Thinking in Education

“The most significant question which can be asked, accordingly, about any situation or experience proposed to induce learning is what quality of problem it involves” (p. 161).

The kitchen in our house when we purchased in 2009.

The Essentials of Method.

“…all which the school can or need do for pupils, so far as their minds are concerned (that is, leaving out certain specialized muscular abilities), is to develop their ability to think” (p. 159).
Since thinking is in itself a risk (chapter 11) and every thinker places some portion of an apparently stable world in jeopardy (E&N) those who wish for the world to remain for the most part as it is (is that the definition of conservatism?) run the risk of being jeopardized if students actually develop the ability to think.  This, I think, is one of Dewey’s core ideas, and possibly the single sentence (when fully realized) which makes this book dangerous to conservative academics.

“And skill obtained apart from thinking is not connected with any sense of the purposes for which it is to be used” (p. 159).
Another core issue, and I think one which is realized by the people who benefit economically from skilled labor, and is therefore lobbied for in public policy.

“The sole direct path to enduring improvement in the methods of instruction and learning consists in centering upon the conditions which exact, promote, and test thinking. Thinking is the method of intelligent learning, of learning that employs and rewards mind” (p. 159).

“…thinking is often regarded both in philosophic theory and in educational practice as something cut off from experience, and capable of being cultivated in isolation” (p. 160).

“What is here insisted upon is the necessity of an actual empirical situation as the initiating phase of thought. Experience is here taken as previously defined: trying to do something and having the thing perceptibly do something to one in return” (p. 160).

“But the first stage of contact with any new material, at whatever age of maturity, must inevitably be of the trial and error sort” (p. 160).

“Hence the first approach to any subject in school, if thought is to be aroused and not words acquired, should be as unscholastic as possible” (pp. 160-161).
Thinking begins before thought, with action and experience.  Unschoolastic experiences have the most potential to be thought about, rather than the “pseudo thought” which we get from words in theory (from text books and learning programs.)  But it seems so engrained in the culture of public school to have objectives and to waste no time in meeting them.  Unschoolastic experiences are hard to explain to administrators, but I think this mostly comes from the top down, say from people who benefit from a class of people who are not thinking, or even worse who have a series of “pseudo thoughts.” 

“And careful inspection of methods which are permanently successful in formal education… will reveal that they depend for their efficiency upon the fact that they go back to the type of the situation which causes reflection out of school in ordinary life. They give the pupils something to do, not something to learn; and the doing is of such a nature as to demand thinking, or the intentional noting of connections; learning naturally results” (p. 161) [emphasis mine].

“The most significant question which can be asked, accordingly, about any situation or experience proposed to induce learning is what quality of problem it involves” (p. 161).
Giving students something to do which demands thinking is the intentional act of making relevant problems for students, the quality of which curricular planning should be scrutinized.  Dewey offers a good rubric for planned experiences…

“…Is there anything but a problem?... Is it the pupil's own problem, or is it the teacher's or textbook's problem… Is the experience a personal thing of such a nature as inherently to stimulate and direct observation of the connections involved, and to lead to inference and its testing? Or is it imposed from without, and is the pupil's problem simply to meet the external requirement?” (pp. 161-162).
So it becomes difficult to plan for authentic problems for a group of students.  This is partly because…

“The physical equipment and arrangements of the average schoolroom are hostile to the existence of real situations of experience” (p. 162).

“No one has ever explained why children are so full of questions outside of the school (so that they pester grown-up persons if they get any encouragement), and the conspicuous absence of display of curiosity about the subject matter of school lessons” (p. 162).

“The material of thinking is not thoughts, but actions, facts, events, and the relations of things” (p. 163).

“A well-trained mind is one that has a maximum of resources behind it, so to speak, and that is accustomed to go over its past experiences to see what they yield” (p. 164).

“…it is a necessary part of education that one should acquire the ability to supplement the narrowness of his immediately personal experiences by utilizing the experiences of others… Most objectionable of all is the probability that others, the book or the teacher, will supply solutions ready-made, instead of giving material that the student has to adapt and apply to the question in hand for himself” (p. 164).
This citation hints a bit at our earlier discussions of the benefits of a social landscape.  But the caution Dewey gives us is apt: supply material, not solutions.  So often in the interest of “efficiency” we fail to heed this advice, and we don’t become more efficient, we become less intelligent even if more informed. 

“The correlate in thinking of facts, data, knowledge already acquired, is suggestions, inferences, conjectured meanings, suppositions, tentative explanations: -- ideas, in short” (p. 164).

“In this sense, a thought (what a thing suggests but is not as it is presented) is creative, -- an incursion into the novel” (p. 165).

“When Newton thought of his theory of gravitation, the creative aspect of his thought was not found in its materials. They were familiar; many of them commonplaces -- sun, moon, planets, weight, distance, mass, square of numbers. These were not original ideas; they were established facts. His originality lay in the use to which these familiar acquaintances were put by introduction into an unfamiliar context” (pp. 165-166).

“The child of three who discovers what can be done with blocks, or of six who finds out what he can make by putting five cents and five cents together, is really a discoverer, even though everybody else in the world knows it” (p. 166).
These citations illustrate learning as something like an art, creation of new meanings from common material.  They example of Newton’s theory of gravity seems to illustrate this theme perfectly, this type of activity seems to be learning at its best, and is similar to what education should aim for, and its evident in his example of the toddler with blocks.  The citations seem to be core to Dewey’s philosophy of the possibilities in learning and they lead to the passage we have discussed often…

“It is that no thought, no idea, can possibly be conveyed as an idea from one person to another. When it is told, it is, to the one to whom it is told, another given fact, not an idea. The communication may stimulate the other person to realize the question for himself and to think out a like idea, or it may smother his intellectual interest and suppress his dawning effort at thought. But what he directly gets cannot be an idea. Only by wrestling with the conditions of the problem at first hand, seeking and finding his own way out, does he think. When the parent or teacher has provided the conditions which stimulate thinking and has taken a sympathetic attitude toward the activities of the learner by entering into a common or conjoint experience, all has been done which a second party can do to instigate learning. The rest lies with the one directly concerned. If he cannot devise his own solution (not of course in isolation, but in correspondence with the teacher and other pupils) and find his own way out he will not learn, not even if he can recite some correct answer with one hundred per cent accuracy. We can and do supply ready-made "ideas" by the thousand; we do not usually take much pains to see that the one learning engages in significant situations where his own activities generate, support, and clinch ideas -- that is, perceived meanings or connections. This does not mean that the teacher is to stand off and look on; the alternative to furnishing ready-made subject matter and listening to the accuracy with which it is reproduced is not quiescence, but participation, sharing, in an activity. In such shared activity, the teacher is a learner, and the learner is, without knowing it, a teacher -- and upon the whole, the less consciousness there is, on either side, of either giving or receiving instruction, the better” (pp. 166-167).

He concludes this chapter with some valuable suggestions for educators..

“Where schools are equipped with laboratories, shops, and gardens, where dramatizations, plays, and games are freely used, opportunities exist for reproducing situations of life, and for acquiring and applying information and ideas in the carrying forward of progressive experiences” (p. 169).

“Classroom instruction falls into three kinds. The least desirable treats each lesson as an independent whole… Wiser teachers see to it that the student is systematically led to utilize his earlier lessons to help understand the present one, and also to use the present to throw additional light upon what has already been acquired… The best type of teaching bears in mind the desirability of affecting this interconnection [to the reality of everyday life.] It puts the student in the habitual attitude of finding points of contact and mutual bearings (p. 170).