A epistemologia instrumentalista de John Dewey e sua aplicabilidade na Escola experimental da Universidade de Chicago.

Abstract

The dissertation is structured in two chapters and presents, as goals, to demonstrate that Dewey's knowledge and education's theories are connected and sustain themselves, besides pointing out that John Dewey's instrumentalist epistemology shapes up and defines itself as a general theory of education, from his experiences with the University of Chicago Laboratory School. It aims, in contrast, to expose how the applicability of his pedagogical ideas, at that school, contributed to his knowledge theory's development. It is commonly known that Dewey's philosophical argumentation, when reflecting on the nature of knowledge, happens from the criticism associated with philosophical systems and debates with other thinkers. In the first chapter we present the need to rebuild the philosophy, analyzing, in the first section, the knowledge theories through some philosophical movements since it is this theme that draws Dewey's attention and represents the essence of his educational assertions; in the second section we investigate the intellectual itineraries that shaped Dewey's educational instrumentality, its relations to Hegel's idealism, Charles Darwin's naturalism, William James' psychology and Charles Pierce's logic. In the second chapter we explore the University of Chicago Laboratory School, in tree sections, respectively: physical and administrative structure, the context and the guiding principles of the school: the laboratory school embedded curriculum that associates itself, from one side, to knowledge's nature and from another side to the child's experience; and the teacher's mission on the experimental school at the teaching and learning process and in which way he or she can assist the child to establish the knowledge and incorporate it in his or her own experiences. By the end of the research we perform an investigation on the main conclusions obtained which especially emphasize the existing relations between Dewey's theory of knowledge and the University of Chicago Experimental School development on the years he was the principal. By analyzing his writings and the environment in which they were produced, this dissertation offers the philosophy of education an input to the understanding of the development process of knowledge founded on the scientific method and on human experience.