How Did John Dewey Influence Education

John Dewey, an American philosopher, psychologist, educator, social critic and political activist. When he was a teenager, he started teaching at a private school in Vermont. During his free time, he would read philosophical treatises and discuss them with his former teacher. As his interests grew in philosophy, Dewey went off about teaching at the private school and onto studying philosophy and psychology at John Hopkins. George Sylvester Morris and G. Stanley Hall were among the teachers there who influenced him the most (Biography.com). As he believed that education should be based on the principle of learning through doing, his ideas became been influential in education and social reform. Dewey was one of the primary figures associated
with the philosophy of Pragmatism, which is “a philosophical movement that includes those who claim that an ideology or proposition is true if it works satisfactorily, that meaning of a proposition is to be found in the practical consequences of accepting it, and that unpractical ideas are to be rejected” (Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy). It was originated in the United States during the nineteenth century. The ideals of Pragmatism slowly changed when the progressive movement in the twentieth century begins. And by the time of the progressive movement, Dewey’s experiment in education had caught attention by many teachers at every level of the education system. The new knowledge on education was radical, but it also enlarged the view of childhood learning. Dewey became the leading proponent for Progressive Education, and one of his ideas was that the school should improve the way of life of our citizens through experiencing freedom and democracy in schools.