He sought to make the public school a training groundfor democratic life.
他寻求使学校教育面向民主生活。
John Dewey (October 20, 1859 – June 1, 1952) was an American philosopher, psychologist, andeducational reformer whose ideas have been influential in education and social reform. Dewey,along with Charles Sanders Peirce and William James, is recognized as one of the founders of thephilosophy of pragmatism and of functional psychology. He was a major representative of theprogressive and progressive populist philosophies of schooling during the first half of the 20thcentury in the USA.
Although Dewey is known best for his publications concerning education, he also wrote aboutmany other topics, including experience, nature, art, logic, inquiry, democracy, and ethics.
In his advocacy of democracy, Dewey considered two fundamental elements—schools and civilsociety—as being major topics needing attention and reconstruction to encourage experimentalintelligence and plurality. Dewey asserted that complete democracy was to be obtained not just byextending voting rights but also by ensuring that there exists a fully-formed public opinion,accomplished by effective communication among citizens, experts, and politicians, with the latterbeing accountable for the policies they adopt.
Dewey and functional psychology
At University of Michigan, Dewey published his first two books, Psychology (1887), and Leibniz'sNew Essays Concerning the Human Understanding (1888), both of which expressed Dewey's earlycommitment to British neo-Hegelianism. In Psychology, Dewey attempted a synthesis betweenidealism and experimental science.
While still professor of philosophy at Michigan, Dewey and his junior colleagues, James HaydenTufts and George Herbert Mead, together with his student James Rowland Angell, all influencedstrongly by the recent publication of William James' Principles of Psychology (1890), began toreformulate psychology, emphasizing the social environment and on the activity of mind andbehaviour rather than the physiological psychology of Wundt and his followers.
By 1894, Dewey had joined Tufts, with whom he would later write Ethics (1908), at the recentlyfounded University of Chicago and invited Mead and Angell to follow him, the four men forming thebasis of the so-called "Chicago group" of psychology.
Their new style of psychology, later dubbed functional psychology, had a practical emphasis onaction and application. In Dewey's article "The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology" which appearedin Psychological Review in 1896, he reasons against the traditional stimulus-responseunderstanding of the reflex arc in favor of a "circular" account in which what serves as "stimulus"and what as "response" depends on how one considers the situation, and defends the unitarynature of the sensory motor circuit. While he does not deny the existence of stimulus, sensation,and response, he disagreed that they were separate, juxtaposed events happening like links in achain. He developed the idea that there is a coordination by which the stimulation is enriched bythe results of previous experiences. The response is modulated by sensorial experience.
Dewey was elected president of the American Psychological Association in 1899.
John Dewey's USA StampIn 1984, the American Psychological
Association announced that Lillian Moller Gilbreth (1878–1972) had become the first psychologistto be commemorated on a United States postage stamp. However, psychologists Gary Brucato Jr.and John D. Hogan later made the case that this distinction actually belonged to John Dewey, whohad been celebrated on an American stamp 17 years earlier. While some psychology historiansconsider Dewey more of a philosopher than a bona fide psychologist, the authors noted thatDewey was a founding member of the A.P.A., served as the A.P.A.'s eighth President in 1899, andwas the author of an 1896 article on the reflex arc which is now considered a basis of Americanfunctional psychology.
Dewey also expressed interest in work in the psychology of visual perception performed byDartmouth research professor Adelbert Ames, Jr. He had great trouble with listening, however,because it is known Dewey could not distinguish musical pitches - in other words was tone deaf.
Pragmatism and instrumentalism
Although Dewey did not identify himself as a pragmatist per se, but instead referred to hisphilosophy as "instrumentalism", he is considered one of the three major figures in Americanpragmatism, along with Charles Sanders Peirce, who invented the term, and William James, whopopularized it. Dewey worked from strongly Hegelian influences, unlike James, whose intellectuallineage was primarily British, drawing particularly on empiricist and utilitarian ideas. Neither wasDewey so pluralist or relativist as James. He stated that value was a function not of whim norpurely of social construction, but a quality situated in events ("nature itself is wistful and pathetic,turbulent and passionate" (Experience and Nature)).
James also stated that experimentation (social, cultural, technological, philosophical) could be usedas an approximate arbiter of truth. For example he felt that, for many people who lacked "over-belief" of religious concepts, human life was superficial and rather uninteresting, and that while noone religious belief could be demonstrated as the correct one, we are all responsible for making agamble on one or another theism, atheism, monism, etc. Dewey, in contrast, while honoring theimportant function that religious institutions and practices played in human life, rejected belief inany static ideal, such as a theistic God. Dewey felt that only scientific method could reliably increasehuman good.
Of the idea of God, Dewey said, "it denotes the unity of all ideal ends arousing us to desire andactions."
As with the reemergence of progressive philosophy of education, Dewey's contributions tophilosophy as such (he was, after all, much more a professional philosopher than an educator)have also reemerged with the reassessment of pragmatism, beginning in the late 1970s, byphilosophers like Richard Rorty, Richard J. Bernstein and Hans Joas.
Because of his process-oriented and sociologically conscious opinion of the world and knowledge,his ideology is considered sometimes as a useful alternative to both modern and postmodernideology. Dewey's non-foundational method pre-dates postmodernism by more than half acentury. Recent exponents (like Rorty) have not always remained faithful to Dewey's original ideas,though this itself is completely consistent with Dewey's own usage of other writers and with hisown philosophy— for Dewey, past doctrines always require reconstruction in order to remainuseful for the present time.
Dewey's philosophy has had other names than "pragmatism". He has been called aninstrumentalist, an experimentalist, an empiricist, a functionalist, and a naturalist. The term"transactional" may better describe his views, a term emphasized by Dewey in his later years todescribe his theories of knowledge and experience.
Aesthetics
Art as Experience (1934) is Dewey's major writing on aesthetics. It is, according to his place in thePragmatist tradition that emphasizes community, a study of the individual art object as embeddedin (and inextricable from) the experiences of a local culture. See his Experience and Nature for anextended discussion of 'Experience' in Dewey's philosophy.
On education
Dewey's educational theories were presented in My Pedagogic Creed (1897), The School andSociety (1900), The Child and Curriculum (1902), Democracy and Education (1916) andExperience and Education (1938).
His recurrent and intertwining themes of education, democracy and communication are effectivelysummed up in the following excerpt from the first chapter, "Education as a Necessity of Life", of his1916 book, Democracy and Education: an introduction to the philosophy of education: "Whatnutrition and reproduction are to physiological life, education is to social life. This education consistsprimarily in transmission through communication. Communication is a process of sharingexperience till it becomes a common possession."
As well as his very active and direct involvement in setting up educational institutions such as theUniversity of Chicago Laboratory Schools (1896) and The New School for Social Research (1919),many of Dewey's ideas influenced the founding of Bennington College in Vermont, where heserved on the Board of Trustees.
Dewey's works and philosophy also held great influence in the creation of the short-lived BlackMountain College in North Carolina, an experimental college focused on interdisciplinary study, andwhose faculty included Buckminster Fuller, Willem de Kooning, Charles Olson, Franz Kline, RobertDuncan, and Robert Creeley, among others. Black Mountain College was the locus of the "BlackMountain Poets" a group of avant-garde poets closely linked with the Beat Generation and the SanFrancisco Renaissance.
Dewey was an educational reformer, who emphasized that the traditional teaching's concern withdelivering knowledge needed to be balanced with a much greater concern with the students' actualexperiences and active learning.
At the same time, Dewey was alarmed by many of the "child-centered" excesses of educational-school pedagogues who claimed to be his followers. In How We Think, Dewey wrote
The older type of instruction tended to treat the teacher as a dictatorial ruler. The newer typesometimes treats the teacher as a negligible factor, almost as an evil, though a necessary one. Inreality, the teacher is the intellectual leader of a social group, He is a leader, not in virtue of officialposition, but because of wider and deeper knowledge and matured experience. The suppositionthat the teacher must abdicate its leadership is merely silly.
Dewey was the most famous proponent of hands-on learning or experiential education, which isrelated to, but not synonymous with experiential learning. Dewey went on to influence many otherinfluential experiential models and advocates. Many researchers credit him with the influence ofProject Based Learning (PBL) which places students in the active role of researchers.
Dewey's theories influenced many Chinese scholars including Hu Shih, Zhang Boling and TaoXingzhi while they studied under him in Columbia University.
pragmatism n. 实用主义;独断
synthesis n. 综合，[化学] 合成;综合体
stimulus n. 刺激;激励;刺激物
interdisciplinary adj. 各学科间的
