The Education of John Dewey

A Biography

Jay Martin

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9780231507455
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosopher Biographies

During John Dewey's lifetime (1859-1952), one public opinion poll after another revealed that he was esteemed to be one of the ten most important thinkers in American history. His body of thought, conventionally identified by the shorthand word "Pragmatism," has been the distinctive American philosophy of the last fifty years. His work on education is famous worldwide and is still influential today, anticipating as it did the ascendance in contemporary American pedagogy of multiculturalism and independent thinking. His University of Chicago Laboratory School (founded in 1896) thrives still and is a model for schools worldwide, especially in emerging democracies. But how was this lifetime of thought enmeshed in Dewey's emotional experience, in his joys and sorrows as son and brother, husband and father, and in his political activism and spirituality? Acclaimed biographer Jay Martin recaptures the unity of Dewey's life and work, tracing important themes through the philosopher's childhood years, family history, religious experience, and influential friendships.

Based on original sources, notably the vast collection of unpublished papers in the Center for Dewey Studies, this book tells the full story, for the first time, of the life and times of the eminent American philosopher, pragmatist, education reformer, and man of letters. In particular, The Education of John Dewey highlights the importance of the women in Dewey's life, especially his mother, wife, and daughters, but also others, including the reformer Jane Addams and the novelist Anzia Yezierska. A fitting tribute to a master thinker, Martin has rendered a tour de force portrait of a philosopher and social activist in full, seamlessly reintegrating Dewey's thought into both his personal life and the broader historical themes of his time.

BOOK III

Engagement

Dewey’s tentative plan to give a series of lectures in Japan had formed early in 1917 when a Professor Fukusaki of the University of Tokyo proposed to try to get him an invitation to lecture there sometime in 1918–19. Dewey had let the possibility of this plan slip out when he responded to W. E. Hocking’s invitation to become a visiting professor at Harvard: “I have laid certain plans . . . which I hope . . . would take me to Japan.” A little later, this prospect of a semester lecturing in Japan in the spring of 1919 kept him from moving with Beard, Robinson, and Thorstein Veblen to the New School for Social Research, and it influenced many of his decisions throughout 1917 and the first half of 1918. Dewey asked whether Benjamin Ide Wheeler, president of the University of California at Berkeley, would renew his offer of a term there as a visiting professor. Wheeler was happy to invite Dewey to teach there in the fall of 1918, which also made it possible for him to offer a lecture series at Stanford in May and June 1918. These lectures, which Dewey seemed to take so lightly, proved to be important, for eventually they became the basis for one of his best books, Human Nature and Conduct. But in the spring of 1918, he was too hurried to complete the book: he gave the lectures, filed them away for future reconsideration, banked his fee, and rushed back to Philadelphia.

In fact, Dewey was concerned about money. He had always been concerned about money, for the Deweys had always been close to being poor. At a time when every middle-class professional had a maid, the Deweys could not afford one until the birth of their sixth child made a servant almost obligatory. Six children were a constant drain on a professor’s salary. For a long time the Deweys did not even have a telephone and had to rely on a neighbor to call them to his phone. A collection was taken up in Fenton to buy the children shoes. Whatever money could be saved was set aside for books or European trips, years apart, not as vacations, but as periodic extensions of knowledge. No wonder John bargained hard for good salaries at Michigan and Chicago. In 1895, he became extremely agitated over the fact that Wahr and Phillips, which had published his Ethics syllabus, owed him $73.60. Although he was a distinguished philosopher, he was almost impoverished. The move to Columbia was a financial blow, and even with all his extra teaching, it took him ten years to get back to a salary that had the buying power of his salary in Chicago. Even as recently as 1914, Alice commented to John about his heavy schedule of lecturing: “Of course, the money is always needed. That’s the worst of it, and that is what drives you so.”

A tour of Japan beckoned. He was on sabbatical with half-pay. How much would the trip cost? Where would the money come from? Always generous where his affections lay, Barnes recognized Dewey’s plight and proposed paying Dewey a monthly stipend for him “to make a report on Japan as a factor in the future international situation.” Along with a promise from the New Republic that he would be guaranteed a monthly stipend for his articles on Japanese culture and politics, added to the royalties that were now coming in regularly, he would be secure financially for four or five months. If Professor Fukusaki or Dewey’s old friend from Michigan, Ono Eijirô, were able to arrange for Dewey to get an official invitation to lecture in Japan, that would further help pay expenses. This meant simply that he could go to Japan. But why did he want to go to Japan?

True, the children played a part in the idea, for 1919 was the earliest time that he and Alice could get off alone, without the expense or care of the children. Sabino had a job. Fred was in the army. Evelyn was settled in a career in New York. Lucy would graduate from Barnard in December, and in the fall of 1918 his youngest child Jane would be a freshman at Berkeley. After he and Alice stayed near Jane during the semester he spent at Berkeley, she presumably would have settled in. For the first time, the Deweys were free to go away for an extended period. Moreover, he would be away from Columbia and New York where there had been so many difficulties to deal with. He also would not be under pressure to respond daily to the political chaos of the war’s aftermath, especially the anticipated restrictions on progressive ideas. By November 1918, Dewey was already disillusioned with Wilson’s leadership and very pessimistic about the results of the war. “The situation is disquieting,” he wrote to Samuel H. Goldenson, “Wilson’s real test of character is yet to come; whether he is already weakening and hedging to get the appearance of victory for his aims, when the reality is being seriously encroached upon, it is hard to tell.” But Dewey inclined to believe that at the end, democratic idealism would not be heightened by the war. It was also true, as he recalled for John D. Graves years later, that in 1918 he himself had become depressed: “I had got in a rut or the doldrums.” These all counted as minor motives, but none explains why Dewey found the prospect of going abroad so compelling.

The reason was Alice.

Two of the Deweys’ children had died in Europe, first Morris and then Gordon, who had in a sense, taken Morris’s place. Although John was still sad, Alice was truly depressed, and her depressions determined many decisions in Dewey’s life. Thus the decision to go to Asia was at least partly related to Alice’s almost unremittingly dark moods.

ALICE’S DEPRESSION

Alice had a lifelong history of depression. Her father mourned himself to death after her mother died when Alice was four years old. As very young children she and her sister watched him fade away, day by day, until he simply took a last breath, died, and made them orphans. All her life Alice kept the few letters she had from her father, which tell a pathetic story. In April or May 1863, Alice’s mother, Lucy Riggs Chipman, gave birth to her third child in Fentonville, Michigan. After a month’s illness, she died on June 5. Gordon O. Chipman, left with three children, was inconsolable. He managed to hold himself together during the daytime, but when the night fell he became the sort of melancholic that Edward Young and the other “graveside poets” wrote about in the mid-eighteenth century. A hired girl was watching Augusta, Harriet Alice, and the baby. Gordon slept in his office and took his meals at a hotel. Uncared for, the baby, Alice’s younger sister, did not thrive and died on August 7, 1863. Virtually abandoned, the two remaining children merely survived. Gordon’s melancholy continued unassuaged. Early in 1864, he moaned to his mother: “Tonight after tea the weather being so pleasant I walked out to the home of the Dead. Oh it does me good to visit that sacred spot and there pour out my heart.” Alice turned to religion, attending church and Sunday school. She needed some consolation. “She was much pleased with it and wants to go regular,” her father mentioned. “Oh I wish she could.” But if she prayed for her father’s health, neither that nor his incessant visiting of the home of the Dead did him any good, for he died before Alice turned six. She stopped going to church and was taken in by her mother’s parents.

Evaline, her grandmother, provided an anchor in her life, but it was her grandfather Fred Riggs whom she idealized. Indeed, just as Fred had been described as a “moody loner” perfectly suited to the life of a solitary frontiersman or miner, so Alice was often similarly described as moody, discontented, and hypercritical. Like him, Alice found solace only in motion.

She was like this even before she met John Dewey. On the surface she seemed strong and her intellectual brilliance seemed to confirm this impression, but there was a brittle part of her that sometimes cracked open and dropped her into depression. When Alice entered the University of Michigan, she found a place and the kind of intellectual work that eased her depressive moods, but even so she attended irregularly and took six years to graduate. Leaving Fentonville when she married made little change in her, although the excitement of having a partner and then children covered over her deeper grief. Although she tried to suppress it, it occasionally surfaced. She loved traveling. But when, for instance, she went to Europe in 1894, her self-recriminations started immediately. John was afraid to see them emerge, but he was more worried about her guilt, and he advised her once: “Don’t reproach yourself for letting your troubles ooze out and don’t cease to do it in the future.”

Morris’s death hit her hard, and she barely recovered from it through the distractions of her new work as principal of the University of Chicago Laboratory Elementary School. Then President Harper and she began their acrimonious disputes, which ended her work. Soon thereafter, Gordon died. Dewey’s student Max Eastman wrote that after Gordon’s death,

she fell gradually into a habit of resentment. She grew caustic where she had been keen, captious where she had been critical. Her health began to decline. . . . The less she could do herself, the more her perfectionism, her insistence upon everybody’s doing his best and doing it just right, turned into a vice of Pironical nagging.

Others diagnosed the cause differently but saw the same result as Eastman did. Adolf E. Meyer referred to the fact that “her resentment at Harper’s unjust treatment [of her] never cooled, and gradually her erstwhile wit and charm turned to acid.”

By 1896, Alice appeared to be clinically depressed. She wished she were dead. “My whole existence,” she wrote, “is passed in screwing my self up to standing the next week. It doesn’t pay. There is no telling what may transpire in the next week.” By now John was familiar with these dark moods. In 1897 he tried to help her out of her “discouragement” by reminding her not to let it get a hold on her: “As we have frequently discovered, it is the worst of policy to get so deep in a hole that it doesn’t seem worth while to get out.” Perhaps, he suggested, it would help her to take a little jaunt from their cottage in Keene, where she was so miserable, to Lake Placid, a resort area nearby. He knew that traveling was one of the few things that could cheer her up, and she went. But exactly a month later she was showing new signs of “discouragement,” and John gave her the same prescription: “getting off for a good long change and rest.”

During the last months of her pregnancy with Lucy, in March 1900, Alice was severely depressed—and once again took the “travel cure.” John took care of Fred, Gordon, and Lucy while Alice took Evelyn on a trip to Georgia, Florida, and New Orleans. When her usual guilty recriminations reappeared, John comforted her: “The thing for you to do is to get thoroughly rested . . . from the babies awhile.” But Alice got little pleasure from the trip.

From this time on, Alice regularly complained of exhaustion. She had planned to resume teaching once she got to New York, but after her return from Europe it was not until 1907 that she was able to prepare an outline for a course on “Elementary Education . . . Methods: Their Theory and Practice” at the School of Liberal Arts and Sciences for Non-Residents. Alice taught the course only once, however, and fell back into the depression that manifested itself as exhaustion. In 1909 she consulted a doctor about her fatigue, but neither he nor anyone else understood that it was depression that sapped her strength. Concerned, Evelyn wrote from Honolulu: “I’m afraid it has been terribly hard for mother. I don’t understand very well about her being run down before, was there anything definite [about] this matter, and is it something which will probably last always?” John’s best explanation was that moving from Chicago to New York had damaged her will: “The idea of starting all over again . . . was too much for mamma.”

The next year Alice was on the move again, taking Lucy and Jane to Europe, where she found a school for them in Switzerland and then traveled through Italy with Evelyn. But when she got there, she realized that she was making an invalid of herself: “I seem to have cut myself off from the useful life for about three months more,” and this depressing thought spoiled the trip and left her more depressed than when she began it. Alice drifted in her life, caring for the children but without her original passion. Occasionally when she was challenged, her old spirit revived, as in the case of Maxim Gorky and in her advocacy of female suffrage. Her phrase to describe her life was “fiddling around in the usual way.” Like her grandfather, she traveled restlessly.

By the summer of 1918 she was in a bad way. “I have been through some hard times in my life,” she wrote to Evelyn, “but for concentrated dull misery of a fruitless sort this summer goes ahead of anything I can remember.” She went to the movies to be entertained but left the theater with the feeling that cinema “is really as stupid as it looks from the outside . . . most of the stupidity is so labored as to be painful.” After Dewey had gotten her and Jane settled in San Francisco, hardly a month passed when she was already discontented and restless, thinking of moving to Berkeley. Then she considered moving back to New York. She wondered what to do “in case the present is a failure.” When John left California to begin his project in Philadelphia, she “was so depressed at first as to be rather incapacitated.” She told John that she was convinced of “the hopelessness of anticipating anything humane from the future.” The war also hit her hard, for she obsessed about the mass slaughter of young boys. Such thoughts made her “so depressed . . . as to be rather incapacitated.” She dreaded that Sabino was doomed. He would, she imagined, be drafted and slaughtered. She told Evelyn that “my mind has become numb these weeks as the result of constant repressions.”

Gordon was still very much on her mind. John and Alice met the San Francisco sculptor Benny Bufano and showed him Gordon’s photo and death mask, asking Bufano “to make a good high relief’ of his face. Alice also worried about the other children. She feared that Jane seemed hopelessly depressed. When would Fred be released from the service? What would happen to Lucy if Evelyn got a roommate and left her sister all alone in Long Island or New York? Would Evelyn be able to complete her book on her own? Where and how would Sabino live, and would he be drafted? Fred and his wife Elizabeth had had a baby, and she wanted to see it. Confused and indecisive, she thought of simply returning home, even though John was scheduled to teach the fall term in California. “I feel something as if I died,” she told Lucy, “and was hearing of these things . . . from another world.” John might be blue, but Alice plunged into blackness. Whether she stayed or went, it would look to her like one more instance of “my ‘fool impulses.’” Although Lucy was nearly three thousand miles away, she sensed from Alice’s letters that her thoughts were “disjointed.” In the fall her distress was obvious. Alice spoke of the “collapse of my feelings,” and everyone knew what that meant.

All this made Alice wonder whether even John’s plan to go to Japan for a term was sound: “One begins to wonder,” she confided to Fred and Elizabeth, “why go to a strange and expensive land for troubles we have always with us.” The very excursion that he had planned to help ease her discontent now was causing her grief. But he persevered, and at last Alice became reconciled to going, determined to make the best of the trip. In her usual studious way she began to read up on Japanese civilization and especially Japanese art. This was just what John had hoped for, to find something that would engage her personal attention, something besides brooding about their dead children and worrying about their living ones. Alice needed something of her own instead of the reactive life into which she had fallen. And something positive, not the sort of protest that had merely masked her depression as a young girl, even before she had met John. In the fall, John watched with guarded optimism as Alice slowly turned to the task of becoming, as she called it, a “connoisseur” of Asian art. Benny Bufano led her to stores of Asian antiques in San Francisco, and she read all the books that she could find. Periodically, her spirits flagged when she allowed herself to drift into depression in the mornings, but her work brought her back.

ON TO JAPAN

A few days after Christmas, when a cablegram arrived confirming Dewey’s invitation to lecture at Tokyo Imperial University, he himself suddenly became regretful, worrying about the children and how they would manage without their parents’ constant attention. “The time seems short now and I have sinkings of heart to think we are to be so far away from you all. To wish you a happy new year seems so little in comparison with the love I would send you that it is hard to put it down.” He felt that he should leave enough money in the United States for the support of all the children. “If the stock market should have an inflation . . . I’ll be all right,” he told Barnes. He was particularly worried about Sabino, who had joined them in California, because the boy had never been legally adopted. Now he tried to do so but discovered that California law required a year’s residence first. Nonetheless John was determined to go to Japan for a few months, and they left on January 23 for Honolulu.

As early as 1884, when Herbert Baxter Adams brought a speaker into his seminary who had lived in China for forty years, Dewey had been interested in the possible development of democracy in Asia. Indeed, Adams’s guest speaker had “called attention [to] the prevalence of democratic ideas among the Chinese.” At both the University of Chicago and Columbia, Dewey had attracted a considerable number of students from Japan and China, and from the first, he had shown a special interest in them. Partly because of his worldwide fame but mainly because he was a well-known sponsor of Asian students and the only major American philosopher interested in Asian philosophy, Dewey was warmly greeted in Japan. Upon arriving in Tokyo, he and Alice took a room at the famous Imperial Hotel, but after five days, they moved to Dr. and Mrs. Nitobe Inago’s house, as they were soon leaving for France. Alice was very glad to save the astonishingly high hotel expense and then, in addition, to learn that “the University will pay very well for the lectures, so,” she told the girls, “you need to have no anxiety about our money and Bino need not send on any money that he may accumulate.” In addition, Mrs. Nitobe was an American and a Quaker and gave Alice a quick sketch of Japan’s “small feminist movement.”

Alice was in for a series of surprises. Everything fascinated her. “It is more exciting than any play ever,” she declared. In her second letter home, it was clear that Alice was experiencing great relief from her habitual anxieties and depression. She showed interest, even excitement, about attending a traditional tea ceremony. She looked forward to going to Kyoto in the spring to see the cherry blossoms and temples. Her imagination revived and she even began to think about continuing on to China. “It is even more interesting than we anticipated,” she wrote. By March she was speaking Japanese from a phrase book. Dewey’s hoped-for travel cure was starting to work. Alice seemed to have left her cares behind.

John was beginning to realize how busy he would be kept in Japan. In addition to his “official” schedule of eight lectures at Tokyo Imperial University, he was invited to talk at four or five private universities as well as normal schools, teacher associations, and so on. He gave several lectures at the private Waseda University, where more than one of his students taught. For his public lectures he drew as many as five hundred persons. For each, he prepared a synopsis of his talk in advance for the benefit of his translators, and the synopses turned out to be helpful when he converted the lectures into...