John Dewey Thinking In Education Analysis

John Dewey is an arguably the most influential thinker on education in the twentieth century. He wrote a book “Thinking in education”, where he described thinking as an experience. According to Merriam-Webster dictionary, thinking is an internal mental process that uses information as input, integrates that information into the previous learned material and the result may be knowledge. Experience is practical knowledge, skill, or practice derived from direct observation or participation in events or in a particular activity. John Dewey was an advocate of practical education and supported the long term effect rather than short one. He considered that the educational system is outdated and in the first paragraph of “Thinking in education”, Dewey

He was a pragmatist who was interested in results and in the usefulness of thinking process. The innocent-sounding sentence “Thinking is experienced” contains much of Dewey’s basic theory of education, which implies working from concrete experience toward ideas that can be converted back into a new concrete experience (Jacobus 299). This is what happens when a child at first begins to build with blocks, and it is equally what happens when a scientific man in his laboratory begins to experiment with unfamiliar objects. Intelligence must help us to cope with the difficulties, or convert an uncertain or questionable situation in a certainly solved one. This situation Dewey calls as a problem solving. For this situation is characterized by a feeling of embarrassment in front of the problem. Dewey wanted students to learn through experience and to think and reflect critically on their experience. Students need to learn practical, pragmatic daily life skills in order to build a better society. “Good education should have both a societal purpose and purpose for the individual student” (Dewey Chapter 12). Once we have a theory of experience, then as educators, we can organize our subject matter progressively in a way that it takes account of students ' past experiences, and then provides them with experiences which will help to open up, rather than shut down, a person 's access to future growth experiences, thereby expanding the person 's likely contribution to society. Thinking and experience go hand-in-hand and they are interdependent. They work together as two parts of a process. Experience is not an object known, but rather an action performed. Math could be learned via learning proportions in cooking or figuring out how long I would take to get from one place to another by mule. As an example, we can take math classes during school or university years. At these lessons, we often had a