Mark Wagner is back on the blogging beat with a discussion of Dewey’s Pedagogic Creed. It’s one of Dewey’s earlier works, so I haven’t studied it as much as I have his later writings. But Mark’s post is really good at analyzing Dewey from an educator’s perspective as opposed to a philosopher’s. And I’ve jumped in on the comments, so click on over if the last post doesn’t have enough talking about Dewey for you.
You’d think that conservative opponents of John Dewey would have their hands full dealing with what the man wrote over the course of his lifetime. But that hasn’t stopped some bizarre misquotes from working their way into the conversation. A few weeks ago my Technorati watchlist pulled up a blog that contained the following statement, alleged to be by Dewey:
You can’t make Socialists out of individualists. Children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society which is coming, where everyone is interdependent.
Now, this sounds so completely unlike anything I’ve ever read Dewey say that I wondered where the quote came from. My curiosity was further encouraged when I did a web search and found the quote on hundreds of web pages – none of which could cite a particular text, lecture, or occasion on which Dewey said this. The closest I could find to an attribution was the year 1899 – which is the year that Dewey gave the lectures that formed the basis for The School and Society, one of his key books on education. So I turned to the Past Masters database, which contains a searchable full-text database of both The Collected Works of John Dewey and The Collected Correspondence of John Dewey. I put in various phrases from the longer quote and asked for results.
I came up empty.
I did some more searching in the archives of the electronic Dewey mailing list, and learned that a few years back, the users of that list tried to track down the original source of the quote as well. They had no more luck at pinning down the attribution than I did. So while I can’t completely rule out the idea that this quote was made in a context not included in the Collected Works or the Collected Correspondence, my best guess is that this is a caricature of a paraphrase that somehow came to be seen as a direct quote. The only other alternative I can think of is someone deliberately falsifying a citation, and I’d like to be more charitable than that.
As long as I was in the database, I decided to see what Dewey does say about the notion of children and people thinking for themselves. I got the following hits for the exact phrase “think for themselves” from Dewey’s published writings. (There were two additional hits, one from an account of an interview with Dewey, and one from an unpublished manuscript. I wanted to focus on the published instances for this post.)
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