Thoughts on John Dewey?
Pragmatism and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race
He really revolutionized education with the learning by doing approach.
No thoughts on him, but don't get me started on his brother, Don Jewey.>*Sound of raucous applause and laughter*Thank you, thank you I'll be here all night. Good to be here on /his/, great people here, except those haplogroup threads. I spent my entire life just assuming I was white, turns out according to that thread they were actually black, jewish, mongolian, and gay... so y'know typical polish.>*hysterical laughter*
>>18052996Charles Sanders Peirce was the one who founded Pragmatism. Dewey wasn't even part of the first wave of American Pragmatism, but rather of Instrumentalism, and really he was more of a philosopher of education and a writer on educational reform than a pure epistemologist, logician, or metaphysician, thus putting him closer to the political arena than to the lecture hall pulpit.Peirce did make some original contributions to logic and applied epistemology, especially to subjects like statistical inference and what later on became known as Boolean logic, but overall John Dewey's mindset was quite typical of a late 19th century/early 20th century American political progressive. Dewey fit squarely alongside people like Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Booker T. Washington, and had a mindset that saw education as a restless fiddling around with stuff, tinkering with "educational" toys, and other kinds of things of that sort, seeing grown young people and adults merely as large babies rather than as beings capable of a high degree of rational thinking, and although he did have some premonition of the negative aspects of trying to turn education into a "fun" experience, he was unable to imagine that people would, decades long after his death, try to turn every single educational activity into an "active", "fun" educational experience by claiming to follow his philosophy of education.I believe that experience is not always necessary to understand subjects, and that in many cases it may in fact hinder people from acquiring proper concepts by themselves due to misunderstandings that may arise from prior misconceptions, so therefore it is necessary to have clarity in both descriptions and examples, but not to have students expect that every single explanation must necessarily be followed by sensory stimulation.
