Experience and Education

Summary

Experience and Education is a short book of eight chapters in which John Dewey, then nearly eighty, restates his philosophy of education and answers both its opponents and some of its followers. By the 1930s progressive education, often associated with Dewey's name, had become a broad movement in American schools, and critics charged it with neglecting knowledge, discipline and the inherited wisdom of the past. Dewey argues that the quarrel between traditional and progressive education has been framed as a false either-or. In Chapter 1 he describes traditional education: subject matter of information and skills worked out in the past, transmitted by teachers to pupils who are expected to be docile, receptive and obedient, with textbooks and rules as the chief means. Progressive education rejected this imposition from above in favor of expression, free activity and learning from experience. Dewey grants the progressive criticism but warns that rejecting the old is not enough; a new education needs a sound philosophy of experience, or it will merely react against tradition. Chapters 2 and 3 supply that philosophy. Not every experience is educative; some are mis-educative, arresting or distorting further growth by producing callousness, carelessness or narrow habits. Dewey offers two criteria for judging experiences. The principle of continuity holds that every experience takes something from those before it and modifies those that follow, so the educator must ask where an experience leads. The principle of interaction holds that experience arises from the meeting of a person's inner condition with an objective situation, which the teacher is responsible for arranging. The teacher must therefore know both the pupils and the world of things and people around them. Chapters 4 to 6 treat social control, freedom and purpose. Like children at a game, who accept rules because the rules belong to the activity, pupils can be governed by the shared work of the group rather than by the teacher's personal will, though the teacher remains its mature leader. The freedom that matters is freedom of intelligence, the power to form purposes and judge wisely, not mere freedom of movement or impulse. A genuine purpose grows out of impulse through observation, knowledge of what similar situations have meant, and judgment. Chapter 7 addresses the progressive weakness Dewey most regrets: the failure to organize subject matter. Experience must lead step by step from what pupils already know toward the ordered knowledge of the mature adult and of the sciences, and the scientific method is the best model of intelligent experience. Chapter 8 concludes that the issue is not old against new but what deserves the name of education. The book was published in 1938 by Macmillan as one of the Kappa Delta Pi Lecture Series. It is under copyright; the library stores no text.

Top Lessons

• Beyond either-or

  Dewey argues that the debate between traditional and progressive education has hardened into opposing slogans, and that each side defines itself against the other. He asks educators to think about what education actually requires rather than choosing a camp.

• Not every experience educates

  Dewey insists that experience can teach bad habits as well as good ones. An experience is educative only if it opens the way to richer future experience; one that leaves a person careless, callous or bored is mis-educative, however lively it seemed.

• Continuity and interaction

  Every experience carries forward into later ones, and every experience arises from a person meeting a particular situation. These two principles make the teacher responsible both for knowing the learner and for arranging the conditions of learning.

• Freedom as self-control

  Dewey distinguishes outward freedom of movement from the inner freedom of intelligence: the power to form purposes, weigh consequences and act on judgment. In his view the aim of education is the growth of this kind of self-control, not the removal of all restraint.

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Medical Lens

The book has no medical content. Its account of habit and of the growth of self-control draws on the functional psychology of Dewey's era, but it does not discuss illness, psychiatry or medicine.