John Dewey 杜威 · 約翰・杜威

🔊In Chicago he did something few philosophers have done. In 1896 he and his wife Alice opened an elementary school in order to test a theory. The children cooked, built, sewed, and gardened, and arithmetic, chemistry, and history were taught as the problems arose from the work. Dewey called it the Laboratory School. He was also a trustee of Hull House, Jane Addams’s settlement among the city’s immigrants, and learned there what democracy looked like from below. In 1904, after a dispute with the university over the running of the school, he resigned and went to Columbia in New York, where he stayed for the rest of his career.

在芝加哥，他做了一件很少有哲學家做過的事。1896 年，他和妻子愛麗絲開辦了一所小學，為的是檢驗一個理論。孩子們煮飯、蓋東西、縫紉、種菜；而算術、化學與歷史，是在工作裡出現問題的時候才教的。杜威稱它為「實驗學校」。他也是赫爾館的董事；那是珍・亞當斯在這個城市的移民當中設立的睦鄰之家。他在那裡學到了，從底層看上去的民主是什麼樣子。1904 年，因為學校的經營問題與大學起了爭執，他辭了職，轉到紐約的哥倫比亞大學，在那裡度過了其餘的學術生涯。

🔊In 1919 Dewey took a sabbatical in Japan. Former students of his, among them Hu Shih, invited him to cross to China for a short visit. He and Alice landed in Shanghai on April 30. Four days later students in Peking took to the streets against the terms of the Versailles treaty, and the May Fourth Movement began. Dewey was fascinated. He stayed for more than two years, leaving in July 1921, and lectured in many provinces with Hu Shih and others interpreting. His lectures on education, democracy, and scientific method were printed in newspapers and sold as books.

1919 年，杜威趁休假到日本。他從前的學生（其中有胡適）邀請他渡海到中國短暫訪問。他與愛麗絲在 4 月 30 日抵達上海。四天之後，北京的學生走上街頭，抗議凡爾賽和約的條款；五四運動開始了。杜威深深著迷。他留了兩年多，到 1921 年 7 月才離開；由胡適等人口譯，在許多省分演講。他關於教育、民主與科學方法的演講，被刊在報紙上，並且印成書出售。

🔊No Western philosopher had been heard so widely in China before, and few have been since. His students carried his ideas into Chinese schools, and one of them, Tao Xingzhi, turned two of his slogans around. Dewey had said that education is life and the school a small society. Tao, working among the rural poor, said that life is education and society is the school. After 1949 Dewey’s name was attacked on the mainland together with Hu Shih’s. His influence on education in Taiwan continued through Hu Shih and his colleagues.

在這之前，沒有一位西方哲學家在中國被這麼多人聽過；之後也很少。他的學生把他的想法帶進了中國的學校；其中一位，陶行知，把他的兩句口號倒了過來。杜威說過：教育即生活，學校即社會。在農村窮人當中工作的陶行知說：生活即教育，社會即學校。1949 年之後，杜威的名字在大陸與胡適的名字一起受到批判。他對台灣教育的影響，經由胡適與他的同事們延續了下來。

🔊Back in New York, Dewey wrote steadily for the next thirty years, in books for scholars and in magazine articles for everyone else. He helped to found associations for university teachers and for civil liberties. In 1937, at the age of seventy-eight, he traveled to Mexico to chair a commission of inquiry into Stalin’s charges against Leon Trotsky. He disagreed with Trotsky’s politics, and the commission found the charges false. He published Art as Experience at seventy-five and a major work on logic at seventy-nine.

回到紐約之後，杜威在接下來的三十年裡持續寫作：為學者寫書，為其他所有人在雜誌上寫文章。他協助創立了大學教師的組織與維護公民自由的組織。1937 年，他七十八歲，遠赴墨西哥，主持一個調查委員會，調查史達林對托洛斯基的指控。他並不同意托洛斯基的政治主張；而委員會的結論是：那些指控是假的。他七十五歲出版《藝術即經驗》，七十九歲出版一部關於邏輯的重要著作。

🔊Alice died in 1927. In 1946, at eighty-seven, he married again, and he and his wife adopted two children. He died of pneumonia in New York in 1952, aged ninety-two. A Canadian historian who deplored his influence on schools wrote that he had been to his age what Aristotle was to the later Middle Ages: “not a philosopher, but the philosopher.” His prose is plain and often heavy, and he has been praised more often than read.

愛麗絲在 1927 年去世。1946 年，他八十七歲時再婚；他與妻子領養了兩個孩子。1952 年，他因肺炎在紐約去世，享年九十二歲。一位對他在學校裡的影響深感痛惜的加拿大歷史學者寫道：他之於他的時代，就像亞里斯多德之於中世紀後期：「不是一位哲學家，而是『那位』哲學家。」他的文筆樸素，常常還很沉重；人們稱讚他的次數，比讀他的次數多。