International Seminar on 

Vidya Bhawan Society, Udaipur

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Ability to think is largely accepted as a major goal of education. This requires a deeper understanding of the nature of process of thinking as well as constructing an epistemological basis in which thinking is conceptualized. Thinking is seen both as a rational process idealized by information processing or formal logic and at the same time as a creative process idealized by the imaginative inventiveness of the artist. Reconciling rational and creative aspects of thinking poses a major philosophical challenge. Cognitivist epistemology recognises a radical split between cognitive and noncognitive parts of the mind, the former being well structured with information processing and problem solving models. The problem arises in characterising the noncognitive mind’s structure, its epistemology and its interaction with or role in the cognitive processes. Dewey, along with William James, viewed thinking, including creative thinking, as a process emergent from and continuously controlled by noncognitive levels of experience including experiential structures such as emotion, habit and imagination. The social environment is the most important factor in intellectual development, being extraordinarily rich in meanings because of communication and language. The classroom and the curriculum, according to Dewey, must be a place where experience is funded on a variety of levels. The paper further examines the implications of this understanding and locate it in variety of interpretations of the constructivist pedagogy.

Reference:

Dewey, J. (1916), Democracy and Education.

Dewey, J. (1933), How we think.

Dewey, J. (1938), Logic: The theory of Inquiry.

Dewey, J. (1938), Education and Experience.

Garrison, J. (1995), The new scholarship on Dewey. Kluwer Academic Publishers, London.