JOHN DEWEY, Part 1

John Dewey, The Essential Dewey, Volume 1: Pragmatism, Education, Democracy, edited by Larry A. Hickman & Thomas M. Alexander (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana U. Press, 1998) (From "The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy": "We pride ourselves upon being realistic, desiring a hardheaded cognizance of facts, and devoted to mastering the means of life. We pride ourselves upon a practical idealism, a lively and easily moved faith in possibilities as yet unrealized, in willingness to make sacrifice for their realization. Idealism easily becomes a sanction of waste and carelessness, and realism a sanction of legal formalism in behalf of things as they are--the rights of the possessor. We thus tend to combine a loose and ineffective optimism with assent to the doctrine of take who take can: a deification of power. All peoples at all times have been narrowly realistic in practice and have then employed idealization to cover up in sentiment and theory their brutalities. But never, perhaps, has the tendency been so dangerous and so tempting as with ourselves. Faith in the power of intelligence to imagine a future which is the projection of the desirable in the present, and to invent the instrumentalities of its realization, is our salvation. And it is a faith which must be nurtured and made articulate: surely a sufficiently large take for our philosophy." Id. at 69. From "Nationalizing Education":. "I find that many who talk the loudest about the need of a supreme and unified Americanism of spirit really mean some special code or tradition to which they happen to be attached. They have some pet tradition which they would impose upon all. In thus measuring the scope of Americanism by some single element which enters into it they are themselves false to the spirit of America. Neither Englandism nor New-Englandism, neither Puritan nor Cavalier any more than Teuton or Slav, can do anything but furnish one note in a vast symphony." Id at 266-267. From "Education in Relation to Form": "[U]pon its intellectual side education consists in the formation of wide-awake, careful, thorough habits of thinking." Id. at 274.).