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This volume offers John Dewey’s two great texts on education: his treatise on pedagogy, Democracy and Education (1916) and Experience and Education (1938) where the author clarifies his thinking and responds to his detractors. Dewey places experience at the heart of learning and refocuses pedagogy on the individual rather than on knowledge: the school must respond to the natural curiosity of the child and teach him to desire and undertake; manual work and social life take precedence over compulsory exercises; motivation and individual effort can replace discipline and the sanction regime. The purpose of the school is to increase the ability to act and it is in this that it participates in democracy. We will realize the modernity of Dewey’s pedagogy or at least the topicality of the questions he asks: how to center education on “the child’s own social activities” rather than on knowledge? How can education prepare the child for the social conditions he will experience outside of school? How to restore the continuity of school and society?
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