To Moscow

(See front cover)

Number Six on the Boulevard Sreten-sky in Moscow is the People's Commissariat for Education. There excited Russians are awaiting this week the coming of a great U. S. citizen who is chiefly famed on other Continents--John Dewey.

Of him a sportive and popular Teuton savant, Count Hermann Keyserling,* has said: "The two contributions of America to world culture are Professor Dewey and Negro jazz."

In contrast to that flippant view, which nonetheless expresses the esteem of Europeans for Professor Dewey, is another statement. It was made by one who is per-haps the greatest of living Chinese savants, Dr. Fai Yuan-pei. The occasion was the birth anniversary of Confucius in 1920. Dr. Fai, acting as Rector of the National University at Peking, was presenting an honorary Ph.D. degree to John Dewey.

"We honor you," said Dr. Fai, "as the Second Confucius."

In China higher praise is not.

Up the gangplank of the S. S. George Washington there shambled, last fortnight, an unkempt, lanky man whose profile somewhat resembles that of the late famed Robert Louis Stevenson. Fellow passengers took small note of the droopy, bedraggled mustache, the old fashioned spectacles, the somewhat scrawny neck girt by a casual tie. Why should they? Not one American in ten thousand has ever heard of John Dewey.

As propellers churned and the George Washington nosed down the bay, Dr. Dewey slumped into a characteristic, sloppy, sprawly arrangement in a deck chair.

Now he could leave behind his duties as a professor of philosophy at Columbia University. Ahead lay Europe, then broad, fertile Russian plains, and Moscow, and Number Six Boulevard Sretensky.

John Dewey was setting out with his huge casualness "to have a look at Russia." Of course the news of his impending visit had elicited from Soviet Commissar of Education Anatoly Vasilievich Lunacharsky a formal invitation and an expression of enthusiasm that the Second Confucius was coming. Comrade Lunacharsky is a Red, but he knows his Deweys. A dynamo of energy, he not only directs the Commissariat (Ministry) for Education, but writes plays, is President of the Moscow Society of Dramatic Writers & Composers, and acts as supervising editor of three Moscow publications: Novy Mir (The New World), Krestyanka (The Peasant Woman), and Iskusstvo Trudyaschimsya (Art for the Workers). Lastly Comrade Lunacharsky is Director of the Institute of Archaeology and the Science of Art. His principles are Red; but his brain is fully capable of coping with that of the tall, untidy man who resembles Robert Louis Stevenson.

John Dewey was born at Burlington, Vermont, a cold pinnacle of New England culture, on Oct. 20, 1859. To him came the rude, germinal, quickening call of the Midlands. He grew up to teach philosophy in the universities of Michigan (1884-88), Minnesota (1888-89), Michigan (1889-94) and Chicago (1894-1904). There the pragmatism--the "practicality" -- of his philosophy was nurtured on a basically pragmatic human soil. Dewey, more than anyone else, may be justly called the Philosopher of the American continent. With characteristic "practicality" he has declared:* "Philosophy recovers itself when it ceases to be a device for dealing with the problems of philosophers and becomes a method, cultivated by philosophers, for dealing with problems of men."

Even a simpleton would know from this that Philosopher Dewey has been driven by his concept of philosophy to become an educator. He is one of the greatest. His small volume School and Society (1899) caused world wide repercussions among pedants, pedagogs & preceptors. His lectures at Peking, while he held an exchange professorship there in 1919-20, wrought profoundest effects upon Chinese students --and in China it was the "student move-ment" which produced the present Nationalist Government (see CHINA) now exerting authority over two-thirds of Cathay.

In general, U. S. Christian missionaries deplore the instantaneous affinity displayed by pragmatic young Chinese for Dewey doctrines. To him and to many of them the Kingdom of Heaven and the Prince of Peace seem nearly destitute of practicality.

Dewey doctrines are best not heard from the lips of the Second Confucius. His delivery is monotonous, halting, full of long pauses while the great mind ponderously moves careless of the impatience of auditors. But a printed page of Dewey is starred with diadems.

Example: "The phrase 'think for one's self' is a pleonasm. Unless one does it for one's self, it isn't thinking."

There, in an epigram, is almost the core of Dewey's concept of education: a concept about which he will soon be shrewdly questioned by Red Commissar Lunacharsky, guiding educator of the largest and perhaps least tutored nation on the globe.

The basic concept & method of Educator Dewey derives with brutal logic from a major premise, a definition. He postulates:

"Education: It is that reconstruction or reorganization of experience which adds to the meaning of experience, and which increases ability to direct the course of subsequent experience."

In other words: learning should mean discovering how to do. The element of "discovery" is held high if not paramount by Educator Dewey. He declares: "While immature students will not make discoveries from the standpoint of advanced students, they make them from their own standpoint whenever there is genuine learning."

Pupils, then must be "encouraged to utilize their own peculiarities of response to subject matter." They must not learn by rote. In disparaging this latter method, which he finds still all too prevalent Dr. Dewey has said: "Much work in [an ordi-nary] school consists in setting up rules by which pupils are to act of such a sort that even after pupils have acted they are not led to see the connection between the result--say the answer--and the method pursued. So far as they are concerned, the whole thing is a trick and a kind of miracle."

To Deweyites it is clear that to teach children formulae by rote is almost as ridiculous as teaching them the incantations of medieval wizards. The schoolroom must be a place where the child is intelligently encouraged to dynamically project its ego in discovering how to do.

Already, of course, numerous fruits of Professor Dewey's labors are to be seen, green or half ripened, in the more progressive elementary schools of America, Europe, and certain restricted areas of Asia. The great adventure still looming before the Second Confucius is to persuade fellow educators, parents and taxpayers that the "discovery method" can be applied to successively more advanced classes, and will.not degenerate under incompetent teachers into merely "letting the students do whatever they please."

*Author of the widely popular Travel Diary of a Philosopher & The Book of Marriage.

*Convenient is the new one volume The Philosophy of John Dewey, an able selection. (Holt, $4.00.)