Educational Biography: John Dewey

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Educational Biography: John Dewey


John Dewey was an American philosopher and educator. His writings and teachings have had an enormous impact on education in the U.S. Pragmatism, Dewey’s philosophy of education, focused on learning-by-doing.
Dewey was a very productive writer. Some of his most popular works on education are:
• My Pedagogic Creed (1897)
• The School and Society (1900)
• Child and the Curriculum (19902)
• Democracy and Education (1916)
• How We Think (1933)
• Experience and Education (1938)
John Dewey was born on October 20, 1859. He was the third of four sons born to Archibald Sprague Dewey and Lucina Artemesia Rich of Burlington, Vermont. Dewey attended the public school and later the University of Vermont in Burlington. After receiving his degree in 1879, Dewey taught high school for two years. It was during this time that Dewey decided to pursue a career in philosophy. Dewey enrolled at Johns Hopkins University at Baltimore as a graduate student in 1884.
During his time at Johns Hopkins there were two people that would have a lasting influence on Dewey. A German-trained Hegelian philosopher, George Sylvester Morris, exposed Dewey to the organic model of nature characteristic of German idealism. And one of the most prominent American experimental psychologists at the time, G. Stanley Hall, provided Dewey with an appreciation of the power of scientific methodology as applied to the human sciences. The influence of these two men launched Dewey’s early thought, and set the general course of his ideas throughout his philosophical career.
After receiving his doctorate in 1884, Dewey taught at the University of Michigan for ten years. In 1886 Dewey married Harriet Alice Chipman and had several children. During the ten years Dewey taught one year at the University of Minnesota in 1888. In 1894 Dewey accepted a position at the newly founded University of Chicago, where he got his materi...