John Dewey

John Dewey taught philosophy at Chicago and Columbia for half a century and was the most influential American thinker of his time on education, democracy and the theory of knowledge. He held that thinking is a form of doing, tested by its consequences, and that schools should be places of inquiry rather than recitation. Democracy and Education is the founding text of progressive education, How We Think its method, and Experience and Nature the metaphysics behind them. Adler’s list and the Great Books set assign him as the last word in American pragmatism.