(2 of 3)
John Dewey was setting out with his huge casualness "to have a look at Russia." Of course the news of his impending visit had elicited from Soviet Commissar of Education Anatoly Vasilievich Lunacharsky a formal invitation and an expression of enthusiasm that the Second Confucius was coming. Comrade Lunacharsky is a Red, but he knows his Deweys. A dynamo of energy, he not only directs the Commissariat (Ministry) for Education, but writes plays, is President of the Moscow Society of Dramatic Writers & Composers, and acts as supervising editor of three Moscow publications: Novy Mir (The New World), Krestyanka (The Peasant Woman), and Iskusstvo Trudyaschimsya (Art for the Workers). Lastly Comrade Lunacharsky is Director of the Institute of Archaeology and the Science of Art. His principles are Red; but his brain is fully capable of coping with that of the tall, untidy man who resembles Robert Louis Stevenson.
John Dewey was born at Burlington, Vermont, a cold pinnacle of New England culture, on Oct. 20, 1859. To him came the rude, germinal, quickening call of the Midlands. He grew up to teach philosophy in the universities of Michigan (1884-88), Minnesota (1888-89), Michigan (1889-94) and Chicago (1894-1904). There the pragmatism—the "practicality" — of his philosophy was nurtured on a basically pragmatic human soil. Dewey, more than anyone else, may be justly called the Philosopher of the American continent. With characteristic "practicality" he has declared:* "Philosophy recovers itself when it ceases to be a device for dealing with the problems of philosophers and becomes a method, cultivated by philosophers, for dealing with problems of men."
Even a simpleton would know from this that Philosopher Dewey has been driven by his concept of philosophy to become an educator. He is one of the greatest. His small volume School and Society (1899) caused world wide repercussions among pedants, pedagogs & preceptors. His lectures at Peking, while he held an exchange professorship there in 1919-20, wrought profoundest effects upon Chinese students —and in China it was the "student move-ment" which produced the present Nationalist Government (see CHINA) now exerting authority over two-thirds of Cathay.
In general, U. S. Christian missionaries deplore the instantaneous affinity displayed by pragmatic young Chinese for Dewey doctrines. To him and to many of them the Kingdom of Heaven and the Prince of Peace seem nearly destitute of practicality.
Dewey doctrines are best not heard from the lips of the Second Confucius. His delivery is monotonous, halting, full of long pauses while the great mind ponderously moves careless of the impatience of auditors. But a printed page of Dewey is starred with diadems.
Example: "The phrase 'think for one's self' is a pleonasm. Unless one does it for one's self, it isn't thinking."
There, in an epigram, is almost the core of Dewey's concept of education: a concept about which he will soon be shrewdly questioned by Red Commissar Lunacharsky, guiding educator of the largest and perhaps least tutored nation on the globe.