John Dewey in Search of Himself

Extract

Up to this writing, the late John Dewey remains by all odds our most influential American philosopher of education, and it is a long time since any other individual of any nation has had so much influence on educational theory and practice at home and abroad. He is also one of our most influential philosophers in general, and this in spite of the fact that young men are not now espousing his philosophy. An obvious fact about him is that he is characteristically American: he is a meliorist and reformer, an experimentalist, energetic and resourceful, and, as it were, a born pioneer and frontiersman. He is impatient, always in a hurry, wanting to get a lot of things done, sure that to change things is to better them, and committed to change as integral to being if not its very core. “To be,” he said, “is to be in process, in change.” In all these matters central to Dewey, his thought is remarkably conventional. We are like Dewey in many of these things, or Dewey is like us.