dewey

interesting wikipedia entry on [|John Dewey]

"He saw Rousseau's as overemphasizing the individual and Plato's as overemphasizing the society in which the individual lived. For Dewey, this distinction was by and large a false one; like [|Vygotsky], he viewed the mind and its formation as communal process. Thus the individual is only a meaningful concept when regarded as an inextricable part of his or her society, and the society has no meaning apart from its realization in the lives of its individual members. However, as evidenced in his later //Experience and Nature// Dewey recognizes the importance of the subjective experience of individual people in introducing revolutionary new ideas. For Dewey, it was vitally important that education should not be the teaching of mere dead fact, but that the skills and knowledge which students learned be integrated fully into their lives as persons, citizens and human beings"

Dewey described his philosophy as [|instrumentalism]: "**instrumentalism** is the view that concepts and theories are merely useful instruments whose worth is measured not by whether the concepts and theories are true or false (or correctly depict reality), but by how effective they are in explaining and predicting phenomena."