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The basic concept & method of Educator Dewey derives with brutal logic from a major premise, a definition. He postulates:
"Education: It is that reconstruction or reorganization of experience which adds to the meaning of experience, and which increases ability to direct the course of subsequent experience."
In other words: learning should mean discovering how to do. The element of "discovery" is held high if not paramount by Educator Dewey. He declares: "While immature students will not make discoveries from the standpoint of advanced students, they make them from their own standpoint whenever there is genuine learning."
Pupils, then must be "encouraged to utilize their own peculiarities of response to subject matter." They must not learn by rote. In disparaging this latter method, which he finds still all too prevalent Dr. Dewey has said: "Much work in [an ordi-nary] school consists in setting up rules by which pupils are to act of such a sort that even after pupils have acted they are not led to see the connection between the result—say the answer—and the method pursued. So far as they are concerned, the whole thing is a trick and a kind of miracle."
To Deweyites it is clear that to teach children formulae by rote is almost as ridiculous as teaching them the incantations of medieval wizards. The schoolroom must be a place where the child is intelligently encouraged to dynamically project its ego in discovering how to do.
Already, of course, numerous fruits of Professor Dewey's labors are to be seen, green or half ripened, in the more progressive elementary schools of America, Europe, and certain restricted areas of Asia. The great adventure still looming before the Second Confucius is to persuade fellow educators, parents and taxpayers that the "discovery method" can be applied to successively more advanced classes, and will.not degenerate under incompetent teachers into merely "letting the students do whatever they please."
*Author of the widely popular Travel Diary of a Philosopher & The Book of Marriage.
*Convenient is the new one volume The Philosophy of John Dewey, an able selection. (Holt, $4.00.)