Philip W. Jackson, December 2, 1928–July 21, 2015, A Life Well Lived

The world of John Dewey scholarship recently lost one of its most thoughtful contributors, and teachers of all kinds lost one of their most passionate and committed advocates. Philip W. Jackson was born in 1928 in Vineland, New Jersey, a locale known historically for its excellent grape-growing soil (hence the name) and veterinarian Arthur Goldhaft’s famous pledge to “put a chicken in every pot.” Jackson’s adoptive parents were, appropriately enough, chicken farmers, and, as the story goes, they noticed early on his indisputable knack for singing and poetry recitation. Feeling very at home on the stage, the plucky six-year-old even tried his hand as a vaudevillian, performing a snake charmer act between reels at movie theaters and employing all the usual accoutrements. For a time, a career as a performer seemed a very real possibility.

Jackson’s life, however, took a momentous turn in 1948 when he married his high school sweetheart, Josephine D’Andrea (Jo), before spending a brief stint in the Navy. After being encouraged by his peers to set his sights on higher education, Jackson’s initially uncertain path led him first to what is now Rowan University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree, Temple University, for his master’s degree, and, eventually, a doctorate in developmental psychology from Teachers College at Columbia University. Upon obtaining his PhD in 1955, Jackson took a position at Wayne State University for a short time before proceeding on to the University of Chicago, where he eventually became the David Lee Shillinglaw Distinguished Service Professor of Education and Psychology.

Though Jackson’s training in psychology would always serve him well, he soon developed a keen (and, depending on its use, at times painful) awareness of its limitations, especially methodologically. In 1962, Jackson and his colleague Jacob Getzels published a book entitled Creativity and Intelligence: Explorations with Gifted Students. The study was very well received and utilized numerous tests and test subjects as a means of developing a useful measure of creativity. The book’s chief finding, surprisingly, was that high IQ was not a strong correlate with giftedness. Moreover, Jackson and Getzels discovered that, while high creativity could result in as much academic achievement as high IQ could, gifted children were often not at their best with traditional academic tasks and testing, which they typically found unengaging.

What Jackson himself began to find unengaging, however, was the prospect of a career spent administering paper-and-pencil tests to children (and often in test centers rather than classrooms), which he later likened to poking a chimp with a stick, and generating and analyzing reams of statistics. The paltry empiricism (as Emerson might put it) of this behaviorist methodology became fully evident to Jackson during a year’s research leave at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, where he met a group of anthropologists studying the social behavior of primates in the wild. The researchers stressed the need to study these animals in their natural habits, which meant developing and honing their individual perceptual abilities as the instruments of research. This proved an epiphany for Jackson and led, in 1968, to the publication of his most enduring work, Life in Classrooms, an ethnography of school life based on almost five years of observations in elementary classrooms and one of the first book-length qualitative studies in the history of educational research.¹

Jackson’s interest in John Dewey’s philosophy was piqued shortly after when he became Director of the Laboratory Schools at the University of Chicago in 1970. He was surprised to discover that Dewey’s ideas seemed absent from the thinking of the teachers and administration of the school. So, to amend the situation, he commenced a project of reading some of Dewey’s works and discussing them as a school community.

Like many others who first encounter Dewey through his educational writings but move beyond those to Dewey’s ideas about other...