Account Rendered

Right from the start, the rumpled-look-ing graduate student from Vermont made a deep impression on President Daniel Coit Gilman of Johns Hopkins University. But President Gilman did think that the young man was off on a wrong track. "Don't be so bookish," Gilman thundered. "Get out and see more people." Student John Dewey listened politely to his president, and then ignored the advice. He had long since made up his mind that he would keep right on studying: his ambition in life was to become a philosopher.

In time, John Dewey more than realized his ambition. A shy, shuffling figure, he probably managed to exert as much influence on U.S. education and thinking as any man of his time. Teachers and judges became Deweyites, and so did millions of ordinary men and women, who did not even know who he was or what his theories were.

Born the year (1859) in which Darwin's Origin of Species came out, Dewey marked the crest of a tide that had begun to swell with the French Revolution. No man so completely summed up the raw, rationalistic credo of his century--belief in the here & now, in the necessity for perpetual adjustment to change, in the idea that man has no provable end, only "ends that are literally endless."

No Solution. For 65 years after his Hopkins days, Dewey preached his doctrine, making his way from the University of Michigan to the University of Chicago and finally to Columbia's Teachers College. Tugging at his mustache and rumpling his hair, he lectured in a gentle voice, pausing awkwardly now & then to glance at his crumpled fistful of notes, or to gaze distractedly out of the window. But however labored his delivery, his message took hold. Philosophy, he declared, could not lean on eternal verities, nor summon up answers, for there are no ultimate answers to be summoned. "The moment philosophy supposes it can find a final and comprehensive solution," said he, "it ceases to be inquiry and becomes either apologetics or propaganda."

In such a world, said Dewey, the philosopher (and, for that matter, the educator) has no alternative but to ignore the universe. Nor should he concern himself with God or the existence of absolutes. His target is man and society, where nothing is either good or bad, but only better or worse. Values are not eternal; they are perpetually born, and "philosophy cannot desire a better work than to engage in the act of midwifery that was assigned to it by Socrates 2,500 years ago."

To Dewey, the philosopher can only assist at the birth of ideas, shaping values as they come along to meet the needs of the present. He may take hints from the past, but the only real test of an ideal is how it can be expected to work out in the future. Thus, for Experimentalist Dewey and his followers, action became a sort of giant laboratory, where values could be run through a series of streamlined tests. "The method we term 'scientific,' " said he, "forms for the modern man . . . the sole dependable means for disclosing the realities of existence."

No Stars. That being the case, education also had to change. It became the U.S. brand of Progressive Education. For just as the world learns by experience, so do children. Mere memory is therefore not enough: children have to act as well as read, to solve everyday problems, as if their school were society in miniature. The aim of education is not knowledge alone, but growth--and growth is the important thing in John Dewey's world.

Over the years, by his writings and his lecture-room teaching Dewey drummed his philosophy of growth into two generations of Americans, and for millions the popular version of his doctrine became, and is, the one true gospel. But for many others, some of them disillusioned disciples, his sole achievement was that in trying to light the way he merely succeeded in putting out the stars.

In his own life, however, he at least practiced what he preached. He was an old-fashioned liberal who was never afraid to act. He worked tirelessly in behalf of the poor of Hull House, or crusaded for Sacco and Vanzetti, or thrust himself to the forefront of the fray wherever he spotted a Cause. "As the philosopher has received his problem from the world of action," he once wrote, "so he must return his account there for auditing and liquidation." Last week, John Dewey. long ill in his Manhattan apartment, finally settled his account. At 92, he left the world still growing--and other philosophers still wrestling with the question: growing for what?

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