room to meet his classes, has been known to wander into ladies’ washrooms. He often goes out into the snow without rubbers or muffler, but rarely catches cold. Despite his absentmindedness, he is scrupulous about fulfilling obligations, never breaks a promise. He used to make it a rule never to read manuscripts submitted to him for criticism by budding philosophers. But applicants learned how to get around his rule: they brought manuscripts to his office. Dewey peeked at them through a crack in the door, invariably melted and let them in. Having promised to read and criticize a manuscript, he always did so—even if he sent it back to the wrong address.

Dr. Dewey now spends his summers in Nova Scotia, his winters in a Manhattan apartment with his youngest daughter. His favorite hobby is solving acrostic puzzles with his family. He also likes to read detective stories, fancies himself as a farmer. But John Dewey spends most of his time thinking. Father of six children (two died young and he adopted another), he early learned to concentrate on his work amidst domestic bustle. To his classes he lectured in a monotonous voice, made no rhetorical effort whatever to interest his audience. Once, after droning on to graduate students for three solid hours on the meaning of the word “this,” he concluded: “I think this is a little clearer to me now.”

Born in Burlington, Vt., where his father kept a general store displaying a sign: “Ham and Segars, Smoked and Un-smoked,” John Dewey raised Yankee common sense to the status of a full-fledged philosophical system. Essence of his philosophy is indicated in the proverb: “The proof of the pudding is in the eating.” Truth, to John Dewey, is not fixed or absolute, changes as conditions change. And he believes that the highest virtue is intelligence, that intelligence means resolving a problem with the answer that 1) is most workable, 2) makes the most people happy. Moral basis of Dr. Dewey’s philosophy is a firm belief in democracy.

Dr. Dewey’s philosophy was called pragmatism, naturalism, experimentalism, instrumentalism, other hard names. As an undergraduate at University of Vermont, a graduate student at Johns Hopkins, a professor at Michigan, Minnesota, Chicago and Columbia, he busied himself refining his philosophy, applying it, defending it. Dr. Dewey became known as a “philosopher of the plain man.” But no one accused him of speaking plainly. Sample Dewey jargon: “The biological-anthropological method of approach to experience provides the way out of mentalistic into behavioral interpretation of experiencing, both in general and in its detailed manifestations. With equal necessity and pertinency, it points the way out of the belief that experience as such is inherently cognitional and that cognition is the sole path that leads into the natural world.”

Despite his bad writing, Dewey had a profound influence on modern U. S. political theory, religion, especially education. No armchair philosopher, Dewey put his theories to the test of practice. He conducted a laboratory progressive school at Chicago, led a People’s Lobby at Washington, campaigned for perennial Socialist Presidential Candidate Norman Thomas, tried to organize a third party in the U. S. Two years ago, at 78, he got into a fierce fight by trying and exonerating Leon Trotsky of Stalinist charges.

Today many a plain man reckons John Dewey an old dodo, his ideas a dusty commonplace. But there is no dust yet on old Dr. Dewey. Still able to write 5,000 to 7,000 words a day, throw it all in the waste basket and start afresh next morning, in the past 18 months John Dewey has written three major books, the greatest output of his career. Still dewey fresh at

80, Dr. Dewey last week had the strongest liberal voice in the U. S. On his birthday was published Freedom and Culture,* an appeal for faith in the slow, hard process of intelligence. Whatever may be the state of younger liberals, John Dewey is not demoralized.

Dr. Dewey admitted certain disillusionments, however: disillusionment in the effectiveness of schooling (Germany is the world’s most literate nation); disillusionment in Thomas Jefferson’s faith in the corrective value of a free press (a politically free press may still not be free); disillusionment in Marxism (pretending to be scientific, it has become “thoroughly anti-scientific,” an inflexible dogma); disillusionment in war (a supporter of the first war to “save democracy,” Dr. Dewey now says: “Resort to military force is a first sure sign that we are giving up the struggle for the democratic way of life, and that the Old World has conquered morally as well as geographically”).

To these disillusionments, Dr. Dewey has a hopeful but not a simple answer. He still believes that mankind’s best chance is to go on solving its problems one by one, gaining increased intelligence, as it solves each problem, to solve the next one. He believes also that the method of solution is as important as the solution itself: a bad means cannot produce a good end. His creed:

“We have every right to appeal to the long and slow process of time to protect ourselves from the pessimism that comes from a short-span temporal view of events —under one condition. We must know that the dependence of ends upon means is such that the only ultimate result is the result that is attained today, tomorrow, the next day, and day after day, in the succession of years and generations. . . . At the end as at the beginning the democratic method is as fundamentally simple and as immensely difficult as is the energetic, unflagging, unceasing creation of an ever-present new road upon which we can walk together.”

* G. P. Putnam’s Sons ($2). Other Dewey books published for his birthday: John Dewey, “an intellectual portrait,” by his good friend, New York University Professor Sidney Hook (John Day, $2); The Philosophy of John Dewey, containing a biography by his three daughters, criticisms by 17 philosophers and Dewey’s reply (Northwestern University, $4).