John Dewey's Philosophy of Education

John Dewey's philosophy of education was influenced by the philosopher Georg Hegel and the scientist Charles Darwin. Hegel invented the term "dialectic" and applied it to his philosophy that the universe was a unified whole and needed to be known as such. Darwin believed that joining two things produced a better thing, a truer thing. Dewey borrowed the idea of a unified whole from Hegel and the idea of improvement by combination from Darwin. At the heart of Dewey's ideas is the notion of constant improvement, both that constant improvement is possible and how to attain it.

Dewey, like many of the more popular philosophers of the twentieth century, predicated his beliefs and philosophy on the assumption that Darwin was right when he extended microevolution (evolution of a species to different versions of the same species) to include macroevolution (evolution of a species into an altogether different species). If, indeed, humans are no different from animals except for their intelligence, then humans need the same training and control an animal needs to tame its instinct for dominance and destruction. While Dewey might thus be said to have made no actual theological statements in his philosophy since he was primarily concerned with education, he in fact made the most profound theological assumption in basing his philosophy on Darwin's atheism and evolution.

While teaching at the University of Michigan, Dewey found that pedagogical practices operated as they always had

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e have learned" (p. 9). Dewey adds the injunction to "exercise the senses as the powers by which strength is guided" (p. 9) and not for strength's sake alone. Dewey's model is very goal-oriented. That is, all activities are co-opted by his model to the aim of self-education. He saw his model of education versus the one then current (and for the most part still now also) as one of quality versus quantity. He describes other schools as emphasizing learning many facts and much information without the means of using any of it. He tried to have the students learn what it meant while learning the "it" and learn how to apply that meaning in their own lives: "The apparent ease with which children learn is their ruin. We fail to see that this very ease proves that they are not learning" (p. 9). Dewey's school tried to use methods he developed, and so he describes this and other schools he considers ideal in Schools of Tomorrow. Nature study and field geography are taught "almost entirely out of doors." The students "look at trees and flowers, ask questions about them, examine the differences in bark, leaves, and flowers, tell each other what they think, and use their books to answer questions that the trees and plants have sugges

Category: Psychology - J