Category: E-Books → The Education of John Dewey

Superseding The Life and Mind of John Dewey by George Dykhuizen (1974), due to the opening since then of Dewey's papers, Martin's biography will strike chords with admirers of the liberal reformer whose name is synonymous with progressive education. Tracing Dewey's 90-plus years, Martin aims for a sense of Dewey's life as a lived experiment, an exercise in pragmatism as it were, the label affixed to Dewey's philosophy. Although he was serious and conventional in his personal life, intellectually Dewey traveled far from his pietistic upbringing in the 1860s, traversing Hegelian idealism en route to his arrival to the view that the practical must trump the theoretical. Education is, of course, where he applied his ideas, most famously at his University of Chicago Laboratory School. Bowing to readability, Martin emphasizes Dewey's activities as a public expositor over scholarly mulling of his philosophical works, even as he records Dewey's life with a beloved first wife, succeeded by a second whom his children despised. This will be the new standard biography of the great reformer's life.