Methods of Life

from The Education of John Dewey: A Biography by Jay Martin:

A child in Dewey’s school was instantly a member of a cooperative commonwealth. Learning and creating knowledge were merely two forms of knowing, what Dewey called “methods of life.” From occupations, students in Dewey’s school proceeded naturally to their correlatives in the so-called disciplines: from production to economics; from cooperation to politics; from experiment to science; from activity in a community to the understanding of other, larger communities through history, social studies, geography, and culture; and from the activities of a civilization to ethics, morals, and manners. Wherever Dewey’s students entered an occupation, they came out on the other side in interest-saturated reflection. … Even though philosophers … were always wandering around the school, no philosophy was taught there. Rather, the school was the expression of a philosophy, philosophy itself enacted. The students there did not learn logic, they lived it.

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