How we think (1910) by John Dewey PDF book

How we think by John Dewey 

Excerpt:

Our schools are troubled with a multiplication of studies, each in turn having its own multiplication of materials and principles. Our teachers find their tasks made heavier in that they have come to deal with pupils individually and not merely in mass.

 Unless these steps in advance are to end in distraction, some clew of unity, some principle that makes for simplification, must be found. This book represents the conviction that the needed steadying and centralizing factor is found in adopting as the end of endeavor that attitude of mind, that habit of thought, which we call scientific. 

This scientific attitude of mind might, conceivably, be quite irrelevant to teaching children and youth. But this book also represents the conviction that such is not the case; that the native and unspoiled attitude of childhood, marked by ardent curiosity, fertile imagination, and love of experimental inquiry, is near, very near, to the attitude of the scientific mind. If these pages assist any to appreciate this kinship and to consider seriously how its recognition in educational practice would make for individual happiness and the reduction of social waste, the book will amply have served its purpose.

Some contents of the book

I. What is Thought? 1

II. The Need for Training Thought ... 14

III. Natural Resources in the Training of Thought 29

IV. School Conditions and the Training of Thought 45
V. The Means and End of Mental Training: the

Psychological and the Logical. • 56

PART II

LOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS

VI. The Analysis of a Complete Act of Thought. 68
VII. Systematic Inference: Induction and Deduction

VIII. Judgment: The Interpretation of Facts.

IX. Meaning: or Conceptions and Understanding

X. Concrete and Abstract Thinking

XL Empirical and Scientific Thinking



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