John Dewey is known as the master-mind in the history of learning theories. It’s not possible for anyone to exclude his work or ignores his particular theory ‘Experience and Education’. John gave authentic views regarding education and its system. He was persuasive in so many parts of scholastic modification, so choosing a portion of his work is injustice with him, so here we will discuss so many areas in which he had done a tremendous job or called his master-piece.
Already the constructivist theories of Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky were commonly recognized, Dewey was come up with the idea about how students understand the concepts best when they involved in the curriculum designing phase along with the classroom setup. They learn actively as the syllabus is designed according to their need and preference of learning styles. He disagrees with the theory – behaviorism – as he thinks it’s one-dimensional and fails to explain the difficult learning methods. It provides insufficient information to the learners and they left confused. He proposed that lessons will be transformed on the basis of child needs; make them active, involve them in different strategies and methods, rather than making them sitting and listening lessons. He strongly rejected the traditional style of learning in which classes are teacher-centered. He also promotes diversity and equality. His main focus is on communal education. At the end of the 20th Century, these points were important thoughts.
In addition, he discussed that learning process should be efficient, give chances to the students to relate their prior knowledge with the new concept. They relate the information with real-life experiences. This was a mile stone concept for that particular time. The main aspect in Dewey’s theories was the requirement for students to involve directly with the atmosphere, which later known as experiential learning, where ‘information and experience should be gained by actually doing.’ John Dewey’s strategy later becomes the baselines of many other theories like problem-based learning and inquiry based learning which are similar in concept.
Nevertheless, Dewey was focusing on the student’s capabilities, he try to justify by giving equal importance to student teacher and the syllabus which is being taught. He is also considering the ways in which knowledge is been transferred. Eventually, his purpose was that teachers should not take much time in talking in the classroom, she act like a facilitator, she ignite the light and let the student’s will explore what’s going on in the class. They will guess what they are learning and relate that with their real-life. They become an active independent learner as well as reflect their own learning in order to remove all the confusions and errors. Nowadays, this idea is adopted by many institute and they run their educational system on this basis.