Born on October 20, 1859, in Burlington Vermont, John Dewey was born into a small-town middle class family. His father was a reasonably successful town grocer and tobacconist, while his mother, almost twenty years younger and "better-born", had come from a prominent Vermont family.

Dewey remembered his mother as a woman of great piety, strict with her sons, and frequently questioning their "rightness with Jesus". Until he was almost thirty years old, the greater part of Dewey's intellectual life was concerned with mediating between the core of evangelicalism that his mother had given him and life as men live it, particularly the intellectual life of the later nineteenth century. Mrs. Dewey prized the principles of work, prayer, benevolence, maternity, and ambitious goals for her family. The disappointment of her marriage seems to have led her to seek an exaggerated sense of self-reliance.

Due to her strong convictions, the home life of her three sons was very demanding. The teachings of his mother left Dewey with the notion that the world was not to be taken at face value. The rigidity experienced under her required Dewey to grow into himself while at the same time responding to his mother's attentiveness and subscribing to her values. This left him with a carefully constructed, sensitive, stable, and very powerful ego.

After graduating from the local high school at age fifteen, Dewey entered the University of Vermont. While his first two years of schooling at the university consisted of the classical curriculum, his third year brought an intellectual awakening at the hands of a professor of geology and zoology who structured his presentations on the theory of evolution. It was this year that Dewey strayed from his traditional readings and began to read books dealing with the implications of science and evolution for traditional religion.

Dewey's senior year acted to further reinforce his new interests with introductions to various branches of speculative and social philosophy.

Upon graduation from the University of Vermont in 1879, Dewey moved to Oil City where he taught high school for two years. This experience largely left him depressed and impressed upon him that teaching high school was to be but a stepping stone in his career. It was during these two years, however, that Dewey had a mystical experience that greatly altered his spiritual beliefs, substituting the religious anxiety remaining from his childhood with a calm understanding. Dewey was quoted as saying, that, as a result of this experience, he no longer had any doubts nor beliefs.

At the conclusion of his two-year teaching stint, Dewey made an arrangement to study privately under the instruction of Professor Harry A. Torrey. This experience proved to be invaluable, as Torrey's interests, (epistemology and metaphysics), corresponded directly with those of Dewey's, and it presented the opportunity to achieve intellectual intimacy, (which Dewey was sorely lacking in his frustrating job as a teacher), as well as to study philosophical German and the Classics. In addition, Dewey's search for a father-figure of the type expounded by his mother, (intellectual, pious, virtuous, and ambitious), was temporarily answered by Torrey,

Shortly after his study with Torrey, Dewey enrolled at Johns Hopkins University to study philosophy and psychology. His stay at Johns Hopkins significantly altered Dewey's philosophical outlook. Studying under George Morris left Dewey with a more straight forward orthodoxy and an increased understanding of Idealism, particularly of the work of Georg Wilhelm Fredrich Hegel. Dewey wrote that the work of Hegel satisfied "a demand for unification that was doubtless an intense emotional craving, and yet was a hunger that only an intellectualized subject matter could satisfy..." (Campbell, pg. 11-12).

By the end of his first semester at Johns Hopkins, Dewey had established himself in Morris' eyes as his prize pupil. Dewey was appointed to instruct the undergraduate course in the history of philosophy in the second semester while Morris would be away.
In his second and last year at Hopkins, Dewey published a paper entitled The New Psychology. This, his initial essay on experimental psychology, and the herald of what was to be a lifelong interest in that science, is generally recognized as the turning point in Dewey's thinking.

After earning a Ph.D. in 1884, Dewey was offered a position teaching philosophy with Morris at the University of Michigan. He remained in Ann Arbor for the next decade, with the exception of the academic year 1888-1889, which he spent at the University of Minnesota. In 1886, Dewey married Harriet Alice Chipman, a Michigan graduate with a strong concern for philosophy and social issues who greatly influenced Dewey's social interests.

While at the University of Chicago from 1894-1904, Dewey chaired the Department of Philosophy, (which included psychology), the Department of Pedagogy, and the Laboratory School. He was also socially active, addressing, along with his wife, his colleagues, (including James Hayden Tufts and George Herbert Mead), and social reformers like Jane Addams of Hull House, the educational and political troubles of Chicago.

Disputes with the university administration about the process of integrating the Laboratory school into the School of Education, and particularly about the continuing employment of Mrs. Dewey as principal, led to Dewey's resignation from the University in 1904. Because of his growing prominence as a philosophical figure, Dewey was able to secure a position at Columbia University in New York City, where he taught from 1905-1930 and served in an emeritus status until the end of the decade.

Toward the end of his active teaching career and during his nine years as emeritus professor beginning in mid-1930, Dewey produced what were to become his best-known works, including: the revised edition of Experience and Nature(1929), The Quest for Certainty (1929), the revised editions of Dewey' and Tuft's Ethics (1932), and of his own How We Think (1932), and Art As Experience (1934), A Common Faith (1934), and Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (1938).

During his Columbia years, Dewey rose to a position of unequaled prominence in the philosophical profession. He was President of the American Philosophical Association, (Eastern Division), in 1905, and offered such prestigious lecture series as the Carus Lectures to the American Philosophical Association in New York City (1922), the Gifford Lectures at Edinburgh (1929), the William James Lectures at Harvard (1931), and the Terry Lectures at Yale (1934). Dewey also traveled widely and lectured in such countries as Japan (1919), China (1919-1921), Turkey (1924), Mexico (1926), and the Soviet Union (1928).

This transition, from the traditional university to the German-inspired scientific-inquiry model laid the groundwork for Dewey's success in the field of progressive education. Progressive education is the concept of teaching in which the individual is viewed as the most important figure in understanding how organizations work and what reason or logic must come to mean in a civilized society (wiles). Progressive education also came to refer to educational practices that fostered individuality, free activity, and learning through experience. Dewey felt that, "Above all, (educators) should know how to utilize the surroundings, physical and social, that exist so as to extract from them all that they have to contribute to building up experiences that are worth while" (?).

The founder of the New School for Social Research in New York City, Dewey was a leader in the drive for alternative/innovative schools, with a cooperative learning base and experience as the mode and mark of a child's work. The procedure he championed recognized that:" 1. Learning is a growth process, not merely the acquisition of knowledge; 2. Schools should be concerned with children's growth, physical, emotional, social, as well as intellectual; 3. Schools should be genuinely adapted to children's total needs at each stage in their development" (Christian Conscience). The curriculum of the schools was organized so that it would, among other things, give the child opportunities for creative work in music, dancing, drama, painting, literature, and sculpture, as an integral part of the school day. (Christian Conscience).

Dewey tied almost all aspects of his life into the concepts of pragmatism and democracy. He felt that the cradle of American political democracy, small closely-knit communities, were diminishing and being replaced by loser associations and a larger nation that is community in name only. "For Dewey, freedom and democracy are not given and complete conditions, but are achieved and worked for results. The progress toward social ends is a social progress, not an economic progress. It requires social means, social instruments, socially tested theories and hypotheses, education and the like" (Ziniewicz). Dewey also cites the tendency of Americans to use old-fashioned social ideals and solutions when encountering current problems as a predominant obstacle facing Americans today.

Throughout his career, but, especially after his retirement from teaching, Dewey was a major figure in America's attempts to address its social and political ills. He passed away on June 1, 1952 in New York City.

The possibility of a Faustian bargain doesn't seem to be present in the circumstance of Dewey. By all accounts he seems to have been a friendly, admirable person. The ten-year cycle has also proven faulty in evaluating Dewey's creativity. His best-known works seemed to originate at close intervals. He does not seem to have been a prodigy, although he performed well in school. He was very self-confident, unconventional, hardworking, and committed obsessively to his work. These characteristics, however, do not seem to be inseparable from the characteristics of egotism, narcissism, and egocentrism, as Dewey does not seem to have exhibited them to a significant extent.

The contradictions apparent in Gardner's model when applied to individuals leads me to believe that his model is a very useful philosophical starting point in evaluating creativity and intelligence. Unfortuneatley, though, it seems to be only that. Many of the characteristics that Gardner lists as evidence of a highly creative person seem to be the results of common sense. An excellent example of this is the characteristic of hailing from a small town or, when able, moving to a city to find people with the same interests. Another example is the characteristic of egoism among creative individuals. This also seems obvious, especially when dealing with the individuals he has chosen, as they are all famous and recognized worldwide for their achievements.

On the whole I do not agree with Gardner's model, and I believe that it is somehow wrong to stereotype and dissect people to the extent that he has. But hey, maybe that's why I'm not an psychology or phyciatry major.