The Path Not Taken: Dewey's Model of Inquiry
Laurel N. Tanner · Curriculum Inquiry · 1988
Somewhere, a teaching method lies waiting-waiting to be used to teach You will not find it in a costly kit containing cassettes, workbooks, activity cards, and a teacher's guide, nor is it a software detective game. It can be found in an old book: Dewey's Democracy and Education (1916a)-pages 170-192, to be exact. If we follow Dewey, thinking is motivated by a problem. It must be a genuine problem-the pupil's own problem. Neither a simulated problem nor a practice problem intended to help pupils perform well on reasoning items on tests would qualify, for as Dewey says, are his only as a pupil, not as a human (p. 183). This fundamental part of Dewey's philosophy is ignored in thinking skills development programs today. This is a necessary time to write about Dewey's work on inquiry (reflective or thinking). In the last four or five years we have seen a renewed interest in thinking, triggered mainly by the national reports on education of the 1980s. Judging from the literature, there has been more attention to thinking in curriculum goals and evaluation. Statements such as: Perhaps never before in the history of educational practice has there been a greater push to teach children to think critically (Sternberg 1985, p. 194), and, field of thinking is more vibrant than ever (Norris 1985, p. 40) might cause us to come to this conclusion. But they do not indicate what is being taught under the label of critical thinking. There is a striking difference between Dewey's view of thinking and the views of those who are responding to the call to put more thinking in the curriculum. For Dewey inquiry is an active process that includes all that is needed to actually solve a problem; things happen as a result of inquiry. The course of events has been modified and influenced. Thinking is the natural activity of the human (as contrasted with other