Dewey observes that even in a "savage" tribe, the achievements of adults are far beyond what the immature members would be capable of if left to themselves.

Mere physical growing up and mastery of the bare necessities of subsistence will not suffice to reproduce the life of the group.

Dewey's ideas were never broadly and deeply integrated into the practices of American public schools, though some of his values and terms were widespread.

find it cumbersome that Dewey's philosophical anthropology, unlike Egan, Vico, Ernst Cassirer, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Nietzsche, does not account for the origin of thought of the modern mind in the aesthetic, more precisely the myth, but instead in the original occupations and industries of ancient people, and eventually in the history of science.

Language and its development, in Dewey's philosophical anthropology, have not a central role but are instead a consequence of the cognitive capacity.