John Dewey Thinking In Education Analysis

There is a struggle within the educational system on how best to reach their students. According to John Dewey, a student learns through the process of experiential lessons. This experience is created by hands-on learning. In his essay Thinking in Education, Dewey believes that thinking is a necessary process for learning. This may seem like an obvious statement, but what he means by this is, a student needs to be able to apply, manipulate, discover, create or touch in order to begin the thinking process. Where the child works through it, not simply because he/she is copying the teacher, but because the student is involved in the creative process, they can now apply this lesson to themselves and are now engaged in finding the solution. The student needs to be able to apply what is being taught, so that the learning process can become intelligent learning and not just rote information. This type of learning will build within a child the ability to be a critical thinker in

Our educational system has strict goals when it comes to teaching. They have to teach within the confines of the state requirements for those achievements. Sometimes meeting those goals get in the way of their true teaching ability. Being required to work with students out of a workbook and solving problem after problem in the same fashion does not always constitute learning. Neither does copying from a white board and thinking the student is committing this information to memory. Another struggle in the classroom is teachers wanting minimal interruption and asking that their students sit and be quiet. These teaching techniques can cause disengagement of the pupil in the classroom. All of these examples of teaching, dehumanizes the learning process. Expecting all students to learn from the same method and to standardize their achievements, like little robots, it leaves very little room for the unique learning qualities of the