2. Lagueux—Dewey Quote p. 2
2
than a gloss, to which were then added work and page citations that acquired authority
through repetition.
For example, How We Think does contain the observation that understanding “means
that the various parts of the information acquired are grasped in their relation to one
another—a result that is attained only when acquisition is accompanied by constant reflection
upon the meaning of what is studied”; the first half of this passage does in fact begin on
p. 78.9
Dewey here is speaking specifically of what he calls “education upon its intellectual
side,” not “experience” per se, but one can imagine how this passage might be casually
summarized as “We do not learn from experience, we learn from reflecting on experience.”
That the passage appears near (if not exactly on) p. 78 in one of the two oft-cited references
makes it likely that it is the original source.
There are of course many passages in Dewey’s published work that do discuss
experience and reflection explicitly. To cite just one instance, Democracy and Education
(1916) contains the observation that “When we reflect upon an experience instead of just
having it, we inevitably distinguish between our own attitude and the objects toward which
we sustain the attitude… Such reflection upon experience gives rise to a distinction of what
we experience (the experienced) and the experiencing—the how.”10
This is not nearly as
pithy as the spurious maxim, however; indeed, one would be hard pressed to find an
authentic Dewey quotation quite as succinct.
Careful authors, then, will be sure to use this observation as paraphrase, not as direct
quotation.
NOTES
1. Dewey, How We Think, 3.
2. E.g., Rolheiser-Bennett, Bower, and Stevahn, The Portfolio Organizer, 31; Burris
and Garrity, Detracking for Excellence and Equity, 161; Bain and Zimmerman,
“Understanding Great Teaching,” 12; Johnson, Mims-Cox, and Doyle-Nichols, Developing
Portfolios in Education, 57; Folgueiras and Luna, “How Service Learning Is Understood,” 5.
3. E.g., Miller, Reading in the Wild, 18; Petersen, “Voices,” 93.
4. E.g., Chitpin, “Use of Reflective Journal Keeping,” 74; Doel, “Fostering Student
Reflection, 164; Erasmus, “Developing Reflective Practice Skills,” 57; Beard and Wilson,
Experiential Learning, 28.
5. Chitpin and Simon, “’Even If No-One Looked at It’,” 279; Espey and Brindle,
“Pre-Service & First Year Teacher Perception,” 3551.
6. Kolis, Rethinking Teaching, 19.
7. Shulman, Wisdom of Practice, 474.
8. Dewey, Collected Works.
9. Dewey, How We Think, 78–9.
10. Dewey, Democracy and Education, 173.
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