John Dewey

Dewey argued that a school teaching children to sit still and repeat is training them for a society that no longer exists, and that democracy is less a form of government than a way of living together that has to be practised daily. Democracy and Education is the fullest statement of it. He set up a laboratory school in Chicago in 1896 to test the ideas rather than assert them, helped found the American Association of University Professors and the American Civil Liberties Union, and chaired the 1937 commission in Mexico that examined the Moscow trial charges against Trotsky and found them unproven. He wrote across logic, art, ethics and psychology, and died in 1952 at ninety-two.