Outline the work of Dewey and analyse how he has influenced or will influence your practice
Arguably one of the most influential educational philosophers of the twentieth century, John Dewey has been both lauded and criticised for the ideas and beliefs put forth during the course of his long and distinguished career. As Noddings states, he has been “revered, castigated, admired and ridiculed” (2011, p. 24). There are those who believe that his particular brand of the way in which children should be taught is unpractical and detrimental to the moral and intellectual development of children, and others who firmly believe in the power of the his views – that all education is essentially growth, and that this growth comes from adaptation and change from the result of experience.
In order to understand the position that Dewey was coming from, we must first consider the context into which these ideas arose. Debate surrounding the nature of education, who it should be educated and why, has taken place for centuries. Philosophical theorists such as Aristotle and Plato believed that we must look firstly at the needs of society, and develop our systems and systems of education to serve
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Rather, knowledge is something that we develop in order to live our lives, to solve the problems that we face, and to make sense of the world in which we live. This school of thought became known as instrumentalism, and became the basis on which Dewey built his theories of education (Dewey, 1938). In this context, it is senseless to break down knowledge into different categories and to educate people accordingly. If knowledge is something that arises out of our natural drive to problem solve in order to navigate our world and lives, then it should not be treated as a commodity that can be divvied out and applied as a way of