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.