Dewey's Dream: Universities and Democracies in an Age of Education Reform

Chapter 2: Dewey at the University of Chicago, 1894–1904

IF OUR PROPOSITIONS ARE NOT taken literally, John Dewey primarily became Dewey in Chicago and henceforth essentially lived off the intellectual capital he developed at that university and in that city. Obviously, we deliberately oversimplify and exaggerate to help make our basic point: Dewey’s most important intellectual development took place in Chicago, and he did his most important work there. Though he never lost interest in the theory of communication that excited him so greatly at Michigan, it was not until he went to Chicago that he saw that the best strategy for developing a participatory democratic society was to develop a participatory democratic schooling system. To support that proposition, we begin by noting a tendency of previous scholarship to greatly exaggerate Dewey’s interest and work in education before he came to Chicago in 1894 and after he left it for New York and Columbia University in 1904. If we carefully examine all of Dewey’s publications from 1882 to 1894 and do not anachronistically read into his Michigan years the great interest in pedagogy and schools he came to develop at  2 Dewey at the University of Chicago, 1894–1904 Democracy has been given a mission to the world, and it is of no uncertain character. I wish to show that the university is the prophet of this democracy, as well as its priest and philosopher; that in other words, the university is the Messiah of the democracy, its to-be-expected deliverer. WILLIAM RAINEY HARPER, “THE UNIVERSITY AND DEMOCRACY” (1899) the University of Chicago, it is clear that, at best, those subjects were of only minor interest to him at that time. In the four lengthy volumes for the Michigan years in the Early Works of John Dewey, 1882–1898, only a handful of very brief articles deal with education, and they focus on such highly specialized topics as “Education and the Health of Women,” “Health and Sex in Higher Education,” and “Psychology in High-Schools from the Standpoint of the College.” As those titles indicate, his Michigan publications had little or nothing to do with the problems of pedagogy and schools that greatly engaged him at Chicago. Understandably, therefore, in his introduction to Dewey’s Early Works, the editor of “Volume 4, 1893–1894” observes that Dewey was then “still a novice in . . . educational theory.”1 At the risk of seeming to indulge in the academic game of oneupmanship , for reasons that will later become clear, we must point out that, contrary to erroneous accounts in various biographies, Dewey had nothing to do with establishing the Department of Pedagogy at the University of Chicago. Moreover, his appointment did not come about because of his interest or work in that subject. On the contrary, the available evidence seems conclusive that he was offered and accepted the appointment for entirely different reasons. President Harper and Chicago’s Department of Pedagogy Even before the University of Chicago began formal operations in October 1892, its president, William Rainey Harper, “expressed some interest in establishing a school of pedagogy.” At that time his primary motives were to attract students to the new university and to gain it support from wealthy Chicago elites who had become highly interested in improving the public schools of Chicago. Though his views changed radically soon after he created the Department of Pedagogy in 1892, Harper was then not very impressed with the utility of courses in pedagogy. In addition to his other motives for creating the Department of Pedagogy, it helped him recruit Julia E. Bulkley as the first dean of women at the university. Harper was very impressed with her organizational abilities, but “she insisted that her responsibilities at the university include work in education.”2 14  Dewey’s Dream Acceding to her demands, he appointed her to the rank of associate professor of pedagogy, gave her a leave of absence until 1895 to travel to Europe and secure a PhD, and staffed the Department of Pedagogy with a teaching fellow from the Department of Philosophy.3 As is well known, Dewey was not Harper’s first choice for head of the philosophy department, and he owed his appointment to James H. Tufts, an assistant professor in that department who had been a colleague of Dewey’s in Michigan. Aware that the vacancy existed, Tufts wrote a letter to Harper strongly recommending Dewey on a variety of grounds. None of these grounds...