Quotes and sayings from John Dewey

John Dewey was an American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer who was born on October 20, 1859, in Burlington, Vermont, U.S. He is considered one of the most prominent American scholars in the first half of the twentieth century. Dewey was a cofounder of the philosophical movement known as pragmatism, a pioneer in functional psychology, an innovative theorist of democracy, and a leader of the progressive movement in education in the United States. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree from the University of Vermont in 1879 and received a doctorate in philosophy from Johns Hopkins University in 1884. Dewey’s interests gradually shifted from the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel to the new experimental psychology being advanced in the United States by G. Stanley Hall and the pragmatist philosopher and psychologist William James. In 1894, he joined the faculty of philosophy at the University of Chicago, where he further developed his progressive pedagogy in the university’s Laboratory Schools. Dewey left Chicago for Columbia University in New York City in 1904, where he spent the majority of his career and wrote his most famous philosophical work, Experience and Nature (1925). His subsequent writing, which included articles in popular periodicals, treated topics in aesthetics, politics, and religion. Dewey believed that a democratic society of informed and engaged inquirers was the best means of promoting human interests