John Dewey (October 20, 1859 - June 1, 1952) was 
an American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer, 
whose thought has been greatly influential in the United States 
and around the world. He is recognized as one of the founders of 
the philosophical school of Pragmatism (along with Charles Sanders 
Peirce and William James), a pioneer in functional psychology, and 
a leading representative of the progressive movement in U.S. 
education during the first half of the twentieth century.

Dewey was born in Vermont of modest family origins. From 1904, he 
was professor of philosophy at Columbia University, New York.

Educational philosophy

As can be seen in his  Democracy and Education 
Dewey attempts to at once synthesize, criticize, and expand upon 
the democratic or proto-democratic educational philosophies of 
Rousseau and Plato. He saw Rousseau's as overemphasizing the 
individual and Plato's as overemphasizing the society in which 
the individual lived. For Dewey, this distinction was by and 
large a false one; like Vygotsky, he viewed the mind and its 
formation as communal process. Thus the individual is only a 
meaningful concept when regarded as an inextricable part of his 
society, and the society had no meaning apart from its realization 
in the lives of its individual members. However, as evidenced in his 
later Experience and Nature Dewey recognizes the importance of the 
subjective experience of individual people in introducing 
revolutionary new ideas.

For Dewey, it was vitally important that education not be the teaching 
of mere dead fact, but that the skills and knowledge which students 
learned be integrated fully into their lives as citizens and human 
beings. At the Laboratory School which Dewey and his wife Alice ran 
at the University of Chicago, children learned much of their early 
chemistry, physics, and biology by investigating the natural 
processes which went into cooking breakfast--an activity they did 
in their classes. This practical element--learning by doing--sprang 
from his subscription to the philosophical school of Pragmatism.

Dewey was essentially the seminal thinker of educational progressivism 
and an important progressive in general. His ideas, while quite 
popular, were never broadly and deeply integrated into the practices 
of American public schools, though some of his values and terms were 
widespread. Progressive education (both as espoused by Dewey, and in 
the more popular and inept forms of which Dewey was critical) was 
essentially scrapped during the Cold War, when the dominant concern 
in education was creating and sustaining a scientific and 
technological elite for military purposes. In the post-Cold War period, 
however, progressive education has reemerged in many school reform 
and education theory circles as a thriving field of inquiry.


Dewey and historical progressive education

While Dewey's educational theories have enjoyed a broad popularity 
during his lifetime and after, they have a troubled history of 
implementation. Dewey's writings can be difficult to read, and his 
tendency to reuse commonplace words and phrases to express extremely 
complex reinterpretations of them makes him unusually susceptible to 
misunderstanding. So while he remains one of the great American public 
intellectuals, his public often did not quite follow his line of 
thought, even when it thought it did. Many enthusiastically embraced 
what they thought was Deweyan teaching, but which in fact bore little 
or somewhat perverse resemblance to it. Dewey tried, on occasion, to 
correct such misguided enthusiasm, but with little success. 
Simultaneously, other progressive educational theories, often 
influenced by Dewey but not directly derived from him, were also 
becoming popular, and progressive education grew to comprehend many, 
many contradictory theories and practices, as documented by 
historians like Herbert Kliebard.

It is often thought that progressive education "failed"; whether this 
view is justified depends on one's definitions of "progressive" and 
"failed"; several versions of progressive educations succeeded in 
transforming the educational landscape; the utter ubiquity of guidance 
counseling, to name but one example, is owing to the progressive 
period. However, radical versions of educational progressivism were 
hardly ever tried, and often were troubled and short-lived. The 
Laboratory School, which Dewey and his wife, Alice, founded at the 
University of Chicago is a good example. This school failed within 
three years and forced Dewey to leave Chicago. He then created his 
famous Lincoln School in Manhattan that also failed in a short 
amount of time.


Deweyan pragmatism

Dewey was a second-generation pragmatist, following Charles Sanders 
Peirce and William James. He was not nearly so pluralist or relativist 
as James. He held that value was a function not of whim nor purely 
of social construction, but a quality inherent in events ("nature 
itself is wistful and pathetic, turbulent and passionate" 
(Experience and Nature).

He also held, unlike James, that experimentation (social, cultural, 
technological, philosophical) could be used as a relatively 
hard-and-fast arbiter of truth. For example, James felt that for 
many people who lacked "over-belief" in religious concepts, human 
life was shallow and rather uninteresting, and that while no one 
religious belief could be demonstrated as the correct one, we were 
all responsible for taking the leap of faith and making a gamble 
on one or another theism, atheism, monism, or whatever. Dewey, 
in contrast, while honoring the important role that religious 
institutions and practices played in human life, rejected belief 
in any static ideal, such as a theistic God. For Dewey, God was 
the method of intelligence in human life: that is to say, 
rigorous inquiry, or, very broadly configured, science.

As with the reemergence of progressive philosophy of education, 
Dewey's contributions to philosophy as such (he was, after 
all, much more a professional philosopher than a thinker on 
education) have also reemerged with the post-Cold War 
reassessment of pragmatism by thinkers like WVO Quine and 
Richard Rorty.

Because of his process-oriented and sociologically conscious 
view of the world and knowledge, he is sometimes seen as 
a useful alternative to both modern and postmodern ways of 
thinking. Recent exponents (like Rorty) have not always 
remained faithful to Dewey's original vision, but this itself 
is completely in keeping both with Dewey's own usage of other 
thinkers and with his own philosophy--for Dewey, past doctrines 
always require reconstruction in order to remain useful for the 
present time.

Dewey's philosophy has gone by many names other than 
"progressivism." He has been called an instrumentalist, and 
experimentalist, an empiricist, a functionalist and a 
naturalist. The term, "transactional," may better describe 
his views. It was a term emphasized by Dewey in his later 
years to describe his theories of knowledge and experience.