This ended his laboratory experimentation in education. Dewey continued to write and lecture on school reform.
He published his most well-known book in this area, Democracy and Education , in The book harshly criticized the still common practice of forcing students to memorize masses of disconnected facts. He began to write and lecture more on reconstructing American democracy for greater citizen participation. He realized that this could not occur in school classrooms alone. Philosophers and other intellectuals, he believed, needed to step forward and push for democratic changes in all areas of American life.
In the years leading up to World War I, Dewey spoke out for worker and women's rights. He worried, however, about increasing government restrictions on free speech and academic freedom during and after the war.
Disillusioned by the weakness of the League of Nations to enforce world peace, he joined the movement to outlaw war and establish a world court to settle international disputes. Meanwhile, his fame as a philosopher and progressive educator led to invitations for him to lecture and teach in Japan, China, Turkey, Mexico, and the Soviet Union. In the s, critics began to question Dewey's idea about more citizen participation in American democracy. Liberal journalist Walter Lippman wrote that ordinary citizens lacked the intelligence, knowledge, and time to think about and decide important public issues.
Lippman favored a democracy in which experts supplied information to elected professional politicians who would decide what laws and policies were best for the American people. The role of the citizen, Lippman said, should be limited to voting in occasional elections: "To support the Ins when things are going well; to support the Outs when they seem to be going badly. William James, America's leading psychology scholar in the s, was the first to use "pragmatism" to describe his philosophy.
James once said, "The true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good. Pragmatists value experimental proof over religious faith, the wisdom of thinkers in the past, or human reasoning to discover truth and knowledge. Pragmatists want to know what works as a practical matter in such areas as the law, politics, and education.
Many associate John Dewey's philosophy with pragmatism, but he preferred to use the term "instrumentalism. His most famous experiment, the Dewey School at the University of Chicago, attempted to find out the best way to educate American children for life in a democracy.
Dewey said that the most important thing about democracy is what comes before voting: the thinking, discussion, and debate. He proposed that groups such as local unions, professional organizations, and business associations should meet regularly to deliberate on public questions. Elected politicians would follow their lead since only the ordinary citizens knew what was best for them. Dewey agreed that Americans were often uninformed and easily manipulated by the wealthy and powerful. Thus, he repeated his ideas to make schools emphasize problem solving, thinking skills, and other knowledge necessary for democratic decision making.
In addition, he assigned a key role to the media then mainly newspapers, journals, and books to pass on accurate facts from the experts to the people. Dewey concluded that the result would be a more democratic society, which he called "The Great Community.
Alice, Dewey's wife and inspiration for transforming philosophy into a useful instrument for social progress, died in Two years later, at the peak of his international fame, he celebrated his 70th birthday. The following year he retired from Columbia. He soon began a new career as a social activist. During the Great Depression of the s, Dewey harshly criticized capitalism for "stunting" workers by denying them any share in controlling their work. But he also condemned Marxism, Stalinism, and government planned "state socialism" for going too far in taking away the freedom of individuals.
In addition, he thought President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal liberalism did not go far enough in its reforms. In books, political journals, and speeches, Dewey staked out a middle ground between unregulated capitalism and state socialism. He envisioned a decentralized "planning society" where workers and consumers would participate in decisions affecting their lives and communities.
But Dewey never developed a clear plan for what he called "democratic socialism. Dewey rejected revolutionary rhetoric and violence to achieve his ideas for reconstructing American democracy. Subscribe today and start reading. Over the course of a lifetime that stretched from the Civil War to the Cold War , Dewey pushed liberal commitments to freedom of inquiry, equal opportunity, and personal liberty to their democratic limits.
Realizing that equal liberty for all required democratizing institutions from the state to the workplace and the school, Dewey set his radical liberalism on a collision course with the capitalist social relations that liberalism historically served. The Right saw him as a Communist, the Communist Party saw him as a philosopher of reaction. And that, he had no trouble admitting, required confronting capitalism.
Hege l as a student at the University of Vermont. After a short stint as a teacher in Oil City, Pennsylvania, Dewey entered graduate school at Johns Hopkins University in and immersed himself in the German idealism that dominated Anglo-American philosophy at the time. Dewey graduated two years later and begin his career as a prominent voice of idealism, first as a professor of philosophy at the University of Michigan and then the University of Minnesota.
In those early years, Dewey formulated three ideas that would come to define his mature vision of democracy: individualism offers a distorted vision of human freedom, genuine freedom is found in social cooperation, and true social freedom is impossible in a class society. But they also marked his first real engagement with the labor movement.
In the spring of , workers at the Pullman Palace Car Company launched a wildcat strike to protest wage reductions, and a nationwide solidarity strike brought rail travel through continental hubs like Chicago to a grinding halt.
A quarter-million workers were in revolt. Federal and state government responded to the mass action with violent suppression. In Chicago alone, fourteen thousand federal troops, state militiamen, and private marshals descended on the city to reclaim the yards.
He wagered that the labor battle might revitalize the party system and spark public debate about the tensions between capitalism and democracy at the heart of American society. Inquiry as practical judgment involves reflecting on, and revising our ends, in the light of what is involved for us in achieving them, and this often leads us creatively to transform our values and to develop new ends.
Moral theories are generated in contingent historical circumstances, are responsive to the particular needs and conflicts of those circumstances, and reflect their prejudices and assumption.
Ideas that were functional for a particular social order can cease to make sense or become dysfunctional as that order changes. Mistaking contingent social products for unchangeable features of human nature or psychology is one of the core occupational hazards of moral philosophers.
Rather, he sees it as as a repertoire of conceptual resources and tools that we have for dealing with the problems of value judgement in a world of plural and changing values. In Ethics , Dewey and James H. Tufts offer an interpretation of different canonical value theories, teleology, deontology and virtue ethics as providing contrasting methodological orientations for identifying, describing and solving problems.
Instead, these provide standpoints from which agents can identify and analyze problems, sift important from unimportant considerations, and appraise our raw preferences and alternative plans of action. Values, Dewey suggests, can be viewed as constructs to solve practical problems. Like an outmoded piece of technology, a past value which was once constructed to address a problem in one set of circumstances can outlive its usefulness, and become a hindrance to the capacity of those in the present to deal with their practical needs and worries.
This, Dewey believes, is the case with values of classical liberalism. He develops this thought in discussing the relation of individual and society, the character and value of freedom, and the scope of legitimate social and political action. This is the tendency to divide up experienced phenomena, and to take the distinct analysed elements to be separate existences, independent both of the analysis and of each other. Instead, he argues, a genuine:. The abstraction of the individual from social context in classical liberalism shapes its ethics.
If the individual is thought of as existing prior to social institutions, then it is easier to envisage securing freedom for the individual in purely negative terms as solely consisting in the removal of external impediments on individual action, such as legal restrictions on freedom of speech.
By contrast, Dewey argues that, while removal of external constraints may often be important for supplying the conditions of liberty, liberty in the sense in which it is a value for liberals does not consist in the mere absence of external constraint. The first point is that freedom is held to consist in the capacity and willingness on the part of a person to reflect on her or his own goals, aims and projects, and to revise them as a result of this reflection.
This is not a matter of arbitrarily or whimsically plumping for one option rather than another, for Dewey. Rather, choice that is expressive of individuality in the strong sense involves intelligent criticism of options. Second, freedom as individuality is social: it is thought to involve participation in shaping the social conditions that bear on individuality. Freedom in its fullest sense, then, is only possible in a canonical form of social order, in which all take part in shaping the conditions of common life.
Third, this is what has been called an exercise rather than an opportunity concept of freedom. This account of the character and value of freedom was for Dewey, as for the Idealists and New Liberals that he drew on and for later writers on negative and positive liberty such as Isaiah Berlin, flowed into a debate about the proper scope of social and political action. The classical identification of liberty with negative liberty bolsters the identification of freedom with the sphere of life outside the scope of political action.
By contrast, for Dewey the scope of legitimate social and political action had to be determined experimentally: laissez-faire should not be assumed to be the default position for a liberal, according to Dewey, since what he called intelligent social control or social action rather, it should be noted, than state control is often a requirement of positive liberty or individuality, in modern industrial conditions.
Unsurprisingly, this drew a hostile reception from advocates of a negative concept of liberty such as F. So, for example, throughout his life he argued that education to produce undocile, unservile citizens was essential, in the name of individuality. More pointedly, Dewey argued, particularly in the s, that a socialized economy was necessary for individuality. Dewey drew on a wide range of sources to flesh out his conception of social action or social control, including the utopian Edward Bellamy and British guild socialist G.
Individuality as an ethical ideal requires that individuals find their own way, and not have particular doctrines or social roles imposed on them. Furthermore, viewing liberty through the prism of individuality only opens up the possibility of political action in the name of liberty, but it does not itself require it.
Finally, and in contrast to technocratic critics of laissez-faire such as Walter Lippmann, Dewey argues that an extensive form of democracy is essential for social action, and he vests little faith in experts. The essay he published about his visit praised the new society he found, justifying the non-existence of actual communist equality in any of the cities he visited as the beginning of the socialist experiment that had yet to realize its full form, and excusing the general poverty of the Russian people.
This attitude can be extended to his approach to the entire communist experiment—he saw it all as a great experimental endeavor, regardless of the cost in human suffering it caused. Dewey described meeting an education reformer who glibly told him that there were two choices for intellectuals in the new Russia: those who refused to cooperate with the state, and those who chose to go along with it.
He writes like a deluded lover determined to excuse the egregious infidelities of his partner, however obvious they may be. In , Stalin told H. Wells that he believed that the embrace of socialist ideas by capitalists was doomed to fail—the only way socialism could lead to utopia was through violent revolution.
The committee sent copies of the documents it had gathered to a large group of writers and thinkers, and then published their responses as a preface to the book.
Wells contributed letters expressing horror and dismay that the idealism of the revolution had been converted into a tyranny worse than that of the Tzars. The present age is, of course, everywhere one in which propaganda has assumed the role of a governing power. But nowhere else in the world is employment of it as a tool of control so constant, consistent and systematic as in Russia at present.
Indeed, it has taken on such importance and social dignity that the word propaganda hardly carries, in another social medium, the correct meaning. For we instinctively associate propaganda with the accomplishing of some special ends, more or less private to a particular class or group, and correspondingly concealed from others.
But in Russia the propaganda is in behalf of a burning public faith. One may believe that the leaders are wholly mistaken in the object of their faith, but their sincerity is beyond question. To them the end for which propaganda is employed is not a private or even a class gain, but is the universal good of universal humanity.
In consequence, propaganda is education and education is propaganda.
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