John Dewey's Influence On The Classroom

John Dewey (1859-1952), was a philosopher and educator who changed the normal schooling conventions throughout his career, lifetime and beyond. Dewey strongly influenced the design of innovative educational approaches to create a democratic learning environment. Examples of these democratic strategies are demonstrated through current day discovery and experiential learning methods undertaken by teachers globally. The idea behind these approaches is to allow transmission to occur through communication. For John Dewey, education and democracy are intimately connected. Dewey’s philosophy of democratic education was, potentially, influenced by his Early life and Education, Relationships and Books e.g. Darwin.

Early life and Education

John Dewey

Alice was orphaned as a young child and was raised to be fiercely independent, self-reliant and carried disdain for social conventions. Alice taught for many years in Michigan schools before meeting Dewey in 1884. Before Dewey met Alice, he was described as being ‘cold, impersonal, psychological, sphinx like, anomalous and petrifying to flunkers’ (The Cambridge Companion to Dewey, 2010). This description of Dewey’s personality may have been a factor in the type of research he was exploring at the time. It could be presumed that prior to meeting Alice; he hadn’t been exposed to other factors. Alice stirred a huge change in Dewey. Alice’s social concern ‘liberated’ Dewey. Alice influenced Dewey to focus on the problems of men rather than the problems of philosophers. Before their marriage, there had been no mention of ‘democracy’ in his writing. Upon developing his theories, Dewey wrote a book entitled Democracy and Education which defined democracy as a way of defining culture. Dewey and Alice viewed democracy as a way of government that allows for the members of society to enjoy freedom in a well organized civilization. This sharing and collaboration was the basis for a natural educative process (lecture notes, 2016). It is clear to see the relationship between Alice and John developed his outlook, extended his knowledge and areas of research which hadn’t been explored prior to their