The Education of John Dewey

A life of the philosophical pragmatist and education reformer that, like its subject, is sturdy, thoughtful, and rather drab. Retiring, mild manner, gentlemanly. So an FBI operative assigned to tail him described John Dewey (1859-1949). Though the brass soon decided that he was no threat to the country's internal security, the FBI had reason to be interested in Dewey; after all, he was a socialist, atheist, and all-around idealist, not to mention a bookworm. How the practical-minded son of a Vermont grocer came to harbor these views occupies much of this account by Martin (Humanities/Claremont McKenna Coll.). Though given to psychobiographical speculations that don't bring much to the table ( influenced by his mother, he yearned to be affected by his father ), Martin does a good job of locating Dewey's work in the intellectual traditions of the time and of explaining his contributions to the development of an authentically American school of philosophy: pragmatism, built on the cold ashes of neo-Hegelianism and other imported notions. Martin also gives an adequate account of Dewey's ideas on education, which similarly scrapped European ideas of great books and the seven arts for an approach befitting what Dewey called industrial citizenship. (Martin gamely notes that the two universities most closely associated with Dewey, Johns Hopkins and Chicago, repudiated this approach.). A large part of the biography is given over to Dewey's late-life political activism, including the famous mock trial that exonerated Leon Trotsky of the charges Josef Stalin had leveled against him. Nowhere does Martin convey much passion for Dewey's work, though he does make the interesting if metaphorically mixed claim that today various strains of neo-pragmatist thought are beginning to form and consolidate a body of method that must and will leave a permanent pragmatist deposit in the American mind for decades to come. Solid overall, but less readable than the selective and sometimes unflattering portrait of Dewey given in the pages of Louis Menand's The Metaphysical Club (2001). (Kirkus Reviews)