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 ed...