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Brief Summary of Dewey's Life
John Dewey (1859 – 1952) was one of America’s early founders of pragmatism and debatably the most renowned American intellectual for the first half of the twentieth century, (Hildebrand, 2021). His theories and experiments on education had an international reach. He developed extensive and often systematic views in ethics, epistemology, logic, metaphysics, aesthetics, and the philosophy of religion (Hildebrand, 2021)
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Democracy of Education -1916
Dewey argued that education should be relevant to children’s environment and the skillsets they would need. As the American population appears increasingly subject to rhetorical manipulation and ideological extremism, Dewey imagines the possibility of education cultivating habits of mind which secure social changes without introducing disorder (Dewey, 2018) -
Experience and Nature - 1925
In 1925, Dewey published his views on Experience and Nature. Here he rejected the dichotomy between being and experience. He recommended that all things are susceptible to change and do change. That there is no stagnant being, and nature is constantly changing. Experience is not biased as the human mind is itself part of nature. Godfrey- Smith (2014) explains that Dewey “comes out of an idealist philosophical tradition, influenced by Hegel and the “St Louis Helegans.” -
Instrumentalism 1929
Instrumentalism was John Dewey's negation of the tradition's basic metaphysical framework. He argued that knowledge and logic are ways to adapt, survive, and thrive. While instrumentalism acknowledges sensation's contributions, it also insists upon the constructive power of reasoning. Hildebrand (2021) explained that instrumentalism utilized a Darwinian starting point to criticize and dissolve entrenched divisions between, for example, realism/idealism, and science/religion.