Human Events asked conservative scholars and policy types to rank the 10 most harmful books of the 19th and 20th Centuries. Some obvious picks, Mein Kampf, for instance, and Marx gets two spots. But Dewey’s Democracy and Education checks in at #5?
Sure, Dewey’s ideas have been abused over the years, but it’s hard to argue the book itself was all that harmful, and particularly on par with several of the books on this list. And presumably conservatives should be more outraged about other Dewey works…but wait…it’s not really about Dewey, it’s about Clinton! They blame Dewey for the “Clinton generation.” Guess it would have just been too obvious to put “My Life” on the list…
Thanks to reader LC – who Eduwonk didn’t have pegged as a Human Events reader – for sending this along.
Update: Jenny D. jumps in. Like Eduwonk she says don’t blame Dewey for what others did with his ideas, but she says do blame him for not doing more to rein it in…