Dupes Read online

  As early as the 1920s, he was already being referred to as the “venerable” John Dewey, as “America's philosopher.” To this day there exists a long line of Dewey devotees, mainly liberals/progressives, whose respect borders on adoration. But there are nearly as many Dewey detractors, mainly from the political Right, whose disrespect borders on demonization.

  It is in the realm of education that Dewey receives his most loving praise and damning criticism. Consider Dewey's best-known work, Democracy and Education (1916). This book would find itself on practically any list of top “progressive” books. Moreover, it is required reading in graduate programs in education, and in many courses in philosophy, history, and political science. But the reception is quite different at the other end of the political spectrum. For instance, the conservative publication Human Events placed Democracy and Education at number five on its list of the “Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries”—trailing only The Communist Manifesto, Mein Kampf, Quotations from Chairman Mao, and The Kinsey Report. Human Events judged Dewey's book worse than Marx's Das Kapital, Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, and Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil (itself a Dewey favorite).1

  More broadly, critics have held Dewey accountable for the decline of education in the United States. Professor Henry Edmondson III, an expert on education, writes that the degree to which American education is “unsound” is “largely attributable to the influence of John Dewey.”2 Similarly, Georgetown University political theorist George W. Carey says that “we cannot come close to understanding why our public education is in such a wretched state without examining John Dewey's philosophy.” Carey laments that “the degenerative effects of Deweyism” still “thrive in the schools of education on our college campuses across the country.”3

  Clearly, more than a half century after his death, John Dewey remains a lightning rod.

  Yet, as in the case of Woodrow Wilson, there are equally important aspects of Dewey's career and legacy that neither his admirers nor his detractors have properly explored. The purpose here is to uncover the crucial, underemphasized elements of his politics and worldview, and to reveal the profound effect of his educational ideas in a most surprising part of the world: Soviet Russia. Dewey was very proud of that influence, but his hagiographers have missed—or worse, covered up—this part of the story.

  Further, of course, the purpose here is to show how badly John Dewey was duped by the men in Moscow.

  Dewey on Education

  Before we consider where John Dewey came from, where he went, and how and where he was duped, it is important to understand his perspective on public education, since those ideas were what appealed to the Soviets and brought him into contact with the architects of the Bolshevik state.

  John Dewey is often claimed as the “father” of a number of concepts, many of which overlap, and some of which are run together or confused. He has been called a founding father of “pragmatism,” and of “experimentalism” or “instrumentalism” in the classroom.4 Today we can see the spirit of Dewey in the constant experimentation that prevails in modern public education, the always-changing methods, programs, terms and trends, fads and fashion, and “research” into “bettering” education.5

  Dewey also favored, and in some respects helped shape, the secular relativism that has come to dominate public education. When it came to repudiating religion and moral absolutes in the public schoolroom, he was way ahead of his time. He rejected the notion of a single fixed, transcendent reality.6 He also dismissed time-honored concepts like “virtue,” asserting that honesty, chastity, courage, and industry were not the private possessions of the individual but, instead, what he called “working adaptations of personal capacities with environing forces.” Dewey underscored the allegedly indispensable formative role of the “collective,” the “public,” and “socialization.” He preached that “all morality is social,” as are all ethics. He opposed traditional notions of individual character.7

  To Dewey, the student was seen not as an individual human being, with private thoughts or feelings, but as part of the “collective”—the collective experience of human beings.8 He or she was a product of the “public,” of the larger society. Thus, “socialization” was a driving principle of Dewey's ideas about education. Not coincidentally, socialization remains at the crux of public education.

  As Henry Edmondson observes, Dewey's views on an individual's education cannot be separated from his broader worldview. Dewey was a political progressive, which at its core means that he viewed humanity and history as constantly being refined and moving forward, as inexorably progressing. His sweeping plans for the child were just an element of his sweeping plans for the nation and the world. Dewey believed that for the United States to survive, “American democracy” must be transformed first by a revolution in education, which would be followed by a social and economic revolution.9

  Significantly, Dewey judged that pursuing political and social change through politics was frustratingly slow, whereas doing so through education could be much quicker and more efficient.10 This was a central theme in his Democracy and Education. His primary focus, then, was the schoolhouse, not the houses of legislature.

  That is no small point. As we shall see, so many radical children of the 1960s embraced this thinking, heading to places like Columbia to earn graduate degrees in education and ultimately becoming the tenured professors of today. They eschewed politics for education, ascertaining that they could be more directly effective in the classroom. Here, too, John Dewey was their forerunner.

  The Life and Career of Dewey

  John Dewey was born in Burlington, Vermont, on October 20, 1859, and died in New York City on June 1, 1952. He was the third of four sons to Lucina Artemisia Rich and a shopkeeper named Archibald Sprague Dewey. Dewey's father was not an academic but pursued books and the life of the mind; he was known to be partial to British literature, and introduced the boy to faculty friends at the University of Vermont. His mother was said to be strict and devoutly religious.11 Some scholars maintain that the mother's (supposed) overbearing piety—a common caricature by Dewey's secular-progressive admirers—ultimately turned away the son.12

  The question of religious impact was no small thing, not only to Dewey and his fellow progressives but also, later, to the Soviets.

  Dewey, at age eleven, joined the First Congregational Church in Burlington, with a membership application written by his mother.13 One could argue that Dewey's slow departure from the faith, barely perceptible at first, began when he was an undergraduate at the University of Vermont, where—along with his reading of “progressive” journals outside the classroom—he was exposed to an intoxicating brew of agnosticism, positivism, and Darwinian evolution.

  Though undecided about his profession when he graduated, he accepted a teaching position in Oil City, Pennsylvania, and then, two years later, took another back in Vermont. At Lake View Seminary in Charlotte, Vermont, he met a philosopher named H. A. P. Torrey, who introduced him to Immanuel Kant. Still a Christian, even an orthodox one, Dewey read Kant as a corrective to the scientific skepticism of faith that was prevailing in much of the academic world.14

  Dewey's professional life as a scholar also began to take flight at this time. In 1882 he published an essay in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, which encouraged him to pursue graduate studies. That same year he entered the doctoral program in philosophy at Johns Hopkins University, where he encountered another mentor, George Sylvester Morris, a leading neo-Hegelian philosopher. Dewey ate up Hegel, referring to Hegel's thought as a kind of personal liberation. “At the same time,” writes Dewey scholar Jared Stallones, “Hegel allowed Dewey to stay within the intellectual camp of theism, albeit a type of philosophical pantheism. He was not yet ready to cut loose the moorings of his religious upbringing.”15 Indeed, even after Dewey earned his doctorate and joined the faculty at the University of Michigan, he became an active member of the First Congregational Church and, on camp
us, involved himself with several student Christian groups and Bible classes.16

  Over the long term, however, Dewey's infatuation with Hegel would have other effects—especially involving his sympathies for Marxism.

  A turning point came in his marriage in 1886 to Harriet Alice Chapman, who was raised with a deep skepticism of organized religion and any form of what she swiftly dubbed “dogma.” Harriet, who felt that theology and “ecclesiastic institutions” had “benumbed rather than promoted” religious attitudes, had an abiding effect on her husband's faith and politics, lasting long after her death.17 It appears that Dewey had abandoned organized religion by the mid-1890s.18

  His wife was not the only important influence on his thinking. As his academic career took off, he entered a series of environments that fostered radical Left thinking. In 1894 he earned a major promotion by being named head of the department of philosophy at the University of Chicago. By this point deeply interested in education and pedagogical reform, Dewey thrived under the social progressivism and left-wing thinking that dominated the city of Chicago's intellectual life. He participated in the lectures at Jane Addams's “progressive” Hull House, which attracted popular speakers such as Clarence Darrow and young professors like Paul H. Douglas. Chicago was a hotbed of radical politics; it is no coincidence that the Communists would, a quarter-century later, choose this “progressive” city for the formal launch of the Communist Party in America.

  In 1905 Dewey moved to another radical hotspot, New York City. He became professor of philosophy at Columbia University, with a joint appointment at Columbia Teachers College, the university's school of education. It was there—at Columbia and in New York City—that Dewey began to shape progressivism. Joining up with like-minded politicos, he became a founding member of groups like the Teachers League of New York (1913), the American Association of University Professors (1915), and the American Civil Liberties Union (1920). He also became president of the American Philosophical Society and the American Psychological Association.

  Over the next few decades, Dewey wrote the works that made him an academic celebrity and philosopher-educator extraordinaire—one of the most recognized names in American education, culture, and politics. His books included such classics as Essays in Experimental Logic (1916), Democracy and Education (1916), Human Nature and Conduct (1922), Experience and Nature (1925), The Public and Its Problems (1927), The Quest for Certainty (1929), Individualism, Old and New (1930), A Common Faith (1934), Liberalism and Social Action (1935), Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (1938), Theory of Valuation (1939), and Freedom and Culture (1939). His articles could be found throughout major publications of the day, including the liberal flagship, The New Republic. Disciples like William H. Kilpatrick made sure that Dewey's ideas became the blueprint for instructing thousands of education majors; Democracy and Education, in fact, became a veritable “bible of Columbia Teachers [College].”19

  God and Man at Columbia

  Like so many other secular progressives, John Dewey expressed a hearty distaste—bordering on contempt—for religion. This trait would appeal to the God-haters in Moscow.

  The onetime Bible-study-teaching son of a devout mother took such a hard left turn that he came to agree with Karl Marx on religion. In April 1935, in a glowing review of a book by a prized student, Columbia colleague, and unflagging atheist and Stalin apologist—none other than Corliss Lamont—Dewey asserted that “religion is the opium of peoples.”20 Elsewhere he judged that religion “has lost itself in cults, dogmas, and myths.”21 The remark on “dogma” seemed to reflect his wife's influence, while the language on “cults” and “myths” was no doubt what he had heard from Marxist colleagues in Chicago and New York and, as we shall see, during his visit to the Soviet Union. The Bolshevik government created an actual Department of Cults, charged with monitoring the dangerous “myths” and “superstitions” of Christians.

  Religion, Dewey maintained, had a crippling, degenerating effect, instilling “a slavery of thought and sentiment.” He devoured Nietzsche, who called the morality of Christian religion a “slave morality.” Dewey wrote that religion is “an intolerant superiority on the part of the few and an intolerable burden on the part of the many.”22 Christianity, in particular, was a “dying myth,” he said. He commended those wise enough to have “escaped this delusion” of “supernatural commands, rewards, and penalties” connected with “Christendom as a whole.” And those who subscribed to more orthodox forms of Christianity were especially foolish, desperately needing to be “progressively liberated from [their] bondage to prejudice and ignorance.”23

  Was Dewey an atheist? Numerous atheist websites proudly claim him as one of their own, while several conservative Christian websites call him an atheist for very different reasons. Some of these sites (pro and con) employ an atheistic quote attributed to Dewey, but the quotation is not reliably sourced.24 We do know that in addition to being a harsh critic of religion, Dewey was also the most prominent philosopher to sign the 1933 Humanist Manifesto, which declared, among other things, that humanists “regard the universe as self-existing and not created,” that “the time has passed for theism [and] deism,” and that “the distinction between the sacred and the secular can no longer be maintained.”25

  Corliss Lamont, who had studied under Dewey while getting his Ph.D. at Columbia, seemed to affirm that Dewey had rejected God. In his atheist classic The Illusion of Immortality, which, as noted, began as Lamont's doctoral dissertation, Lamont fondly called Dewey “one of my earliest teachers in philosophy” and then declared that Dewey was “convinced that this life is all.”26

  The elder philosopher not only did not object to this characterization but even wrote an endorsement for the book; it was the only endorsement that appeared on the dust jacket. Further, Dewey wrote a glowing review of Lamont's book (the review in which he called religion “the opium of peoples”).27 Lamont liked the review so much that he asked Dewey's permission to use it as the introduction to subsequent editions of the book. Dewey happily agreed, and the introduction was carried into the book's fifth edition (1990), many years after his death.28

  Dewey's hostility to religion seemed to spike the more he ran with fellow travelers and admirers of the Great Experiment in Moscow, of which there were many in New York. Columbia University, in particular, was an extremely secular and politically radical place, no doubt the worst of the Ivy League schools in that regard, far ahead of the secular-left drift of universities later in the century. For a Dewey already moving away from conventional religion, and whose politics were already on the left, Columbia was an explosive environment.

  One of the better sources on this political zoo—many others could be cited—was the late, great Catholic writer Thomas Merton, who was a student at Columbia in the 1930s. Merton was a man of the Left throughout his life. He was a vocal peace activist, a prolific author and poet, the world's best-known Trappist monk, and eventually a prominent Vietnam War critic. The very liberal International Thomas Merton Society today bears his name. Merton attested to the extreme secular-left bent of the campus in this period, and to the abnormally high number of Communists at Columbia, especially among students. Merton himself joined the Communist Party while there, and wrote that “there were, at that time, quite a few communists or communist sympathizers among the undergraduates.”29 The Communists at Columbia actually had full control of the student newspaper and other groups on campus.30

  The faculty, said Merton, were mostly liberals, not Communists, and that included the professors at Teachers College, who, wrote Merton, with an edge, “always stood for colorlessness and mediocrity and plain, hapless behaviorism.”31 But secularism was dominant at Columbia, he said. In his brilliant spiritual autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain (1948), Merton wrote:

  Poor Columbia! It was founded by sincere Protestants as a college predominantly religious. The only thing that remains of that is the university motto: In lumine tuo videbimus lumen— one of the deepest and
most beautiful lines of the psalms. “In Thy light, we shall see light.” It is, precisely, about grace. It is a line that might serve as the foundation stone of all Christian and Scholastic learning, and which simply has nothing whatever to do with the standards of education at modern Columbia.32

  This spiritual vacuum, combined with the radical leftism on campus, offered ample opportunities for CPUSA and front-group recruiters who worked the street corners hunting for intelligent but immature recruits. Merton's narrative helps explain why someone like Whittaker Chambers, who attended Columbia in the 1920s, could enter the college as a Taft Republican and leave a Marxist who not only joined the Communist Party and edited its publications but also became a KGB spy.

  John Dewey spent decades in this secular-progressive environment. Of course, he came to influence it as well. By the time Merton arrived on campus, Dewey had been a fixture there for three decades. Dewey towered over Columbia, inspiring near worship. The school's secularism, Merton said, was part of the prevailing Deweyan zeitgeist.