Lipman, Dewey, and Philosophical Inquiry in the Mathematics Classroom

One of John Dewey's major contributions to the reconstruction of the educational process was in his understanding that education needed to develop a working relationship between the refined end-products of inquiry that are codified and sedimented in textbooks, and the raw subject matter inquiry that is natural to the young. Such inquiry, he was convinced, should be shaped and fashioned to the well-known model of scientific inquiry which he set forth in How We Think (Dewey, 1933). In that same book, he describes "reflective thinking" as a special kind of ratiocination that is aware of its means and consequences, and thus is a major instrument in discipline-based inquiry. Dewey's "scientific method" became a ..