John Dewey ─ The Middle Works, 1899-1924

John Dewey’s best-known and still-popular classic, Democracy and Educa-tion, is presented here as a new edition in Volume 9 of the Middle Works. Sidney Hook, who wrote the introduction to this volume, describes Democracy and Education: “It illuminates directly or indirectly all the basic issues that are cen-tral today to the concerns of intelligent educators. . . . It throws light on sev-eral obscure corners in Dewey’s general philosophy in a vigorous, simple prose style often absent in his more technical writings. And it is the only work in any field originally published as a textbook that has not merely acquired the status of a classic, but has become the one book that no student concerned with the phi-losophy of education today should leave unread.” Dewey said in 1930 that De-mocracy and Education, “was for many years the one [book] in which my philos-ophy . . . was most fully expounded.”

Sidney Hook, protege, colleague, and friend of John Dewey, is Senior Re-search Fellow at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace.

Jo Ann Boydston, General Editor of the Middle Works, is Director of the Center for Dewey Studies at Southern Illinois Univer-sity at Carbondale.