John dewey biography essay

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, 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 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 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).

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&

John Dewey (October 20, - June 1, ) was an American philosopher and educator. He was an early originator of pragmatism, a philosophical school of thought popularized at the beginning of the 20th century that emphasized a practical approach to problem solving through experience. Dewey was instrumental in the progressive movement in education, and his belief that the best education involves learning through doing is still a practice studied and used by modern educators.

Education and Career

Growing up, Dewey attended public schools in Burlington, Vermont. At the age of 15, Dewey enrolled at the University of Vermont, where he studied philosophy for four years.

After graduating second in his class, Dewey spent three years as a teacher at a seminary in Oil City, Pennsylvania. He then spent a year studying under the guidance of G. Stanley Hall at Johns Hopkins University in America's first psychology lab. After earning his PhD from Johns Hopkins, Dewey went on to teach as an assistant professor role at the University of Michigan for nearly a decade.

In , Dewey accepted a position as the chairman of the department of philosophy, psychology, and pedagogy at the University of Chicago. Although his prior studies of philosophy and psychology would also influence his later work, it was at the University of Chicago where Dewey began to formalize his views that would contribute so heavily to the school of thought known as pragmatism.

Dewey also helped establish the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools. There, he was able to directly apply his pedagogical theories in practice to study their impact on students. Dewey eventually left the Univer

In July , 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 , 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. 

The key to the new education was “manual training.” Before the factory sys