John Dewey Research Paper

Jadeah Norris

John Dewey was an American philosopher and educator, who has contributed immensely to the development of educational thinking in the twentieth century. His concern with interaction, experience, and interest in community were brought together to form a highly suggestive educative form. Within this form there were many ideas posed on what makes an education system great some of which I agree with and others which I do not.

When discussing John Dewey's ideas on education I think that there are many great ideas in his theories. I like that John Dewey thought that memorization and regurgitation of facts wasn’t the best way to teach students, he thought that hands on education was the best way to go and students learned better

In my opinion, a theory on education should be able to apply to any situation. Dewey thought that the home life should be incorporated into the school life but how does that work for kids who are less fortunate and come from broken homes. If a child was being neglected at home or abused or under the watch of incompetent parents who don’t care about their child's education in the least bit how would that fit into his system. I think this idea would work for a student who had supportive parents that are very active in their child's life. I think that this could have been a good idea but needed to be adapted into an idea that could apply to everyone. Another idea that Dewey proposed was experience should be the main way for a student to learn. Although hands on is definitely a great way for students to really absorb the knowledge they are learning, but a child cannot possibly discover and do everything they come across while learning. I think eventually students will need to use the act of memorization of information or facts to learn about other things. You can learn some things from experience like measuring for baking in math but there's no possible way to learn calculus from experience. With the hands-on approach I think that first, the student should learn a foundation of knowledge, from a textbook, and then they can go out and experiment and apply that knowledge to real everyday situations. In a classroom based on the ideas of john Dewey you would see a teacher giving background information on the subject but you are also likely to see kids in groups talking amongst themselves bouncing off ideas of each other. Although this helps children learn from one another I think that the teacher should be more involved in their discussions to make sure the discussion is moving in the right