John Dewey

John Dewey (1859 to 1952) was an American philosopher, psychologist and educational reformer, one of the most prominent American scholars of the first half of the twentieth century, whom the atlas holds as a theorist of democracy, schooling and civil society. Born in Burlington, Vermont, he took his doctorate at Johns Hopkins University in 1884 and taught at the University of Michigan, the University of Chicago, where he founded the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, and, from 1904 until his retirement in 1930, Teachers College at Columbia University. The overriding theme of his work was a belief in democracy in politics, education and communication, which he held could be reached not by extending the vote alone but by a fully formed public opinion built through communication among citizens, experts and politicians. He treated schools and civil society as the two fundamental areas needing reconstruction, and set out his progressive pedagogy in The School and Society (1899) and Democracy and Education (1916). He was a primary figure of pragmatism and of functional psychology, a founder of The New School, and also wrote on social theory, ethics and logic.