John Dewey

The great educational theorist's most concise statement of his ideas about the needs, the problems, and the possibilities of education--written after his experience with the progressive schools and in the light of the criticisms his theories received -- from cover.

Experience And Education

Nelson Zagalo

This is a very interesting book from Dewey because it was written two decades after his first propositions for a new education (Democracy and Education, 1916), and a decade after some schools started to implement his ideas. Here Dewey had the opportunity to analyse what went good and what went bad.

Thus the goal of the book is not to defend progressive against conservative, but to compare both systems in place. Dewey even admits some mea culpa here and there for some of the most naif ideas, but in general Dewey sticks with his main proposition, which in parts resumes with a lack of arguments. One of it appears in the opposition between the subject matter and the present real world matter. Dewey fails to demonstrate how teachers and school system can work around this problem, proposing then a system dependent on the teacher improvisation.

With this I’m not attacking Dewey, neither his progressist approaches. We are strongly in debt of Dewey ideas, because he was responsible for a lot of the biggest changes that have been introduced in the school system as we know it today. We can never forget that in order to convince the status quo for the need of a revolution he had to push harder, he was battling against a giant accommodated. With time and experimentation we had the possibility to produce empirical data and understand what could work best, and what should be discarded. The main problem with some of his ideas, presented at that time, is that we still have some progressists living today, that use Dewey as the sacred progressist bible defending his principles even after its failures have been demonstrated. Last week I’ve a read a book from one of these so called progressists, Roger Schank “Teaching Minds: How Cognitive Science Can Save Our Schools” http://virtual-illusion.blogspot.pt/2...

Apart all this I want to say that the essence of Dewey ideas are still valid and true today. His defence of Experience as the centre of school system is what we still need to pursue and fight to improve our schools. Dewey defends in this book two central criteria for it: Continuum and Interaction. For the continuum is talking about the need to connect previous experiences with present experiences of the children, as the need to connect the school reality with the real world reality, creating situations of pure experiential continuum. For the interaction he is talking about the need for a peer relation between teacher and student, a relation that permits true communication, with efficient knowledge growing as the interaction between school matters and real world needs.

Even if I defend his main points we should always read Dewey taking into account all science produced after him, from the education area but even more from the cognitive sciences domains. We cannot these days work a subject as relevant as the education of our children without taking notice of the research and empiria produced throughout the last decades.

Ruth Parker 

I enjoy reading about John Dewey’s theories and ideas. While some are of course outdated and perhaps have been disproven as effective educational theories and practices, his ideas and advice to teachers still stands strong. 
A great read for those in education, interested in education or with children of their own.