Dewey's child-raising practices

One "liberated" practice that would surely have shocked their Ann Arbor neighbors, had they known of it, was alluded to much later in a letter by Dewey to W.E. Hocking. He told the somewhat genteel philosopher that "during the critical years of the sex-development of their children, Mrs. Dewey and he would go around the house in the nude." (Joseph Ratner believed that this was the reason the children talked about sex so freely.)

Jay Martin, The Education of John Dewey, 132-3.