Misreading Dewey: Reform, Projects, and the Language Game

Abstract

Two serious misunderstandings of Dewey's pedagogical and philosophical views are discussed. The first, the erroneous assumption that Dewey favored an activity-oriented, child-centered approach to learning, relates to how Dewey thought about the role of experience in knowledge acquisition. The second misunderstanding relates to Dewey's stance on language. Viewing Dewey as an early supporter of the postmodernist linguistic turn in philosophy heralded by Rorty and others (i.e., that all knowledge is essentially linguistic) downplays Dewey's unique ontological solution to the mind/world dilemma. This article focuses on the practical and theoretical consequences that follow from accepting these two erroneous interpretations of Dewey.