John Dewey was born in Burlington, Vermont, in 1859, to parents who both counted roots back to
colonial days --- his father, through a line of merchants, and his mother, through a line of Vermont
farmers. Dewey's childhood and education were unassuming. Finishing his bachelor's degree, at the
University of Vermont, in 1879, he went to work teaching in public schools in Pennsylvania and
Vermont. This modest life ended largely through the influence of his Vermont philosophy
professor, H. A. P. Torrey, who continued to encourage Dewey to read classics, history of
philosophy, T. H. Green, and German philosophers. In 1882, Dewey published a paper called "The
Metaphysical Assumptions of Materialism," in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, and the
success of this paper inspired him to quit teaching and return to school. He enrolled in the newly
established Johns Hopkins University and finished a Ph. D. in 1884. His dissertation was entitled
"The Psychology of Kant."
As it happened, Charles Sanders Peirce was a faculty member at Johns Hopkins during this period and Dewey was strongly influenced by several courses of study with Peirce. Peirce was the brilliant son of the famous Harvard mathematician Benjamin Peirce and he had written a series of influential articles on the philosophy of science and epistemology. Another famous Harvard faculty member had already been substantially influenced by Peirce; this was William James. From the 60s through the late 80s, James had made his way from physiology to psychology to philosophy, writing one of the most famous 19th Century books on psychology along the way. Together, Peirce and James constituted the core of the school of American Pragmatism. Other influences at Hopkins were G. Stanley Hall and James McKeen Catell, famous psychologists, and a Hegelian philosopher, G. S. Morris.
During the first decade after his Ph. D., Dewey taught at Michigan, Minnesota, and Chicago, concentrating on the relationships between psychology and philosophy. In 1887, he published a book, Psychology. But eventually, his teaching experiences in public schools led him to focus on educational pedagogy. At the University of Chicago, he began the famous "Laboratory School" and also was involved with the "Chicago Circle," which developed the philosophy of Pragmatism. The School and Society was one of several books produced in this period.
In 1904, Dewey was invited to join the faculty at Columbia University and he stayed at Columbia until his retirement, in 1930, continuing as an emeritus until 1939. At Columbia, his career blossomed into more purely philosophical areas, and he wrote many books on political and moral philosophy. Dewey was an especially enthusiastic advocate for democracy but he also deeply recognized the complete dependence of a democratic system on a free and well educated electorate. He brought this point home in books like Democracy and Education. But his creative life had tremendous range, as indicated by his large book, late in his career, Art as Experience. While his first wife died in 1927, Dewey remarried, at the age of 87, in 1946. He lived on Long Island, where he continued the life of a Vermont farmer, close to the earth, managing a small egg farm. He died at 93, in 1952. He wrote Freedom and Culture in 1939, in his retirement and at a desperate time in world history. As you will see it reflects his lifelong dedication to ideas about education, culture, democracy, and freedom.
Dewey's Pragmatism in Freedom and Culture
Aside from being inspired by various interpretations of scientific method, Pragmatism was also inspired by the failure of metaphysics (or essentialism) in Western philosophy. Neither the meaning nor the truth of our ideas, even our most fundamental ideas, is believed to descend to us from some untouchable authority or fountainhead. Ideas have meaning insofar as they have application; they have truth insofar as their application is successful. Our physical and social relationships are the testing grounds.
Concepts like democracy and freedom frequently get swept up in metaphysical speculation and, frequently, are put to rhetorical use in rather empty ways. We measure ourselves against other people by saying that we are free and democratic. But what do we really mean? Do we actually say anything in this other than issuing some self-congratulatory slogan that makes us feel happy or righteous? Dewey was especially concerned, in the late 1930s, because the world was rapidly becoming polarized between the radical right and the radical left. At the same time, the Great Depression had brought forward strong polarities within the United States itself. Was democracy coming apart worldwide? Could the pure will to be free salvage America? In particular, do American democratic institutions, as founded in specific political documents, guarantee the survival of democracy and freedom in America? These were understandably important questions in 1939; however, they are no less relevant to our own age. The recently proclaimed "victory" of Capitalism over Communism, ending the Cold War, has welcomed in an incomparable period of blindness, forwarding self-congratulations and prohibiting all further self-criticism.
In Dewey's Pragmatic analysis, the idea of freedom can only mean something that we experience in our physical and social relations. It is either there or it isn't. If we are free people, then we have something to show for it. Similarly, if democracy is meaningful, then we can show what it is by application in our world of experience. If democracy and freedom are alive and well, they are aspects of our actual culture, not just declarations on paper, eternal principles, or heroic beliefs. Dewey was completely convinced that a democratic way of life is hard. It demands work, and it demands constant vigilance. This conviction comes straight out of his Pragmatist position. That is, democracy doesn't happen because we state it, declare it, or found it. Democracy happens because we make it happen each day in the way we live. Here, Dewey found the development of American society more than worrisome. The principles and social practices of American democracy developed out of the culture of New England --- largely rural agrarian and largely guided by the Protestant ethic. By 1939 that had changed dramatically; by 1997 it has changed even more dramatically. There was no doubt whatsoever, in Dewey's mind, that the cultural changes in America had transformed democracy and freedom. What remained questionable was what democracy had become and where it might go.
Consider one small aspect of the democratic life, exercising our right to select our representatives. How many people exercised that right in fall 1994 or fall 1996? First of all, not all Americans even bother to register to vote. Secondly, usually only around 30-40% actually do vote. In local elections, the performance is even worse. And in the end, how many of that 30-40% actually believe their votes are worth much or have available the candidates that would really matter to them? Granted, voting is merely a small part of the social experience that should be called democracy, but we can surely ask whether our national voting habits don't suggest something about the general lack of health in realizing democracy. What is American culture? And are democracy and freedom attributes of it? If not, how can American culture be re-shaped to preserve freedom and renew optimism among our youth?
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