Discover the Best Books Written by John Dewey

John Dewey was an American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer whose ideas influenced education and social reform. He was one of the most prominent American scholars in the first half of the twentieth century. The overriding theme of Dewey's works was his profound belief in democracy, be it in politics, education, or communication and journalism. As Dewey stated in 1888, while still at the University of Michigan, "Democracy and the one, ultimate, ethical ideal of humanity are, to my mind, synonymous."

Dewey considered two fundamental elements, schools, and civil society, to be major topics needing attention and reconstruction to encourage experimental intelligence and plurality. First, he asserted that complete democracy was to be obtained not just by extending voting rights but also by ensuring a fully formed public opinion, accomplished by communication among citizens, experts, and politicians, with the latter being accountable for the policies they adopt.

Dewey was one of the primary figures associated with the philosophy of pragmatism and is considered one of functional psychology's fathers. His paper "The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology," published in 1896, is regarded as the first major work in the (Chicago) functionalist school of psychology. In addition, a Review of General Psychology survey published in 2002 ranked Dewey as the 93rd-most-cited psychologist of the 20th century.

Dewey was also a major educational reformer of the 20th century. A well-known public intellectual, he was a major voice of progressive education and liberalism. While a professor at the University of Chicago, he founded the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, where he could apply and test his progressive ideas on pedagogical methods. Although Dewey is known best for his publications about education, he also wrote about many other topics, including epistemology, metaphysics, aesthetics, art, logic, social theory, and ethics.

After two years as a high-school teacher in Oil City, Pennsylvania, and one year as an elementary school teacher in the small town of Charlotte, Vermont, Dewey decided that he was unsuited for teaching primary or secondary school. After studying with George Sylvester Morris, Charles Sanders Peirce, Herbert Baxter Adams, and G. Stanley Hall, Dewey received his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University School of Arts & Sciences. In 1884, he accepted a faculty position at the University of Michigan (1884–88 and 1889–94) with the help of George Sylvester Morris. His unpublished and now-lost dissertation was titled "The Psychology of Kant."

In 1894 Dewey joined the newly founded University of Chicago (1894–1904), where he developed his belief in Rational Empiricism, becoming associated with the newly emerging Pragmatic philosophy. His time at the University of Chicago resulted in four essays collectively entitled Thought and its Subject-Matter, which were published with collected works from his colleagues at Chicago under the collective title Studies in Logical Theory (1904).

During that time, Dewey also initiated the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, where he actualized the pedagogical beliefs that provided material for his first major work on education, The School and Society (1899). However, disagreements with the administration ultimately caused his resignation from the university, and soon after that, he relocated to the East Coast. In 1899, Dewey was elected president of the American Psychological Association (A.P.A.).

From 1904 until his retirement in 1930, he was a professor of philosophy at Teachers College at Columbia University and influenced Carl Rogers. In 1905 he became president of the American Philosophical Association. In addition, he was a longtime member of the American Federation of Teachers. Along with the historians Charles A. Beard and James Harvey Robinson, and the economist Thorstein Veblen, Dewey is one of the founders of The New School.

Dewey published more than 700 articles in 140 journals and approximately 40 books. His most significant writings were "The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology" (1896), a critique of a standard psychological concept and the basis of all his further work; Democracy and Education (1916), his celebrated work on progressive education; Human Nature and Conduct (1922), a study of the function of habit in human behavior; The Public and its Problems (1927), a defense of democracy written in response to Walter Lippmann's The Phantom Public (1925); Experience and Nature (1925), Dewey's most "metaphysical" statement; Impressions of Soviet Russia and the Revolutionary World (1929), a glowing travelogue from the nascent USSR.