Dewey and Freire’s Philosophy of Education
The road less traveled in pedagogy: John Dewey and Paulo Freire on active, transformative education.
John Dewey’s (1859–1952) scientific orientation was biology, and he was influenced by the developments in evolutionary biology. His philosophical starting point was the fact that people exist within a biological environment. We create beliefs to adapt to our environment. Dewey created the term “instrumentalism” to describe the human activity of developing and using beliefs as tools or instruments for solving problems and altering our environment to meet our needs and desires. One of Dewey’s primary aims was to reform education to help children develop problem-solving skills — instruments to solve problems.
Dewey’s Instrumentalism and Truth
We exist in a world, and we must react to it and try to navigate within it to accomplish our goals. Our intellectual abilities, Dewey said, are developed in response to our world. The world places demands on us, and we are beings who must make choices and act. The implication of this for Dewey was to understand human intelligence as the continual activity of developing more profitable relations with the objects we encounter. This view rejects the passive mind of Locke and Hume and adopts William…
