John Dewey on education

Five points on Dewey as an educational theorist.

1. Dewey tells us that the key intellectual purpose of education is the development of reflective or critical thinking as a skill and a habit. Even without decoding the adjectives, we can see that the emphasis here is going to be on THINKING, an activity, not a passive body of knowledge that has to be passed along like a family heirloom.

2. But let us get into the adjectives. Reflective thinking is the habit of actively, persistently and carefully considering any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the grounds that support it, those that suggests doubt, and the further conclusions to which it would lead it adopted.

3. Memorizing data so that one can recite it back again on command is not reflective thinking. It has its uses, but it should be some distance from the center of our thinking about thinking, that is, from a system of education.

4. Dewey was actually a critic of the "child-centered approach" to education, though he is sometimes sloppily identified with it. See “My Pedagogic Creed” 1897. He wasn’t in favor of a curriculum-centered approach either. He called the first centering [by, say, Montessori] the “romantic” approach and the second centering the “traditionalist” approach and his own view “interactional.”

5. In essence, his own view is that the classroom must be a positive learning community, under adult supervision but without any effort at a unilateral flow of knowledge. The notion of community, a microcosm of the broader communities outside the doors, is important here.

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