Sunday, November 08, 2009

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.

For Sabrina

I am thinking of you, and my darling I do want you so this evening.... Oh, sweetheart, you are the centre of everything, so that my being would be torn by its attraction to its centre, were you not the circumference of everything also. My own self, I love you---and it is hard to be without one's self. My own life, I love you---and it is hard to live without one's life. But darling you are my self and my life and so I can be and live.... Darling, how did you ever manage to do away with and put out of sight so thoroughly my old doing & my old thinking, and fill my self so full of you? [You] ... found a home for me, who had been homeless before, because I was always looking for you.
-- John Dewey to Alice Chipman, Christmas 1885, quoted in Jay Martin, The Education of John Dewey, pp. 91-2.
Sweetheart, I have found that I am only an abstractly subjective standpoint without you.
-- John Dewey to Alice Chipman, Christmas 1885 (?), quoted in Martin p. 103