John Dewey's Visits to Hawai'i.

one of the foremost “university extensionists...a man of great executive ability...just the man to set up a structure already started and push it forward.”4 Dewey’s celebrity as an educator and lecturer, it was opined, would attract a wide audience, and the teachers who were attending summer school in the same building would especially benefit from his ideas on the life of the child. In order to accommodate the teachers, therefore, the Honolulu High School extension classes were held on Tuesday and Friday evenings and designed to be continuous with the teachers’ summer school. Dewey was preceded as an extension lecturer by Henry W. Rolfe who had arrived in Honolulu in April, 1899, to teach the first set of university extension courses. Rolfe’s visit overlapped with the Deweys’ stay by about one week and the two men seemed to know and like each other well.5 Rolfe was a professor of English literature at the University of Chicago and a “bright and brilliant lecturer.”6 Rolfe’s first extension talks were very popular and well attended, notably the first one which attracted a large and diverse group composed of eager students and prominent persons. The Pacific Commercial Advertiser reported that “among the listeners were those to whom the discourse brought fond recollections of happy days; and there were many to whom a university education had been denied and who were anxious to take advantage of what is proving an admirable substitute.”7 Rolfe’s first university extension course certainly attracted some illustrious persons. One group represented the University Club—an all-male club whose members included President Dole, Minister Mott-Smith, Chief Justice Judd, Judge Frear, and Professor Hosmer of Oahu College, who were there to lend their imprimatur to Rolfe’s course. The University Club, established in 1896 on the model of prestigious mens’ clubs of the period, was a select assembly of Hawai‘i-based university graduates.8 Generally its function appears to have been devoted to bi-annual banquets, to which were added the diversion of after-dinner speeches; but shortly after Dewey’s arrived the club John Dewey visited Hawai‘i on three separate occasions. Of all three trips, by far the most important, as far as Dewey’s influence on education in Hawai‘i is concerned, was in 1899 when he came with his wife, Alice Chipman Dewey, to help launch the University Extension program in Honolulu. Dewey gave two sets of extension lectures. The first set, entitled “The Life of the Child,” was composed of five lectures; the second was a set of four lectures on the topic of nineteenth century thought. The Deweys’ second trip was a very brief one—twenty years later, in 1919, during a brief stopover on their way to Japan and thence to China. It is possible that they made a similar stop on their return, in 1921, but there is no evidence of this in the Dewey correspondence.1 The final visit took place in 1951 when Dewey was ninety-one years old and in poor health. Indeed, Dewey’s health appears to have been one of the main reasons for his visit, in which he was accompanied by his second wife, Roberta Lowitz Grant, and their two adopted children, Adrienne and John Jr.