EDPS 210 Lecture 19: Dewey- Experience and thinking
28 Mar 2017
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Document Summary
Can be understood that it includes an active and a passive element combined: active. Experience is trying: passive is undergoing, connection between them gives value to experience. Learn something: not experience when child sticks finger into flame, but the feelings and fast movement that comes along with it. Two conclusions important for education: experience is primarily an active-passive affair. Not primarily cognitive: the measure of the value of an experience lies in the perception of relationships or continuities to which it leads up. Pupil has come to mean one who is engaged not in having fruitful experiences but in absorbing knowledge directly. Bodily activity becomes an intruder: mental activity becomes a distraction. Chief source of the problem of discipline in schools is that the teacher has to spend the larger part of the time in suppressing the bodily activities. Result is a mechanical use of the bodily activities which have to be employed.
