Reinhold Niebuhr, John Dewey and the constant dialogue

The Constant Dialogue. Reinhold Niebuhr & the American Intellectual Culture.
By Martin Halliwell. Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2005.

I admit to come to this with a certain interest in mind, to understand how John Dewey was seen in his time. John Dewey's most basic idea is that education is the key to understanding and the most important outlet of Philosophy. How did the pragmatism of a most careful intellectual, John Dewey, end up being used as an excuse for remaking elementary education in a child-centric, child-initiated image, to the result that intellectualism was thoroughly purged out of the class rooms. For the painful saga of John Dewey and child centered education, see Diane Ravitch's brilliant history of American schools - Left Back.

Dewey is a generation older than Niebuhr, and both can be described at the time of the events surrounding 1929 as Socialists. Both are upset with Roosevelt's New Deal policies, judging them ad hoc and unprincipled (The Constant Dialogue, p. 72). Niebuhr attacks John Dewey for his atheism; from Niebuhr's perspective, Dewey's pragmatism is at odds with the need of individuals for a bit of transcendence. It could also be argued, says Halliwell (p. 57), that Dewey did not pay attention to the nuances of religious thought and that Niebuhr's awareness of science lacked any depth.

And here is a nice quote from Dewey (p. 65). I seem to be unstable, chameleon-like, yielding one after another to many diverse and even incompatible influences; struggling to assimilate something from each yet striving to carry it forward in a way that is logically consistent with what has been learned from its predecessors.

From Halliwell's perspective, Niebuhr does not manage to dent Dewey's surface. I was hoping I would get a Niebuhr reaction to Dewey's support of Lenin's revolution, and Dewey's excitement with progressive education in the USSR up until its reversal in Stalin's time at the beginning the 1930's. To his credit, Dewey became very critical of communism after the episode. But the question is why did it take him so long to come around, when he had earlier been confronted by educators like Michael Demiashkevich, the brilliant Russian emigre who had been an education official in the starting days of the Revolution. Dewey's minions had been savaging Demiashkevich, as recounted in Ravitch's Left Back. For Dewey was not too picky choosing his collaborators.

And I was also hoping to a Niebuhr reaction to the Scopes trial. Luckily, on the jacket of Halliwell's edition I find a text by Paul K. Conkin which I've heard is quite good, When All the Gods Trembled: Darwinism, Scopes, and American Intellectuals.