Dictionary of Education (PDF)

by John Dewey

John Dewey was essentially a critic. He was a critic not merely, and not primarily, of the inherited problem of professional and technical philosophers. He was a critic in the grand style. He directed his analysis to what he called in contrast "the problems of men." And by this he meant the entire range of intellectual issues raised by the culture in which he found himself living. He saw emerging our 20th-century world-a scientific, technological, international world, in which the immense achievement of the cooperative activity of men in groups hangs precariously on the shifting tensions and antagonisms generated between those groups. On all the ideas and problems involved in these complex difficulties, Dewey had something to say, usually novel, and always significant. Dewey was seeing many things in new relations, and attempting to express original insights. He would try again and again to make his meaning clear, putting his thought now in this form and now in that. In his many pages it is not easy to find the most revealing formulation. A compilation like Dr. Winn's, where the most penetrating and suggestive statements have been carefully singled out and classified, can be of immense help, both to the reader manfully making his way through Dewey's arguments and to the man who wants ready access to Dewey's most incisive thoughts on crucial points.