Describe Education as reconstruction of experiences.

John Dewey is a famous philosopher who in his book ‘Education and Democracy’ has defined education as organization or reconstruction of experiences. In his words, “Education has all the time an immediate end and so far as activity is educative, it reached that end on the direct transformation of the quality of experience.

Infancy, youth, adult life all stand on the same educative level in the sense that what is learned at any and every stage of experience constitutes the value of that experience, and in the sense that it is the chief business of life at every point to make living dins contribute to an enrichment of its own perceptible meaning. Suppose, a child touched a hot iron and gets hurt, he will learn by this experience and will never repeat such a behaviour. Similarly any thing which produced positive results will be repeated.

What John Dewey explained theoretically got a psychological explanation when there was a shift from behavioural paradigm to cognitive paradigm. The main objective behind cognitive paradigm was to explain the cognitive processes of memory, retention, feelings, thoughts, problem solving etc.

They claimed that knowledge is not universal but personal. It depends on how a person reconstructs his experiences. Hence, school curriculum should contain relevant experiences and subsequent opportunity for sharing views. Learners only have to reconstruct sold knowledge through comprehension, meaning seeking and discussion. So they advised activity-based learning and learning by doing.