Experience and Education, 60th Anniversary EditionSynopsis: Experience and Education is the best concise statement on education ever published by John Dewey, the man acknowledged to be the preeminent educational theorist of the twentieth century. Written more than two decades after Democracy and Education (Dewey's most comprehensive statement of his position in educational philosophy), this book demonstrates how Dewey reformulated his ideas as a result of his intervening experience with the progressive schools and in the light of the criticisms his theories had received. Analyzing both "traditional" and "progressive" education, Dr Dewey here insists that neither the old nor the new education is adequate and that each is miseducative because neither of them applies the principles of a carefully developed philosophy of experience. Many pages of this volume illustrate Dr Dewey's ideas for a philosophy of experience and its relation to education. He particularly urges that all teachers and educators looking for a new movement in education should think in terms of the deepen and larger issues of education rather than in terms of some divisive "ism" about education, even such an "ism" as "progressivism." His philosophy, here expressed in its most essential, most readable form, predicates an American educational system that respects all sources of experience, on that offers a true learning situation that is both historical and social, both orderly and dynamic. Originally delivered as a lecture at a 1938 conference of Kappa Delta Pi, this 60th anniversary edition includes a summary of the key point next to each paragraph, plus critical commentary written by preeminent scholars. |
