Chapters 19 & 20: Experience and Reason

In chapter 19 ("Labor and Leisure"), Dewey attacks the "deep-seated antithesis...between education in preparation for useful labor and education for a life of leisure" (p. 204)--i.e., between vocational and liberal aims. In chapters 19 & 20 ("Intellectual and Practical Studies), Dewey traces the history of this opposition beginning with the Greeks for whom experience was equated with "empiricism" in the sense of haphazard or accidental activity. Their response to customs and habits was reason, intended to bring unity, consistency, and purity to human understanding.

The problem in a democratic society is to do away with the dualism and to construct a course of studies which makes thought  guide of free practice for all and which makes leisure a reward of accepting responsibility for service, rather than a state of exemption form it (p. 212).

For Dewey, "the advance of psychology, of industrial methods, and of the experimental method in science" (p. 224) help to establish that experience need not be empirical, but could be experimental. As such, practical activity becomes integral to developing intellectual understanding. The chance to control conditions in activity make doing an engaging way to think about the environmental and social relations by which experience underlies learning--"an intellectualizing of practical pursuits" (p. 222).

It is not the business of the school to transport youth from an environment of activity [out-of-school] into one of cramped study of the records of other men's learning; but to transport them from an environment of relatively chance activities (accidental in the relation they bear to insight and thought) into one of activities selected with reference to guidance of learning (p. 222).