Dewey Unchanged

The name of the thriller was Too Lively to Live. The man in carpet slippers sitting in an easy chair reading it was nearly 87, and the No. 1 theorist of U.S. education. John Dewey had just published his own 35th book (Problems of Men; Philosophical Library, $5). He was packing his bags for a Nova Scotia vacation. For September he planned an inspection trip to China's universities, where he is regarded as a major prophet.

Lively John Dewey (he hates to be called "Dr. Dewey") starts his day at 7:30 a.m., ends it at 9 p.m. He shaves himself with an electric razor, breakfasts with his physicist daughter before she goes to work, then starts tapping away on a typewriter battered by years of hunt-&-peck. Magazine articles and essays still roll out of the machine in the inimitably cluttered prose that has marked Dewey since his first published work (1882).

But Dewey, an experimenter by nature, has no daily routine. Some days he browses in Manhattan bookstores for "tough" mysteries and nonfiction; if he spots a newspaper ad of a white-shirt sale he hurries off to stand in line; or he walks through Central Park, visits a Government agency downtown for a friend who needs help, and generally confounds people who expect him to act his age. In April he issued another of his periodic manifestoes for a third party. Other favorite recreations : double-crostics and letter writing (he has a voluminous correspondence) in his firm, open longhand.

Philosopher in Twang. Even when receiving old friends and pupils like Philosophers Irwin Edman and Sidney Hook, shy John Dewey shuffles his slippers, pulls at his Groucho Marx mustache, or musses his yellowing white hair in embarrassment. He speaks hesitantly in a soft Vermont twang, and is apt to preface his thoughts with a "seems like. . . ." (Says he: "My ancestry is free from all blemish. All my forefathers* earned an honest living as farmers, wheelwrights and coopers. I was absolutely the first one in seven generations to fall from grace.")

But Dewey did not fall very far. He took a crackerbox credo that the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and made a philosophical system out of it. Nothing in science, politics or religion, he argued, must be accepted on say-so. Like the hunt-&-peck philosopher who put it on paper, Dewey's "pragmatism" was a hunt-&-peck philosophy.

Pragmatism was pretty radical when Dewey took it up. Applied to education, it put the emphasis on the student--teaching must be adapted to the individual pupil, instead of making all study the same thing in the same rote-ridden way. As director of the University of Chicago's Laboratory School (1902-04), Dewey fathered the movement now called progressive education--"learning by living." Whether he sowed good seed, or tares, or dragon's teeth, is a moot question still.

John Dewey's new book is a collection of his writings for the past twelve years, plus a new chapter summing them up. Scientific living is still his theme song, as it was in the 1900s.

"Rather Gloomy." To many educators and ordinary people, science, which seems to have outstripped the scientists, no longer looks like the right answer. Dewey has no patience with this attitude. He doesn't like the state of the world ("looks to me about the way it does to everybody, I guess--rather gloomy, rather depressing") but he still believes that the habit of intelligent inquiry is the categorical imperative. ("There have been more scientific changes in the last 50 years or so than in centuries. But management of human relations still goes by guesswork. It needs to catch up. People ought to use scientific methods in handling human problems.")

In Problems of Men Dewey is still at war with those who would put classic tradition or theological assumptions above challenge by scientific method. The University of Chicago, where his experiments began, is now one of the places where he sees the classicists enthroned. Writes Dewey: "[We can have] no commerce with the notion that the problems of philosophy are 'eternal. . . .' Eternity that is permitted to become a refuge from the time in which human life goes on may provide a certain kind of consolation. But emotion and comfort should not be identified with understanding and insight. . . . Every class interest in all history has defended itself from examination by putting forth claim to absoluteness. Social fanaticisms, whether of the right or the left, take refuge in the fortresses of principles too absolute to be subject to doubt or inquiry. . . .

"Present-day philosophy cannot desire a better work than to engage in the act of midwifery [of ideas] that was assigned to it by Socrates 2,500 years ago."

* John Dewey is a distant cousin of New York's Governor Tom Dewey, Manila Bay's Admiral George Dewey.

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