The John Dewey Society Lectureship Series

The author encourages readers to look at education from the standpoint of culture and raises these new questions: How is a culture's wealth to be defined? Who is qualified to contribute to it? How can we preserve a culture's assets for the next generation?

Experience and Education is the best concise statement on education ever published by John Dewey, the man acknowledged to be the pre-eminent educational theorist of the twentieth century. Written more than two decades after Democracy and Education (Dewey's most comprehensive statement of his position in educational philosophy), this book demonstrates how Dewey reformulated his ideas as a result of his intervening experience with the progressive schools and in the light of the criticisms his theories had received. Analyzing both "traditional" and "progressive" education, Dr. Dewey here insists that neither the old nor the new education is adequate and that each is miseducative because neither of them applies the principles of a carefully developed philosophy of experience. Many pages of this volume illustrate Dr. Dewey's ideas for a philosophy of experience and its relation to education. He particularly urges that all teachers and educators looking for a new movement in education should think in terms of the deeped and larger issues of education rather than in terms of some divisive "ism" about education, even such an "ism" as "progressivism." His philosophy, here expressed in its most essential, most readable form, predicates an American educational system that respects all sources of experience, on that offers a true learning situation that is both historical and social, both orderly and dynamic.

Although she has devised a new format for this bibliography, Barbara Levine has included most of the materials published in the two editions of the Checklist of Writings about John Dewey. Material new to this volume includes recently discovered items published during the ninety years covered by the Checklist as well as items published since 1977. Because certain studies at best have only marginal value or because they can be obtained through ordinary library research tools, Levine has deleted some classes of material that appeared in the 1974 and 1978 Checklist editions: primary sources with only brief references to Dewey; the entire section entitled "Unpublished Works about Dewey" (which included theses, dissertations, and papers presented at meetings); and Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC) documents. Levine has included all of the material published about Dewey during the 108 years between 1886 and 1994 and has included many 1995 items as well. She has verified all items and, whenever possible, obtained copies. She has discovered hundreds of items omitted from the second edition of the Checklist and has augmented the current bibliography by nearly two thousand items published since 1977. The bibliography is divided into four parts. The first, "Books and Articles about Dewey," lists works alphabetically by author. Replies and responses to articles immediately follow the work cited. The "Reviews of Dewey's Works" lists titles alphabetically. Reviews are grouped alphabetically by journal under the Dewey work reviewed. The "Author Index" includes multiple authors and editors, authors of replies and responses, and reviewers of works both by and about Dewey. The "Title Key-Word Index" lists key words from most titles and subtitles. The CD-ROM version of Works about John Dewey contains both Windows and Macintosh formats and provides increased search capabilities.