About a 100 years ago, John Dewey was concerned that the then existing traditional school curriculum did not reflect the social, ethnic, industrial and economic changes that were sweeping through American society at the turn of the 20th century. The progressive nature of his pedagogical recommendations aimed toward greater importance being given to who the children in classrooms really were and what their backgrounds were. The questions his philosophy sought answers to were definitely focused on the child: what does the child know? What are the child’s prior experiences? What are the child’s interests? What has the child learned? What further experiences will propel the child’s development and learning? Unfortunately, there were those who took Dewey’s consideration for the individual child to an extreme by giving complete and unlimited freedom to the child. It was in response to this confusion over his intentions that Dewey wrote "Experience and Education" in 1938.
A recent
article by Howard Garner about his Theory of Multiple Intelligence is strangely
reminiscent of John Dewey’s attempt to set the record straight about
Progressive Education. Great ideas are often privy to misinterpretations and distortions over time if they are implemented without being first thoroughly studied and understood within the context of which they emerged.