educational essays john dewey

John Dewey on Education: Impact & Theory

Charlotte Nickerson

Research Assistant at Harvard University

Undergraduate at Harvard University

Charlotte Nickerson is a student at Harvard University obsessed with the intersection of mental health, productivity, and design.

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Key Takeaways

• John Dewey (1859—1952) was a psychologist, philosopher, and educator who made contributions to numerous topics in philosophy and psychology. His work continues to inform modern philosophy and educational practice today.
• Dewey was an influential pragmatist, a movement that rejected most philosophy at the time in favor of the belief that things that work in a practical situation are true, while those that do not are false. This view would go on to influence his educational philosophy.
• Dewey was also a functionalist. Inspired by the ideas of Charles Darwin, he believed that humans develop behaviors as an adaptation to their environment.
• Dewey’s influential education is marked by an emphasis on the belief that people learn and grow as a result of their experiences and interactions with the world. He aimed to shape educational environments so that they would promote active inquiry but did not do away with traditional instruction altogether.
• Outside of education and philosophy, Dewey also devised a theory of emotions in response to Darwin’s ideas. In this theory, he argued that the behaviors that arise from emotions were, at some point, beneficial to the survival of organisms.

John Dewey was an American psychologist, philosopher, educator, social critic, and political activist. He made contributions to numerous fields and topics in philosophy and psychology.

Besides being a primary originator of both functionalism and behaviorism psychology , Dewey was a major inspiration for several movements that shaped 20th-century thought, including empiricism, humanism, naturalism, contextualism, and process philosophy (Simpson, 2006).

Dewey was born in Burlington, Vermont, in 1859 and began his career at the University of Michigan before becoming the chairman of the department of philosophy, psychology, and pedagogy at the University of Chicago.

In 1899, Dewey was elected president of the American Psychological Association and became president of the American Philosophical Association five years later.

Dewey traveled as a philosopher, social and political theorist, and educational consultant and remained outspoken on education, domestic and international politics, and numerous social movements.

Dewey’s views and writings on educational theory and practice were widely read and accepted. He held that philosophy, pedagogy, and psychology were closely interrelated.

Dewey also believed in an “instrumentalist” theory of knowledge, in which ideas are seen to exist mainly as instruments for creating solutions to problems encountered in the environment (Simpson, 2006).

Contributions to Philosophy and Psychology

Dewey is one of the central figures and founders of pragmatism in America despite not identifying himself as a pragmatist.

Pragmatism teaches that things that are useful — meaning that they work in a practical situation — are true, and what does not work is false (Hildebrand, 2018).

This rejected the threads of epistemology and metaphysics that ran through modern philosophy in favor of a naturalistic approach that viewed knowledge as an active adaptation of humans to their environment (Hildebrand, 2018).

Dewey held that value was not a function of purely social construction but a quality inherent to events. Dewey also believed that experimentation was a reliable enough way to determine the truth of a concept.

Functionalism

Dewey is considered a founder of the Chicago School of Functional Psychology, inspired by Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, as well as the ideas of William James and Dewey’s own instrumental philosophy.

As chair of philosophy, psychology, and education at the University of Chicago from 1894-1904, Dewey was highly influential in establishing the functional orientation amongst psychology faculty like Angell and Addison Moore.

Scholars widely consider Dewey’s 1896 paper, The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology , to be the first major work in the functionalist school.

In this work, Dewey attacked the methods of psychologists such as Wilhelm Wundt and Edward Titchener, who used stimulus-response analysis as the basis of psychological theories.

Psychologists such as Wund and Titchener believed that all human behaviors could be broken down into a series of fundamental laws and that all human behavior originates as a learned adaptation to the presence of certain stimuli in one’s environment (Backe, 2001).

Dewey considered Wundt and Titchener’s approach to be flawed because it ignored both the continuity of human behavior and the role that adaptation plays in creating it.

In contrast, Dewey’s functionalism sought to consider organisms in total as they functioned in their environment. Rather than being passive receivers of stimuli, Dewey perceived organisms as active perceivers (Backe, 2001).

Chicago School

The Chicago school refers to the functionalist approach to psychology that emerged at the University of Chicago in the late 19th century. Key tenets of functional psychology included:

• Studying the adaptive functions of consciousness and how mental processes help organisms adjust to their environment
• Explaining psychological phenomena in terms of their biological utility
• Focusing on the practical operations of the mind rather than contents of consciousness

Educational Philosophy

John Dewey was a notable educational reformer and established the path for decades of subsequent research in the field of educational psychology.

Influenced by his philosophical and psychological theories, Dewey’s concept of instrumentalism in education stressed learning by doing, which was opposed to authoritarian teaching methods and rote learning.

These ideas have remained central to educational philosophy in the United States. At the University of Chicago, Dewey founded an experimental school to develop and study new educational methods.

He experimented with educational curricula and methods and advocated for parental participation in the educational process (Dewey, 1974).

Dewey’s educational philosophy highlights “pragmatism,” and he saw the purpose of education as the cultivation of thoughtful, critically reflective, and socially engaged individuals rather than passive recipients of established knowledge.

Dewey rejected the rote-learning approach driven by a predetermined curriculum, the standard teaching method at the time (Dewey, 1974).

Dewey also rejected so-called child-centered approaches to education that followed children’s interests and impulses uncritically. Dewey did not propose an entirely hands-off approach to learning.

Dewey believed that traditional subjects were important but should be integrated with the strengths and interests of the learner.

In response, Dewey developed a concept of inquiry, which was prompted by a sense of need and was followed by intellectual work such as defining problems, testing hypotheses, and finding satisfactory solutions.

Dewey believed that learning was an organic cycle of doubt, inquiry, reflection, and the reestablishment of one’s sense of understanding.

In contrast, the reflexive arc model of learning popular in his time thought of learning as a mechanical process that could be measured by standardized tests without reference to the role of emotion or experience in learning.

Rejecting the assumption that all of the big questions and ideas in education are already answered, Dewey believed that all concepts and meanings could be open to reinvention and improvement and that all disciplines could be expanded with new knowledge, concepts, and understandings (Dewey, 1974).

Philosophy of Education

Dewey believed that people learn and grow as a result of their experiences and interactions with the world. These compel people to continually develop new concepts, ideas, practices, and understandings.

These, in turn, are refined through and continue to mediate the learner’s life experiences and social interactions. Dewey believed that (Hargraves, 2021):

Empirical Validity and Criticism

Despite its wide application in modern theories of education, many scholars have noted the lack of empirical evidence in favor of Dewey’s theories of education directly.

Nonetheless, Dewey’s theory of how students learn aligns with empirical studies that examine the positive impact of interactions with peers and adults on learning (Göncü & Rogoff, 1998).

Researchers have also found a link between heightened engagement and learning outcomes.

This has resulted in the development of educational strategies such as making meaningful connections to students” home lives and encouraging student ownership of their learning (Turner, 2014).

Theory of Emotions

Dewey vs. darwin.

Another influential piece of philosophy that Dewey created was his theory of emotion (Cunningham, 1995).

Dewey reconstructed Darwin’s theory of emotions, which he believed was flawed for assuming that the expression of emotion is separate from and subsequent to the emotion itself.

Darwin also argued that behavior that expresses emotion serves the individual in some way when the individual is in a particular state of mind. These can also cause behaviors that are not useful.

Dewey, however, claimed that the function of emotional behaviors is not to express emotion but to be acts that value someone’s survival. Dewey believed that emotion is separate from other behaviors because it involves an attitude toward an object. The intention of the emotion informs the behaviors that result (Cunningham, 1995).

Dewey also rejected Darwin’s principle that some expressions of emotions can be explained as cases where one emotion can be expressed by actions that are the exact opposite of another.

Dewey again believed that even these opposite behaviors have purposes in themselves (Cunningham, 1995).

Dewey vs. James

Dewey argued against James’s serial theory of emotions, seeing emotion and stimuli as one simultaneous coordinated act.

William James proposed a serial theory of emotion , in which an emotional experience progresses through several sequential stages:

• An object or idea functions as a stimulus
• This stimulus leads to a behavioral response
• The response is then followed by an emotional excitation or affect

An example would be seeing a bear (stimulus), running away (response), and then feeling afraid (emotion).

Dewey, however, argued that emotion and stimulus form a unified, simultaneous act that cannot be separated in this way.

He uses the example of a frightened reaction to a bear to illustrate his point:

• The “bear” itself is constituted by the coordinated sensory excitations of the eyes, touch, etc.
• The feeling of “terror” is constituted by disturbances across glandular, muscular systems.
• Rather than stimulus → response → emotion, these are partial activities within the one act of perceiving the frightening bear and running away in fear.
• The bear object and the fear emotion are two aspects of the total coordinated activity, happening at once.

So, where James treated stimulus, response, and emotion as sequential stages in an emotional episode, Dewey saw them as “minor acts” coming together in a unified conscious experience.

He maintained James was artificially separating elements that occur as part of one ongoing activity of coordination.

The key difference is that Dewey did not believe it was possible to isolate stimulus, response, and affect as self-sufficient events. They exist meaningfully only within the total act – hence why he emphasizes their simultaneity.

Backe, A. (2001). John Dewey and early Chicago functionalism. History of Psychology, 4 (4), 323.

Cunningham, S. (1995). Dewey on emotions: recent experimental evidence. Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 31(4), 865-874.

Dewey, J. (1974). John Dewey on education: Selected writings .

Göncü, A., & Rogoff, B. (1998). Children’s categorization with varying adult support. American Educational Research Journal, 35 (2), 333-349.

Hargraves, V. (2021). Dewey’s educational philosophy .

Hildebrand, D. (2018). John Dewey.

Simpson, D. J. (2006). John Dewey (Vol. 10). Peter Lang.

Turner, J. C. (2014). Theory-based interventions with middle-school teachers to support student motivation and engagement. In Motivational interventions . Emerald Group Publishing Limited.

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Article contents

John dewey and teacher education.

• Margaret Schmidt Margaret Schmidt Arizona State University
•  and  Randall Everett Allsup Randall Everett Allsup Teachers College Columbia University
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264093.013.475
• Published online: 29 July 2019

John Dewey’s writings on schooling are extensive, and characteristically wide-ranging: teachers are expected to think deeply about knowledge construction, how we think and learn, the purpose of curriculum in the life of the child, and the role of school and societal reform. He worked throughout his life to develop and refine his philosophy of experience, describing all learning as defined by the quality of interactions between the learner and the social and physical environment. According to Dewey, teachers have a responsibility to structure educational environments in ways that promote educative learning experiences, those that change the learner in such a way as to promote continued learning and growth. The capacity to reflect on and make meaning from one’s experiences facilitates this growth, particularly in increasing one’s problem-solving abilities.

While Dewey wrote little that specifically addressed the preparation of teachers, his 1904 essay, “The Relation of Theory to Practice in Education,” makes clear that he grounds his beliefs about teachers’ learning in this same philosophy of experiential learning. Dewey argued that thoughtful reflection on previous and current educational experiences is especially important in teacher preparation; teacher educators could then guide beginners to examine and test the usefulness of the beliefs formed from those experiences. Teacher educators, therefore, have a responsibility to arrange learning environments for beginning teachers to promote sequential experiences leading to increased understanding of how children learn, “how mind answers to mind.” These experiences can then help beginning teachers grow, not as classroom technicians, but as true “students of teaching.”

Dewey’s ideas remain relevant, but must also be viewed in historical context, in light of his unfailing belief in education and the scientific method as ways to promote individual responsibility and eliminate social problems. His vision of a democratic society remains a fearless amalgam of human adaptation, continuity, change, and diversity: public schools are privileged locations in a democracy for the interplay and interrogation of old and new ideas. Teacher preparation and teacher wellbeing are crucial elements; they can provide experiences to educate all children for participation in their present lives in ways that facilitate their growth as citizens able to fully participate in a democracy. Despite criticism about limitations of his work, Dewey’s ideas continue to offer much food for thought, for both research and practice in teacher education.

• teacher preparation
• preservice teachers
• learning from experience
• progressive education

Introduction

Few 20th- and 21st-century philosophers have written as prolifically as John Dewey ( 1859–1952 ), capturing ideas in wide-ranging domains such as nature, psychology, science, politics, metaphysics, ethics, and art. Like the ancients Plato and Confucius, Dewey saw philosophy and education as nearly synonymous. And like Plato and Confucius, Dewey sensed the immense power that education could play in shaping not only the individual, but more importantly, the individual in society. Dewey was exceptional in the importance he placed on education, learning, schools, and teachers.

Although practices and beliefs about the preparation of teachers have continued to evolve in the nearly 70 years since Dewey’s death, his writings are regularly referenced among teacher educators. Our intent in this article is to engage with those ideas that have continuing relevance for teacher education, drawing upon the following seminal writings on teachers and teaching: The School and Society ( 1899 ); The Child and the Curriculum ( 1902 ); How We Think ( 1933 ); Experience and Education ( 1938 ); Moral Principles in Education ( 1909 ); Democracy and Education ( 1916 ); “The Relation of Theory to Practice in Education” (1904a), and several essays. As practicing university music teacher educators, we will use examples from the world of music education that are general enough for any discipline.

To understand Dewey’s ideas about how teachers may best learn to teach, Dewey’s own starting point is first approached—that education, and indeed all learning, cannot be understood apart from experience. Next, Dewey’s description of reflective thinking, by which all learners make meaning from their experiences, is presented. Dewey’s ideas specific to teacher education follow: his understanding of the relationship between educational theory and educational practice, and the sequence of experiences he proposed for pre-service teachers. Dewey’s ideas about teaching methods and learning in laboratories are then discussed. The article concludes with reflections placing Dewey’s writings in historical context, and questions for continued research and practice in the Deweyian tradition.

Learning and Experience

All learning, Dewey ( 1938 , p. 7) believed, results from experience—not just in school, but in the individual’s life beyond school as well. Due to the “intimate and necessary relation between the processes of actual experience and education,” he wanted educators to develop deep understanding of the function of experience in learning. Dewey ( 1933 , 1938 ) defined an experience as an interaction between an individual and the environment, suggesting that all experiences—good and bad—involve doing (how the individual interacts with the environment) and undergoing (how the experience changes the individual). Dewey ( 1938 , p. 13) continually emphasized that, while all students unquestionably have “experiences” in schools, “everything depends upon the quality of the experience which is had.”

The quality of an experience can be judged in relation to two simultaneously occurring processes or principles: interaction and continuity (Dewey, 1938 ). As an individual interacts with her physical environment, she creates insights derived from her interests and curiosities (doing). A child playing the piano for the first time will soon discover gradations of high and low, loud and soft. To her delight, she will soon find out that the pedal somehow makes the sound keep going. But from the standpoint of formal education and requisites of growth, a “quality” experience requires that her discoveries become useful to her needs and her community (undergoing growth in understanding). She needs to be given a place to share and test what she has learned with others, thus affording meaningful contributions to the people around her (Dewey, 1916 , 1938 ). Quality experiences require quality interactions, and teachers are tasked with enriching and enlarging the classroom environment, “in other words, whatever conditions interact with personal needs, desires, purposes, and capacities to create the experience which is had” (Dewey, 1938 , p. 25).

The principle of continuity states that the effect of a “good” or “educative” experience is cumulative and enriching. Dewey is famously paraphrased as saying that the purpose of growth is more growth. But such an oversimplification ignores the critical role that teachers play in helping the learner make sense of what has been discovered so that further growth is not misshaped. Whether on the playground or from a history book, all teachers know that wrong lessons can be learned. For Dewey ( 1933 , 1938 ), mis-educative experiences result in insights that impede further learning, while non-educative experiences fail to connect one experience with another, leaving the learner unchanged or merely incurious. In contrast, educative experiences live on in further experiences. “Hence, the central problem of an education based upon experience is to select the kind of present experiences that live fruitfully and creatively in subsequent experiences” (Dewey, 1938 , p. 13). A teacher’s work is thus “moral,” because educators are charged with the fraught task of interfering in the incidental nature of most social learning (Dewey, 1909 ). A society trusts teachers to select experiences (via curriculum, via pedagogy) that then produce “quality” growth in “other people’s children” (Delpit, 1995 ). Likewise, according to Dewey, teachers have a moral responsibility to become familiar with their students’ home cultures and design lessons that appeal to their interests (Gay, 2010 ; Ladson-Billings, 1995 ), using conditions in the local community “as educational resources” (Dewey, 1938 , p. 23).

Dewey ( 1938 , p. 5) frequently critiqued what he and others have called “traditional education.” While we admit that the term is both imprecise and problematic, Dewey used it to refer to classrooms where teachers expected students to repeat back whatever isolated knowledge was presented to them for use in some distant future; such experiences, devoid of meaningful connections are at best noneducative, and at worst mis-educative. As music educators, the authors of this article are aware of the many dangers of isolated knowledge; for example, teaching musical notation as if its purpose were self-evident and universal (say), or teaching Western classical art music as if it were a-historical or context-free. As university teacher educators, we have too often seen beginning teachers ask children for solutions to “so-called problems” that are “simply assigned tasks ” (Dewey, 1933 , p. 233) or “activities” (Dewey, 1916 ), rather than genuine problems leading to meaningful insights. Dewey ( 1938 , p. 23, italics in the original) similarly cautioned proponents of “progressive education,” those “parents and some teachers [who seem to be] acting upon the idea of subordinating objective conditions to internal ones.” For Dewey ( 1938 , p. 63, italics in the original), the issue was not “new versus old education;” rather, his concern was “a question of what anything whatever must be to be worthy of the name education .” He believed that a middle, more pragmatic approach could help students use the interactions between their internal inclinations and the external environment to both connect present experiences with past experiences and prepare them for continued future growth. Drawing on the principles of interaction and continuity, teachers could learn “how to utilize the surroundings, physical and social, that exist so as to extract from them all that they have to contribute to building up experiences that are worthwhile” (Dewy, 1938 , p. 22; also, see Hildebrand, 2018 , for a summary of how Dewey developed these philosophical ideas over time.)

Making Meaning Through Reflective Thinking

To further develop the educative potential of experience, Dewey believed that quality of thought is the basis of all meaningful learning, both in school and in life. Dewey identifies three types of thinking: idle thought, belief, and reflection. Idle thought is “inconsequential trifling with mental pictures, random recollections . . . [and] half-developed impressions” (Dewey, 1933 , p. 114). Beliefs are ideas that “are picked up—we know not how” through “tradition, instruction, imitation . . . Even when they happen to be correct, their correctness is a matter of accident as far as the person who entertains them is concerned” (Dewey, 1933 , p. 116). In contrast, reflective thought is the “active, persistent, and careful consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the grounds that support it and the further conclusions to which it tends” (Dewey, 1933 , p. 118). For Dewey, critical or reflective thinking is the only educational aim that can foster freedom of mind and action; he applied this principle equally to the learning and teaching of everyone involved in education, including students, pre-service teachers, and experienced teachers.

Similar to the consummatory experiences in art described by Dewey in his book Art as Experience ( 1934 ), reflective thinking has a kind of rhythm through which insights emerge. The cycle begins with “a perplexed, troubled, or confused situation,” a deviation from the expected situation, that Dewey ( 1933 , p. 200) identifies as a pre- reflective phase; the cycle concludes temporarily in a post -reflective state, a space of intellectual satisfaction—before a new puzzle or trouble reveals itself:

In between, as states of thinking, are (1) suggestions , in which the mind leaps forward to a possible solution; (2) an intellectualization of the difficulty or perplexity that has been felt (directly experienced) into a problem to be solved, a question for which the answer must be sought; (3) the use of one suggestion after another as a leading idea, or hypothesis , to initiate and guide observation and other operations in collection of factual material; (4) the mental elaboration of the idea or supposition as an idea or supposition ( reasoning , in the sense in which reasoning is a part, not the whole, of inference); and (5) testing the hypothesis by overt or imaginative action.

Reflecting mindfully about experiences “done” and “undergone” creates growth-enhancing habits , which for Dewey ( 1938 , p. 19) include emotional and intellectual dispositions, as well as “our basic sensitivities and ways of meeting and responding to all the conditions which we meet in living.” A large part of learning—and learning to teach—involves the development of productive attitudes and habits of thought. Both teachers and teacher educators must actively cultivate reflective attitudes of open-mindedness, whole-heartedness, and responsibility with their students. Open-mindedne ss, for Dewey ( 1916 , p. 182), is “accessibility of mind to any and every consideration that will throw light upon the situation that needs to be cleared up, and that will help determine the consequences of acting this way or that,” listening to all sides, and considering “the possibility of error even in the beliefs that are dearest to us” (Dewey, 1933 , p. 136). Whole-hearted involvement in finding a solution or creating meaning, a complete absorption in learning, may be cultivated by experiences that create a sense of suspense in learners, an element of story with “plot interest” (Dewey, 1933 , p. 320). Once a pre-service teacher has considered various reasonable possibilities for resolving a problem, an attitude of intellectual responsibility requires projecting and accepting the consequences of a chosen action, “mak[ing] clear what is involved in really knowing and believing a thing” (Dewey, 1916 , p. 186). Together, open-mindedness, whole-heartedness, and responsibility promote “retention of the capacity to grow” for learners of all ages, as “the reward of such intellectual hospitality” (Dewwy, 1916 , p. 182).

Dewey ( 1916 , p. 183) encouraged educators to welcome diversity of thought, to allow children and preservice teachers time to follow their ideas and make errors, and to resist seeking only “speedy, accurately measurable, correct results”:

Results (external answers or solutions) may not be hurried; processes may not be forced. They take their own time to mature. Were all instructors to realize that the quality of mental process, not the production of correct answers, is the measure of educative growth something hardly less than a revolution in teaching would be worked.

The student’s reasoning while solving a problem was far more important to Dewey than the answer itself. A good math teacher will ask students to show their work. A good art teacher will ask students about their intentions and the problems they encountered along the way. A good teacher educator will ask a preservice teacher to explain her thought process in responding to a child’s unexpected response. Dewey ( 1933 , p. 239) recommended that teachers and teacher educators regularly encourage students to conceptualize their reasoning in words, to check that educative meanings were being formed; “without this conceptualizing or intellectualizing, nothing is gained that can be carried over to the better understanding of new experiences. The deposit is what counts, educationally speaking.”

Dewey ( 1899 , p. 12) firmly believed that individuals learn from “books or the sayings of others only as they are related to [personal] experience;” he regularly criticized efforts to require children to memorize information and facts disconnected from their own lives and culture. Such strategies would lead students to repeat meaningless information in efforts to please the teacher or to avoid punishment. In contrast, an emphasis on reflection or “good habits of thinking” (Dewey, 1916 , p. 159) will motivate learners to understand the purposes for which skills and information could be applied, providing further motivation for learning by “arous[ing] curiosity, strengthen[ing] initiative, and set[ting] up desires and purposes that are sufficiently intense to carry a person over dead places in the future” (Dewey, 1938 , pp. 20–21).

For Dewey ( 1916 , p. 166), all children can be creative, no matter the age or domain: “The child of three who discovers what can be done with blocks, or of six who finds out what he can make by putting five cents and five cents together, is really a discoverer.” As learners return to their discoveries, their insights will deepen. Once the child discovers that the pedals on a piano keep the sound ringing, she is likely to explore the very mechanics of the instrument, to lift the lid and look inside. She might even ask a friend to hold down the pedal for her while she touches or plucks the steel wires. Trading places, these intrepid discoverers are likely to create a tentative theory that they bring to the teacher. The music teacher, if she is clever, will help the discoverers find new tricks and delightful problems. “There are no limits to the possibility of carrying over into the objects and events of life, meanings originally acquired by thoughtful examination, and hence no limit to the continual growth of meaning in human life” (Dewey, 1933 , p. 128).

Similarly, beginning teachers must engage in “thoughtful examination” of their educational experiences. For productive reflection, they must reframe a “difficulty or perplexity that has been felt (directly experienced) into a problem to be solved” (Dewey, 1933 , p. 200).

No hard and fast rules decide whether a meaning suggested is the right and proper meaning to follow up. The individual’s own good (or bad) judgment is the guide. There is no label on any given idea or principle which says automatically, “Use me in this situation”—as the magic cakes of Alice in Wonderland were inscribed “Eat me.” The thinker has to decide. (Dewey, 1933 , p. 215)

Unlike the beginning teacher, experienced teachers, in considering children’s conceptual learning, have a store of reflected-upon experiences from which they have learned to predict typical responses. This frees them to focus on surprises that arise in the classroom, and thus they are more likely to be able to frame and reflect on the situation and develop and test hypothetical resolutions. Beginning teachers do not yet have this bank of experiences from which to examine student learning. With so many things happening around them, much of which is surprising, preservice teachers may need guidance to identify or frame a specific problem for productive reflection.

Not Theory Versus Practice: Theory and Practice

The principles of experiential learning and reflection apply equally to teachers working with children and to teacher educators guiding preservice teachers’ learning experiences. Dewey’s important essay, “The Relation of Theory to Practice in Education,” is one of his few that specifically addresses the problems of preparing teachers to do the work of teaching. Dewey ( 1904a , p. 247) “assumes without argument” that both theory and practice are necessary components of teacher preparation; the question in his mind was the purpose of “practical work.” He criticized the apprentice model that was practiced in many programs during his time (and has continued to remain popular) because it too often focuses the apprentice on the immediate results of instructional practices, rather than on long-term growth. Dewey ( 1904a , pp. 255, 251, italics in the original) proposed instead a “laboratory view” of practice, where theory and practice “grow together out of and into the teacher’s personal experience,” and where beginners acquire “ control of the intellectual methods required for personal and independent mastery of practical skill, rather than at turning out at once masters of the craft.” This creates a challenge for teacher educators, as preservice teachers are more interested, at least initially, in “what works” and “what doesn’t” than in general “intellectual methods.” Dewey ( 1904a , p. 256) argued that an early focus on acquiring technical skills is a dangerous shortcut, helpful at the beginning stages of one’s career, but harmful in the longer term:

For immediate skill may be got at the cost of power to go on growing. The teacher who leaves the professional school with power in managing a class of children may appear to superior advantage the first day, the first week, the first month, or even the first year, as compared with some other teacher who has a much more vital command of the psychology, logic, and ethics of development. But later “progress” may with such consist only in perfecting and refining skill already possessed. Such persons seem to know how to teach, but they are not students of teaching . . . Unless a teacher is such a student, he may continue to improve in the mechanics of school management, but he can not grow as a teacher, an inspirer and director of soul-life.

Dewey ( 1904a , p. 258) suggests that teacher education classes begin with critical reflection on preservice teachers’ own “direct and personal” learning experiences, both within and outside school, as “the greatest asset” in their possession. This store of experiences provides preservice teachers with “plenty of practical material by which to illustrate and vitalize theoretical principles and laws of mental growth in the process of learning,” as well as “plenty of practical experience by which to illustrate cases of arrested development—instances of failure and maladaptation and retrogression, or even degeneration” (Dewey, 1904a , p. 258). Through guided reflection about the past experiences that most enthused and confused them when they were young learners, preservice teachers might better connect educational theory with actual practice, becoming better equipped to test out their insights in their current setting.

The principle of continuity suggests both the importance and the possibility of guiding preservice teachers to transition from a student’s perspective on schooling and learning to a teacher’s perspective on education and teaching .

Only by beginning with the values and laws contained in the [preservice teacher’s] own experience of his own mental growth, and by proceeding gradually to facts connected with other persons of whom he can know little; and by proceeding still more gradually to the attempt actually to influence the mental operations of others, can educational theory be made most effective. Only in this way can the most essential trait of the mental habit of the teacher be secured—that habit which looks upon the internal, not upon the external; which sees that the important function of the teacher is the direction of the mental movement of the student, and that the mental movement must be known before it can be directed. (Dewey, 1904a , p. 262)

By focusing preservice teachers’ attention on “how teacher and pupils react upon each other—how mind answers to mind” (Dewey, 1904a , p. 260), the function of practical experiences becomes enriching their understanding of “the knowledge of subject-matter and the principles of education” (Dewey, 1904a , p. 249). Dewey believed that practical experiences could offer a rich source from which to develop, through reflection, a broad understanding of educational psychology and curriculum development, with a goal to develop “intellectual responsibility” and become independent practitioners, not just masters of a craft of teaching.

Sequence of Experiences in the Teacher Education Program

Dewey believed the popular apprenticeship model of learning through “cadetting” or student teaching was not adequate to meet the long-term well-being of future teachers. He developed many of his ideas about teacher education in the context of the laboratory schools he helped found at the University of Chicago ( 1896–1904 ), with later refinements as professor of philosophy at Columbia University. Dewey ( 1904a ) outlined a sequence of experiences that, in conjunction with a laboratory school, could help preservice teachers integrate their theoretical studies with their teaching practices.

Dewey ( 1904a , p. 268) recommended that preservice teachers’ reflection on their own past experiences be supplemented with initial observations in a school classroom—not so much to see how teachers teach, but “to get material for psychological observation and reflection, and some conception of the educational movement of the school as a whole.” According to Dewey ( 1904a , p. 260), these early observations should be focused “to see how teacher and pupils react upon each other—how mind answers to mind. . . . What the student needs most at this stage of growth is ability to see what is going on in the minds of a group of persons who are in intellectual contact with one another.” Only then, after developing a richer understanding of the workings of the school through reflective writing and observation, could preservice teachers begin to serve as assistants for “more intimate introduction to the lives of the children and the work of the school” (Dewey, 1904a , p. 268).

When preservice teachers are ready for the next challenge, after assisting the cooperating teacher with small tasks and putting theory and practice together through observation and reflection, they may begin to select and arrange subject matter. In typical Deweyian fashion, this third stage is pragmatically considered. Dewey believed that initial curriculum-making should not include the common task of writing isolated make-believe or “practice” lesson plans. Rather, the preservice teacher should focus on one subject area across grade levels to develop “the habit of viewing the entire curriculum as a continuous growth, reflecting the growth of mind itself” (Dewey, 1904a , pp. 267–268). In this third sequence of development, the prospective teacher co-participates in lesson planning by helping the cooperating teacher find supplementary materials, creating authentic discipline-specific problems, or developing a “scheme of possible alternative subjects for lessons and studies” (Dewey, 1904a , p. 269).

Once the preservice teacher is deemed ready, she may move to the fourth stage, actual teaching. Interestingly, in this penultimate period of preparation, the prospective teacher is “given the maximum amount of liberty possible” (Dewey, 1904a , p. 269).

Students should be given to understand that they not only are permitted to act upon their own intellectual initiative, but that they are expected to do so, and their ability to take hold of situations for themselves would be a more important factor in judging them than their following any particular set method or scheme. (Dewey, 1904a , p. 269)

Dewey ( 1904a , pp. 269–270) recommended that supervisors keep observation and feedback to a minimum, thereby allowing the preservice teacher time to overcome the “shock” of being newly in charge of a classroom, and “to get enough experience to make him capable of seeing the fundamental bearing of criticism upon work done.”

At this fourth stage, only when the preservice teacher begins to feel comfortable, may the instructor or supervisor offer suggestions. But rather than criticizing specific elements of the teaching or lesson planning, the supervisor should guide “the student to judge his own work critically, to find out for himself in what respects he has succeeded and in what failed, and to find the probable reasons for both failure and success” (Dewey, 1904a , p. 270). Building on a similar process from the third stage, Dewey ( 1904a , p. 270) recommended allowing the prospective educator to “assume responsibility for the development of some one topic . . . [rather than] to teach a certain number (necessarily smaller in range) of lessons in a larger number of subjects.” This posture would afford student teachers a deeper understanding of the principles of teaching, with less focus on the methods of teaching. “No greater travesty” could happen in a preservice teacher’s development than for the supervisor to assign “a brief number of lessons, have him under inspection in practically all the time of every lesson, and then criticise him almost, if not quite, at the very end of each lesson.” Such oversight might give the person “some of the knacks and tools of the trade,” but would not “develop a thoughtful and independent teacher” (Dewey, 1904a , p. 270).

Dewey’s fifth and final stage is actual apprenticeship. He insists that apprenticeship is only useful if the program is long enough for the beginning teacher to be grounded in “educational theory and history, in subject-matter, in observation, and in practice work of the laboratory type” (Dewey, 1904a , p. 271), and if the “practice schools are sufficiently large to furnish the required number of children” to offer all prospective teachers this opportunity (Dewey, 1904a , p. 270). Even here, Dewey ( 1904a , p. 271) recommends limiting oversight and criticism, while allowing the apprentice teacher “as much responsibility and initiative as he is capable of taking.” Preservice teachers’ reflective thinking about their teaching experiences remains critical here. The goal of supervision in this period is not for supervisors to “turn out teachers who will perpetuate their own notions and methods, but in the inspiration and enlightenment that come through prolonged contact with mature and sympathetic persons” (Dewey, 1904a , p. 271).

Dewey ( 1899 , p. 39) believed that this could be accomplished best by “getting things into connection with one another, so that they work easily, flexibly, and fully.” He advocated for more connection at all levels of education from kindergarten through college, connection among content areas, connection of theory and practice, connection of school with life; failing such relationships, “each side suffers from the separation” (Dewey, 1899 , p. 43).

Developing Teaching Methods

Dewey was consistent in his aversion to binary thinking. A concept like method (Latin methodus /Greek méthodos = pursuit) is neither inherently good, nor inherently evil—it is merely a strategic pursuit. A method, after all, is a natural aspect of life and living, defined in this article as the application of intelligence to the contingencies of an ever-changing world. Teaching methods are rightly criticized when they act as proxy for teacher strategy (Allsup & Westerlund, 2012 ; Dewey, 1916 ). In Deweyian logic, the most effective methods are funded by experience and self-reflection. For example, when introducing a new plant to a flower garden, the savvy gardener will call upon her past experiences to forecast how her new addition will thrive. Likewise, a music teacher will draw upon past experience to create interest in an unsuspecting but enthusiastic beginner who wants to play an instrument. In either situation, she knows that flourishing is never guaranteed. In these examples, our hypothetical methodologist will observe and take note, but be ready to make changes should her strategy require it.

In Dewey’s ( 1916 , p. 177) vision for teacher preparation, methods arise from a thorough understanding of one’s disciplinary domain, but subject matter is always balanced by a deep understanding of the principles of learning and teaching: “In brief, the method of teaching is the method of an art, of action intelligently directed by ends.” Using aesthetic language, teaching methods are never counterfeits or copies from fellow artists, but sincere forms of self-expression: “an expression of [teachers’] own intelligent observations” of children. Dewey ( 1916 , p. 177) argues that artists both follow their own inspiration and “study the operations and results of those in the past who have succeeded greatly.” The art of choosing an appropriate method is “the problem of establishing conditions that will arouse and guide curiosity ; of setting up the connections in things experienced that will on later occasions promote the flow of suggestions , create problems and purposes that will favor consecutiveness in the succession of ideas” through productive reflection (Dewey, 1933 , p. 157).

Dewey ( 1916 ) distinguishes “general method” from “individual method.” Preservice teachers can and should learn general methods from a more experienced teacher, including “knowledge of the past, of current technique, of materials, of the ways in which one’s own best results are assured,” supplemented with “child-study, psychology, and a knowledge of social environment” and a thorough knowledge of subject matter (Dewey, 1916 , pp. 177, 180). An understanding of general methods alone, however, is “worse than useless”—or even harmful—if it “get[s] in the way of [the teacher’s] own common sense” (Dewey, 1916 , p. 179). For example, Dewey ( 1933 , p. 207) suggests that there is “nothing especially sacred about the number five” in the phases of reflection that he outlines; depending on the situation, two phases may run together or a phase may be expanded to include more small steps. Dewey ( 1916 , pp. 178–179) viewed general methods, not as “ready-made models” for instruction, but as “aids in sizing up the needs, resources, and difficulties of the unique experiences” of individual learners.

As young teachers develop “the working tendencies of observation, insight, and reflection” (Dewey, 1904a , p. 256) of their students, and of themselves as educators, they may gain confidence and be freed to create their own individual methods as needed for different learners in varied social settings. As preservice teachers deepen their understanding of curriculum and educational theory, they may become more like jazz musicians, more improvisatory—more capable of allowing “these principles to work automatically, unconsciously, and hence promptly and effectively” (Dewey, 1904a , p. 256). The specific methods used by individual teachers with particular students thus “will vary as [their] past experiences and [their] preferences vary . . . [thus] no catalogue can ever exhaust [the] diversity of form and tint” of methodological approaches (Dewey, 1916 , p. 180).

Conceptualizing method as “a statement of the way the subject matter of an experience develops most effectively and fruitfully” (Dewey, 1916 , p. 186) can help young teachers to understand how to sequence problems for children’s experimentation and reflection in ways that, through continuity of learning, build deeper and deeper conceptual understanding of various subjects. Dewey ( 1916 , p. 164) suggests that “a large part of the art of instruction lies in making the difficulty of new problems large enough to challenge thought, and small enough so that, in addition to the confusion naturally attending the novel elements, there shall be luminous familiar spots from which helpful suggestions may spring” to connect with prior learning.

As mentioned, for Dewey ( 1916 , p. 160), the basis of any method (as with all learning) is experience. He suggests that “the first stage of contact with any new material, at whatever age of maturity” and no matter the subject matter, must allow children opportunities to experiment with material through trial and error, taking action (doing) and observing the consequences of the actions (undergoing), “trying to do something and having the thing perceptibly do something to one in return.” Once students have sufficient experience with an object or concept, “memory, observation, reading, communication” may all become “avenues for supplying data” for reflection and problem solving (Dewey, 1916 , p. 164).

Dewey warns that preservice teachers are likely to teach the way they were taught; they may fail to recognize that a new generation of students will always bring new problems to the classroom, or that a different social environment requires different considerations. He believed “thoughtful and alert student[s] of education” (Dewey, 1904a , p. 256) have a moral duty to learn about their students’ interests and prior experiences in order to design appropriate and effective learning experiences for them. The more teachers know about their students’ world, the better they may “understand the forces at work that need to be directed and utilized for the formation of reflective habits” (Dewey, 1933 , pp. 140–141). The teacher should “give pupils something to do, not something to learn; and the doing is of such a nature as to demand thinking, or the intentional noting of connections; learning naturally results” (Dewey, 1916 , p. 161).

To emphasize, Dewey ( 1933 , p. 157) saw the concept of “method” as richer than a pedagogical technique or the sequence of a lesson plan. Method must be understood in its very broadest sense:

Method covers not only what [the teacher] intentionally devises and employs for the purpose of mental training, but also what he does without any conscious reference to it—anything in the atmosphere and conduct of the school that reacts in any way upon the curiosity, the responsiveness, and the orderly activity of children.

Dewey calls this unconscious transmission “collateral learning,” a notion that predates current ideas about the “hidden curriculum” (e.g., Apple, 2004 ; Eisner, 1994 ; Giroux & Penna, 1979 ). Students will learn many things in a classroom, intended or not. For example, methods that require a student to memorize “predigested materials” might inadvertently teach the student that school is not a democratic space, nor one concerned with justice. Dewey ( 1938 , p. 27) believed that inappropriate collateral learning would dull the child’s innate curiosity, and might cause her to engage “in the mental truancy of mindwandering” or to build “an emotional revulsion against the subject” or schooling in general. Collateral learning may be educative or mis-educative, but it appears to be a constant in education.

Everything the teacher does, as well as the manner in which he does it, incites the child to respond in some way or other, and each response tends to set the child’s attitude in some way or other . The teacher is rarely (and even then never entirely) a transparent medium of the access of another mind to a subject. (Dewey, 1933 , p. 159, italics in the original)

Committed and ongoing reflection, Dewey believed, helps teachers, preservice teachers, and teacher educators remain alert for the development of their students’ attitudes toward learning.

Learning in Laboratories

Dewey is sometimes referred to as America’s first postmodernist because of his deep antipathy toward dualistic thinking (Hickman, 2007 ). Dewey was specifically worried that binaries misdirect the focus of our attention. The child, for example, should never be defined in opposition to the curriculum, or seen as an unformed or “miniature” adult (Dewey, 1902 ). Importantly, for Dewey, the public school must never be viewed as somehow isolated from the larger community in which it is located. Referring to the classroom as a “laboratory” was one way that Dewey could skirt the easy dualism that most people associated with schools—those all-too-familiar spaces that, with their tiny desks and green chalkboards, do not resemble much of anything else in society. Rather, the public school in a democracy is embryonic : a nondualistic metaphor that suggests an environment that is both safely apart and protected, but also incorporated into the “body” of society.

To do this means to make each one of our schools an embryonic community life, active with types of occupations that reflect the life of the larger society, and permeated throughout with the spirit of art, history, and science. [Hence] the school introduces and trains each child of society into membership within such a little community, saturating him with the spirit of service, and providing him with the instruments of effective self-direction. (Dewey, 1899 , pp. 19–20)

Set apart, protected, and incorporated, “the school in turn will be a laboratory in which the student . . . sees theories and ideas demonstrated, tested, criticized, enforced, and the evolution of new truths” (Dewey, 1899 , p. 56).

In contrast to the factory model of education, Dewey believed that the public school could be a place where the violence of industrial life (e.g., slaughter houses, iron foundries, railroad work, indentured servitude) is remedied and remediated, where displaced persons could be taught new life skills. Jane Addams in Chicago and Grace Dodge in New York City envisioned the school as a community hub—part library, museum, gymnasium, hospital, clubhouse, and savings bank—one that was centered around learning through community-building (Addams, 2002 ; Lagemann, 1979 ). Evelyn Dewey, writing with her father, makes a case for the school as a “social settlement,” a set-aside place that is deeply committed to the unique concerns of a particular neighborhood:

Schools all over the country are finding that the most direct way of vitalizing their work is through closer relations with local interest and occupations. That period of American school history which was devoted to building up uniformity of subject matter, method, administration, was obliged to neglect everything characteristic of the local environment, for attention to that meant deviation from uniformity . . . in aiming to hit all children by exactly the same educational ammunition, none were really deeply touched. Efforts to bring the work into vital connection with people’s experiences necessarily began to vary school materials to meet the special needs and definite features of local life. (Dewey & Dewey, 1915 , p. 339)

So integrated did Dewey ( 1899 , p. 45) consider the relationship between the school and democratic society that he composed a blueprint—a visual thought experiment—of the school’s relationship to community stakeholders, as well as disciplinary boundaries to each other. On the north side of the re-imagined school are openings to commercial businesses, on the east one sees arrows pointing to home and family life. In this metaphorical blueprint, a garden is located on the school’s south side, and the local university interacts with the school through its westward opening. In another chart, the school houses a museum at the center of the building with openings on four sides leading to chemistry, biology, art, and music labs. On another floor, one finds a library that is provocatively connected to the kitchen, the dining room, the shop, and the textile industries ( 1899 , pp. 52, 49).

Dewey concedes that most people will think of the laboratory as a specialized space, reserved for experts like physicists and physicians. If we leave aside the white-coated scientists in their protected eyewear, what else might we envision?—Activity? Quiet conversation? Focused attention? Group work?

The first great characteristic of a laboratory is that in it there is carried on an activity, an activity which involves contact with technical equipment, as tools, instruments and other apparatus, and machinery which require the use of the hands and the body. There is dealing with real materials and not merely, as in the old, traditional education, with the symbols of learning. (Dewey, 1932 , p. 108)

In this activity-privileged setting, there is a distinction between discovering knowledge and taking information. “I think the laboratory gives a good example of what I mean,” Dewey ( 1923 , p. 176) writes, “The individual has to be using his hands, doing things, but his experimenting in the laboratory is not simply running wild and at random. He has to have enough physical activity to see that his ideas are made definite and precise; that he is getting principles rather than taking information on faith at the word of the teacher or textbook.”

In the early 21st-century context of benchmarks, standards, high-stakes assessment, and accountability, the laboratory provides an antidote to the problem of isolated knowledge and teacher-assigned tasks. Call them inquirers, researchers, or discoverers: laboratory students will necessarily work within and across a discipline’s standards and norms. However, in an authentic laboratory, discoverers are just as likely to reassemble or build new norms and general principles. Dewey would argue that when students test the knowledge that they are given, they will do one of three things: (1) discard that knowledge if it is not useful; (2) alter it to fit a new context; or (3) accept the knowledge as worthwhile for the time being . In this sense, learners—even young learners—are practicing freedom . Standards alone do not fund freedom; that is, they do not inherently enlarge personal capacity or directly aid in problem-solving. But standards that are tested, discarded, altered, or kept in the light of present circumstances are acts of learner agency.

Norms and standards of practice are needed in the laboratory. Indeed, they help us build warranted assertions, which if tested, may assume new forms of knowledge. As Dewey suggests in the previous paragraph, the choices that warrant an assertion, claim, or solution cannot be informed solely by authority, which alone cannot help one make good judgments. Laboratory settings are democratic spaces where debate can occur, where the usefulness or validity of an emerging truth or act of creation is tested and debated with others (Allsup, 2016 ). For all learners who participate in it—students, preservice teachers, and cooperating teachers—the laboratory school, thus, can be characterized as:

a place of creativity, construction, imagination;

a place to test, perform, critique, and verify responses to authentic problems;

a place of warranted assertability; a place of hypothesis-building;

a “real”—but supportive—community, like those that exist outside classrooms, but affording students opportunities to succeed and fail;

a place of knowledge-making, where groups can collectively add to the sum of facts (asserted and tested) and principles (emerging and verified).

Dewey believed that such a laboratory setting within a teacher education program would provide preservice teachers with imaginative experiences that could help them develop understandings of the principles of education in its most ideal sense. Formal and informal settings, no matter the design, might aim for similar ends. Thus, laboratories—in their broadest, most non-binary sense—become both places to test specialized knowledge and everyday settings where (say) a new recipe could be tried out, or a previous lesson plan could be altered and studied for its results.

Dewey’s Work in Historical Context

Dewey’s writings have demonstrated consistent staying power in educational circles, with many ideas that remain relevant well beyond the 70 years during which he wrote them ( 1882–1952 ). His educational work, however, has also been criticized for saying too little about the role of schools and other democratic institutions in addressing social inequities (e.g., Brick, 2005 ; Portelli & Vilbert, 2002 ). It is essential, however, to consider Dewey’s work in the context of his time. Dewey’s ideas about reforming education were in response to the needs of a changing society, one that was undergoing rapid industrialization and mass migration. Electricity, the telegraph, and improved mail service sped communication across great distances. New discoveries in medicine and medical practice helped people live longer. We emphasize, however, that Dewey lived in an era when many in American society, like Dewey ( 1899 , pp. 6–7, 17, 7; see also 1930 , regarding Dewey’s faith in the scientific method), clung to the era’s faith that science could solve problems that were previously intractable.

One can hardly believe there has been a revolution in all history so rapid, so extensive, so complete. Through it the face of the earth is making over, even as to its physical forms; political boundaries are wiped out and moved about, as if they were indeed only lines on a paper map. . . . Even our moral and religious ideas and interests, the most conservative because the deepest-lying things in our nature, are profoundly affected. . . . Travel has been rendered easy; freedom of movement with its accompanying exchange of ideas, indefinitely facilitated. The result has been an intellectual revolution. Learning has been put into circulation; . . . a distinctively learned class is henceforth out of the question. It is an anachronism. Knowledge is no longer an immobile solid; it has been liquefied. . . . That this revolution should not affect education in some other than a formal and superficial fashion is inconceivable.

This description, written by Dewey in 1899 , bears striking resemblance to social conditions in the first quarter of the 21st century . Writing in 1930 , Dewey (p. 275) recognized that “progress” could have negative effects as well; international tensions fostered during and after World War I meant that “race and color prejudice have never had such opportunity as they have now to poison the mind, while nationalism is elevated into a religion called patriotism.” But there remains a hopeful fascination to Dewey’s tone, an inherent faith in the inevitability of progress and growth that is contradicted by the decades that followed his death. Dewey is often described as lacking a sense of the tragic. Should he have lived to see it, the violence of the latter half of the 20th century may have surprised him, particularly as business interests have remade public education according to market principles. And the promises of progressive education are mostly located in private universities and expensive “independent” schools, undermining Dewey’s democratic ideals. While Dewey’s principles clearly address the 21st century’s global interest in the standardization, privatization, and accountability of education, we believe he would continue to argue against any totalizing, one-size-fits-all approach to any reform movement.

Dewey viewed universities as laboratory spaces for social repair and experimentation. At the end of “Theory into Practice” (1904a), Dewey believed that within “the next decade,” more normal schools would become four-year bachelor’s-degree-granting programs. Dewey was hopeful that extending the teacher preparation program from two to four years, within a model of a laboratory school in conjunction with a university, would provide adequate time for preservice teachers to develop deep understandings of theory integrated with their practice and methods of teaching. Those who would graduate from such a program would become lifelong learners and genuine “students of teaching” (Dewey, 1904a , p. 256).

One fundamental and striking element in the significance of the [University of Chicago] School of Education is the desire and resolute purpose to promote the cause of education, not only here, but everywhere, through inspiring teachers with more vital and adequate conceptions of the nature of their work, and through furnishing them with the intellectual equipment necessary to make them effective and apt in carrying out such broadened and deepened ideals. (Dewey, 1904b , pp. 274–275)

Although this goal seemed tantalizingly close in Dewey’s laboratory school experiments, he admitted the model might be challenging to replicate in other settings. Dewey ( 1899 ) cites critics who accuse him of developing his ideas in the context of ideal circumstances: a small teacher–student ratio, close collaboration between university researchers and K-12 faculty, a teaching faculty sharing common beliefs and focused on learning together in community, among other benefits not common to most educators. Dewey ( 1899 , p. 56) responded that genuine experiments, in education as much as in science and industry, required carefully controlled conditions, “working out and testing a new truth, or a new method,” before “applying it on a wide scale, making it available” to others. Ultimately, he left the lab school after seven contentious years (Knoll, 2014 ), although it has continued to offer learning experiences in the Deweyian tradition into the 21st century (University of Chicago Lab Schools, n.d. ).

We now benefit from far deeper knowledge of psychology, which was a young science in Dewey’s time. Dewey did not have access to 21st-century understandings of the intersectionality of race, ethnicity, and class, and the multiple ways these contribute to continued inequities in education and teacher education. We also must admit to a far more complex understanding of educational and social problems, arising from, as in Dewey’s ( 1899 , pp. 8–9) day, an “increase in toleration, in breadth of social judgment, the larger acquaintance with human nature, the sharpened alertness in reading signs of character and interpreting social situations, greater accuracy of adaptation to differing personalities.” We continue to expand our vision of what education in a democracy means, who it is for, and how to work toward Dewey’s vision of education for all, with the goal of citizens prepared to participate fully in a democratic society. We have experienced an additional century of research, with solutions proposed and tried with varying success, yet Dewey’s ideas continue to offer teacher educators ample food for thought and practice.

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John Dewey is credited as founding a philosophical approach to life called ‘pragmatism’, and his approaches to education and learning have been influential internationally and endured over time. He saw the purpose of education to be the cultivation of thoughtful, critically reflective, socially engaged individuals rather than passive recipients of established knowledge. He rejected the rote-learning approach driven by predetermined curriculum which was the standard teaching method at the time. However, importantly, he also rejected child-centred approaches that followed children’s uninformed interests and impulses uncritically. While he used the term ‘progressive education’, this has since been misappropriated to describe, in some cases, a hands-off approach to children’s learning which was not what Dewey proposed. Dewey believed that traditional subject matter was important, but should be integrated with the strengths and interests of the learner.  

He developed a concept of inquiry, prompted by a sense of need and followed by intellectual work such as defining problems, testing hypotheses, and finding satisfactory solutions, as the central activity of such an educational approach. This organic cycle of doubt, inquiry, reflection and the reestablishment of sense or understanding  contrasted with the ‘reflex arc’ model of learning popular in his time. The reflex arc model thought of learning as a mechanical process, measurable by standardised tests, without reference to the role of emotion or experience in learning.   Dewey was critical of the reductionism of educational approaches which assume that all the big questions and ideas are already answered, and need only to be transmitted to students. He believed that all concepts and meanings could be open to reinvention and improvement, and all disciplines could be expanded with new knowledge, concepts and understandings. 

The m ain features of Dewey’s theory of education  

Dewey suggested that individuals learn and grow as a result of experiences and interactions with the world. These interactions and experiences lead individuals to continually develop new concepts, ideas, practices and understandings, which, in turn, are refined through and continue to mediate the learner’s life experiences and social interactions. According to Dewey:  

Interaction s  and  communication s   focused on enhancing and deepening shared meanings  increase potential for learning and development . When students communicate ideas and meanings within a group, they have the opportunity to consider, take on and work with the perspectives, ideas and experiences of other students.  

Shared activities are  an important  context for learning and development . Dewey valued real-life contexts and problems as educative experiences. If students only passively perceive a problem and do not experience the consequences in a meaningful, emotional and reflective way, then they are unlikely to adapt and revise their habits or construct new habits, or will do so only superficially.  

Students learn best when their interests are engaged.  It is important to develop ideas, activities and events that stimulate students’ interest and to which teaching can be geared. Teaching and lecturing can be highly appropriate as long as they are geared towards helping students to analyse or develop an intellectual insight into a specific and meaningful situation.  

Learning always begins with a student’s emotional response ,  which spurs further inquiry.   Dewey advocated for what he called ‘aesthetic’ experiences: dramatic, compelling, unifying or transforming experiences in which students feel enlivened and absorbed.  

Students should be engaged in active learning and inquiry.  Rather than teach students to accept any seemingly valid explanations, education ought to give students opportunities to discover information and ideas by their own effort in a teacher-structured environment, and to put knowledge to functional use by defining and solving problems, and determining the validity and worth of ideas and theories. As noted above, this does not preclude explicit instruction where appropriate. 

Inquiry involves students in reflecting intelligently on their experiences  in order to adapt their habits of action . Experience should involve what Dewey called ‘transaction’: an active phase, in which the student does something, as well as a phase of ‘undergoing’, where the student receives or observes the effect that their action has had. This might be as simple as noticing patterns when adding numbers, or experimenting to determine the correct proportions for papier mâché. 

E ducation  i s a key way of developing skills  for democratic activity . Dewey was positive about the value of recognising and appreciating differences as a vehicle through which students can expand their experiences, and open up to new ways of thinking rather than closing off to their own beliefs and habits.  

What e mpirical evidence  is there for this philosophy in practice?  

While there is no direct evidence that Dewey’s approach improves student outcomes, Dewey’s theory of students’ learning aligns with current theories of education which emphasise how individuals develop cognitive functioning by participating in sociocultural practices 1 , and with empirical studies examining the positive impact of interactions with peers and adults 2  on students’ learning. Quantative research also underlines a link between heightened engagement and children’s learning outcomes, with strategies such as making meaningful connections to students’ home lives and encouraging student ownership of their learning found to increase student engagement 3 . A few empirical studies which examined the effectiveness of aesthetic experiences for students confirmed that students experienced those lessons as more meaningful, compelling and connected than a comparison group. 4

Dewey’s influence on teaching practice  

Dewey’s theory has had an impact on a variety of educational practices including individualised instruction, problem-based and integrated learning, dialogic teaching, and critical inquiry. Dewey’s ideas also resonate with ideas of teaching as inquiry.  

I ndividualised instruction  

Dewey’s ideas about education are evident in approaches where teaching and learning are designed to be responsive to the specific needs, interests, and cultural knowledge of students. Teachers therefore learn about students and their motivating interests and desires in order to find subject matter, events and experiences that appeal to students and that will provoke a need to develop the knowledge, skills and values of the planned curriculum. Students are encouraged to relate learning to their lives and experiences.  

Problem-based learning  and integrated learning approaches  

Dewey’s principles of learning are evident also in problem-based learning and project approaches to learning. These approaches begin with a practical task or problem which is complex, comprehensive, multi-layered, collaborative, and involves inquiry designed to extend students’ knowledge, skills and understandings. Problem-based learning should: 

• start by supporting students to intellectualise exactly what the problem is  
• encourage controlled inquiry by helping students to develop logical hypotheses (rather than depending on their habits of thinking to jump to conclusions), for example, by connecting or disconnecting ideas they already have encountered  
• encourage students to revise their theories and reconstruct their concepts as their inquiry unfolds.  

Student engagement   

Dewey’s theory has also been extended to the problem of enhancing student engagement. Some strategies that have been found to increase student engagement and that align with Dewey’s concept of aesthetic experiences include:  

• engaging students in deeper perception – going beyond the simple recognition of objects to look carefully at colours, lines and textures, question perceptions, and use new understandings to perceive things in new ways  
• building intellectual, sensory, emotional or social connections to a topic, such as connecting to the topic of space travel through intellectual connections to the concepts of speed, power and force, sensory connections to the sounds, fire and vibrations, and emotional or social connections to the feelings of astronauts involved 
• encouraging risk-taking, such as suggesting a calculation, or experimenting to make papier mâché    
• encouraging sensory exploration 
• using a theme or metaphor to illuminate powerful ideas and to produce a sense of wonder, imagination and anticipation, such as  ‘rocks have a story to tell’ 
• provoking anticipation with evocative materials or suggestive situations, enabling students to unravel a mystery rather than follow a recipe.  

Engagement can be heightened when students have ownership of their learning, for example, by being engaged in curriculum planning and cooperatively build curriculum themes, or by selecting a topic to research rather than being assigned a topic. Students can take responsibility for judging the value, significance and meaning of their experiences as well as next steps.  

Dialogic teaching  

Dialogic teaching emphasises the importance of open student dialogue and meaning-making for learning, and builds on Dewey’s ideas about the importance of communication and social interaction. In this approach, students are encouraged to form habits of careful listening and thoughtful speaking: for example, they might be discouraged from raising their hand to speak in a lesson, as that action triggers anticipatory thought rather than full attention to the current speaker. Attention is paid to issues of power, privilege and access that may hinder open dialogue.  

Critical  inquiry    

Dewey’s approach to education is evident in curricula focused on critial thinking skills in which students engage in intellectual reflection and inquiry, critique, test and judge knowledge claims, make connections, apply their understandings in a range of different situations, and go into depth, rather than be given quick answers or rushed through a series of content. Dewey’s philosophy of education highlights the importance of imagination to drive thinking and learning forward, and for teachers to provide opportunities for students to suspend judgement, engage in the playful consideration of possibilities, and explore doubtful possibilities.  

Teaching as inquiry  

Dewey’s perspective on teaching and learning encourages a teaching as inquiry mindset. His principles for teaching and learning suggest that teachers should cultivate an energetic openness to possibilities alongside a commitment to reflectively learning from experiences, be willing to experience ambiguity and use problems as an opportunity to get deeper into an understanding of self, students, the subject and the context. 

References  

Dewey, J. (1980). Democracy and education. In J. A. Boydston (Ed.),  John Dewey: The middle works 1899-1924: Vol 15, 1923-1924  (pp. 180-189). Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

Dewey, J. (1988). Experience and education. In J. A. Boydston (Ed.),  John Dewey: The later works 1925-1953: Vol 13, 1938-1939  (pp. 1-62). Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

Girod, M., & Wong, D. (2002). An aesthetic (Deweyan) perspective on science learning: Case studies of three fourth graders. Elementary School Journal, 102 ( 3 ) , 199-224.

Hickman, L., Neubert, S., & Reich, K. (2009). John Dewey between pragmatism and constructivism. Fordham University Press.

Moroye, C. M., & Uhrmacher, P. B. (2009). Aesthetic themes of education. Curriculum and Teaching Dialogue, 11 ( 1&2 ) , 85-101.

1 Tomasello 1999, 2008, cited in Garrison, J. W., Neubert, S., Reich, K. (2012).  John Dewey’s philosophy of education: An introduction and recontextualization for our times.  New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

2 Göncü, A., & Rogoff, B. (1998)Children’s categorization with varying adult support. American Educational Research Journal, 35 (2), 333-349; Rogoff, B. (2003). The cultural nature of human development. Oxford University Press.

3 Turner, J. C. (2014). Theory-based interventions with middle-school teachers to support student motivation and engagement.  Motivational interventions.  341-378.

4 Girod, M., Rau, C., Schepige, A. (2003). Appreciating the beauty of science ideas: Teaching for aesthetic understanding.  Science Education, 87 ( 4), 574-87.

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John Dewey (1859–1952) was one of American pragmatism’s early founders, along with Charles Sanders Peirce and William James, and arguably the most prominent American intellectual for the first half of the twentieth century. Dewey’s educational theories and experiments had global reach, his psychological theories influenced that growing science, and his writings about democratic theory and practice helped shape academic and practical debates for decades. Dewey developed extensive and often systematic views in ethics, epistemology, logic, metaphysics, aesthetics, and philosophy of religion. Because Dewey’s approach was typically genealogical, couching his views within philosophy’s larger history, one finds in Dewey a fully developed metaphilosophy.

Dewey’s “cultural naturalism” (which he favored over “pragmatism” and “instrumentalism”) is a critique and reconstruction of philosophy within the ambit of a Darwinian worldview (Lamont 1961; MW4: 3). Following William James, Dewey thought philosophy had become overly technical and intellectualistic, divorced from assessing everyday social conditions and values ( FAE , LW5: 157–58). Philosophy, he believed, needed to be reconnected with education-for-living (philosophy as “the general theory of education”), viz., social criticism at the most general level, a “criticism of criticisms” ( EN , LW1: 298; see also DE , MW9: 338).

Understood within the Darwinian evolutionary arena, philosophy becomes an activity taken by interdependent organisms-in- environments. From this standpoint of active adaptation, Dewey criticized traditional philosophers’ tendency to abstract and reify concepts derived from living contexts. Along with other classical pragmatists, Dewey critiqued metaphysical and epistemological dualisms (e.g., mind/body, nature/culture, self/society, and reason/emotion) reconstructing their elements as parts of larger continuities. For example, human thinking is not a phenomenon categorically external from the world it seeks to know; indeed, such knowing is not a purely rational attempt to escape illusion and discover ultimate “reality” or “truth”. Rather, knowing is one among many ways organisms with evolved capacities for thought and language cope with problems. Minds, then, are not passive observers but are engines of active adaptation, experimentation, and innovation; ideas and theories are not rational fulcrums to transcend culture, but rather function within culture, adjudged on situated, pragmatic grounds. Knowing, then, is no “divine spark”, for while knowing (or inquiry , to use Dewey’s term) includes calculative or rational elements, these are agentially entangled with the body and emotions.

Beyond academia, Dewey was an active public intellectual, infusing contemporary issues with insights found in philosophy. He addressed topics of broad moral significance, such as human freedom, economic alienation, race relations, women’s suffrage, war and peace, and educational methods and goals. Typically, he integrated discoveries made via public inquiries back into his academic theories. This practice-theory-practice rhythm powered every area of Dewey’s intellectual enterprise, and perhaps explains the enduring usefulness of his philosophy in many academic and practical arenas. The fecundity of Dewey’s ideas continues to manifest in aesthetics, education, environmental policy, information theory, journalism, medicine, political theory, psychiatry, public administration, sociology, and philosophy, per se.

Short Chronology of the Life and Work of John Dewey

2.1 associationism, introspectionism, and physiological psychology, 2.2 the “reflex arc” and dewey’s reconstruction of psychology, 2.3 instincts/impulses, 2.4 perception/sensation, 2.5 acts and habits, 2.6 emotion, consciousness, 3.1 the development of “experience”, 3.2 traditional views of experience and dewey’s critique, 3.3 dewey’s positive account of experience, 3.4 metaphysics, 3.5 the development of “metaphysics”, 3.6 the project of experience and nature, 3.7 empirical metaphysics and wisdom, 3.8 criticisms of dewey’s metaphysics, 4.1 the organic roots of instrumentalism, 4.2 beyond empiricism, rationalism, and kant, 4.3 inquiry, knowledge, and truth, 5.1 experiential learning and teaching, 5.2 traditionalists, romantics, and dewey, 5.3 democracy through education, 7. political philosophy, 8. art and aesthetic experience, 9.1 dewey’s religious background, 9.2 aligning naturalism and religion, 9.3 “religion” vs. “religious”, 9.4 faith and god, 9.5 religion as social intelligence—a common faith, collections, abbreviations of dewey works frequently cited, individual works, b. secondary sources, other internet resources, related entries, 1. biographical sketch.

John Dewey lead an active and multifarious life. He is the subject of numerous biographies and an enormous literature interpreting and evaluating his extraordinary body of work: forty books and approximately seven hundred articles in over one hundred and forty journals.

Dewey was born in Burlington, Vermont on October 20, 1859 to Archibald Dewey, a merchant, and Lucina Rich Dewey. Dewey was the third of four sons; the first, Dewey’s namesake, died in infancy. He grew up in Burlington, was raised in the Congregationalist Church, and attended public schools. After studying Latin and Greek in high school, Dewey entered the University of Vermont at fifteen and graduated in 1879 at nineteen. After college, Dewey taught high school for two years in Oil City, Pennsylvania. Subsequent time in Vermont studying philosophy with former professor H.A.P. Torrey, along with the encouragement of the editor of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy , W.T. Harris, helped Dewey decide to attend graduate school in philosophy at Johns Hopkins University in 1882. There, his study included logic with Charles S. Peirce (which Dewey found too “mathematical”, and did not pursue), the history of philosophy with George Sylvester Morris, and physiological and experimental psychology with Granville Stanley Hall (who trained with Wilhelm Wundt in Leipzig and with William James at Harvard). [ 1 ]

Though Dewey later attributed important credit to Peirce’s pragmatism for his mature views, Peirce had no sizable impact during graduate school. There, his main influences—Neo-Hegelian idealism, Darwinian biology, and Wundtian experimental psychology— created a tension he fought to resolve. Was the world fundamentally biological, functional, and material or was it inherently creative and spiritual? In no small part, Dewey’s career was launched by his attempt to mediate and harmonize these views. While sharing the idea of “organism”, Dewey also saw in both — and rejected— any aspects he deemed overly abstract, atomizing, or reductionistic. His earliest attempts to create a “new psychology” (aimed at merging experimental psychology with idealism) sought a method to understand experience as integrated and whole. As a result, Dewey’s early approach modified English absolute idealism. In 1884, two years after matriculating, Dewey graduated with a dissertation criticizing Kant from an Idealist position (“The Psychology of Kant”); it remains lost.

While scholars still debate the degree to which Dewey’s mature philosophy retained early Hegelian influences, Hegel’s personal influence on Dewey was profound. New England’s religious culture, Dewey recalled, imparted an “isolation of self from the world, of soul from body, [and] of nature from God”, and he reacted with “an inward laceration” and “a painful oppression”. His study (with George Sylvester Morris) of British Idealist T.H. Green and G.W.F. Hegel afforded Dewey personal and intellectual healing:

Hegel’s synthesis of subject and object, matter and spirit, the divine and the human, was, however, no mere intellectual formula; it operated as an immense release, a liberation. Hegel’s treatment of human culture, of institutions and the arts, involved the same dissolution of hard-and-fast dividing walls, and had a special attraction for me. ( FAE , LW5: 153)

Philosophically, early encounters with Hegelianism informed Dewey’s career-long quest to integrate, as dynamic wholes, the various dimensions of experience (practical, imaginative, bodily, psychical) that philosophy and psychology had defined as discrete.

Dewey’s family, as well as his reputation as a philosopher and psychologist, grew while at various universities, including the University of Michigan (1886– 88, 1889–1894) and the University of Minnesota (1888–89). At Michigan, Dewey developed long-term professional relationships with James Hayden Tufts and George Herbert Mead. In 1886, Dewey married Harriet Alice Chipman; they had six children and adopted one. Two of the boys died tragically young (two and eight). Chipman had a significant influence on Dewey’s advocacy for women and his shift away from religious orthodoxy. During this period, Dewey wrote articles critical of British idealists from a Hegelian perspective; he taught James’ Principles of Psychology (1890), and labeled his own view “experimental idealism” (1894a, The Study of Ethics , EW4: 264).

In 1894, at Tuft’s urging, President William Rainey Harper offered Dewey leadership of the Philosophy Department at the University of Chicago, which also included Psychology and Pedagogy. Motivated to put these disciplines into active collaboration, Dewey accepted and began building the department by hiring G.H. Mead from Michigan and J.R. Angell, a former student at Michigan (who also studied with James at Harvard). Dubbed the “Chicago School” by William James, Dewey, Tufts, Angell, Mead and several others developed “psychological functionalism”. He also published the seminal “Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology” (1896, EW5; hereafter RAC ), and broke from transcendental idealism and his church.

At Chicago, Dewey founded The Laboratory School, a site to test psychological and educational theories. Dewey’s wife Alice was the principal from 1896–1904. Dewey became active in Chicago’s social and political causes, including Jane Addams’ Hull House; Addams became a close personal friend of the Dewey’s. Dewey and his biographer, daughter Jane Dewey, credited Addams with helping him develop his views on democracy, education, and philosophy. The significance of Dewey’s intellectual debt to Addams is still being uncovered (“Biography of John Dewey”, Dewey 1939a; see also Seigfried 1999, Fischer 2013).

In 1904, conflicts related to the Laboratory School lead Dewey to resign his Chicago positions and move to the philosophy department at Columbia University in New York City. There, he established an affiliation with Columbia’s Teacher’s College. Important influences at Columbia included F.J.E. Woodbridge, Wendell T. Bush, W.P. Montague, Charles A. Beard (political theory) and Franz Boas (anthropology). Dewey retired from Columbia in 1930, going on to produce eleven more books.

In addition to many significant academic publications, Dewey wrote for various non-academic audiences, notably in the New Republic ; he was active in leading, supporting, or founding a number of important organizations including the American Civil Liberties Union, the American Association of University Professors, the American Philosophical Association, the American Psychological Association, and the New School for Social Research. Dewey spoke out to support progressive politics and social change. His renown as a philosopher and educator lead to numerous invitations; in 1922, he inaugurated the Paul Carus Lectures (revised and published as Experience and Nature , 1925), gave the 1928 Gifford Lectures (revised and published as The Quest for Certainty , 1929), and gave the 1933–34 Terry Lectures at Yale (published as A Common Faith , 1934a). He traveled for two years in Japan and China, and made notable trips to Turkey, Mexico, the Soviet Union, and South Africa.

In 1946, almost two decades after Alice Chipman Dewey died (1927), Dewey married Roberta Lowitz Grant. John Dewey died of pneumonia in his home in New York City on June 1, 1952.

Source: H&A 1998, xiv

• 1859 Oct. 20. Born in Burlington, Vermont
• 1879 Receives A.B. from the University of Vermont
• 1879–81 Teaches at high school in Oil City, Pennsylvania
• 1881–82 Teaches at Lake View Seminary, Charlotte, Vermont
• 1882–84 Attends graduate school at Johns Hopkins University
• 1884 Receives Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University
• 1884 Instructor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Michigan
• 1886 Married to Alice Chipman
• 1888–89 Professor of Philosophy at the University of Minnesota
• 1889 Chair of Department of Philosophy at the University of Michigan
• 1894 Professor and Chair of Department of Philosophy (including psychology and pedagogy) at the University of Chicago
• 1897 Elected to Board of Trustees, Hull-House Association
• 1899 The School and Society
• 1889–1900 President of the American Psychological Association; Studies in Logical Theory
• 1904 Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University
• 1905–06 President of the American Philosophical Society
• 1908 Ethics
• 1910 How We Think
• 1916 The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy, Democracy and Education, Essays in Experimental Logic
• 1919 Lectures in Japan
• 1919–21 Lectures in China
• 1920 Reconstruction in Philosophy
• 1922 Human Nature and Conduct
• 1924 Visits schools in Turkey
• 1925 Experience and Nature
• 1926 Visits schools in Mexico
• 1927 The Public and its Problems
• 1927 Death of Alice Chipman Dewey
• 1928 Visits schools in Soviet Russia
• 1929 The Quest for Certainty
• 1930 Individualism, Old and New
• 1930 Retires from position at Columbia University, appointed Professor Emeritus
• 1932 Ethics
• 1934 A Common Faith, Art as Experience
• 1935 Liberalism and Social Action
• 1937 Chair of the Trotsky Commission, Mexico City
• 1938 Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, Experience and Education
• 1939 Freedom and Culture, Theory of Valuation
• 1946 Married to Roberta (Lowitz) Grant; Knowing and the Known
• 1952 June 1. Dies in New York City

2. Psychology

Dewey’s involvement with psychology began early. He hoped the emerging discipline would answer philosophy’s deepest questions. His initial approach resembled Hegelian Idealism, though it did not incorporate Hegel’s dialectical logic; instead he sought new methods in psychology (Alexander 2020). By overcoming longstanding divisions (between subject and object, matter and spirit, etc.) he would show how human experiences —physical, psychical, practical, and imaginative —all integrate in one, dynamic person ( FAE , LW5: 153). Dewey’s large ambitions for psychology (as the new science of self-consciousness), imagined it as the “completed method of philosophy” (“Psychology as Philosophic Method”, EW1: 157). Nominally a textbook, Psychology (1887 EW2) introduced psychology’s study of the self as ultimate reality.

Dewey developed his own psychological theories. Extant accounts of behavior were flawed, premised upon outdated and false philosophical assumptions. (He eventually judged that such larger questions about the meaning of human existence exceeded the resources of psychology.) Dewey’s work at this time reconstructed components of human conduct (instincts, perceptions, habits, acts, emotions, and conscious thought) and these proved integral to later, mature accounts of experience. They informed his lifelong contention that mind, contrary to long tradition, is not fundamentally subjective and isolated, but social and interactive, emerging in nature and culture.

Dewey’s entry into psychology coincided with two dominant trends: introspectionism (arising from associationism, a.k.a., “mentalism”) and the newer physiological psychology (imported from Germany). Earlier British empiricists, such as John Locke and David Hume, explained intelligent behavior with (1) internally inspected (“introspected”) entities, including perceptual experiences (e.g., “impressions”), and (2) thoughts or ideas (e.g., “images”). These accrue toward intelligence via an elaborate process of associative learning. Discovery-by-introspection was indispensable to many empiricists, and to physiological cum experimental psychologists (e.g., Wundt).

Dewey was deeply influenced by graduate study of physiological psychology with G. Stanley Hall, whose classes included theoretical, physiological, and experimental psychology. Dewey conducted laboratory experiments on attention. Unlike the introspectionists, Hall’s methods incorporated strict experimental controls, a biology-based approach which proffered Dewey an organic and holistic model of experience capable of overcoming the subjectivist dualisms plaguing the older, associationist models. [ 2 ] However, Dewey still found experience atomized and mechanistic in physiological psychology, stemming from a reliance upon “sense data”. From his Hegelian perspective, this psychology could never account for a wider, socio-cultural world. Briefly, for Dewey, “organism” entails “environment” and “environment” entails “culture”. A rigorously empirical psychology could restrict study to “the” mind but was bound to forge connections with other sciences. [ 3 ]

Dewey sought an account of psychological experience that respected experimental limits and culture’s pervasive influences. James’s tour de force, The Principles of Psychology (1890), modeled how to explain the conscious and intelligent self without appealing to a transcendental Absolute. The Principles’ emphatically biological conception of mind, Dewey recalled, gave his thinking “a new direction and quality” and “worked its way more and more into all my ideas and acted as a ferment to transform old beliefs” ( FAE , LW5: 157). Rather than measuring psychic phenomena against preexisting abstractions, it deployed a “radical empiricism” that starts from lived experience’s actual phases and elements and aims to understand its functional origins.

One expression of this Jamesean turn was Dewey’s seminal critique of the reflex arc concept (1896). The “reflex arc” model of behavior was an influential way to empirically and experimentally explain human behavior using stimulus-response (cause-effect) pairings. It sought to displace less observable and testable approaches relying upon “psychic entities” or “mental substance”. In the model, a passive organism encounters an external stimulus, causing a sensory and motor response — a child sees a candle (stimulus), grasps it (response), burns her hand (stimulus), and pulls her hand back (response). This makes explicit the event’s basic stimuli and responses, describing connections in mechanistic and physiological terms. No recourse to mysterious and unobservable entities is necessary.

Dewey criticized the reflex arc on several grounds. First, events (sensory stimulus, central response, and act) are artificially separated for purposes of analysis. “The reflex arc”, Dewey wrote, “is not a comprehensive, or organic unity, but a patchwork of disjointed parts, a mechanical conjunction of unallied processes” ( RAC , EW5: 97). Second, the model falsifies genuine interaction; organisms do not passively receive stimuli and then actively respond; rather, organisms continuously interact with environments in cumulative and modifying ways. The child encountering a candle is already actively exploring, anticipating; noticing a flame modifies ongoing actions. “The real beginning is with the act of seeing; it is looking, and not a sensation of light” ( RAC , EW5: 97). Third, the model too rigidly designates certain events ( the stimulus, the response); it reifies them and ignores a wider, ongoing matrix of activity. Effectively, Dewey was pointing out the ironic fact that the reflex arc model — intending to shed metaphysical assumptions — was inadvertently creating new ones. We are seeking to discover, Dewey argued, “what stimulus or sensation, what movement and response mean ” and we are finding that “they mean distinctions of flexible function only, not of fixed existence ” ( RAC , EW5: 102; emphasis mine). His suggestion is pragmatic; rather than an underlying reality ( pure stimulus, pure response), psychology should look to meanings. Pragmatically, then, terms such as stimulus, response, sensation, and movement “mean distinctions of flexible function only, not of fixed existence” ( RAC , EW5: 102). Meanings of terms are understood once they are seen as functional acts in a dynamic context that includes aims and interests. [ 4 ]

Dewey’s critique and reconstruction of the reflex arc presaged other important developments in his pragmatism. The wider lesson was the need to pay greater attention to context and function, and he applied it over his career to science more broadly, and to logic and mathematics. This was a warning not to mistake analyses’ eventual outcomes as evidence for already-existing entities. [ 5 ] It was also a reminder that specific applications of theory earned salience by their value in a longer temporal context, checked both prospectively and retrospectively.

Rather than recount Dewey’s extensive reconstruction of the human self, here is a cursory review to illustrate how he developed some basic notions: instincts/impulses, perceptions, sensations, habits, emotions, sentiency, consciousness, and mind.

James had already attacked attempts to explain complex, developed behavior by reference to preexisting impulses and instincts (e.g., “Habit”, James 1890: chapter 4); Dewey continued the assault. Such explanations fail to consider instinct’s plastic and pliable character. Across a variety of individuals, instincts considered simple or basic are anything but—they blossom into many different habits and customs. [ 6 ] Also, instincts are not pushing an essentially passive creature, but are actively taken up in diverse circumstances, for diverse purposes. “Instinct”, like “stimulus”, has meaning depending upon contextual factors which may include biological and socio-linguistic responses. There is no psychology without social psychology, no plausible inquiry into pure, biological instincts (or other “natural” powers) without consideration of social and environmental factors, let alone the particularities of a given inquiry. As interactive phenomena-in-environment, instincts/impulses are better framed as transactions ( HNC , MW14: 66).

Dewey’s argument about instincts applied to perception and sensation as well — do not base an empirical science on unquestioned, metaphysical posits, and do not rely upon strictly analytical methods that use simple elements to build up complex behavior. Too often, such methods are inadequate to explain psychological phenomena. Accordingly, Dewey attacked the then-common view that a perception (1) was simply and externally caused, (2) completely occupied a mental state, and (3) was passively received into an empty mental space.

Such elements grow out of an erroneous “psychophysical dualism” that radically separates perceiver from world. Consider (1), perception as causation. Perception as simply and externally caused is contravened by the Darwinian, ecological model. There, organism-environment interactions include, but are not ontologically reducible to , “minds”, “bodies”, and their impingements— the so-called “impressions” and “ideas” of modern philosophy. We do encounter surprising, unbidden events but such occurrences do not justify leaping to metaphysical conclusions, that there is a world “out there” and a mind “in here”.

While experience is profoundly qualitative, qualities are never simply received nor are they contextless. This new view of qualities rejects the longstanding dualism between “objective” and “subjective”. A lemon’s “yellowness” or “tartness” are neither in a perceiver nor in a lemon; each quality emerges from complex interactions that can later be characterized ( as “tartness”) for reasons germane to the inquiry. Dewey wrote,

The qualities never were ‘in’ the organism; they always were qualities of interactions in which both extra-organic things and organisms partake. ( EN , LW1: 198–199)

Thus, as discriminated, perceptions and qualities are made in inquiry and language, not reports of ontological entities that are simple, discrete, or ultimate. “Perception”, then, is shorthand for more complicated interacting events. “Red” abstracts from a more complex experience (e.g., red-car-merging-into-my-lane), and the pragmatic question becomes, What is the function of this abstraction? How does it mediate thought or action for future experiences? (“A Naturalistic Theory of Sense-Perception”, LW2: 51; EN , LW1: 198–199)

Regarding (2), perceptions pervading mental states, Dewey echoes James in “The Stream of Thought” (James 1890: chapter 9). While a perception may occupy mental focus, there is also an attendant “fringe” which contributes contrast and creates, in the wider situation, an “underlying qualitative character” (“Qualitative Thought”, LW5: 238 fn. 1). The aforementioned “tartness” of the lemon relies for its character upon a slew of “fringe” conditions (e.g., immediate past flavors, gustatory anticipations, etc.).

Finally, regarding passive reception (3), perception is already a “taking up” by organisms already functioning in situations; there is no instantaneous and passive apprehension of stimuli. Taking up always means selectivity, a process of adjustment that take some time. Perception is never naïve, never a confrontation with some “given” content already imbued with inherent meaning. Long before Wilfred Sellars (see entry on Sellars ) dismissed the passive-perception-encounter as modern empiricism’s “Myth of the Given”, Dewey had rebuked such claims. All seeing is seeing as —adjustments within larger acts. These habits of adjustment can change (subsequent selections and interpretations are modified), so what is perceived can shift ( DE , MW9: 346).

The 1896 “Reflex Arc” paper argued that simpler constituents are insufficient to explain complex behavior; Dewey found that the “act” provided a better starting point ( HNC , MW14: 105). Acts help organisms cope with their environment; they direct movement. Acts exhibit selectivity and express interest, which make things meaningful. Our ancestors’ selective acts to satisfy instinctive hunger resulted in choosing certain foods (safe) over others. Over time, more elaborate interest in food becomes social norms (dining, e.g.) and aesthetic expectations (cuisine).

Following James and Peirce, Dewey integrates “habit” deeply into his philosophy, using it to explain various dimensions of human experience (biological, ethical, political, and aesthetic) as manifested in complex and social behaviors—walking, talking, cooking, conversing. [ 7 ] Habits are complex, composed of acts which unfold in time. Acts may begin with instinct borne of need and muddle toward reintegration and satisfaction. To become a habit, an act-series changes gradually and cumulatively; one act leads to the next. “Habit” emerges when acts cumulatively link to structure experience. Habit, Dewey wrote, “is an acquired predisposition to ways or modes of response, not to particular acts” ( HNC , MW14: 32). Such “ways” draw on past experiences, including social and linguistic interaction. Habits shared by groups are “customs”.

Dewey challenged assumptions about the routine nature of habits. Habits may become routine, but are not strictly automatic or insulated from conscious reformulation. Indeed, they cannot be literally automatic because every situation is somehow new. Thus, the same exact acts never repeat. Unlike machine routines, organic habits remain plastic, changeable. Habitually eating sweets is subject to contingency (toothache) and modification (restraint); thus, conscious reflection is the first stage of habits’ revision.

He also challenged the notion that habits were dormant powers, waiting to be invoked. Instead, habits are “energetic and dominating ways of acting” determining what we do and are: “All habits are demands for certain kinds of activity; and they constitute the self” ( HNC , MW14: 22, 21). Habits are not individual possessions or inner forces; rather, they are transactions between organisms and environments, functions making adaptation or reconstruction possible.

Habits enter into the constitution of the situation; they are in and of it, not, so far as it is concerned, something outside of it. (“Brief Studies in Realism”, MW6: 120)

Because situations are cultural as well as bio-physical, habits are ineliminably social. So-called “individual” habits emerge within the social world of friends, family, home, work, media, etc. Change of habit, then, is not a project of invoking sheer willpower, but rather one of intelligent inquiry into relevant, frequently wider and social, conditions (psychological, sociological, economic, etc.).

Dewey redescribed “emotion” as he did “habit” — a basic form of involvement in “coordinated circuits” of activity. But while habits are controlled responses to problematic situations, emotion is not predominantly controlled or organized; emotion is an organism’s “perturbation from clash or failure of habit” ( HNC , MW14: 54). As with the other psychological accounts, Dewey reconstructs emotion as transactional with other experiences (also typically analyzed as discrete — “rational,” “physical,” etc.).

Dewey’s account draws upon Darwin and James. Darwin argued that internal emotional states cause organic expressions which, depending on their survival value, may be subject to natural selection. James sought to decrease the distance between emotion and accompanying bodily expression. In cases of emotion, a perception excites a pre- organized physiological mechanism; recognizing such changes just is the emotional experience: “we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike” (James 1890 [1981: 450]). Dewey’s “The Theory of Emotion” (1894b & 1895, EW4) pushed James’ point further, toward an integrated whole (feeling-and-expression). Being sad is not merely feeling sad or acting sad but is the purposive organism’s overall experience. In effect, Dewey is gently correcting James’ (1890) reiteration of mind-body dualism. To understand emotion, we must see that “the mode of behavior is the primary thing” (“The Theory of Emotion”, EW4: 174). Like habits, emotions are not private possessions but emerge from the dynamic organism-environment complex; emotions are “called out by objects, physical and personal” as an intentional “response to an objective situation” ( EN , LW1: 292). As I encounter a strange dog, I am perplexed about how to react; usual habits are inhibited and there is emotion. (“The Theory of Emotion”, EW4: 182) We may say emotions are intentional insofar as they are “ to or from or about something objective, whether in fact or in idea” and not merely reactions “in the head” ( AE , LW10: 72).

Philosophically, emotion is a central feature of Dewey’s critique of traditional epistemology and metaphysics. By pursuing simple or pure rational access (to truth, reality) such systems misrepresent and castigate emotion as distraction, confused thought, or bodily interference; naturally, emotion becomes something needing to be suppressed, controlled, or bracketed. For Dewey, emotion is courses through individuals (reasoning, acting) and social groups (creating cultural meanings). He connects the traditional balkanization of emotion to non-philosophical motives, such as the segregation of leisure from labor and men from women. On Dewey’s reading, traditional rationalistic approaches require not just logical but moral critique.

2.7 Sentiency, Mind, and Consciousness

Dewey’s accounts of sentiency, mind, and consciousness build upon those of impulse, perception, act, habit, and emotion. A cursory view completes this sketch of Dewey’s psychology.

As with other psychic phenomena, sentience emerges through organism-environment transactions. Creatures seek to satisfy needs and escape peril; when precarity disrupts stability a struggle to reestablish balance begins, and what follows is adjustment of self, environment, or both. Sometimes previously successful methods (pre-organized responses) fail, and we become ambivalent. Divided against ourselves about what to do next, it proves advantageous to inhibit practiced responses (look before leaping). It is this inhibitory pause of action that, Dewey wrote, “introduces mental confusion, but also, in need for redirection, opportunity for observation, recollection, anticipation” ( EN , LW1: 237). In other words, inhibition makes new ways of considering alternatives possible, imbuing crude, physical situations with new meaning. Thus, Dewey wrote, sentiency or feeling

is in general a name for the newly actualized quality acquired by events previously occurring upon a physical level, when these events come into more extensive and delicate relationships of interaction. ( EN , LW1: 204)

At this stage, the new relationships are not yet known ; they do, however, provide the conditions for knowing. Symbolization, language, liberates these now-noticed relationships using tools of abstraction, memory, and imagination ( EN , LW1: 199).

Dewey rejected traditional accounts of mind-as-substance (or container) and more contemporary reductions of mind to brain states ( EN , LW1: 224–225). Rather, mind is activity, a range of dynamic processes of interaction between organism and world. Language offers some clues to the diversity of ways we can think of mind: as memory (I am re mind ed of X); as attention (I keep her in mind , I mind my manners); as purpose (I have an aim in mind ); as care or solicitude (I mind the child); as heed (I mind the traffic stop). “Mind”, then, ranges over many activities: intellectual, affectional, volitional, or purposeful. It is

primarily a verb…[that] denotes every mode and variety of interest in, and concern for, things: practical, intellectual, and emotional. It never denotes anything self-contained, isolated from the world of persons and things, but is always used with respect to situations, events, objects, persons and groups. ( AE , LW10: 267–68)

As Wittgenstein ( entry on Wittgenstein, section on rule-following and private language ) pointed out 30 years later, no private language (see entry on private language ) is possible given this account of meaning. While meanings might be privately entertained, they are not privately invented; meanings are social and emerge from symbol systems arising through collective communication and action ( EN , LW1: 147).

Active, complex animals are sentient due to the variety of distinctive connections they have with their environment. But “mentality” (mindfulness) arises due to the eventual ability to recognize and use meaningful signs. With language, creatures can identify and differentiate feelings as feelings, objects as objects, etc.

Without language, the qualities of organic action that are feelings are pains, pleasures, odors, colors, noises, tones, only potentially and proleptically. With language they are discriminated and identified. They are then “objectified”; they are immediate traits of things. ( EN , LW1: 198)

The bull’s charge is stimulated by the red flag, but the automobile driver takes the red stoplight as a sign.

Dewey thus de-divinized mind while accentuating new aspects of mind’s significance. No longer our spark of divinity, as some ancients held, mind is also no mere ghost in a machine. Mind is vital , investigating problems and inventing tools, aims, and ideals. Mind bridges past and future, an “agency of novel reconstruction of a pre- existing order” ( EN , LW1: 168).

Like mind, consciousness is also activity—the brisk transitioning of felt, qualitative events. Profoundly influenced by James’s metaphor of consciousness as a constantly moving “stream of thought” ( FAE , LW5: 157), Dewey did not conclude that an account of consciousness could be adequately captured in words. Talk about consciousness is always elliptical—it is “vivid” or “conspicuous” or “dull”—always falling shy of the phenomenon. Because the experience of consciousness is ever-evanescent, we cannot fix it as with objects of our attention— for example, “powers”, “things”, or “causes”. Dewey, then, evokes but does not define consciousness. Consider these contrasts in Experience and Nature , ( EN , LW1: 230)

As the comparison makes obvious, psychological life is processual and active; accordingly, Dewey describes consciousness in terms suiting dynamic organisms. Consciousness is thinking-in-motion, ever-reconfiguring series of events that are felt as qualitative experience proceeds. If mind is a “stock” of meanings, consciousness is the realization-and-reconstruction of meanings, reconstructions which can reorganize and redirect activity ( EN , LW1: 233).

Dewey occasionally tried to convey his notion of consciousness performatively, inviting readers to reflect about consciousness while they were reading about it. Here, again, “focus” and “fringe” play a crucial role. ( EN , LW1: 231). As physical balance controls walking, mental meanings adjust and direct ongoing foci and interpretation.

3. Experience and Metaphysics

Dewey’s notion of “experience” evolved over the course of his career. Initially, it contributed to his idealism and psychology. After he developed instrumentalism in Chicago during the 1890’s, Dewey moved to Columbia, revising and expanding the concept in 1905 with his historically significant “The Postulate of Immediate Empiricism” ( PIE , MW3). “The Subject-matter of Metaphysical Inquiry” (1915, MW8) and the “Introduction” to Essays in Experimental Logic (1916, MW10) developed the concept, showing “experience” did more than rebut subjectivism in psychology, but was also central to his metaphysical accounts of existence and nature (Dykhuizen 1973: 175–76). This was concretized in Dewey’s 1923 Carus Lectures, revised and expanded as Experience and Nature (1925, revised edition, 1929; EN , LW1). Further extensions and elaborations followed, notably in Art as Experience (1934b, AE , LW10). [ 8 ]

Pivotal to his oeuvre, interested readers should track experience across this entry; here, the focus will be on Dewey’s philosophical method and metaphysics.

Why was experience so important that it permeated Dewey’s approach to philosophy? Three influences were paramount. First, Dewey inherited Darwin’s idea of nature as a complex congeries of changing, transactional processes without fixed ends; in this context, experience means the undergoing and doing of organisms-in-environments, “a matter of functions and habits, of active adjustments and readjustments, of coordinations and activities, rather than of states of consciousness” (“A Short Catechism Concerning Truth”, MW6: 5). Second, Dewey took from James a radically empirical approach to philosophy—the insistence that perspectival experience, (e.g., the personal , emotional , or temperamental ) was philosophically relevant, including to abstract and logical theories. Finally, Dewey accepted Hegel’s emphasis on experience beyond the subjective consciousness — manifest in social, historical, and cultural modes. The self is constituted through experiential transactions with the community, and this vitiates the Cartesian model of simple, atomic selves (and any methods based upon that presumption). Understood this way, philosophy starts where we start, personally — with complex, symbolic, and cultural forms.

These influences, plus Dewey’s own inquiries, convinced him “experience” was the linch-pin to a broader theory of human beings and the natural world. This renewed focus on experience also amounted to a metaphilosophy; it discarded the assumption that philosophy gave special insights into ultimate truth or reality. Philosophy was equipment for living.

As both sheer terminology and as Dewey deployed it, “experience” generated much confusion and debate. Dewey commented about this toward the end of his life. [ 9 ] Decades later, one of Dewey’s foremost philosophical celebrants, Richard Rorty, lambasted Dewey for both the term and (what Rorty perceived as) Dewey’s intentions. [ 10 ] (Rorty 1977, 1995, 2006) (Rorty 1977, 1995, 2006) Nevertheless, since the term lives on, both in Dewey’s work and in everyday discourse, it deserves continued analysis.

Understanding Dewey’s view of experience requires, first, some notion of what he rejected. It was typical for many philosophers to construe experience narrowly, as the private contents of consciousness. These might be perceptions (sensing), or reflections (calculating, associating, imagining) done by the subjective mind. Some, such as Plato and Descartes, denigrated experience as a flux which confused or diverted rational inquiry. Others, such as Hume and Locke, thought experience (as atomic sensations) provided the mind at least some resources for knowing, but with limits. All agreed that percepts and concepts were different and in tension; they agreed that sensation was perspectival and context-relative; they also agreed that this relativity problematized the assumed mission of philosophy—to know with certainty—and differed only about the degree of the problem.

Dewey disputed the empiricist conviction that sensations are categorically separable contents of consciousness. This belief produced a “whole epistemological industry” devoted to the general problem of “correspondence” and a host of specific puzzles (about the existence of an external world, other minds, free will, etc.) (“Propositions, Warranted Assertibility, and Truth”, LW14: 179). This “industry” isolates philosophy from empirically informed accounts of experience and from pressing, practical problems. Regarding mental privacy, Dewey argued that while we have episodes of what might be called mental interiority, it is a later development: “Personality, selfhood, subjectivity, are eventual functions that emerge with complexly organized interactions, organic and social” ( EN , LW1: 162; see also 178–79). Regarding sensorial atomicity, discussed previously in the section on psychology ,

Dewey explained sensation as embedded in a larger sensori-motor circuit, a transaction which should not be quarantined to any single phase—nor to consciousness.

Dewey levied similar criticisms against traditional accounts of reflective thought. He denied a substantial view of mind, especially one ontological apart from body, history, or culture. Reasoning is one function of mind, not the exercise of a separate “faculty”. There is no reason to purify reasoning of feeling, either; reasoning is always permeated with feelings and practical exigencies. It may be practical, at times to “bracket out” a feeling or exigency when they interfere with mental calculating, but it is nevertheless true that reasoning subsists in a wider and “qualitative world” (“Psychology and Work”, LW5: 243).

We have, already, an outline of Dewey’s view: experience is processual, transactional, socially mediated, and not categorically prefigured as “rational” or “emotional”. We add three additional, positive characterizations of experience: first, as experimental ; second, as primary (“had”) or secondary (“known”); and third, as methodological .

First, experience exhibits a fundamentally experimental character. Dewey’s saw, during decades in education, how children’s experiences alternate between acting and being acted upon. Such phases become “experimental” when agents (students) consciously relate what is tried with what eventuates as they come to understand which actions are significant for controlling future events. When experience is experimental, we name the outcome “learning”. [ 11 ]

Second, most of experience is not known or reflective; it is barely regulated or reflected upon. As such, it is “felt” or “had”. Dewey also calls such experience direct and primary. The other kind experience, the focus of philosophy, is characterized by “knowing” or mediation-by-reflection. Dewey labels these “indirect”, “secondary”, or “known”. Known experience abstracts from had (or direct) experience purposefully and selectively, isolating certain relations or connections. The Quest for Certainty provides a cogent description:

[E]xperienced situations come about in two ways and are of two distinct types. Some take place with only a minimum of regulation, with little foresight, preparation and intent. Others occur because, in part, of the prior occurrence of intelligent action. Both kinds are had ; they are undergone, enjoyed or suffered. The first are not known; they are not understood; they are dispensations of fortune or providence. The second have, as they are experienced, meanings that present the funded outcome of operations that substitute definite continuity for experienced discontinuity and for the fragmentary quality due to isolation. ( QC , LW4: 194) [ 12 ]

Dewey’s had/known distinction describes existence without presupposing a dualism between appearance/reality. Much can be unknown without therefore being illusory or merely apparent. Pace Plato, we are not trapped in a cave of illusions with reason as our only escape. We cope with a world that is often confusing or opaque; as we try to make meaning, we keep track of ideas especially helpful predicting and controlling circumstances. Some other experiences are simply enjoyed without making them less real .

Third, Dewey’s renewed and expanded focus on experience was methodological. This requires some unpacking. Dewey’s distinction between experience “had” and “known” was more than a phenomenological observation; it was directive about how philosophy should be done. (We can see this kind of move embedded in Peirce’s pragmatic maxim and James’s radical empiricism.) For Dewey, experience is not just “stuff” presented to (or witnessed by) consciousness; experience is activity, engagement with life. Philosophy, too, is a form of lived activity, which means that doing philosophy properly requires a different starting point. In life, even philosophers do not start with a theory. Theories undoubtedly enter in, but not first. “The vine of pendant theory”, Dewey wrote about the denotative method, “is attached at both ends to the pillars of observed subject-matter” ( EN , LW1: 11; see also 386). [ 13 ]

Following James and Peirce, Dewey is challenging the theoretical assumptions of previous philosophies—“substances”, “mind vs. body”, “pleasure as natural aim”, and so on. Dewey’s philosophical work did critique those concepts, but the point here is metaphilosophical—that we do not start with what is abstract, conceptual. Dewey’s concern with such theoretical starting points was that they isolate philosophy from a more thoroughgoing empiricism capable of engaging actual human problems.

“Experience as method”, then, is both a warning and a positive recommendation. It warns philosophers to recognize that while intellectual terms may seem “original, primitive and simple” they should be understood as the historically and normatively situated “products of discrimination and classification” ( EN , LW1: 386; see also 371–372, 375). “Knowing” does not stand beyond experience or nature, but is an activity with its own standpoint and qualitative character. Whatever theory is eventually devised, a genuinely experiential method will check it against ordinary experience ( EN , LW1: 26). [ 14 ]

The experiential or denotative method tells us that we must go behind the refinements and elaborations of reflective experience to the gross and compulsory things of our doings, enjoyments and sufferings—to the things that force us to labor, that satisfy needs, that surprise us with beauty, that compel obedience under penalty. ( EN , LW1: 375–76)

Such a method is critical because it forces inquirers to check previous interpretations and judgments against their live encounters in a new situation ( EN , LW1: 364). Philosophy has to engage with new subject matters (and theories), accept challenges beyond the traditional “problems of philosophy”, and embrace the idea that “the starting point is the actually problematic ” ( EN , LW1: 61).

Much that is central to Dewey’s metaphysics has been discussed—the transactional organism-environment setting, mind, consciousness, and experience. Accordingly, this section will examine how Dewey conceived of “metaphysics”, the main project in Experience and Nature , how he attempted to reconnect empirical metaphysics with an ancient idea (philosophy as wisdom), and some of the criticisms his conception received.

Debate over a definite meaning for the term “metaphysics”, was as alive in Dewey’s day as in ours. From the beginning, Dewey sought to critique and reconstruct metaphysical concepts (e.g., reality, self, consciousness, time, necessity, and individuality) and systems (e.g., Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, and Hegel). Like his fellow pragmatists Peirce, James, and Mead, Dewey wished to transform not eradicate metaphysics. Dewey’s early metaphysical views were closest to idealism, but engagements with experimental science and instrumentalism convinced him to abandon the traditional goal of ultimate and complete accounts of reality.

His interest in metaphysics was revivified at Columbia by colleague F. J. E. Woodbridge, who thought metaphysics could be done in a “descriptive” rather than an extra-physical way (“Biography of John Dewey”, in Schilpp 1939: 36). While many of Dewey’s most important metaphysical works focused on experience (discussed above), special attention is due to “The Postulate of Immediate Empiricism” (1905, PIE , MW3), “The Subject-Matter of Metaphysical Inquiry” (1915, MW8), and his “Introduction” to Essays in Experimental Logic (1916c, MW10). [ 15 ] These were all vital precursors to his magnum opus, Experience and Nature . EN ’s final chapters, dealing with art and consummatory experience, were further developed in Art as Experience (1934b, LW10), a text containing additional and significant metaphysical discussions.

While labels tend to obscure what was innovative in his work, it is safe to say Dewey composed a realist, naturalistic, non-reductive, emergentist, process metaphysics. [ 16 ] He described nature’s most general features (“generic traits”) while trying to do empirical justice to the world as encountered. His account also aimed to remain fallible and useful for future researchers seeking to improve life with philosophy. In the end, Dewey described his efforts as a “metaphysics” and as a “system”: “the hanging together of various problems and various hypotheses in a perspective” (“Nature in Experience”, LW14: 141–142). He did not propose a metaphysics from a god’s eye point of view, but one informed and motivated by “a definite point of view” and linked to the contemporary, human world (“Half-hearted Naturalism”, LW3: 75–76 ).

Experience and Nature provides extended criticism of past metaphysical approaches, especially their quest for certainty and assumption of an Appearance/Reality framework, and a positive, general theory regarding how human existence is situated in nature. It is empirical, descriptive, and hypothetical, eschewing claims of special access beyond “experience in unsophisticated forms”. Such experience, Dewey argued, gives us “evidence of a different world and points to a different metaphysics” ( EN , LW1: 47). EN looks to existing characteristics of human culture, anthropologically, to see what they reveal, more generally, about nature. One significant product is Dewey’s isolation, analysis, and description of “generic traits of existence” and their relations to one another.

While this entry lacks space for even a bare summary, it is noteworthy that EN begins with an extensive discussion of method and experience as a new starting point for philosophy. An extensive presentation of the generic traits follows, which later informs discussions about science, technology, body, mind, language, art, and value. While the traits are not presented systematically (à la other metaphysicians such as Spinoza or Whitehead) there is a progression moving from the more basic to the more complex. [ 17 ]

One might ask, How can metaphysics contribute to the world beyond academic philosophy? Dewey aimed to return philosophy to an older, ancient mission—the pursuit of wisdom. And while Dewey describes philosophy as inherently critical, a “criticism of criticisms”, it still raises questions about the objectives of an empirical, hypothetical, naturalistic metaphysics? ( EN , LW1: 298) Dewey raises the issue, himself, prophylactically:

As a statement of the generic traits manifested by existences of all kinds without regard to their differentiation into physical and mental, [metaphysics] seems to have nothing to do with criticism and choice, with an effective love of wisdom. ( EN , LW1: 308)

His answer comes by way of an account of existence’s generic traits, which purportedly provides “a ground-map of the province of criticism, establishing base lines to be employed in more intricate triangulations” ( EN , LW1: 308). [ 18 ] A new metaphysics, like a new map, offers new possibilities for framing and explaining the world. This could discredit entrenched truisms—e.g., men are rational, women are emotional, humans are intelligent, animals are dumb, etc.— or facilitate new connections and new meanings. As Dewey saw it, the long tradition of philosophy had rendered too basic conceptual tools (kinds, categories, dualisms, aims, and values) unassailable; his reconsideration offered a new basis for metaphysics, one which would be relevant and revisable.

"Map-making" suggested a new way to do metaphysics and a new role for philosophers. Philosophers, on this model, become “liaison officers”, intermediators able to facilitate communication between those speaking at cross purposes or in different jargons ( EN , LW1: 306). Drawing from contemporary circumstances and purposes, the maps drawn could not promise certainty or permanency but would need to be redrawn according to changing needs and purposes. Their test, as with the rest of Dewey’s pragmatist philosophy, would lay in their capacity to sharpen criticisms and secure values.

Dewey received and responded to many criticisms of his metaphysical views. Critics often overlooked that his aim was to undercut prevailing metaphysical genres; often, his view was rashly consigned to some other extant camp. (He was characterized, variously, as a realist, idealist, relativist, subjectivist, etc. See Hildebrand 2003.) One recurrent criticism was that his statement in PIE (that “things are what they are experienced as” ) could not yield a metaphysics because it merely reported subjective and immediate experience; such reports, the criticism went, prevented a more mediated and (properly) objective account. Twenty years later, EN received similar reactions by critics who attacked Dewey’s non-binary approach to experience and nature. [ 19 ]

Subsequent criticisms focused upon Dewey’s supposed neglect of a tension between “qualities” vs. “relations”. Qualities, the argument ran, are immediate, whereas relations are mediate; how could Dewey claim they coexist in the same item of experience? This seemed to embody a contradiction. [ 20 ] Richard Bernstein (1961) seized on this issue, and claimed that Dewey harbored two irreconcilable strains, a “metaphysical strain” and a “phenomenological strain”, but failed to sufficiently account for them with his “principle of continuity”. One response to Bernstein argued that his critique unwittingly reenacted the very spectatorial standpoint Dewey’s experiential starting point seeking to overcome. [ 21 ]

In recent years, some debate whether Dewey should have engaged in metaphysics at all. Richard Rorty and Charlene Haddock Seigfried argued that Dewey’s critique of traditional metaphysics was as far as he should have gone; his further efforts diverted him from more important ethical work (Seigfried 2001a, 2004) or plunged him into foundationalist projects previously disavowed (“Dewey’s Metaphysics” in Rorty 1977). Defenders argue that Dewey’s genuinely new approach to metaphysics avoids old problems while contributing something salutary to culture at large (Myers 2020, Garrison 2005, Boisvert 1998a, Alexander 2020).

4. Inquiry and Knowledge

The interactional, organic model Dewey developed in his psychology informed his theories of learning and knowledge. Within this framework, a range of traditional epistemological proposals and puzzles (premised on metaphysical divisions such as appearance/reality, mind/world) lost credibility. “So far as the question of the relation of the self to known objects is concerned”, Dewey wrote, “knowing is but one special case of the agent-patient, of the behaver-enjoyer-sufferer situation” (“Brief Studies in Realism”, MW6: 120). As with psychology, Dewey’s wholesale repudiation of the traditional metaphysical framework required extensive reconstruction in every other area; “instrumentalism” was one popular name for Dewey’s reconstruction of epistemology (or “theory of inquiry”, as Dewey preferred). [ 22 ]

As with his earlier functional approach to psychology, Dewey’s instrumentalism leveraged Darwin to dissolve entrenched divisions between, for example, realism/idealism, science/religion, and empiricism/rationalism. Change and transformation become natural features of the actual world, and knowledge and logic are recast as ways to adapt, survive, and thrive. The better way to understand reasoning is by looking to the dynamic and biological world which harbors it, rather than the traditional paradigms of static precision, physics or mathematics. [ 23 ]

Early statements of instrumentalism (and definitive breaks by Dewey with Hegelian logic) may be seen in “Some Stages of Logical Thought” (Dewey 1900 [1916], MW1); that essay follows Peirce ( entry on Peirce section on pragmatism, pragmaticism, and the scientific method ], [ 24 ] especially the well known 1877–78 articles championing the larger framework of scientific thinking, namely the “doubt-inquiry process” (MW1: 173; see also Peirce 1877, 1878). This account is developed in Studies in Logical Theory (Dewey 1903b, MW2), by Dewey and his collaborators at Chicago. In the work, Dewey acknowledges a “preeminent obligation” to James (Perry 1935: 308–309). [ 25 ]

Studies criticizes transcendentalist logic extensively, concluding that logic should not assume either thought or reality’s existence in general but should rest content with the function or use of ideas in experience :

The test of validity of [an] idea is its functional or instrumental use in effecting the transition from a relatively conflicting experience to a relatively integrated one. ( Studies , MW2: 359)

Thus, instrumentalism abandons all psycho-physical dualisms and all correspondentist theories of knowing. Dewey wrote,

In the logical process the datum is not just external existence, and the idea mere psychical existence. Both are modes of existence—one of given existence, the other of possible , of inferred existence….In other words, datum and ideatum are divisions of labor, cooperative instrumentalities, for economical dealing with the problem of the maintenance of the integrity of experience. ( Studies , MW2: 339–340)

While instrumentalism was of a piece with Dewey’s other views, it was also responding to dialectic within philosophy’s epistemological positions, particularly between British empiricism, rationalism (see entry on rationalism vs. empiricism ), and the Kantian synthesis.

Classical empiricists insisted that sensory experience provided the origins of knowledge. They were motivated, in part, by the concern that rationalistic accounts effort to link knowledge with thought alone (away from particular sense stimuli), were too unchecked. Without the constraints of sense experience, philosophy was doomed to keep producing wildly divergent systems. Classical empiricists, like Dewey, shared a genuine interest in scientific progress; such progress required, first, escape from unfettered speculation. The account developed by figures such as Locke, Berkeley, and Hume claimed that (in Locke’s version) the world writes on a receptive blank slate, the mind, in the language of ideas. Using faculties of memory, association, and imagination, knowledge is generated; extension of knowledge must, on this account, be traceable to origination in sense experience.

Rationalists, in contrast, argued that knowledge was both abstract and deductively certain. Sensory experiences are fluid, individualized, and permeated by the relativity borne of innumerable external conditions. How could a philosophical account of genuine knowledge—necessarily certain, self-evident, and unchanging—be derived using sensorial flux? No, knowledge must be derived from inner and certain concepts. Knowledge, then, is produced by an immaterial entity, mind, with an innate power to reason, independent of the contingencies of practical ends and physical bodies.

Kant responded to the empiricist-rationalist tension by reigning in their ambitions; philosophy must stop attempting to transcend the limits of thought and experience. Philosophy’s more modest and proper aspiration is to discover what can be known in the phenomenal world. Kant, then, refused an originary role to either percepts or concepts, arguing that sense and reason are co-constitutive of knowledge. More important, Kant argued for mind as systematizing and constructive.

Dewey’s response to this three-way epistemological conflict was foreshadowed in the earlier discussion of the “Reflex Arc” paper and the idea of sensori-motor circuits. For Dewey, any proposal premised on a disconnected mind and body—or upon one assuming that stimuli (causes, impressions, or what have you) were atomic and in need of synthesis—was a non-starter. [ 26 ]

Accepting some of Kant’s criticisms of rationalism and empiricism, Dewey rejected Kant’s propagation of several significant but unjustified assumptions: that knowledge must be certain; that nature and intellect were categorically distinct; and that it was justified to posit a noumenal realm (things-in-themselves). Dewey also questioned Kant’s supposition that the sensations ingredient to knowledge are initially inchoate; such a claim was, Dewey believed, driven by Kant’s architectonic. Methodologically, perhaps most significantly, Dewey followed James in criticizing Kant’s standpoint as too spectatorial. From a pragmatic, Jamesean, “radical empiricist” standpoint, one may accept a wide variety of phenomenon (clear, vague, felt, remembered, anticipated, etc.) as real even though they are not known .

Thus, for Dewey, Kant falls short of the philosophical perspective needed to synthesize perception and conception, nature and reason, practice and theory. While Kant’s model of an active and structuring mind was a clear advance over passive ones, it retained the retrograde picture of knowledge as reality’s faithful mirror. Kant failed to see knowledge as a dynamic instrument for managing (predicting, controlling, guiding) future experience. This pragmatic conception of knowledge judges it as one would an eye or hand, gauging how it affects the organism’s ability to cope:

What measures [knowledge’s] value, its correctness and truth, is the degree of its availability for conducting to a successful issue the activities of living beings. (“The Bearings of Pragmatism Upon Education”, in MW4: 180)

Thus, Dewey replaced Kant’s mind-centered system with one centered upon experience-nature transactions—“a reversal”, Dewey wrote, “comparable to a Copernican revolution” ( QC , LW4: 232).

In the context of instrumentalism, what is “logic” and “epistemology”? Dewey does not discard these but insists on a more empirical approach. How do reasoning and learning actually happen? [ 27 ] Dewey comprehensively addresses logic in his 1938 Logic: The Theory of Inquiry ( LTI , LW12), which calls logic the “inquiry into inquiry”. LTI attempts to systematically collect, organize, and explicate the actual conditions of different kinds of inquiry; the aim, previewed in his 1917 “The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy”, is pragmatic and ameliorative: to provide an “important aid in proper guidance of further attempts at knowing” (MW10: 23).

Throughout his career, Dewey described the processes and patterns evinced in active problem solving. Here, we consider three: inquiry, knowledge, and truth. There is, Dewey argued, a “pattern of inquiry” which prevails in problem solving. “Analysis of Reflective Thinking” (1933, LW8) and LTI (LW12) describes five phases. Disavowing the usual divide between emotion and reason, inquiry begins (1) with a feeling of something amiss, a unique and particular doubtfulness; this feeling endures as a pervasive quality imbued in inquiry and serves as a kind of “guide” to subsequent phases. Next, because what is initially present is indeterminate, (2) a problem must be specifically formulated; note that problems do not preexist inquiry, as typically assumed. [ 28 ] Next, (3) a hypothesis is constructed, one which imaginatively utilizes both theoretical ideas and perceptual facts in order to forecast possible consequences of eventual operations. Next, (4) one reasons through the meanings involved in the hypothesis, estimating implications or possible contradictions; frequently, discoveries here direct one return to an earlier phase (to reformulate the hypothesis or redescribe the problem). [ 29 ] Finally, inquiry closes, (5) acting to evaluate and test the hypothesis; here, inquiry discovers whether a proposed solution resolves the problem, whether (in LTI ’s terminology) inquiry has converted an “indeterminate situation” into a “determinate one”.

The inquiry pattern Dewey sketched is schematic; actual cases of reasoning often lack such discreteness or linearity. Thus, the pattern is not a summary of how people always think but rather how exemplary cases of inquirential thinking unfold (e.g., in the empirical sciences).

Knowledge, on Dewey’s transactional model of inquiry, departs from tradition and brought to earth. “Knowledge, as an abstract term”, Dewey wrote,

is a name for the product of competent inquiries. Apart from this relation, its meaning is so empty that any content or filling may be arbitrarily poured in. ( LTI , LW12: 16)

To understand a product, one must understand the process; this is Dewey’s approach. By denying that knowledge is an isolated product, he effectively denies a metaphysics that makes mind- the-substance separate from everything else. He does not depreciate knowing as an activity , and strongly maintains that “intelligence” is crucial to mediating individual and societal conflicts. [ 30 ]

Truth is also radically reevaluated. Truth long connoted an ideal— an epistemic fixity (a correspondence, a coherence) capable of satisfying the need for further inquiry. Since this is not the actual situation human beings (or philosophy) inhabits, the ideal should be set aside. Still, Dewey was ever the (re)constructivist; in “Experience, Knowledge, and Value” (1939c) he provided an account. Truth no longer points toward something transcendental but toward the process of inquiry (“Experience, Knowledge, and Value”, LW14: 56–57). A proposition is “true” insofar as it serves as a reliable resource:

In scientific inquiry, the criterion of what is taken to be settled, or to be knowledge, is being so settled that it is available as a resource in further inquiry; not being settled in such a way as not to be subject to revision in further inquiry. ( LTI , LW12: 16)

Truth is not beyond experience, but is an experienced relation, particularly one socially shared. In How We Think , Dewey wrote,

Truth, in final analysis, is the statement of things “as they are,” not as they are in the inane and desolate void of isolation from human concern, but as they are in a shared and progressive experience….Truth, truthfulness, transparent and brave publicity of intercourse, are the source and the reward of friendship. Truth is having things in common. ( HWT , MW6: 67; see also “The Experimental Theory of Knowledge”, 1910b, MW3: 118)

In Dewey’s instrumentalism, then, knowledge and truth are adjectival not nominative, describing a process which, as Peirce tells us, can persist as long as we do. “There is no belief so settled as not to be exposed to further inquiry” (LTI, LW12: 16). Words like “knowledge” and “truth” are honored because of their historic service as tools for past inquiries and their aid in securing values.

5. Philosophy of Education

Around the world, Dewey remains as well known for his educational theories (see entry on philosophy of education, section Rousseau, Dewey, and the progressive movement ) as for his philosophical ones. A closer look shows how often these theories align. Recognizing this, Dewey reflected that his 1916 magnum opus in education, Democracy and Education ( DE , MW9) “was for many years that [work] in which my philosophy, such as it is, was most fully expounded” ( FAE , LW5: 156). DE argued that philosophy itself could be understood as “the general theory of education”, avoiding further hyper-specialization and investing more earnestly in everyday problems.

This was a call to see philosophy from an educational standpoint:

Education offers a vantage ground from which to penetrate to the human, as distinct from the technical, significance of philosophic discussions….The educational point of view enables one to envisage the philosophic problems where they arise and thrive, where they are at home, and where acceptance or rejection makes a difference in practice. If we are willing to conceive education as the process of forming fundamental dispositions, intellectual and emotional, toward nature and fellow-men, philosophy may even be defined as the general theory of education . ( DE , MW9: 338)

Dewey was active in education his entire life. Besides high school and college teaching, he devised curricula, established, reviewed and administered schools and departments of education, participated in collective organizing, consulted and lectured internationally, and wrote extensively on many facets of education. He established the University of Chicago’s Laboratory School as an experimental site for theories in instrumental logic and psychological functionalism. This school also became a site for democratic expression by the local community.

Dewey’s “Reflex Arc” paper applied functionalism to education. “Reflex” argued that human experience is not a disjointed sequence of fits and starts, but a developing circuit of activities. Framed this way, learning is a cumulative, progressive process where inquirers move from dissatisfying doubt toward satisfying resolutions of problems. “Reflex” also shows that the subject of a stimulus (e.g., the pupil) is not a passive recipient but an agent actively selecting stimuli within a larger field of activities.

Cognizance of these facts, Dewey argued, compelled educators to discard pedagogies based on the mind as “blank slate”. In The School and Society Dewey wrote, “the question of education is the question of taking hold of [children’s] activities, of giving them direction” (MW1: 25). How We Think (1910c, MW6) primarily aimed to help teachers apply instrumentalism. Overall, education’s intellectual goals would advance by acquainting children using the general intellectual habits of scientific inquiry.

The native and unspoiled attitude of childhood, marked by ardent curiosity, fertile imagination, and love of experimental inquiry, is near, very near, to the attitude of the scientific mind. ( HWT , MW6: 179)

These proposals entailed the revision of the teacher’s role; while teachers still had to know their subject matter, they also needed to understand students’ cultural and personal backgrounds. If learning was to incorporate actual problems, more careful integration of content with particular learners was needed. Motivational tactics also had to change. Rather than rewards or punishments, Deweyan teachers were to reimagine the whole learning environment, merging the school’s existing goals with pupils’ present interests. One strategy was to identify specific problems that could bridge curriculum and student and then formulate learning situations to exercise them. [ 31 ] This problem-centered approach was demanding, requiring teachers to train in subject matters, child psychology, and pedagogies for weaving these together. [ 32 ]

Dewey’s educational philosophy emerged amidst a fierce 1890’s debate between educational “romantics” and “traditionalists”. Romantics (also called “New” or “Progressive” education by Dewey), urged a “child- centered” approach; the child’s natural impulses provided education’s proper starting point. Education should not fetter creativity and growth, even if content must sometimes be attenuated. Traditionalists (called “Old” education by Dewey) pressed for “curriculum-centered” approaches. Children were empty cabinets curriculum fills with civilization’s contents; the main job of instruction was to ensure receptivity with discipline.

Dewey developed an interactional model to move beyond that debate, refusing to privilege either child or society. (See “My Pedagogic Creed”, 1897b, EW5; The School and Society , 1899, MW1; Democracy and Education , 1916b, MW9; Experience and Education , 1938b, LW13, etc.) While Romantics correctly identified the child (replete with instincts, powers, habits, and histories) as an indispensable starting point for pedagogy, Dewey denied that the child was the only starting point. Larger social groups (family, community, nation) have a legitimate stake in passing along extant interests, needs, and values as part of an educational synthesis.

Still, of these two approaches, Dewey more adamantly rejected traditionalists’ (overly) high premium on discipline and memorization. While recognizing the legitimacy of conveying content (facts, values), it is paramount that schools eschew indoctrination. Educating meant incorporating , giving wide latitude for unique individuals who, after all, would inherit and have dominion over the changing society. This is why who the child was mattered so much. Following colleague and lifelong friend G.H. Mead’s ideas about the social self, Dewey argued that schools had to become micro-communities to reflect children’s growing interests and needs. “The school cannot be a preparation for social life excepting as it reproduces, within itself, the typical conditions of social life” (“Ethical Principles Underlying Education”, 1897a, EW5: 61–62). [ 33 ]

Connecting child, school, and society aimed not only to improve pedagogy, but democracy as well. Because character, rights, and duties are informed by and contribute to the social realm, schools were critical sites to learn and experiment with democracy. Democratic life includes not only civics and economics, but epistemic and communicative habits as well: problem solving, compassionate imagination, creative expression, and civic self-governance. The range of roles a child might inhabit is vast; this creates a societal obligation to make education its highest political and economic priority. During WWII, Dewey wrote,

There will be almost a revolution in school education when study and learning are treated not as acquisition of what others know but as development of capital to be invested in eager alertness in observing and judging the conditions under which one lives. Yet until this happens, we shall be ill-prepared to deal with a world whose outstanding trait is change. (“Between Two Worlds”, 1944, LW17: 463)

Democracy is much more comprehensive than a form of government, it is “not an alternative to other principles of associated life [but] the idea of community life itself” ( PP , LW2: 328). Individuals exist in communities; as their lives change, needs and conflicts emerge that require intelligent management; we must make sense out of new experiences. Education empowers that by teaching the attitudes and habits (imaginative, empirical) that made the experimental sciences so successful. Dewey called these attitudes and habits “intelligence”. [ 34 ]

Informing these areas—science, education, and democratic life—is Dewey’s naturalism, which redirects hope away from what is immutable or ultimate (God, Nature, Reason, Ends) toward the human capacity to learn from experience. In “Creative Democracy—The Task Before Us” (1939b) Dewey wrote,

Democracy is the faith that the process of experience is more important than any special result attained, so that special results achieved are of ultimate value only as they are used to enrich and order the ongoing process. Since the process of experience is capable of being educative, faith in democracy is all one with faith in experience and education. All ends and values that are cut off from the ongoing process become arrests, fixations. They strive to fixate what has been gained instead of using it to open the road and point the way to new and better experiences. (“Creative Democracy”, LW14: 229)

Democracy’s success or failure rests on education. Education is most determinative of whether citizens develop the habits needed to investigate problematic beliefs and situations while communicating openly. While every culture aims to convey values and beliefs to the coming generation, the most important thing is to distinguish between education which inculcates collaborative and creative hypothesizing from education which foments obeisance to parochialism and dogma. This same caution applies to philosophy itself.

Dewey wrote and spoke extensively on ethics throughout his career; some writings were explicitly about ethics, but ethical analyses appear in works with other foci. [ 35 ] As elsewhere, Dewey critiques then reconstructs traditional views; he argued it is typical for traditional systems (e.g., teleological, deontological, or virtue-based) to seek comprehensive and monocausal accounts of, for example, ultimate aims, duties, or values. Such ideal theorizing is obligated to explain morality’s requirements for all individuals, actions, or characters.

Dewey argued for a more experimental approach. Rather than an ultimate explanatory account of moral life, ethics should describe intelligent methods for dealing with novel and morally perplexing situations. No ultimate values should be stipulated or sought. [ 36 ] The only value Dewey celebrated as (something like) ultimate was “growth”. [ 37 ] Ethics means inquiry into concrete, problematic conditions; such inquiry may use theories to inform hypotheses tested in experience. Reliable hypotheses may come to be called “knowledge”, but must, in the end, be considered fallible and revisable. Actual resolutions to moral problems typically point toward plural factors (aims, duties, virtues), rather than just one ( TIF , LW5). Moreover, actual conduct (including inquiry) is undertaken not by isolated, rational actors but by social beings. [ 38 ] “Conduct”, Dewey wrote,

is always shared; this is the difference between it and a physiological process. It is not an ethical “ought” that conduct should be social. It is social, whether bad or good. ( HNC , MW14: 16)

Dewey’s ethical theory, like those in education and politics, utilizes his transactional views of experience, habit, inquiry, and the communicative, social self. It also exemplifies his metaphysics — a world both precarious and stable, where conflict is natural and quests to ignore or permanently eradicate it are fantastical. [ 39 ] Conflict is a generic trait of life, not a defect; theories denying this tend to be so reductive and absolutist that they divorce inquiry from the essential details of concrete situations, cultures, and persons. Such strategies tend to fail. [ 40 ]

Progress in ethical theory, then, means inquiry that is more discriminating and revelatory of consequences and alternatives. [ 41 ] Improving inquiry requires better methods of deliberation; this means being open to contributions from many sources: sciences, social customs, jurisprudence, biographies, moral systems of the past. [ 42 ] Deliberation especially benefits from what Dewey called “dramatic rehearsal”, where imaginative enactment of possible scenarios can illuminate the emotional weight and color of potential ethical choices. [ 43 ]

For further details on Dewey’s ethics, see the entry Dewey’s moral philosophy by E. Anderson (2023) and Hildebrand (2018).

Dewey’s political philosophy, like other areas, builds on the idea that individuals are not self-subsistent social atoms but are constituted in social environments; it also builds on humans’ ability to inquire to solve problems in hypothetical and experimental ways. [ 44 ] As elsewhere, theory is instrumental; concepts do not uncover an underlying “reality,” but are functional (or not) in particular, practical circumstances. Concepts and theories in political theory are fallible and amenable to reconstruction. Dewey rejected approaches relying upon non-empirical, a priori assumptions (e.g., about human nature, progress, etc.) and those proposing ultimate, typically monocausal, explanations. His work criticized and reconstructed core concepts (individual, freedom, right, community, public, state, and democracy) along naturalist and experimentalist lines. Besides numerous articles (for academic and lay audiences), Dewey’s political thought is found in books including The Public and Its Problems (1927b, LW2), Individualism, Old and New (1930f, LW5), Liberalism and Social Action (1935, LW11), and Freedom and Culture (1939d, LW13). Because Democracy and Education (1916b, DE , MW9) emphasizes profound connections between education, society, and democratic habits—it also merits study as a “political” work.

Enormous changes occurred during Dewey’s lifetime, including massive US population growth, the rise of industrial, scientific, technological, and educational institutions, the American Civil War, two world wars, and a global economic depression. These events strained prevailing liberal theories, and Dewey labored to reconceive democracy and liberalism. “The frontier is moral, not physical”, Dewey urged, proposing that democracy was tantamount to a “way of life” which required continual renewal to survive. [ 45 ] Beyond governmental machinery (universal suffrage, recurring elections, political parties, trial by peers, etc.), he also characterized democracy as “primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience” ( DE , MW9: 93; see also, PP , LW2: 325). Such experience, expressed through collaborative inquiry, required intellectual and emotional competencies so that shared problems and value differences could be discussed and addressed. Ultimately, democracy requires faith that experience is a sufficient resource for future solutions, and that recourse to transcendent rules or aims can be outgrown. [ 46 ]

Dewey’s analysis of individualism arose from earlier academic interests and his sensitivity to contemporary economic and technological pressures. [ 47 ] The older “atomic” individualism—where natural egoists vie to maximize their standing—was now harming not protecting individuals; deployed as a rhetorical pretext, it was enabling wealthy and powerful interests to undermine most of the protections which initially justified liberalism. [ 48 ]

Dewey’s counter-proposal was “renascent liberalism”. [ 49 ] Reconstructing its core concept (“atomic” individuals become “social”), made other key political notions revisable—e.g., “liberty”, “freedom”, and “rights” —as all were resituated in an instrumentalist framework ( LSA , LW11: 35; E , MW5: 394). [ 50 ] Also revised are notions of “community” and “public”. A democratic “public” forms around problems, and aims to conduct experimental inquiry that leads to redress ( PP , LW2: 314). Dewey also expressed a grave concern, still with us today, regarding “inchoate” publics. Such publics include members lacking the education, time, and attention necessary for inquiry. They present democracy with perhaps its most significantly undermining condition ( PP , LW2: 321, 317).

For further details on Dewey’s political theory, see the entry on Dewey’s political philosophy by M. Festenstein (2023) and Hildebrand (2018).

Dewey’s magnum opus on aesthetics, Art as Experience ( AE , LW10: 31) states that art, as a conscious idea, is “the greatest intellectual achievement in the history of humanity” (31). [ 51 ] Such high praise deserves notice. Dewey began writing about aesthetics very early, regarding art’s relevance to psychology (1887, EW2), to education (1897c, EW5), the invidious distinction between “fine” and “practical” art (1891, EW3: 310–311), and on Bosanquet (1893, EW4). His own theory emerged in Experience and Nature (1925a, EN , LW1) and flourished in AE (1934b); he proposed aesthetics as central to philosophy’s mission, namely rendering everyday experience more fulfilling and meaningful.

Dewey’s aesthetics has four main objectives and an overarching purpose. First, it explicates artworks’ ontology, the interrelated processes of making and appreciation, and specifies the functions of interpretation and criticism. [ 52 ] Second, it examines arts’ social role in presenting, reimagining, and projecting human identity. Third, it analyzes the communicative functions of art, especially in education and political life. Finally, it describes and analyzes the implications of art’s expression as experience; such experience can reach levels of integration as they become qualitatively distinct, or “consummatory”. [ 53 ] Consummatory experience happens occasionally; sometimes it occurs not in an “artistic” context (concert, museum, etc.) but in unexpectedly quotidian circumstances. It is life at its fullest. The overarching purpose of Dewey’s aesthetics is determining how more of life’s experiences could become consummatory.

The main problem posed by AE is: How did a chasm arise between the arts, artists and ordinary people? How have cultural conditions and aesthetic theories (reinforced by institutions) isolated “art and its appreciation by placing them in a realm of their own, disconnected from other modes of experiencing”? ( AE , LW10: 16) AE makes art’s natural continuities with everyday life explicit, while seeking to prevent its reduction to mere entertainment or “transient pleasurable excitations”. ( AE , LW10: 16) [ 54 ] Dewey criticizes traditional aesthetics’ spectatorial (or theoretical) starting point and offers radically empirical accounts of art making, appreciation, expression, form, and criticism. Because aesthetic experience has organic roots, it can be recognized even in everyday objects and events. [ 55 ] Again, the goal is dissolution of dualisms between “fine” and “useful” objects to foment a greater “continuity of esthetic experience with normal processes of living” ( AE , LW10: 16).

For further details on Dewey’s aesthetics, see entry on Dewey’s aesthetics by T. Leddy (2021) and Hildebrand (2018).

9. Religion, Religious Experience and A Common Faith

The whole story of man shows that there are no objects that may not deeply stir engrossing emotion. One of the few experiments in the attachment of emotion to ends that mankind has not tried is that of devotion, so intense as to be religious, to intelligence as a force in social action. ( A Common Faith , 1934a, LW9: 52–53)

Dewey grew up in a religious family; his devout mother pressured her sons to live up to a similar devotion. His family church was Congregationalist; a bit later, including in college, Liberal Evangelicalism proved more acceptable. At twenty-one, while living in Oil City, Pennsylvania, Dewey had a “mystic experience” which he reported to friend Max Eastman:

There was no vision, not even a definable emotion—just a supremely blissful feeling that his worries [about whether he prayed sufficiently in earnest] were over. (Dykhuizen 1973: 22)

Dewey belonged to congregations for about thirty-five years, turning away circa 1894 as he left for a post in Chicago. After that, Dewey’s deepest loyalties lay outside religion; he was, as John J. McDermott put it,

an unregenerate philosophical naturalist, one for whom the human journey is constitutive of its own meaning and is not to be rescued by any transcendent explanations, principles of accountability, or posthumous salvation. (McDermott 2006, 50–51)

Dewey returned to philosophical issues of religion in the 1930’s. “What I Believe” (1930, LW5) argued for a new kind of “faith”, a “tendency toward action”. Such a faith was not transcendental, but signified that “experience itself is the sole ultimate authority” (“What I Believe”, LW5: 267). This faith arises actively, from “the full participation of all our powers in the endeavor to wrest from each changing situation of experience its own full and unique meaning” (“What I Believe”, LW5: 272). In 1933–34, Dewey gave the Terry Lectures at Yale, published as A Common Faith (1934a, ACF , LW9), his major statement on religion and religious experience.

Dewey’s endeavor in A Common Faith seems, in retrospect, insurmountable: to reconstruct religion in a way harmonious with his empirical naturalism, while transforming religious experience and belief to support and advance a secular conception of democracy. Religions vary, of course, but typically posit transcendent, eternal, unobservable entities and reveal themselves in ways which are not, shall we say, open to verification. Empirical experience, typically, is cast as inferior—castigated as flux, illusion, uncertainty, or confusion — and must be set aside. Dewey had squared himself against the metaphysics, epistemology, and seemingly the morality, of major religions.

Who was ACF ’s intended audience? Dewey was not addressing believers content with supernatural religion, nor religious liberals seeking a compromise that would place scientific and spiritual truths in separate categories. He was not addressing militant atheists, and rejected their dogmatism. [ 56 ] Rather, ACF addressed those who had abandoned supernaturalism yet still believed themselves religious (“Experience, Knowledge, and Value”, LW14: 79–80). ACF meant to salvage whatever made the religious attitude valuable in experience while shedding traditional religious frameworks and supernaturalistic beliefs.

Dewey’s strategy was to divorce “religious experience” from religion, showing how the former might arise within a natural and social context. [ 57 ] He found that none of the qualities reported by religious experiencers (feelings of peace, wholeness, security, etc.), offered evidence for the supernatural. ( ACF , LW9ff.) He also found that religious experience is not self-enclosed; it can color or affect other experiences. Just as sunset may exhibit “aesthetic” dimensions or a linguistic remark may betray a “moral” tint, various experiences may have a “religious” aspect ( ACF , LW9: 9.). The “religious” character of experience, then, is attitudinal, lending “deep and enduring support to the processes of living” ( ACF , LW9: 15). Dewey analyzed such religiosity as a kind of coping. Consider three options for coping: (1) accommodate an obstacle by resigning to put up with conditions imposed; (2) adapt or modify the obstacle’s conditions to one’s liking; finally, (3) adjust to the obstacle by changing one’s attitude and altering conditions. (Consider, as adjustment , the case of of becoming a parent which demands significant changes that encompass both self and environment.) Option (3) ( adjustment ) is characteristic of religious experience for it is “inclusive and deep seated” and transformative of attitudes in “generic and enduring” ways ( ACF , LW9: 12,13). Adjustment projects imaginative possibilities and puts them into action—both in oneself (wants, aims, ideals) and in surrounding conditions. The cumulative impact of adjustment is often the evolution of identity ( ACF , LW9: 13). [ 58 ]

Dewey’s effort to naturalize religion reinterpreted other traditional notions, including “faith” and “God”. Typically, faith is juxtaposed against reason. Faith requires neither empirical inquiry nor verification; it reposes in the transcendent and ultimate, in “things not seen”. It typically connotes intellectual acceptance, without proof, of religious propositions (e.g., “God exists and loves mankind”).

Dewey made at least two important criticisms of traditional faith. First, faith is too closely identified with intellectual acceptance, eclipsing its pragmatic side; faith in a cause , for example, indicates a practical willingness to act strong enough to modify present desires, purposes, and conduct. By over-identifying faith with intellectual recognition, traditional accounts undermine inquiry and constructive action. Second, faith tends to reify its objects (e.g., “sin”, “evil”, etc.) making them immune to inquiry and redescription. Creeds based on such interpretations of faith attempt to “solve” problems with formulaic appeals to absolutes. The better approach, Dewey argues, is fallibilistic and experimental: approaching problems with empirical inquiry. Insofar as traditional faith frustrates inquiry (and solutions), it tends to run counter to moral aims.

One faith Dewey can accept he calls “natural piety”. Natural piety is not grounded in unseen, supernatural powers; it is a “just sense of nature as the whole of which we are parts” and the recognition that, as parts, we are

marked by intelligence and purpose, having the capacity to strive by their aid to bring conditions into greater consonance with what is humanly desirable. (ACF, LW9: 18)

Faith grounded in natural piety accepts the idea that “experience itself is the sole ultimate authority” (“What I Believe”, LW5: 267).

Regarding God, Dewey’s naturalism disallows traditional models—a single being responsible for the physical and moral universe, and its inhabitants. Belief in God is neither warranted nor advisable. Instead, Dewey offers a reconstructed “God”. He proposes we think not of a singular object (person) but of the qualities to which God is compared—goodness, wisdom, love, etc. Such descriptions reveal our highest ideals. Remove the possessor of the ideals and consider how ideals pull us from possibility (imagination, calculation, action) to actualization —and one begins to understand "God" in Dewey’s sense:

This idea of God, or of the divine is also connected with all the natural forces and conditions—including man and human association—that promote the growth of the ideal and that further its realization….It is this active relation between ideal and actual to which I would give the name “God”. ( ACF , LW9: 34; see also 29–30)

As a pragmatist, a meliorist, and a humane democrat, Dewey sought to harness the undeniable power of religion and religious experience toward ends beneficial to all. Religion provides people with a story about the larger universe and how we fit. He knew simple critiques of religion were ineffective because they leave powerful needs unmet. Dewey did not propose swapping out old religious institutions for new ones; he hoped that emancipating religious experience from institutional and ideological shackles might free its energies toward a “common faith”, a passion for imaginative intelligence in pursuit of moral goods. Methods of inquiry and criticism are not mysteries; society is already deeply familiar with them. What was necessary would be for religious persons to connect inquiry with the enhancement of religious experience and values ( ACF , LW9: 23). If persons could appreciate how many celebrated accomplishments were due not to God but to intelligent, human collaboration, then perhaps the idea of community could inspire a non-sectarian, common faith. [ 59 ]

Dewey thought his call for a common faith was deeply democratic. The idea of the supernatural was, by definition, suspicious of experience (as an adequate guide) and, consequently, suspicious of empirical methods. Unchecked by lived experience or experiment, supernaturalism can produce deep divisions. Dewey’s common faith, in contrast, is bound up with experimental inquiry and open communication. This is why Dewey’s exhortation to exchange traditional religious faith for a common faith is another expression of his ideal of experimental democracy.

A. Works by Dewey

Citations to John Dewey’s works are to the thirty-seven-volume critical edition The Collected Works of John Dewey, 1882–1953 , edited by Jo Ann Boydston (Southern Illinois University Press, 1969–1991). The series includes:

• [EW] 1967, The Early Works , 1882–1898, 5 volumes.
• [MW] 1976, The Middle Works , 1899–1924, 15 volumes.
• [LW] 1981, The Later Works , 1925–1953, 17 volumes.

This critical edition was also published in electronic form as:

• The Collected Works of John Dewey, 1882–1953: The Electronic Edition , Larry A. Hickman (ed.), Charlottesville, Va.: InteLex Corporation, 1996, available online . To insure uniformity of citation, the electronic edition preserves the line and page breaks of the print edition.

In-text citations give the original publication date, series abbreviation, followed by volume and page number. For example LW10: 12 refers to page 12 of Art as Experience , which is published as volume 10 of The Later Works .

• [ ACF ] 1934a, A Common Faith
• [ AE ] 1934b, Art as Experience
• [ DE ] 1916b, Democracy and Education
• [ E ] 1908, Ethics , with James H. Tufts,
• [ E-rev ] 1932, Ethics , revised edition, with James H. Tufts,
• [ EEL ] 1916c, “Introduction” to Essays in Experimental Logic
• [ EN ] 1925a, Experience and Nature
• [ FAE ] 1930a, “From Absolutism to Experimentalism”
• [ H&A ] 1998, The Essential Dewey
• [ HNC ] 1922a, Human Nature and Conduct
• [ HWT ] 1910c, How We Think
• [ ION ] 1930f, Individualism, Old and New
• [ LSA ] 1935, Liberalism and Social Action
• [ LTI ] 1938c, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry
• [ PIE ] 1905, “The Postulate of Immediate Empiricism”
• [ PP ] 1927b, The Public and Its Problems
• [ QC ] 1929, The Quest for Certainty: A Study of the Relation of Knowledge and Action
• [ RAC ] 1896, “The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology”
• [ RIP ] 1920, Reconstruction in Philosophy
• [ TIF ] 1930d, “Three Independent Factors in Morals”
• [ TV ] 1939e, Theory of Valuation
• 1884, “The New Psychology”, Andover Review , 2(Sept.): 278–289. Reprinted in EW1: 48–60.
• 1886, “Psychology as Philosophic Method”, Mind , old series, 11(42), 153–173. Reprinted in EW1: 144–67. doi:10.1093/mind/os-XI.42.153
• 1887, Psychology , New York: Harper and Brothers. Reprinted in EW2.
• 1891, Outlines of a Critical Theory of Ethics , Ann Arbor, Michigan: Register Publishing Company. Reprinted in EW3: 239–388.
• 1893, Dewey, review of Bosanquet, “A History of Aesthetic, by Bernard Bosanquet, formerly Fellow of University College, Oxford” , Philosophical Review , 2 (Jan. 1893):63–69. Reprinted in EW4: 189–197.
• 1894a, The Study of Ethics: A Syllabus , Ann Arbor, MI: The Inland Press. Reprinted in EW4: 220–362.
• 1894b, “The Theory of Emotion I: Emotional Attitudes”, Psychological Review , 1(6): 553–569. Reprinted in EW4: 152–169. doi:10.1037/h0069054
• 1895, “The Theory of Emotion II: The Significance of Emotions”, Psychological Review , 2(1): 13–32. Reprinted in EW4: 169–188. doi:10.1037/h0070927
• [ RAC ] 1896, “The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology”, Psychological Review , 3(4): 357–370. Reprinted in EW5: 96–109. doi:10.1037/h0070405
• 1897a, “Ethical Principles Underlying Education”, in Third Yearbook of the National Herbart Society , Chicago: The National Herbart Society, pp. 7–33. Reprinted in EW5: 54–83.
• 1897b, “My Pedagogic Creed”, School Journal , 54(Jan.): 77–80. Reprinted in EW5: 84–95.
• 1897c, “The Aesthetic Element in Education”, Addresses and Proceedings of the National Educational Association , pp. 329–30. Reprinted in EW5: 202–204.
• 1899, The School and Society , Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Reprinted in MW1.
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How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

• A Brief Account: John Dewey’s Ethics, Political Theory, and Philosophy of Art and Aesthetics , by David L. Hildebrand (2018)
• John Dewey, American Pragmatist, at pragmatism.org
• Gouinlock, James S., “John Dewey”, Encyclopedia Britannica , revision: 27 September 2018. URL = < https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Dewey >
• John Dewey, entry by Jim Garrison in Encyclopedia of the Philosophy of Education (internet Archive)
• Field, Richard, “John Dewey (1859–1952)”, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy . URL = < http://www.iep.utm.edu/dewey/ >
• Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy, resources (research and teaching) on John Dewey and other American Philosophers
• The Center for Dewey Studies
• The John Dewey Society

Addams, Jane | aesthetics of the everyday | associationist theories of thought | Berkeley, George | civic education | critical theory | critical thinking | Dewey, John: aesthetics | Dewey, John: moral philosophy | Dewey, John: political philosophy | education, philosophy of | faith | feminist philosophy, approaches: pragmatism | globalization | God: and other ultimates | Green, Thomas Hill | Hook, Sidney | hope | Hume, David | information technology: and moral values | introspection | James, William | Kant, Immanuel | liberalism | Locke, John | Mead, George Herbert | metaphysics | ontology of art, history of | Peirce, Charles Sanders | pragmatism | process philosophy | rationality: historicist theories of | religion: and morality | religious experience | Rorty, Richard | Sellars, Wilfrid | Wundt, Wilhelm Maximilian

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John Dewey: Portrait of a Progressive Thinker

His ideas altered the education of children worldwide  .

John Dewey in 1950.

—Bettmann / Getty Images

“I believe that education is the fundamental method of social progress and reform.” —John Dewey  

“He was loved, honored, vilified, and mocked as perhaps no other major philosopher in American history.” —Larry Hickman

In the 1894 Pullman strike, workers fought against having their wages cut. Dewey saw the turmoil as symbolic of a rapidly changing America in need of school reform.

—Wikimedia Commons

Dewey praised the Pullman strikers’ leader Eugene V. Debs—head of the American Railway Union—and the strikers’ “fanatic sincerity and earnestness.”

—Harris & Ewing photograph, 1912 / Library of Congress

In July 1894, a train carrying a young philosopher from Ann Arbor, Michigan, pulled into Chicago Union Station. Its arrival was delayed by striking workers of the American Railway Union, who were made furious by the Pullman Company’s decision to cut their wages. The strike ended two weeks later, took the lives of thirty people, and symbolized a rapidly changing America dominated by corporations that set laborers against owners. 

The philosopher had entered a city whose population was exploding with immigrants, many of whom were illiterate; a city of half-built skyscrapers and noisome meatpacking plants; a city with a new university funded by John D. Rockefeller, the University of Chicago, whose Gothic buildings and eminent faculty would rival those of Harvard and Yale. John Dewey had arrived to chair the philosophy and pedagogy department. Once in the city, he visited the strikers, applauded their “fanatic sincerity and earnestness,” praised their leader Eugene Debs, and condemned President Cleveland’s suppression of the strike. Worried about working for a university dedicated to laissez-faire capitalism, Dewey found himself becoming more of a populist, more of a socialist, more sympathetic to the settlement house pioneered by Jane Addams, and more skeptical of his childhood Christianity. He would conclude that a changing America needed different schools.

In 1899, Dewey published the pamphlet that made him famous, The School and Society , and promulgated many key precepts of later education reforms. Dewey insisted that the old model of schooling—students sitting in rows, memorizing and reciting—was antiquated. Students should be active, not passive. They required compelling and relevant projects, not lectures. Students should become problem solvers. Interest, not fear, should be used to motivate them. They should cooperate, not compete. 

Boys in Armstrong Technical High School in Washington, D.C., construct models of airplanes in 1942 to be used by the U.S. Navy. Dewey advocated for democratized education that was relevant and practical.

—Marjory Collins / Library of Congress

The key to the new education was “manual training.” Before the factory system and the growth of cities, children handled animals, crops, and tools. They were educated by nature “with real things and materials.” Dewey lamented the disappearance of the idyllic village and the departure of children’s modesty, reverence, and implicit obedience. He was, however, no reactionary: “It is radical conditions which have changed, and only an equally radical change in education suffices.” Urban children needed to sew, cook, and work with metal and wood. Manual training should not, however, be mere vocational education or a substitute for the farm. It should be scientific and experimental, an introduction to civilization.

“You can concentrate the history of all mankind into the evolution of flax, cotton, and wool fibers into clothing,” asserted Dewey. He described a class where students handled wool and cotton. As they discovered how hard it was to separate seeds from cotton, they came to understand why their ancestors wore woolen clothing. Working in groups to make models of the spinning jenny and the power loom, they learned cooperation. Together they understood the role of water and steam, analyzed the textile mills of Lowell, and studied the distribution of the finished cloth and its impact on everyday life. They learned science, geography, and physics without textbooks or lectures. Learning by doing replaced learning by listening. 

Manual training revolved around the study of occupations to develop both the hand and the intellect. To know and to do were equally valuable. Cooperative learning encouraged a democratic classroom, which promoted a democratic society without elites, ethnic divisions, or economic inequality. Throughout his life, Dewey believed that humans were social beings inclined to be cooperative, not selfish individuals predisposed to conflict. Always he praised democracy as a way of life and scientific intelligence as the key to reform. 

America in 1900 was preoccupied with the clash between capital and labor, debating how to make the worker more than an appendage to the machine. To science, geography, and physics, Dewey added another advantage: meaning. While the typical student did not go on to high school or attend college, manual training conducted by a skilled teacher could stimulate the imagination, enlarge the sympathies, and acquaint young people with scientific intelligence. Dewey was outraged that “thousands of young ones . . . are practically ruined . . . in the Chicago schools every year.” His new education sought to encourage students to continue in school and combat the increase in juvenile delinquency. It looked to produce an inquiring student who could change America.  

Running through The School and Society is a suspicion of the intellectual who wants to monopolize knowledge and keep it abstract. Dewey opposed the academic curriculum revolving around classical languages and high culture, which he believed suited an aristocracy, not a democracy. “The simple facts of the case are that in the great majority of human beings,” he wrote, “the distinctively intellectual interest is not dominant. They have the so-called practical impulse and disposition.” With more and more Americans enrolled in schools, educators had to acknowledge this fact. Learning had to be democratized and made relevant and practical. “The school must represent present life.”

Classes modeled on Dewey’s principles emphasize cooperation over competition.

—Mauritius images GmbH / Alamy Stock Photo

Who was this philosopher who believed that children are curious and good, who would introduce them to civilization through wool and cotton, who would create cooperative classrooms that would end divisions between managers and workers and democratize America? Dewey lived from the Civil War to the Cold War, wrote 37 books, and published 766 articles in 151 journals. In his lifetime, he was hailed as America’s preeminent philosopher. Historian Henry Steele Commager called him “the guide, the mentor, and the conscience of the American people.” In China, he was called a “second Confucius.” 

John Dewey grew up in Burlington, Vermont, the son of a pious, high-minded mother and a well-read grocer father. Shy and withdrawn, the young Dewey read voraciously and graduated from the University of Vermont. Uncertain about a career, he moved to Oil City, Pennsylvania, to teach Latin and algebra at the local high school. An average teacher but an ambitious intellectual, he decided to become a philosopher and fought to gain admission to Johns Hopkins University, which was dedicated to original research. He graduated with a PhD in philosophy. The president of Johns Hopkins, Daniel Coit Gilman, encouraged Dewey to accept an offer to teach at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor but suggested that he curtail his “reclusive and bookish habits.” 

At Michigan, a newly confident Dewey published a psychology textbook and fell in love with one of his students, Alice Chipman (later described by their daughter as a woman “with a brilliant mind which cut through sham and pretense”). Influenced by Alice, Dewey paid more attention to social problems. They started a family and, observing his children, he applied his psychological insights to their upbringing, becoming increasingly more interested in education, so that his children might escape what he felt were the shortcomings of the schools he attended as a child. 

One of his students in Michigan described Dewey as “a tall, dark, thin young man with long black hair, and a soft, penetrating eye, and looks like a cross between a Nihilist and a poet.” A colleague at Michigan found him “simple, modest, utterly devoid of any affectation or self-consciousness, and makes many friends and no enemies.” Later associates would corroborate this positive portrait, stressing Dewey’s ability to accept criticism, his willingness to give credit to others, and his intellectual and physical vigor. After a lunch (hosted by T. S. Eliot) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Bertrand Russell praised Dewey: “To my surprise I liked him very much. He has a large slow-moving mind, very empirical and candid . . . [he] impressed me very greatly, both as a philosopher and as a lovable man.” Self-effacing but not introspective, Dewey spoke little about himself, writing neither memoirs nor an autobiography.

Dewey, who seemed to fit the model of the quintessential reserved New Englander, was surprisingly complex. Arriving in Chicago during the strike, he mused, “I am something of an anarchist.” Slightly bohemian, he encouraged his children to go barefoot even in winter, and he and his wife walked naked around the house. He socialized with radicals in Greenwich Village. To understand prostitution, he visited Chicago’s brothels. He wrote passionate love letters to his wife and rhapsodized over the endearing qualities of his children. Once reclusive, he happily worked on philosophic tracts as his children crawled around his desk. His friend Max Eastman noted, “Dewey is at his best with one child climbing up his pants leg and another fishing in his inkwell.” At the age of 58, he had a brief romance (possibly platonic) with Anzia Wezierska, who wrote novels and short stories about the immigrant experience. He wrote poems to her and for himself about the anxiety of philosophizing, poems without literary flair that he never expected would be published.

Away from his family, Dewey could slip into melancholy. In 1894, he wrote to Alice, “I think yesterday was the bluest day I have ever spent.” He was twice visited by catastrophe. While vacationing in Italy in the fall of 1894, his youngest son, Morris, died of diphtheria at age two and a half, a loss from which he and Alice never fully recovered. Ten years later, during his second European trip, his eight-year-old son, Gordon, contracted typhoid fever and died in Ireland. “I shall never understand why he was taken from the world,” wrote Dewey.

Dewey marched in a suffragette parade and campaigned for women’s right to vote. He celebrated as his mentors Ella Flagg Young, the superintendent of Chicago Public Schools, and Jane Addams, the founder of Hull House. He rejected his mother’s query, “Are you right with Jesus?,” but sprinkled his essay “My Pedagogic Creed” with religious imagery. Who were Dewey’s heroes? Thomas Jefferson and Walt Whitman, the apostles of democracy; William James, the founder of pragmatism; and Eugene Debs, the champion of radical reform. 

Suspicious of capitalism, this philosopher, the father of six children, had to deal with money. He demanded raises from college presidents, taught extra classes, and moved from apartment to apartment nine times between 1905 and 1914 in a gentrified New York. A workaholic, he pounded away at his typewriter and stopped reading for six months because of eyestrain. 

Why were students drawn to Dewey? He was not a mesmerizing lecturer, sitting at a table in front of the class with a single piece of paper and thinking aloud. Irving Edman (who became a philosopher) was initially repelled by this method, but looking over his notes, he soon realized “what had seemed so rambling . . . was of extraordinary coherence, texture and brilliance.” Dewey’s former student and later colleague, the philosopher J. H. Randall Jr., described a man who was “simple, sturdy, unpretentious, quizzical, shrewd, devoted, fearless, genuine.” Dewey had, according to biographer Jay Martin, “a general spiritedness and joviality . . . that attracted people of all ages, genders and races.”

After leaving Ann Arbor and following his dramatic entrance into Chicago during the Pullman Strike, Dewey spent ten years at the University of Chicago, becoming more radical and more famous. Before he published his groundbreaking essay, Dewey had to test his half-formed ideas in a real school, thus he and his wife ran the Lab School at the University of Chicago from 1894 to 1905. Classes were small and select. Dewey drew on the expertise of Chicago’s professors to create age-appropriate curriculums, stressing discovery and cooperation and the talents of creative teachers to implement it. The Dewey school was distinctly middle class, with motivated students and supportive parents. 

Visitors came from all over America and Dewey’s vision spread, so much so that he and his daughter Evelyn co-authored the 1915 book Schools of Tomorrow , a celebration of progressive pedagogy, complete with 27 photographs of children at work and play. In these schools, students visited fire stations, post offices, and city halls. They grew their own gardens, cooked, cobbled shoes, and tutored younger students. They staged plays dramatizing historical events. Pretending to be the heroes of the Trojan War, they held battles at recess with wooden swords and barrel-cover shields. Reading, writing, spelling, and calculating would be acquired naturally in conjunction with projects: “Studying alone out of a book is an isolated and unsocial performance,” the Deweys reminded readers of Schools of Tomorrow . The schools portrayed were chiefly elementary, and it is important to remember that Dewey’s reforms were rarely extended to rapidly growing high schools and less tractable adolescents.

In the John Dewey School in Denver in 1964, eighth graders create mosaic murals to decorate school corridors and offices. The activity demonstrates the Dewey principle of manual training—active rather than passive learning, “with real things and materials.”

—Ed Maker / Denver Post via Getty Images

Following a long-simmering conflict with University of Chicago President William Rainey Harper, Dewey—now prominent—moved to Columbia University in 1905. He remained there until 1930, teaching, lecturing in schools and community centers, traveling abroad to advise foreign educators, and writing articles for learned journals and popular magazines like the New Republic . Dewey believed that a philosopher should not only reflect but also act, both to improve society and to participate in “the living struggles and issues of his age.” His tools: reason, science, pragmatism. His goal: democracy, not only in politics and the economy but also as an ethical ideal, as a way of life. 

As an activist and public intellectual, Dewey made a stunning series of contributions. He founded the American Association of University Professors and helped organize the New York City Teachers Union. He supported efforts that led to the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the American Civil Liberties Union. He worked in settlement houses to help assimilate immigrants, spoke out against the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, defended Bertrand Russell when Russell’s morals were questioned, and sided with historian Harold Rugg when Rugg’s books were censored. In response to feelings of guilt he harbored about his support for World War I, Dewey led a crusade that culminated in the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact, an influential though controversial treaty outlawing war. 

During the 1920s, Dewey’s influence became international. He traveled with Alice to Japan in 1919, where he criticized the emperor cult, and lived in China for more than two years, giving two hundred lectures. The Chinese called him “Mr. Democracy” and “Mr. Science.” His books have been translated into Mandarin, and scholars at the Center for Dewey Studies at Southern Illinois University remind me that his emphasis on discovery and ethics has influenced contemporary Chinese educators trying to encourage creativity and virtue in students. Dewey went on to travel to Turkey, South Africa, and Mexico, advising governments on how to improve their educational systems. Today, in eleven countries, ranging from Italy to Argentina, that traditionally educate their students with lectures, memorization, and exams, there are Dewey centers that look to humanize education and consider the wider aspects of his philosophy. 

John Dewey’s seventieth birthday on October 20, 1929, just before the stock market crash, became a national event. He had received numerous honorary degrees, declarations from foreign nations, and a portrait bust by the famous sculptor Jacob Epstein. From all over the world came telegrams, including tributes from Supreme Court Justices Oliver Wendell Holmes and Felix Frankfurter. Twenty-five hundred notables crowded into the Astor Hotel’s Grand Ballroom to hear Dewey compared to Ben Franklin and praised by historian James Harvey Robinson as “the chief spokesman of our age and the chief thinker of our days.” 

Surrounded by children in 1949, John Dewey celebrates his ninetieth birthday at the Waldorf Astoria in New York City.

—Gado Images / Alamy Stock Photo

Not all Americans praised John Dewey. From his days at the Experimental School in Chicago until his death in 1952, he was the object of sharp criticism. Some parents in Chicago claimed that after a morning of chaotic play in the Dewey school, they had to teach their children how to read and write. Immigrants in New York City violently protested against manual training in 1915. They wanted a classical education so that their children could go to college and become professionals. Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr found Dewey’s view of human nature too optimistic, his view of society utopian.

The controversy surrounding Dewey continued after his death. “The 1950s was a horrible decade for progressive educators,” notes educational historian Diane Ravitch. In Educational Wastelands: The Retreat from Learning in Our Public Schools (1953), Arthur Bestor mocked the fad of “life adjustment” and called for a return of the “academic curriculum.” Admiral Hiram Rickover, the father of the nuclear-powered submarine, attributed Russia’s achievement with Sputnik to Dewey and his followers. In Life magazine, President Eisenhower blamed America’s educational failings on “John Dewey’s teachings.”

The controversy continues today. Analytic philosophers have little use for a sage who was not interested in arcane disputes over language. The champion of cultural literacy, E. D. Hirsch, insists that the education-school professors who lionize Dewey instruct future teachers to eschew facts, completion, testing, and lectures. In 2011, Human Events , a conservative weekly, listed Democracy and Education among the most dangerous books published in the past two hundred years. 

Perhaps Dewey’s greatest liability was his style. Concerning clarity, the nineteenth-century philosopher Herbert Spencer once wrote: “To so present ideas that they may be apprehended with the least possible effort.” Dewey read Spencer but did not follow this advice. The editor of the New Republic regularly rewrote Dewey’s submissions. Defenders detect profundity beneath obscurity and argue that Dewey deliberately adopted an antirhetorical writing style. Critics demand clarity and example, maybe some rhythm and grace—missing in a philosopher who had no ear for music. I have met many contemporary teachers who have heard of John Dewey. I have not met one who has read his works, except reluctantly.

Of course, any philosopher who becomes famous can expect critiques and may become attractive to followers who will distort his or her message. The distortion will be magnified when the philosopher writes a lot, especially in an abstract and imprecise style. As a result, sweet-tempered John Dewey, who welcomed dialog and experimentation, is blamed for any change that opponents can label “progressive”: open classrooms, cooperative learning, life adjustment, language reading, the attacks on Latin and canonical books, the slighting of the gifted and talented, declining test scores. The assaults can be expanded to include social ills as well as educational shortcomings: communism, creeping socialism, juvenile delinquency, declining patriotism, a weakened military, and a less productive economy. Both Catholics and Communists reviled Dewey.

Patiently, Dewey defended himself. He reminded his educational disciples that students should not be allowed to do whatever they please, that planning and organization must accompany freedom, and that teachers should be guides as well as subject matter experts. While many forms of progressive education were spreading in America, he insisted in his 1938 book, Experience and Education , that education should not be without direction. 

What are we to make of John Dewey? His FBI file mentioned his carelessly combed gray hair, disheveled attire, and monotonous drawl. They might have added that he was agnostic in religion and radical in politics. He was a good husband and father and a generous colleague. Optimistic, hard-working, idealistic, he rejected the Lost Generation’s cynicism and Sigmund Freud’s pessimism and preoccupation with the unconscious. Biographer Alan Ryan notes, “He was uninterested in either his own or other people’s private miseries.” He did not comment on sexuality, the obsession of contemporary America. Unlike evolutionary psychologists, he believed nurture was more powerful than nature. He overcame a natural timidity to become a giant in the world of philosophy and insisted on a new role for the philosopher, combining contemplation with action. 

The words authority , discipline , deferred gratification , tradition , hierarchy , and order , were not part of his vocabulary. He favored community , equality, activity , freedom . He had no use for McGuffey Readers, designed to instill character, patriotism, and love of God. He criticized the Gilded Age, the Roaring Twenties, and the New Deal. He believed in unions, strikes, government planning, and redistribution of income. Opposed to laissez-faire capitalism, he was convinced that leaders were more dangerous than the masses. 

Rejecting the specialization of contemporary philosophers, Dewey tackled logic, ethics, aesthetics, and epistemology. He commented on war and peace, labor unions, and capitalists. Above all, he transformed schools, connecting students to real life, encouraging them to become critical thinkers and idealists.

The philosopher and educator, photographed here in 1946, wrote 37 books and published 766 articles over his lifetime.

—JHU Sheridan Libraries / Gado Images / Getty

What is Dewey’s legacy? President Lyndon Johnson (once a teacher) extolled “Dr. Johnny” and connected Dewey’s ideas to the Great Society. Southern Illinois University has created a center for Dewey studies and published 37 volumes of his writings as well as twenty-four thousand pieces of his correspondence. The former editor, Larry Hickman, tells me there has been a revival of interest in Dewey after years of neglect. He argues that Dewey’s pluralism encourages “global citizenship.” He notes that after World War II, Japanese educators turned to Dewey and adds that he has a following among millions of Japanese Buddhists. 

There is a John Dewey Society in America and John Dewey Study Centers around the world. Deborah Meier, the only elementary school teacher ever to receive a MacArthur “Genius” award, repeatedly cites Dewey’s influence on her democratic, project- and community-based schools. The Coalition for Essential Schools, whose slogan is “less is more,” is based on Dewey progressivism. Left-leaning public intellectuals and professors Cornel West and Noam Chomsky champion Dewey as an enemy of elites and founder of participatory democracy. The late Richard Rorty, an iconoclastic and controversial but prominent philosopher, rediscovered Dewey in the 1980s and praised Dewey’s pragmatism, political engagement, and vision for a democratic utopia (which Rorty says will never happen).

Echoing Dewey’s conclusion in “My Pedagogic Creed,” many contemporary psychologists insist that human beings are wired to be social, craving group activity and connections. In addition to evidence from brain imaging unavailable in Dewey’s time, they cite the ubiquity of iPhones and the power of Facebook. Communitarians who feel America’s celebration of individualism has gone too far quote Dewey.

“Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp,” advised Robert Browning, Dewey’s favorite poet. Dewey was a radical reformer, a socialist, a secular humanist, a meliorist, even a utopian. He dreamed of an America without sexism or racism or ethnic divisions, a community that respected capitalists as well as craftspeople and that cultivated both science and art. His dense, turgid philosophical tracts are now of interest primarily to academicians; his more readable journalism remains of use to historians; his educational writings prove the most influential.

Contemporary Americans have opted for testing, standards, competition, choice, and academic curriculums. Education reports emphasize national security, jobs, and the achievement gap, not discovery, manual training, or community. Deliberately antiprogressive charter schools, such as the KIPP Schools and Success Academies, try to overcome the achievement gap and end poverty by content, competition, and discipline. They stress grit, not joy. Teachers, denied the status Dewey thought so important, still stand in front of the class and talk. Progressive schools are few and seem most effective in small schools staffed by “true believers.” 

Still, glimmers of Dewey’s dream remain. In the New Haven middle school of my thirteen-year-old grandson, the social studies teacher started the year by asking, “Why study history?” The mathematics teacher showed the movie Stand and Deliver . The language arts teacher asked each student to share with the class their thoughts about their individually selected summer reading book. My grandson chose a trilogy, The Hunger Games , not in the canon. The science teacher asked them to construct a model bridge out of one piece of paper and Scotch tape. To build community, the principal suspended classes, led the students outside, and asked each to start a conversation with someone he or she had not talked to before that morning. 

Today most K–12 teachers still believe in content, competition, evaluation, and discipline. Simultaneously, they believe in relevance, projects, group learning, and choice. The Common Core Standards, approved by most states, stress rigor but at the same time emphasize inquiry and understanding. John Dewey would be moderately pleased with a pragmatic nation that combines traditional education with the insights of progressives.

Peter Gibbon is a Senior Research Scholar at the Boston University School of Education and the author of A Call to Heroism: Renewing America’s Vision of Greatness (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2002). He has directed four Teaching American History programs and is currently the director of an NEH Summer Seminar, “Philosophers of Education: Major Thinkers from the Enlightenment to the Present.”

Funding information

NEH has awarded 19 grants, totaling $3,091,240, on John Dewey to Southern Illinois University for publication of the Collected Works, in 37 volumes, and an electronic edition of Dewey’s correspondence.

Republication statement

The text of this article is available for unedited republication, free of charge, using the following credit : “Originally published as “John Dewey: Portrait of a Progressive Thinker” in the Spring 2019 issue of  Humanities  magazine, a publication of the National Endowment for the Humanities.” Please notify us at  @email  if you are republishing it or have any questions.

John Dewey on Education: Selected Writings by Reginald A. Archambault, ed., University of Chicago Press, 1964. Understanding John Dewey: Nature and Cooperative Intelligence by James Campbell, Open Court, 1995. Democracy and Education by John Dewey, The Macmillan Company, 1916. Schools of Tomorrow by John Dewey and Evelyn Dewey, Grindl Press, 2016.  The Education of John Dewey: A Biography by Jay Martin, Columbia University Press, 2002. The Metaphysical Club by Louis Menand, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001. John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism by Alan Ryan, W. W. Norton & Company, 1995.

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• John Dewey and Our Educational Prospect: A Critical Engagement with Dewey's Democracy and Education

In this Book

• David T. Hansen
• Published by: State University of New York Press

Table of Contents

• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction: Reading Democracy and Education
• 2. “Of all affairs, communication is the most wonderful": The Communicative Turn in Dewey’s Democracy and Education
• 3. Curriculum Matters
• 4. Socialization, Social Efficiency,and Social Control: Putting Pragmatism to Work
• 5. Growth and Perfectionism? Dewey after Emerson and Cavell
• 6. Rediscovering the Student in Democracy and Education
• 7. Dewey’s Reconstruction of the Curriculum: From Occupation to Disciplined Knowledge
• pp. 113-127
• 8. A Teacher Educator Looks at Democracy and Education
• pp. 129-145
• 9. Dewey’s Philosophy of Life
• pp. 147-164
• 10. Dewey’s Book of the Moral Self
• pp. 165-187
• List of Contributors
• pp. 189-190
• pp. 191-195

Additional Information

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John Dewey Theory on Education

This essay about John Dewey explores his revolutionary ideas on education, emphasizing “learning by doing” and experiential learning. It highlights how Dewey’s philosophy extends beyond traditional classroom boundaries, integrating community engagement and interdisciplinary learning. The piece portrays schools as democratic spaces that nurture citizenship and respect for diversity, advocating for a shift towards student-centered learning. Dewey’s enduring influence on education is underscored, framing his concepts as crucial for addressing modern educational challenges.

How it works

John Dewey stands as an intellectual beacon, illuminating the path toward a more enlightened approach to education. Born in 1859, amidst the throes of societal transformation, Dewey’s formative years were steeped in the ferment of change, imbuing him with a profound understanding of the evolving needs of education. His educational philosophy, an intricate tapestry woven from threads of experience, democracy, and inquiry, continues to shape the very essence of pedagogy.

At the heart of Dewey’s educational theory lies the radical notion of “learning by doing.

” In a world where passive absorption often masquerades as learning, Dewey’s clarion call resounds: true understanding springs forth from active engagement with the world. He decried the sterile confines of traditional education, where students passively imbibed knowledge, akin to parched soil absorbing rain. Instead, Dewey championed experiential learning, where students roll up their sleeves and immerse themselves in the rich tapestry of life’s experiences, weaving together the threads of theory and practice to craft a mosaic of understanding.

Dewey’s vision transcends the classroom, extending tendrils of learning into the very fabric of society. He envisioned education as a vibrant tapestry, intricately woven with threads of community engagement, service learning, and real-world application. Field trips become windows into the soul of a subject, internships transform classrooms into laboratories of experience, and community service projects breathe life into abstract concepts, fostering empathy and social responsibility.

Progressive education, Dewey’s clarion call, beckons educators to embrace the winds of change and chart a course toward student-centered learning. No longer content to be mere dispensers of knowledge, teachers become guides, facilitators, and mentors, nurturing the seeds of curiosity and inquiry within each student. The rigid shackles of traditional pedagogy give way to the fluidity of personalized learning journeys, where students chart their course amidst a sea of possibilities, guided by the compass of their passions and interests.

Interdisciplinary learning, the cornerstone of Dewey’s educational edifice, breaks down the artificial barriers erected between subjects, inviting students to traverse the fertile valleys and towering peaks of knowledge. No longer confined to the narrow confines of disciplinary silos, students embark on a journey of discovery, where the boundaries between science and art, history and mathematics, blur into a vibrant tapestry of interconnected ideas and concepts.

Democracy, Dewey’s lodestar, guides the ship of education through the tumultuous seas of societal change. Schools become microcosms of democracy, where students learn not only the three R’s but also the fundamental principles of citizenship, cooperation, and respect for diverse perspectives. In the crucible of the classroom, the fires of democracy are kindled, forging a generation of enlightened citizens equipped to navigate the complexities of a rapidly changing world.

In the ever-evolving landscape of education, Dewey’s legacy endures as a beacon of hope and inspiration. His ideas, though born in a bygone era, continue to resonate with a timeless wisdom that transcends the boundaries of time and space. As educators and policymakers grapple with the challenges of the 21st century, Dewey’s voice echoes in the corridors of academia, reminding us that education is not merely the imparting of knowledge but the cultivation of wisdom, empathy, and understanding. In embracing Dewey’s vision, we embark on a journey toward a brighter future, where education is not a destination but a lifelong odyssey of discovery and growth.

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