In education Dewey’s philosophy has its most complete vitality, for here he is dealing with concrete needs and the means of satisfying them. The problem of education is to integrate knowledge and life. He finds no joy in information for information’s sake. Curiosity may be the gift of the child, but it must be utilized to equip the man to hold his own in a world of industrialism and democracy. Yet Dewey’s sympathies are with spontaneity. He is a Rousseau with a new methodology. Connected with the Laboratory School at Chicago from 1896 to 1903, he has since followed with sympathetic interest all radical experimentation from the methods of Madame Montessori to those of the Gary Schools. The vast erudition amassed in this field, and his careful and unprejudiced study of children, has made him competent above all men to speak critically of methods and results.
In regard to education, he has given a fuller consideration of the ends to be attained than in the case of ethics. The end is seen as continued growth, springing from the existing conditions, freeing activity, and flexible in its adaptation to circumstances. The educational result is social efficiency and culture. This efficiency does not, however, imply accepting existing economic conditions as final, and its cultural aspect, good citizenship, includes with the more specific positive virtues, those characteristics that make a man a good companion. Culture is a complete ripening of the personality. “What is termed spiritual culture has usually been futile, with something rotten about it, just because it has been conceived as a thing which a man might have internally—and therefore exclusively.” The antithesis between sacrificing oneself for others, or others for oneself, is an unreal figment of the imagination, a tragic product of certain spiritual and religious thinking.
Professor Dewey well understands the dangers that lurk behind such terms as social efficiency and good citizenship. To him sympathy is much more than a mere feeling: it is, as he says it should be, “a cultivated imagination for what men have in common and a rebellion at whatever unnecessarily divides them.” But his very gift of clear vision, his penetration of the shams of dogma, economic and social, leads him to treat these things with scant respect. In consequence his fellow-philosophers, the educators over whom his influence is profound, and the public suspect him of radicalism. Only too often, to avoid suspicion of themselves, they turn his doctrine to the very uses that he condemns: industrial efficiency for them becomes identical with business expedience; the school, a trade school; culture, a detached æstheticism to be condemned; and democracy, the privilege of thinking and acting like everybody else.
The greatest weakness of Dewey’s philosophy, and it is serious, for Dewey as no other American philosopher grasps principles through which American civilization might be transformed for the better—lies in its lack of a metaphysics. Not, of course, a transcendentalism or a religious mysticism, but above all an interpretation of human nature. Emotionality represents a phase of the behaviour process too real to deny, yet it has no place in Dewey’s philosophy of man. Human longings and aspirations are facts as real as the materials of industry. Most men remain religious. Must they rest with quack mystics or unintelligent dogmatists? What is religion giving them that they crave? Is it a form of art, an attitude toward the ideal, or some interpretation of the forces of nature that they seek to grasp? Professor Dewey is himself a lover of art, but what place has art in his philosophy? If it is an instrument of education, what end does it serve, and how is it to be utilized? The pragmatic ethics gives no guarantee that the moral criteria developed by specific situations will always be the same even for two men equally intelligent. Perhaps, in spite of the paradox, there may be several best solutions. If so, this fact has some significance rooted in man’s nature and his relations to the world that philosophy should disclose. Such supplementation need not change the character of the results, but it might forefend them from misinterpretation and abuse.
With all its incompleteness, Dewey’s philosophy is undeniably that of the America of to-day. What shall we say of the future? No nation in the world has more abused its philosophies than ours. The inspirational elements of our idealisms have become the panderings of sentimentalists. The vitalizing forces of our pragmatisms threaten to congeal into the dogmata of cash-success. The war has intensified our national self-satisfaction. We tend to condemn all vision as radical, hence unsound, hence evil, hence to be put down. Philosophy thrives in the atmosphere of the Bacchæ:
“What else is Wisdom? What of man’s endeavour
Or God’s high grace, so lovely and so great?
To stand from fear set free, to breathe and wait;
To hold a hand uplifted over Hate;
And shall not loveliness be loved for ever?”