John Dewey

Had a lot of awesome things to say. And much of it rings true today, 100 years later. Most important, I think we're at place today where so many people that talk, write, and make decisions about education are not educators. Dewey was an educator, and it comes through in everything he writes. While the non-educator crowd will continue to push for pencil-and-paper tests that ask for regurgitation of simple facts and not understand how anything else could be important to learning, Dewey speaks the language of educators in his push for more thought and thinking in education:

"[A]ny habit of teaching which encourages the pupil for the sake of a successful recitation or of a display of memorized information glide over the thin ice of genuine problems reverses the true method of mind training."

-from How We Think, 1910

I agree, and at this point wonder what this looks like in 2009. Who are the teachers and schools that are doing this? What does it look like, especially in low-income communities? Can this kind of teaching and learning be reconciled with pencil-and-paper tests? Can it be made politically popular enough to be put into practice anywhere?