John Dewey, America’s Education Reformer

Michael Sidiropoulos, BScEE, MEng

In a past article titled Pragmatism in America, we explored John Dewey’s position as a philosopher and saw that he is regarded by many scholars as the leading American philosopher of the twentieth century. We made only a passing reference to his work as the leading education reformer in America. We are ready to fill this gap now following a brief review of his philosophical work.

Dewey was born in 1859 in Burlington, Vermont and studied at the University of Vermont and Johns Hopkins University. He held academic posts in Michigan, Chicago and finally at Columbia University in New York, where he spent most of his life.

During his student days, Dewey became aware of evolutionary theory, which would influence his thinking for the rest of his life. In the world before Darwin, organisms and species were seen as well-defined entities, as created by the Creator. By the time Dewey was a young university student, Darwinian evolution had been accepted by the scientific community and the public. The idea that all species had descended over time from common ancestors through natural selection, adaptation and iterative change had an immense impact on young Dewey and became central in his view of the natural world and his conception of human nature.

Dewey didn’t write any major works until he was 50, when he wrote his book How We Think. In this work Dewey exposes his ideas on inference, understanding, empirical and scientific thinking, all with a dual purpose: to understand the nature of knowledge and to apply this understanding in shaping his own teaching methods.

The theory of knowledge is a central focus in Dewey’s philosophical work. He rejected the term epistemology, preferring the theory of inquiry and experimental logic as more descriptive of his own work. Dewey believes that knowledge develops out of a continuing interaction between the mind and the environment, and the mind has practical instrumentality in the guidance of that interaction, aiming at restructuring the environment and its practical consequences.

Dewey rejects the old mind-matter dualism and proposes an alternative view. In its interaction with the world, the mind energizes, coordinates, and integrates sensory and motor responses…