Read the following passage and mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the correct answer to each of the questions. The ideas of John Dewey, philosopher and educator, have influenced American thought for over one hundred years. Dewey was born in Vermont in 1859, and throughout his life, he kept the respect for experience, individuality, and fair play that shaped the character of the nineteenth–century Vermonter. He viewed his own life as a continuously reconstructive ...

Read the following passage and mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the

correct answer to each of the questions.

The ideas of John Dewey, philosopher and educator, have influenced American thought for over one hundred years. Dewey was born in Vermont in 1859, and throughout his life, he kept the respect for experience, individuality, and fair play that shaped the character of the nineteenth–century Vermonter. He viewed his own life as a continuously reconstructive process–with experience and knowledge building to each other.

By the 1930s, Dewey had simplified his theory of experience to its essence. As the intellectual leader of the progressive schools, he asserted that there was danger in rejecting the old unless the new was rooted in a correct idea of experience. He held that experience is an interaction between what a person already knows and the situation at hand. Previous knowledge interacting with the present environment influences future experience.

Dewey believed that experience could not be equated with education because all experiences are not necessarily educative. Experience is educative only when it contributes to the growth of the individual, but it can be miseducative if it distorts the growth of future experience. It is the quality of experience that matters. Thus, productive experience is both the means and the goal of education. Furthermore, since education is a social process, truly progressive education involves the participation of the learner in directing the learning experience.

During his long life, Dewey lectured and published prolifically. These writings were influential both during his lifetime and after his death at the age of ninety–two. He viewed his whole life as an experiment which would produce knowledge that would lead to the further experimentation. The range and diversity of Dewey’s writings and his influence on society place him among American’s great thinkers.

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