John Dewey

John Dewey (1859–1952) was an American philosopher, psychologist and educational reformer, the leading figure of pragmatism after William James. Born in Burlington, Vermont, he taught at Michigan, at Chicago, where he founded the Laboratory School to test his ideas about learning by doing, and from 1904 at Columbia. His books include The School and Society, Democracy and Education, Human Nature and Conduct, Experience and Nature, The Quest for Certainty and Art as Experience, and his conception of education as the growth of experience within a democratic community shaped schools around the world. Politically active to the end, he chaired the commission that heard Trotsky's defense in Mexico in 1937.