Excellent content, but I found Dewey's writing style heavy going.

Being a younger teacher and rather liberal by nature, I have already learned, experienced, and practiced much of what Dewey had to say in this text. But after reading this text, I better understand much of my more confused and chaotic philosophy.

For me the foundation of the text and the philosophy is the concept that students need to develop knowledge through experience, to have some control over their learning, and to not be subjected to the traditional "teacher as repository of knowledge" form of education. I have always agreed with this, but after teaching for a few years, I found the often-touted alternate of complete student freedom completely impractical. Luckily, in Experience and Education, Dewey continually stresses the importance of not fleshing out the progressive philosophy of education in reaction against the traditional. He argues that an educational philosophy needs to build upon itself and its own ideas and not just be a negative of the philosophy which came before. In this light, Dewey has the instructor as a participant and facilitator in the educational process, not as an observer.

Okay so maybe a review of the actual book instead of my thoughts on the ideas within it.... I found the text well organized and the ideas within it easily accessible due to the use of real life analogies. This is not your impractical, overly wordy, impossible to comprehend statement of philosophy. In keeping with his philosophy of education, Dewey uses recognizable experiences of the reader to instruct the reader.

If you are an educator, a student, a parent, or just interested in education, I highly recommend this book. ( )

since I entered Library and got an introduction of John Melvil Dewey I was very interested in him and thought that he was the cause of millions of people to be majored in several subjects from his classification system.........!