This article is adapted from Paul Kengor’s book Dupes: How America’s Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a Century.
Google the phrase “founding father of public education,” and you’ll likely land on Horace Mann (1796–1859). But many of us would submit that the title ought to go to John Dewey (1859–1952), who has had a more profound, lasting, and damaging influence. Dewey is honorary president for life of the National Education Association. That title is fitting, and, really, it tells you all you need to know.
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It is difficult to overstate the impact John Dewey made on educational philosophy, particularly during his time at Columbia University’s destructive Teachers College. That sweeping influence has endured; at most education departments on university campuses, one genuflects before a statue of Dewey. (READ MORE: Education Has Reached Peak Absurdity, But There Is Hope)
Like so many American youths, John Dewey began life as a Christian and ended up abandoning his faith in favor of the socialistic secularism that pervades education today.
Dewey’s mother had made him a Christian, but his wife, whom he married in 1886, pulled him away from the faith. Harriet Alice Chapman was a corrupting influence. She was raised with a deep skepticism of organized religion and church “dogma.” She more than sufficiently demonstrated that skepticism to Dewey.
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Harriet contributed to Dewey’s eventual understanding of Christianity as a “dying myth” (in his words), a religion based on “supernatural commands, rewards, and penalties.” And among the members of “Christendom as a whole,” it was orthodox Christians especially whom Dewey came to view as slack-jawed idiots. Those who subscribed to more orthodox forms of Christianity badly needed to be “progressively liberated from [their] bondage to prejudice and ignorance.”
Harriet wasn’t the only bad influence on Dewey. The American Communist Party was launched in Chicago in September 1919, setting up shop at 1219 Blue Island Avenue. Like New York City, where Dewey headed next, Chicago was a hotbed of Marxists and socialists. Like Dewey, the American Communist Party would eventually move to New York City.
In New York, Dewey became a professor of philosophy at Columbia University, with a joint appointment at Columbia’s Teachers College. It was in that capacity that Dewey became the Dewey known by history.
Dewey’s Idiotic Politics
John Dewey and Columbia University were no match made in heaven. It was at Columbia that young people as diverse as Whittaker Chambers and Thomas Merton and Bella Dodd arrived naïve and impressionable and were filled with Marxist rot. Dodd would end up becoming one of the highest-ranking female members of the American Communist Party and the chief organizer of the party’s education front. In that capacity, she led a mass infiltration of the New York Teachers Union.
Columbia University by the 1910s had already become an extremely secular and politically radical place, no doubt in part a product of its unfortunate location in New York City, the epicenter of the communist movement and the headquarters of the Communist Party USA. A declassified March 2, 1948, FBI report titled “Redirection of Communist Investigations” disclosed that there were “approximately 30,000” Communist Party members in the New York City area alone. Remarkably, the document reported that “almost 50% of the Communist Party members in the United States are located in the New York area.”
This Marxist milieu affected Dewey deeply. “[W]e are in for some form of socialism, call it whatever name we please,” averred Dewey. “And no matter what it will be called when it is realized, economic determinism is now a fact, not a theory.”
These theories also determined Dewey’s views on education. Canadian scholar William Brooks observed that Dewey believed that schools needed to be liberated from religious influences — which, like Karl Marx, he considered medieval superstitions — in order to demonstrate that it was not Providence but rather man’s labor that was responsible for progress.
As for communism, Dewey flirted with it, if not embraced it, especially as he made a political pilgrimage to the USSR in 1928. That Dewey trip is infamous, or at least it ought to be. I wrote about it at length in my 2010 book, Dupes: How America’s Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a Century, but here are a few highlights and lowlights.
The 1928 invitation from Moscow came about because the Bolsheviks were big fans of Dewey’s work. From the beginning, the Bolsheviks studied and experimented with Dewey’s educational ideas. Immediately after the October Revolution, even with the bloody Russian Civil War (1917–21) still raging, the Bolsheviks began rapidly translating Dewey’s works into Russian. In 1918, only three years after it was published in the United States, Dewey’s Schools of Tomorrow was published in Moscow.
It ought to shock the US educational establishment to learn that the Bolsheviks — Lenin, Trotsky, Bukharin, Stalin — felt that John Dewey’s understanding of educational collectivism was the perfect model for the Soviet Marxist–Leninist state’s education system.
The Deweyan classic Democracy and Education became a Bolshevik phenomenon. That thought deserves special pause. Think about it. Democracy and Education remains Dewey’s opus, the bible of Columbia Teachers College, the text of choice for college education departments, and the guidepost for public education in America. Dewey himself said that it encapsulated his “entire philosophical position.”
And who loved it? Who quickly translated and implemented it? The Bolsheviks. The men who implemented the deadliest totalitarian state in human history.
Has this reality given American public educators caution? Not at all. And neither did it concern Dewey. To the contrary, Dewey was flattered and encouraged. According to his admiring colleague William Brickman, Dewey judged this “fulsome praise indeed.”
To be fair, it must be emphasized that Dewey later came to reject the USSR in part. That is to say, he came to reject Stalinism. He did so as the namesake of a prominent commission in the late 1930s, the Dewey Commission, which took up the noble task of exposing Stalin’s “Moscow trials” as barbaric show trials. Dewey did excellent work in that capacity. Yet, in so doing, he worked arm in arm with the Trotskyites, the anti-Stalin wing of the international communist movement. Dewey was anti-Stalin, but not anti-Trotsky.
So, Dewey spurned Stalinism, but not really communism. Ultimately, he came to say that he rejected official “Communism” — “spelt with a capital letter,” as he put it — as practiced by the likes of Stalin and Communist officials in the 1930s. Dewey wrote this in a brief April 1934 article published in Modern Monthly titled “Why I Am Not a Communist.” It would take Dewey a while to come to that position, though he always seemed to harbor sympathies to “communism” (lowercase c) as an ideology.
Nonetheless, a crucial reality remains: Dewey’s pioneering educational work, which set the standard and foundation for American public education, was deemed ideal by the Bolsheviks for their totalitarian state.
Dewey’s Educational Philosophy
All of this brings us to what Dewey taught. And figuring that out is not always easy.
Dewey’s written work was as ambiguous as it was prolific. Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. called Dewey’s writing “inarticulate.” The Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain said that the innumerable “ambiguities” in Dewey’s work fostered “a disastrous confusion of ideas.” Leo R. Ward, a political scientist, rightly noted that “it is difficult to say for sure in what Dewey believed.”
Dewey’s ideas require some philosophical unpacking. He has been called the father of “pragmatism” and “experimentalism” in the classroom. Pragmatism, which was developed by Charles Peirce and William James, is the theory that the meaning of a course of action or proposition lies in its observable consequences; it is the sum of those consequences that constitutes the meaning of the action or proposition. This is considered a practical way of addressing problems. It can be — as it was by Dewey — applied to the classroom in the form of a desire to experiment in search of the best methods of learning. To this day, this thinking maintains a hold on educators, as does the sharp secularism and postmodernism that have come to dominate public education.
Dewey, too, favored that secular relativism and, in some respects, helped to shape it. When it came to the repudiation of religion and moral absolutes in the public schoolroom, Dewey was way ahead of his time.
The specter of Dewey thrives today in public schools and doctoral programs via the zeitgeist of constant experimentation.
The specter of Dewey thrives today in public schools and doctoral programs via the zeitgeist of constant experimentation, the seemingly never-ending and always-evolving search for new fads and fashions that treats your children as though they are educational lab mice. Your children are constantly subjected to the latest “research” in “outcomes-based education,” “self-esteem,” “values clarification,” and whatever other nonsense is spoon-fed to aspiring teachers in education departments.
To Dewey and his minions, what mattered most were “environing forces,” or, as he put it, “working adaptations of personal capacities with environing forces.” Today, the minions call this “socialization” — the molten, golden calf of public education. One of the reasons they loathe homeschooling is because they believe that it fails to achieve this grand goal (or at least the kind of “socialization” they have in mind). To Dewey and his disciples, it isn’t about the individual. What is indispensable is the formative role of the “collective,” the “public.” Dewey preached that “all morality is social.”
The degree to which Dewey was a prophet who foresaw these trends or the originator of them is hard to discern. Either way, Dewey’s specter is undeniably thriving in education today. Moreover, disciples of Dewey will never go unemployed, since experimentation and change are their modus operandi. There will always be something new to conjure up, to try, to need, with the one constant being the student, who is the subject of the ever-changing experimentation.
And yet ironically that student, that individual human being, is always seen as part of the “collective” — the collective experience of human beings, not the private thoughts or feelings of a unique individual. He or she is a product of the “public.” Thus, “socialization” is again an essential core and perpetual driving principle. It is at the crux of public education.
This Deweyan view of an individual’s personal education also conforms to Dewey’s view of society and the larger world. Reality itself, the environment itself, and progress itself are always moving onward, while also never satisfied with their present states. A process of constant flux and refinement is always at hand. This is the essence of political progressivism. Dewey’s political and philosophical “progressivism” is the handmaiden to his educational views.
Like many of the twentieth-century radicals who went into education, especially those of the 1960s generation, Dewey judged that pursuing political and social change through politics was too slow. As he argued in Democracy and Education, enacting change through education could be much quicker and more efficient. Dewey judged that the schoolhouse could be much more efficacious than houses of legislatures.
It is no coincidence that leading ’60s radicals like Bill Ayers of the Weather Underground gave up bomb making in the 1980s and instead enrolled at Columbia Teachers College. By the 2000s, Ayers was teaching in the education department at the University of Illinois at Chicago and publishing books on subjects like “teaching social justice” through publishing houses like Columbia’s Teachers College Press. His former Weather Underground colleagues, such as Mark Rudd and his sweetheart Bernardine Dohrn, to note just two, likewise headed to the halls of higher learning.
The classroom rather than the factory floor became the new battleground for winning over the masses and forwarding the revolution.
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To John Dewey, secularization, socialization, and experimentation are the lifeblood of education. The masses are to be herded into the public educational collective, where they will evolve along with society in an ever-changing understanding of what is right. They need to get with history, or they will be washed away by the tide.
As for your children, they are the perpetual twitching guinea pigs in the always-evolving process of experimentation. It is not the parents at home who know what is best for their children. Those who know best are those experts who are armed with the latest fads from the most recent edition of the textbook that serves as the latest rage in the education department. Those newly minted PhDs and their trained student teachers know what is best because they have been trained properly. They have certificates.
This is democracy and education Dewey-style — a method for the ages. Such is the ongoing legacy of John Dewey’s destruction.
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