Published: February 1, 1995

Looking For John Dewey

In 1896, John Dewey, the famous American philosopher of democracy and education, founded the University of Chicago's Laboratory School--an experimental school of "intelligent inquiry'' for faculty sons and daughters.

Some 75 years later, in 1970, when Philip Jackson became director of the school, there was nary a sign that Dewey had ever been there--no plaque at the entrance, no portrait in an office, no classroom bearing his name. To rectify the situation, Jackson rescued a bust of Dewey from a wrecker's ball and placed it in the director's office. A few years later, Jackson left the Laboratory School to take a post at the University of Chicago. When he returned to the Lab School in 1982 for a conference memorializing the

30th anniversary of Dewey's death, the bust was gone from his old office and was nowhere to be found. After a two-day search, Jackson located it in the office of a secretary who, unable to stand Dewey's "stare,'' had turned the...