John Dewey was born in Vermont in 1859, forty weeks after the death of an older brother who shared his name, and began his career as a grade school teacher who was miserable at the job. This episode traces how that failure drove him to question how humans actually learn, leading to his 1896 reflex arc paper that replaced the pinball-machine model of stimulus and response with a continuous feedback loop, and founded functional psychology, all while he himself was so tone-deaf that a student called him allergic to music.

The hosts follow him to the University of Chicago laboratory school, where pragmatism was tested with real students planting gardens and building planter boxes, then to his two years lecturing across China during the May Fourth Movement, his cool reception from the architects of apartheid in South Africa, his famous debate wi ...