Dewey Know?

Do we really know John Dewey?  If someone asked you, "Who was John Dewey," what would you say?

He is not the man who invented the familiar “Dewey Decimal System” used in libraries to categorize books that we call it the "Dewey Decimal System." That was Melvil, Melvil Dewey...the librarian. John Dewey, (1859-1952) you might know or remember, was an educator, psychologist, and philosopher. You might know him as the Father of Modern Education  People sometimes get him mixed up with Melvil, but this should set the record straight a little.

John Dewey was a humanist and one who believed in reforming the American system of Education. As a humanist, he was historically very much a part of creating the document called the Humanist Manifesto, an American version of the Communist one.  As an humanist, Dewey professed atheism.  He didn’t believe in God, but you might say that he was quite religious in how he viewed both his atheism and public education.

Though Dewey was an atheist, he did believe religion was important part of human life. In his book titled,  A Common Faith, he even advocated a militant “faith,” but he meant a militant faith in Humanism, (which he believed to have “always been the common faith of mankind.”) Dewey said humanism was "a religious faith that shall not be confined to sect, class, or race." 

Indeed humanism is a "faith," it is something you believe in but it was antiChristianity and anti-family. It was the kind of faith that required children to be liberated from the prejudices and values of their parents. Like religious communities of faith,  being a humanist required learning about that faith, and the place where this faith would be taught would not be churches and synogogues, but public schools.

Dewey's vision for life in  1930 America, included children being educated using a radically secular vision of life that did not include God.  It was based upon the premise that humanity, (recently enlightened by the wisdom of Charles Darwin,)was to progress or rather, "evolve" higher and tthat this could only be done through change.  Furthermore, he believed that the American schools of his day violated the child's nature and hindered the best "ethical results," this by, “by introducing the child too abruptly" to reading, writing, geography, etc., and this "out of relation to this social life.”  He did not believe the true center of school to be "science, nor literature, nor history, nor geography, but the child's own social activities.” (My Pedagogic Creed by John Dewey, 1897)

For the young child in a typical home, their social activities would be oriented around family, siblings, brothers sisters mother father... dog.... but Dewey wanted to remove children from this environment and create a new one.  It was not necessarily a placd where they would actually learn subjects, (like science and history,) but more importantly to be “socialized” and directed in what their thoughts and beliefs ought to be.  Dewey believed that children needed to learn how to be a part of a group, but that " group" would not apply to family, or to neighbors or neighborhoods, nor recreational hobbies like sports, and certainly not the church community. It applied to the classroom experience, one that would be taught by a trained professional who had adopted his way of thinking, socialism.


Can you imagine education without facts and truths? Dewey did.  He said they make one selfish.

“The mere absorption of facts and truths is so exclusively an individual affair that it tends very naturally to pass into selfishness. There is no obvious social motive for the acquirement of mere learning, there is no clear social gain in success thereat.” 
                                          (John Dewey, The School and Society, 1899)

Do we know John Dewey?  Yes, we do!  He's the Father of Modern Education!