Experience & Education

The great education theorist’s most lucid and concise statement on the needs, problems, and possibilities of education.

Experience and Education is the most lucid and concise statement on education ever published by John Dewey, the man acknowledged to be the pre-eminent educational theorist of the twentieth century. Written more than twenty years after his comprehensive work, Democracy and Education, it demonstrates how Dewey reformulated his ideas in light of his experience with progressive schools.

Analyzing both “traditional” and “progressive” education, Dr. Dewey here insists that neither is adequate because they each fail to apply the principles of a carefully developed philosophy of experience. Dewey goes on to illustrate his ideas for a philosophy of experience and its vital relation to education. He particularly urges that all teachers and educators should consider the larger issues of education rather than thinking in terms of some divisive “ism” —even one as high-minded as “progressivism.”

Dewey’s philosophy, here expressed in its most essential form, predicates an American educational system that respects all sources of experience, offering a true learning situation that is both historical and social, both orderly and dynamic.