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John Dewey and Educational Reform
| Article
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19927 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1992 |
4,747 Words |
| Author
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John Bremer
John Bremer, a Cambridge philosopher and educator, writes
mostly on Plato. |
The philosophy of John Dewey is highly relevant to the current concerns about education, its failures, its successes, and its necessary reform. The most immediately pertinent works of Dewey are, of course, Democracy and Education (1916) and Experience and Education (1938), and although the former work is seventy-six years old and the latter more than fifty, we have yet to come to terms with the profundity of their thought.
Dewey was a well-trained, technical philosopher and made significant contributions to many branches of philosophy, specializing in logic and psychology in his early career. But he was also an active man, an action intellectual, who, as head of the philosophy department at the University of Chicago, insisted that pedagogy should be a separate department to educate education specialists. In addition to his duties as head of philosophy he became head of this new department, mandating that it undertake a program of "pedagogical discovery and experimentation" requiring its own special laboratory, a school in which new educational theories and practices could be tried and tested.
The famous laboratory school opened in 1896, and Dewey was intimately and actively engaged in its affairs. When Dewey moved to Columbia University in 1905, he took his educational interests with him and was well known for his work with Teachers College and the Lincoln School. His thoughts on education were not simply those of an academic. He had published The School and Society in 1899 and Moral principles in Education in 1909, but his most widely read educational works, How We Think (1910), a teacher's delight, and Interest and Effort in Education (1913), date from this period. But Democracy and Education and Experience and Education are the fullest statements of Dewey's educational views.
Democracy, Education, Experience
There are three terms--all contained in the titles of these two seminal works--that must be understood if we are to benefit from the assistance that Dewey affords us. They are, obviously enough, democracy, education, and experience. We use these words rather casually and informally, and so, on occasions, does Dewey himself, but they are really highly technical terms with quite precise meanings in his philosophical vocabulary. Before offering, mostly in Dewey's own words, an explication of their meaning, a moment must be spared for the simple conjunction repeated in both titles. The humble and common place "and" may not seem very important, but in Dewey it represents a true conjunction. To use a
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