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Title: John Dewey: And the High Tide of American Liberalism by Alan Ryan ISBN: 0-393-31550-9 Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: 01 February, 1997 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $17.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.67 (3 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: The low tide of totalitarianism
Comment: Very informative book. Could use more info about John Dewey's dark side. Dewey was a totalitarian socialist who wanted government to take over all education via government schools. He called Edward Bellamy his "Great American Prophet" after Bellamy wrote the book "Looking Backward" wherein Bellamy penned his totalitarian vision. Edward Bellamy was the cousin of Francis Bellamy, another national socialist in the U.S. who, in 1892 created the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag (using a straight-armed salute) to promote government schools. They all wanted the government to takeover all schools and create an "industrial army" of totalitarian socialism as described in "Looking Backward" (an international bestseller written in 1887). Government-schools spread and they mandated racism and segregation by law and did so through WWII and beyond.
Dewey spread Bellamy socialism at home and abroad. Dewey was fascinated by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and between 1920 and 1928 wrote many articles praising the "new" educational system imposed by the totalitarian socialists. At the invitation of the Commissar of Education in 1928, Dewey traveled to the fledgling Soviet Union. None of the socialist "utopia" espoused in 1917 had developed. The Soviet educational ideal of collective liberation lay in shambles. It is the individual (student)-collective (society) tenet of Dewey's socialist education that appealed to the Soviet socialists. Dewey studied its educational system, prepared educational surveys, and wrote several articles and a book on the topic. After the First World War, Dewey also studied education in China and lectured there from 1919 to 1921. The Chinese literary reformer Hu Shih (1891-1962), completed his Ph.D. in philosophy at Columbia University under John Dewey in 1917. He was greatly influenced by Dewey and became a lifelong advocate of Dewey's ideas. Dewey and his "new" education expanded government-schools and totalitarian socialism everywhere.
The socialist Wholecaust followed shortly after the worldwide impact of Bellamy's totalitarian ideas. While the Holocaust was monstrous, it was part of the bigger Wholecaust. Under the industrial army of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, 62 million people were slaughtered; the People's Republic of China, 35 million; and the National Socialist German Workers' Party, 21 million (numbers from Professor R. J. Rummel's article in the Encyclopedia of Genocide (1999))
Dewey was also interested in the socialist economic experiments in the Union of the Soviet Socialists Republics. He imported their cockamamy ideas, after exporting his own.
Dewey's ideas have also been criticized for their alleged neglect of the basic skills of literacy and numeracy.
It is a tragedy that he is considered a "great philosopher" in the U.S. He was probably also considered a "great philosopher" by the totalitarian socialists in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the Peoples' Republic of China.
Rating: 4
Summary: A Visionary of the Everyday
Comment: In the course of a long life beginning before the Civil War and extending to shortly before the election of President Eisenhower, John Dewey (1859-1952) made large contributions to philosophy and to American public life. Dewey wrote extensively for both an academic and a public audience. He developed a philosophy of pragmatism and contributed significantly to American education. He was a socialist and was publically engaged througout his life in addressing the issues of the day. In particular he criticized the President Roosevelt's New Deal for what Dewey thought was an inadequate response to the Depression and a misguided attempt to preserve capitalism. He supported United States participation in WW I but shortly after the end of the War, he became an isolationist. He retained this isolationist stance until Pearl Harbor.
Dewey's thought resists easy summation. His writing style, particularly in his philosophical works, was long, winding, obscure and difficult to follow. As did many thinkers in the 20th Century, Dewey changed and modified his views with some frequency during the course of his life.
Alan Ryan has written an exellent study of John Dewey which explores Dewey's life, the influences upon him, his philosophical writings, his political activism, and the rises and falls in Dewey's reputation after his death. The book is somewhat dense and repetitive, but this too is a characteristic of the writings of its subject. Ryan writes insightfully in trying to place Dewey as philosophically somewhere between the despair of European existentialists such as Heidegger and Sartre and the English-American analytical philosophy of the 20th Century which denied that philosophical thought had a distinctive contribution to make to human intellectual endeavor.
I thought Ryan was good in discussing Dewey's early Congregationalit upbringing and his falling away from Christianity. I also thought Ryan placed good emphasis on the Hegelian idealism which Dewey adopted early in his career. The book could have used a fuller discussion of the nature of Hegelian idealism. As I read Ryan's book, I thought that Dewey retained even more of a Hegelian influence in his later thought than Ryan recognized. Dewey's emphasis on holistic thinking and on the relationship of the community and the individual remains Hegelian -- a naturalized Hegelianism as Ryan points out.
Ryan discussed Dewey's educational work at the University of Chicago. This is the aspect of Dewey's work that is best known. As Ryan points out, Dewey is often criticized for the shortcomings of American education. He is blamed, probably unjustifiably, for a lack of discipline and academic knowledge in too many American students. Ryan does point out, in fairness, that Dewey's actual educational theory was obscure in many points and undeveloped in specifics. It is hard to know just what Dewey had in mind, but it surely was not laxness and a deference to the wishes of young children.
I thought the strongest aspect of Ryan's book was his discussion of Dewey's mature philosophical writings, in particular "Experience and Nature" "A Common Faith" and "Art and Experience." In these works, Dewey tried to develop a philosophical pragmatism which was based on science and secularism. He denied the existence of an objective independent truth which science tries to capture and also denied subjectivism. Dewey recognized that human experience could be viewed from many perspectives and he struggled to explain how many of the goals of the religious and artistic life were consistent with science and secularism. He wanted to show them as perspectives equally important to the scientific perspective and to disclaim a concept of truth as "out there" rather than as sought,developed and made through human social activity. Dewey's position is difficult and, to his credit, Ryan does not simplify it. Ryan's exposition is challenging and made me want to read some of Dewey for myself.
A great deal of Ryan's book is devoted to Dewey's career as a public intellectual commenting on the issues of the day, as he saw them. Dewey travelled to Russia and China, investigated the Russian show trials of Trotsky and others, supported American participation in WW I, and advocated social liberalism. Ryan discusses Dewey's positions fully and intelligently and explores how Dewey's issues remain alive in the late 20th (and early 21st)century. The discussion of American political life and of the role of ideas is fascinating even though I frequently did not agree either with Dewey or with Ryan.
Ryan recognizes the paradoxical nature of the work of this American thinker. Dewey was a philosopher who critized sharply thought and reflection separate from action. He was a secularist who saw the importance of religion. He recognized the nature of industrial society but stressed the importance of art and culture. Dewey was, as Ryan points out in his conclusion
something of a visionary of the everyday. Ryan writes (page 269): "It was his ability to infuse the here and now with a kind of transcendent glow that overcame the denseness and awkwardness of his prose and the vagueness of his message and secured such widespread conviction. .... He will remain for the forseeable future a rich source of intellectual nourishment for anyone not absolutely locked within the anxieties of his or her own heart and not absolutely despondent about the prospects of the modern world."
Rating: 5
Summary: The life of Dewey and 100 years of American thought
Comment: Ryan, from a British perspective, offers a detailed biography of Dewey the philosopher while enveloping the reader in the context of Dewey's varied and shifting America. Ryan also wrestles with the issues America wrestled with and continues to struggle with today. The work blends nicely the intricacies of Dewey's tremendous ideas with detailed and insightful references to Bertrand Russell and contemporary Democratic politics in America. The greatest contribution Ryan has made is detailing the arguments, philosophy, and problems Dewey felt significant without epitomizing and reducing Dewey as many have done since Dewey rose to prominance at the turn of the century at the Chicago Univeristy Lab School.
Educators, graduate students in education and philosophy, politicians, and anyone genuinely interested in American thought will be inpsired by Ryan to dig further--to read more by Dewey, to read more of the history of American ideas not just events in America
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Title: The Education of John Dewey by Jay Martin ISBN: 0231116764 Publisher: Columbia University Press Pub. Date: 15 February, 2003 List Price(USD): $35.00 |
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Title: John Dewey and American Democracy by Robert B. Westbrook ISBN: 0801481112 Publisher: Cornell University Press Pub. Date: 01 February, 1993 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: The Political Writings by John Dewey, Debra Morris, Ian Shapiro ISBN: 0872201902 Publisher: Hackett Publishing Company Pub. Date: 01 October, 1993 List Price(USD): $10.95 |
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Title: The School and Society and the Child and the Curriculum by John Dewey ISBN: 0226143961 Publisher: University of Chicago Press Pub. Date: 01 August, 1991 List Price(USD): $11.00 |
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Title: How We Think by John Dewey ISBN: 0486298957 Publisher: Dover Publications Pub. Date: 17 October, 1997 List Price(USD): $8.95 |
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