Experience & Education by John Dewey

It has been 79 years since Dewey wrote Experience & Education and yet if I simply put into practice the ideas he describes in this very short book; I'd be considered a radical teacher, a maverick outside the usual educational bounds.

"The educator is responsible for a knowledge of individuals and for a knowledge of subject-matter that will enable activities to be selected which lend themselves to social organization, an organization in which all individuals have an opportunity to contribute something,and in which the activities in which all participate are the chief carrier of control." pg. 56

“[O]nce more, it is part of the educator’s responsibility to see equally to two things: First, that the problem grows out of the conditions of the experience being had in the present, and that it is within the range of the capacity of students; and, secondly, that it is such that it arouses in the learner an active quest for information and for production of new ideas.” Pg. 79

“What avail is it to win prescribed amounts of information about geography and history, to win ability to read and write, if in the process the individual loses his own soul: loses his appreciation of things worth while, of the values to which these things are relative; if he loses desire to apply what he has learned and, above all, loses the ability to extract meaning from his future experiences as they occur?” pg. 49