John Dewey (1859-1952)

John Dewey, who was born in Burlington, Vermont, entered the University of Vermont where he became interested in philosophy, especially Leibniz, Kant, and Hegel, as well as the evolutionary views of T. H. Huxley. He taught high school for two years in Pennsylvania, but decided to attend graduate school in philosophy at Johns Hopkins University. In only two years, he received his doctoral degree for his dissertation, The Psychology of Kant. Six years later, he published a seminal work on Leibniz's critique of Locke, Leibniz's New Essays Concerning Human Understanding: A Critical Exposition (1888).

Dewey taught at the University of Michigan for ten years before he became chairman of the Department of Philosophy, Psychology and Education at the University of Chicago, where he designed and ran his Laboratory School. This was an experimental learning environment for children from age 4 to 15 employing his unorthodox methods of teaching. In 1905, he joined the Philosophy Department at Columbia University, where he remained for the rest of his life. Dewey was a founder of the American Civil Liberties Union. He wrote over 40 books; his major works include Democracy and Education (1916), Human Nature and Conduct (1922), Experience and Nature (1925), The Quest for Certainty (1929), and Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (1938).

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