Dewey Experience And Education Quotes

The most important attitude that can be formed is that of desire to go on learning.

We always live at the time we live and not at some other time, and only by extracting at each present time the full meaning of each present experience are we prepared for doing the same thing in the future.

There is no such thing as educational value in the abstract. The notion that some subjects and methods and that acquaintance with certain facts and truths possess educational value in and of themselves is the reason why traditional education reduced the material of education so largely to a diet of predigested materials.

I believe finally, that education must be conceived as a continuing reconstruction of experience; that the process and the goal of education are one and the same thing. —JOHN DEWEY

Collateral learning in the way of formation of enduring attitudes, of likes and dislikes, may be and often is much more important than the spelling lesson or lesson in geography or history that is learned.

As we have seen there is some kind of continuity in any case since every experience affects for better or worse the attitudes which help decide the quality of further experiences, by setting up certain preference and aversion, and making it easier or harder to act for this or that end.

I believe finally, that education must be conceived as a continuing reconstruction of experience; that the process and the goal of education are one and the same thing.

It is [the teacher's] business to be on the alert to see what attitudes and habitual tendencies are being created. In this direction he[sic] must, if he is an educator, be able to judge what attitudes are actually conducive to continued growth and what are detrimental. He must, in addition, have that sympathetic understanding of individuals as individuals which gives him an idea of what is actually going on in the minds of those who are learning.

If humanity has made some headway in realizing that the ultimate value of every institution is its distinctively human effect—its effect upon conscious experience—we may well believe that this lesson has been learned largely through dealings with the young.

believe finally, that education must be conceived as a continuing reconstruction of experience; that the process and the goal of education are one and the same thing. —JOHN DEWEY

A single course of studies for all progressive schools is out of the question; it would mean abandoning the fundamental principle of connection with life-experiences.

Except in dealing with commonplaces and catch phrases one has to assimilate, imaginatively, something of another's experience in order to tell him intelligently of one's own experience.

The scientific method is the only authentic means at our command for getting at the significance of our everyday experiences of the world in which we live...scientific method provides a working pattern of the way in which and conditions under which experiences are used to lead ever onward and outward.

A genuine purpose always starts with an impulse. Obstruction of the immediate execution of an impulse converts it into a desire. Nevertheless neither impulse nor desire is itself a purpose. A purpose is an end-view. That is, it involves foresight of the consequences which will result from acting upon impulse.

Preparation" is a treacherous idea. In a certain sense every experience should do something to prepare a person for later experiences of a deeper and more expansive quality. That is the very meaning of growth, continuity, reconstruction of experience. But it is a mistake to suppose that the mere acquisition of a certain amount of arithmetic, geography, history, etc., which is taught and studied because it may be useful at some time in the future, has this effect, and it is a mistake to suppose that acquisition of skills in reading and figuring will automatically constitute preparation for their right and effective use under conditions very unlike those in which they were acquired.

As formal teaching and training grow in extent, there is the danger of creating an undesirable split between the experience gained in more direct associations and what is acquired in school. This danger was never greater than at the present time, on account of the rapid growth in the last few centuries of knowledge and technical modes of skill.

Collateral learning in the way of formation of enduring attitudes, of likes and dislikes, may be and often is much more important than the spelling lesson or lesson in geography or history that is learned. For these attitudes are fundamentally what count in the future. The most important attitude that can be formed is that of desire to go on learning. If impetus in this direction is weakened instead of being intensified, something much more than mere lack of preparation takes place. The pupil is actually robbed of native capacities which otherwise would enable him [sic] to cope with the circumstances that he meets in the course of his life. We often see persons who have had little schooling and in whose case the absence of set schooling proves to be a positive asset. They have at least retained their native common sense and power of judgement, and its exercise in the actual conditions of living has given them the precious gift of ability to learn from the experiences they have.

I believe finally, that education must be conceived as a continuing reconstruction of experience; that the process and the goal of education are one and the same thing. —JOHN DEWEY I’m standing on the red railway car that sits abandoned next to the barn. The wind soars, whipping my hair across my face and pushing a chill down the open neck of my shirt. The gales are strong this close to the mountain, as if the peak itself is exhaling. Down below, the valley is peaceful, undisturbed. Meanwhile our farm dances: the heavy conifer trees sway slowly, while the sagebrush and thistles quiver,

There is, I think, no point in the philosophy of progressive education which is sounder than its emphasis upon the importance of the participation of the learner in the formation of the purposes which direct his [sic] activities in the learning process, just as there is no defect in traditional education greater than its failure to secure the active cooperation of the pupil in construction of the purposes involved in his studying.

The lesson for progressive education is that it requires in an urgent degree, a degree more pressing than was incumbent upon former innovators, a philosophy of education based upon a philosophy of experience. I remarked incidentally that the philosophy in question is, to paraphrase the saying of Lincoln about democracy, one of education of, by and for experience. No one of these words, of, by, or for, names anything which is self-evident. Each of them is a challenge to discover and put into operation a principle of order and organization which follows from understanding what educative experience signifies.

For some years now there has been considerable conflict in educational circles about what and how children should be taught. The old system was to serve two purposes: to discipline the mind and to provide young people with a background of knowledge about the past, history, philosophy, and the arts. More recently, the influence of Dewey has been powerful in effecting a change in orientation. It is not so important, according to this school, to provide the child with a background of general culture. The essential thing is to relate every fact learned to the tangible world around him. The purpose of his education is to explain to him the things he can feel and see and touch and experience in his daily life.

Learning “from direct experience,” a Harvard Business School study found, “can be more effective if coupled with reflection—that is, the intentional attempt to synthesize, abstract, and articulate the key lessons taught by experience.” The philosopher and educator John Dewey went a step further: “We do not learn from experience . . . we learn from reflecting on experience.

As an individual passes from one situation to another, his [sic] world, his environment, expands or contracts. He does not find himself living in another world but in a different part or aspect of one and the same world. What he has learned in the way of knowledge and skill in one situation becomes an instrument of understanding and dealing effectively with the situations which follow. The process goes on as long as life and learning continue. Otherwise the course of experience is disorderly, since the individual factor that enters into making an experience is split. A divided world, a world whose parts and aspects do not hang together, is at once a sign and a cause of a divided personality. When the splitting-up reaches a certain point we call the person insane. A fully integrated personality, on the other hand, exists only when successive experiences are integrated with one another. It can be built up only as a world of related objects is constructed.

121. George Bernard Shaw – Plays and Prefaces 122. Max Planck – Origin and Development of the Quantum Theory; Where Is Science Going?; Scientific Autobiography 123. Henri Bergson – Time and Free Will; Matter and Memory; Creative Evolution; The Two Sources of Morality and Religion 124. John Dewey – How We Think; Democracy and Education; Experience and Nature; Logic; the Theory of Inquiry 125. Alfred North Whitehead – An Introduction to Mathematics; Science and the Modern World; The Aims of Education and Other Essays; Adventures of Ideas 126. George Santayana – The Life of Reason; Skepticism and Animal Faith; Persons and Places 127. Vladimir Lenin – The State and Revo

We may take as our guide, here, John Dewey's observation that the content of a lesson is the least important thing about learning. As he wrote in Experience and Education, "Perhaps the greatest of all pedagogical fallacies is the notion that a person learns only what he is studying at the time. Collateral learning in the way of formation of enduring attitudes may be and often is more important than the spelling lesson, or the lesson in geography or history. For these attitudes are fundamentally what count in the future." In other words, the most important thing one learns is always something about *how* one learns. As Dewey wrote in another place, "We learn what we do.

Well known American education reformer John Dewey rightly said, "We do not learn from experience...we learn from reflecting on experience.

Dewey and the School’s Isolation from Life Even among Euro-Americans, similar approaches to cultural transmission remained common throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when formal schooling was little more than a supplement to the informal educational experiences from which children learned how to support themselves as farmers, tradespeople, homemakers, or industrial workers. As access to desirable jobs has become tied to high school and now college graduation, however, these contextually rich educational settings have given way to classrooms where learning is typically divorced from the lives children lead when they aren’t in

school. In the late 1890s John Dewey warned of this emerging disconnect in School and Society and sought in his own educational approach to recover the relationship between formal learning and community life that had been disrupted in most schools: From the standpoint of the child, the great waste in the school comes from his inability to utilize the experiences he gets outside the school in any complete and free way within the school itself; while, on the other hand, he is unable to apply in daily life what he is learning at school. That is the isolation of the school—its isolation from life. When the child gets into the schoolroom he has to put out of his mind a large part of the ideas, interests, and activities that predominate in his home and

neighborhood. So the school, being unable to utilize this everyday experience, sets painfully to work, on another tack and by a variety of means, to arouse in the child an interest in school studies. (Dewey, 1959, pp. 76–77) During Dewey’s tenure at the University of Chicago, he and his colleagues created a model of an educational process that sought to immerse children in those fundamental community activities from which the contemporary academic disciplines have emerged. Using such perennial vocations as gardening, cooking, carpentry, and clothing manufacture, students at the Laboratory School were drawn into the forms of problem-solving and investigation that led to the invention of biology, mathematics, chemistry,

For Rosseau, then, education would have to be a way not of instilling the ideals of civilization but rather of liberating the young from civilization and its evils. Much of the program he described in his didactic novel Emile is what he calls "negative education," an antidote and inoculation against the pervasive evils of civilization. It has come to be called "The Child's Charter"-a basis for modern child psychology. And it would be the prospectus and statement of principles for "progressive education" in the United States, led by John Dewey (1859-1952), who conceived it as a way of bringing democracy into the classroom (The School and Society, 1899; Democracy and Education, 1916). The movement attended tot he child's physical and emotional as well as his intellectual development, favored "learning by doing," and encouraged experimental and independent thinking. The teacher, then, aimed not at instilling a body of knowledge but at developing the pupil's own skill at learning from experience.

Traditional education tended to ignore the importance of personal impulse and desire as moving springs. But this is no reason why progressive education should identify impulse and desire with purpose and thereby pass lightly over the need for careful observation, for wide range of information, and for judgment is students are to share in the formation of the purposes which activate them

Strait-jacket and chain-gang procedures had to be done away with if there was to a chance for growth of individuals in the intellectual springs of freedom without which there is no assurance of genuine and continued normal growth.

We may take as our guide here John Dewey’s observation that the content of a lesson is the least important thing about learning. As he wrote in Experience and Education: “Perhaps the greatest of all pedagogical fallacies is the notion that a person learns only what he “is studying at the time. Collateral learning in the way of formation of enduring attitudes ... may be and often is more important than the spelling lesson or lesson in geography or history.... For these attitudes are fundamentally what count in the future.

The interaction of knowledge and skills with experience is key to learning.

Just because traditional education was a matter of routine in which the plans and programs were handed down from the past, it does not follow that progressive education is a matter of planless improvisation.

On the other hand, if an experience arouses curiosity, strengthens initiative, and sets up desires and purposes that are sufficiently intense to carry a person over dead places in the future, continuity works in a very different way. Every experience is a moving force.