"The theories of John Dewey (1859-1952)i philosopher and educator, have had a tremendous impact on generations of thinkers. Dewey viewed life as a continuously reconstructive process, with experience and knowledge building on each other. He believed that learning is more than the amassing and retention of information; learning is learning how to think. Thinking is not something abtsract; it is aliving process that starts when old habits meet new situations.
For Dewey, experience cannot be separated from nature because all experience is rooted in nature. Nature is what we experience: air, stones, plants, diseases, pleasure, and suffering. Dewey believed that experience is an interaction between what a person already knows and person's present situation. Previous knowledge of nature interacts with the present environment, and together they lead to new knowledge that in turn will influence future experience.
Dewey asserted that experience is central to education; however, experience cannot be equated with education because all experiences are not necessarily educative. Experience is educative only when it contributes to the growth of the individual. It can be miseducative if it distorts the growth of further experience. It is the quality of experience that matters. Thus, productive experience is both the means and the goal od education.
Dewey felt that education should be problem-centered and interdisciplinary rather than subject-centered and fragmented. The methods and curricula of education must take the cdild's growth the central concern. Furthermore, truly progressive education must involve the participation of the learner in direction the learning experience."
"Two American philosophers, William James and John Dewey, developed very influential theories about how we think and learn. Both believed that truth of any idea is a function of its usefulness and that experience is central to learning.
William James (1842-1910) was a philosopher and psychologist who believed that truth is not absolute and unchangeable; rather, it is made in actual, real-life events. In a person's life, there are experiences that have meaning and truth for that person. Truth cannot be separated from experience, and in order to understand truth, we have to study experience itself. Thus, for James, human experience should be the primary subject of study, and he called upon thinkers to concentrate on experience instead of essences, abstractions, or universal laws.
James focused on what he called the stream of experience, the sequential course of events in our lives. He belived that human consciousness is a stream of thoughts and feelings, and that this stream of consciousness is always going on, whether we are awake or asleep. The stream consists of very complex waves of bodily sensations, desires and aversions, memories of past experiences, and determinations of the will. One wave dissolves into another gradually, like the ripples of water in a river.
In James's theory, thought and experience are connected. Incoming waves of thought flow in next to outgoing waves of previous experience and thus become associated with each other. An incoming thought is workable only if it is meaningful and can be associated with something already in the person's mind. James's theory supports later theories of associative learning, which assert that new learning involves activating previous learning to find hooks on which to hang new information. To be continued..."