When, as a young instructor, John Dewey came to the University of Michigan in 1889 he moved into a large and dignified house on a street shaded by tall oaks and open to the sun only in the late afternoons of autumn. Today the street has changed. The sun shines in implacably all through the summer and the wind catches up the dirt and refuse of the encroaching campus business district and drifts them into anarchic heaps. The house, once spacious and ample, has been cut up into mean and dilapidated apartments and the lower story has been converted into a Beer-Vault. Pragmatism, naturalism and the democratic process have undone the memory which even poor poets and philosophers deserve of their fellow men.
John Dewey—“ . . charmed circle of hazardous simplifications and distortions.”
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