The Story of Philosophy was preceded by a number of pamphlets in the Little Blue Books series of inexpensive worker education pamphlets. They proved so popular they were assembled into a single book and published in hardcover form by Simon & Schuster in 1926. Philosophers profiled are, in order: Plato, Aristotle, Francis Bacon, Baruch Spinoza (with a section on Descartes), Voltaire (with a section on Rousseau), Immanuel Kant (with a section on Hegel), Arthur Schopenhauer, Herbert Spencer, and Friedrich Nietzsche. The final two chapters are devoted to European and then American philosophers. Henri Bergson, Benedetto Croce, and Bertrand Russell are covered in the tenth,
John Dewey by providing the student with a limited set of skills and information to do a particular job. The works of John Dewey provide the most prolific examples of how this limited vocational view of education has been applied to both the K–12 public education system and to the teacher training schools who attempted to quickly produce proficient and practical teachers with a limited set of instructional and discipline-specific skills needed to meet the needs of the employer and demands of the workforce. In "The School and Society" (Dewey, 1899) and "Democracy of Education" (Dewey, 1916), Dewey claims that rather than