Introduction
"It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that for a generation no major issue was clarified until Dewey had spoken," wrote famed historian Henry Steele Commager of the well-known philosopher and educator John Dewey1 . During his lifetime, Dewey wrote on a variety of topics, most notably democracy, education, philosophy, psychology, and religion. Generations of scholars have thoroughly explored, carefully interpreted, and frequently reinterpreted Dewey's ideas. A prolific writer, Dewey left behind a body of work comprised of forty books and nearly 800 articles that appeared in more than 150 different journals. His influence is readily apparent in the more than 4,000 articles and books published about his life and work. The majority of these publications have focused on Dewey's career after 1894 as a professor at the University of Chicago and later at Columbia University where he retained professor emeritus status until his death in 1952 at age ninety-two. The period that by and large has received the least attention is the decade from 1884 to 1894, which save for one year, was when Dewey was a faculty member at the University of Michigan.
The aim of this essay is to illuminate the important period during which Dewey served on the faculty at the University of Michigan, to note his myriad contributions to Michigan, and to a lesser extent, to study Michigan's influences on Dewey. Perhaps by highlighting this underrepresented era in Dewey's life, greater context and meaning can be added to his subsequent achievements. In 1929, shortly after his seventieth birthday, Dewey expressed the importance of his time at Michigan to the formation of his educational philosophy, writing, "[I]t was in Ann Arbor that I began my teaching activities. It was there that my serious interest in education was aroused. I have never ceased to be grateful that my first connection was with a state university in the middle-west. I learned there something of the deep significance of the relation between educational institutions and the social communities which they serve."4
As for Dewey's philosophy of instrumentalism, later associated with pragmatism, it has been noted that It may not be too much to claim that the University of Michigan was one of the cradles of the new philosophy which later became more distinctively identified with the University of Chicago.5 While Dewey gained greater fame with many of his ideas after leaving the University of Michigan, many of these seeds were sown, if not germinated, at Michigan. The context of the university was the milieu in which Dewey's early philosophical ideas were developed, as he came to embrace the possibility of reform through education and struggled to reconcile idealist philosophy within the confines of Protestant theology and scientific progress. When Dewey left Michigan, he would adapt the reform impulse of his philosophy to the broader canvas of society and the progressive reform movements of the early twentieth century.
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