John Dewey and the Journals

Abstract

IF HE IS ALERT to avenues of advancement, an educator (a term here applied to all college teachers) will heed the dictum publish or perish. Indeed, if he is in the fullest sense of the word an educator, he will have developed or be developing ideas and information he wants to share with readers somewhere. Unpublished material is of little benefit to a waiting world; obviously, information must appear in print to help either the reader or the educator-writer. For a person who has information to communicate, the problem of finding readers cannot be considered acute today. The beginner, whether he considers himself a specialist or a generalist, should find a measure of encouragement in the simple fact that there are literally scores of publications available to him. The aspiring author may find still more encouragement in some of the specific details of the publishing career of John Dewey. A specialist in several fields, Dewey never restricted himself to the prestigious scholarly publications of limited readership. In a time when fewer journals existed than exist at present, Dewey's articles appeared in a total of 151 different periodicals. The journals were for him a means of communicating his ideas to a wide range of readers, and the diversity of the publications as well as of his material testifies to his credentials as an educator in the broad meaning of that term. It is illuminating to study the journal publications of a scholar whose career is now complete. Dewey's is a particularly valuable case in point as it was both long and rich: in a period of 70 years, he published 766 articles-or an average of almost eleven each year from 1882 to 1951.