Good evening and welcome to boring books for bedtime. I hope tonight's installment provides all the boredom your busy brain needs to quiet down and let you get some sleep for once.

So lie back, adjust your volume, take a nice deep breath, and off we go.

This evening we're relaxing to a classic of educational theory.

How we think by John Dewey Professor of Philosophy in Columbia University

published by D.C. Heathinko, 1910.

Let's begin.

Preface.

Our schools are troubled with a multiplication of studies, each in turn having its own multiplication of materials and principals.

Our teachers find their tasks made heavier and that they have come to deal with pupils

individually and not merely in mass. Unless these steps in advance are to end a distraction, some clue of unity, some principle that makes for simplification must be found.

This book represents the conviction that the needed studying and centralizing factor is found in adopting as the end of endeavor that attitude of mind, that habit of thought, which we call scientific. This scientific attitude of mind might

conceivably be quite irrelevant to teaching children and youth.

But this book also represents the conviction that such is not the case, that the native and

unspoiled attitude of childhood, marked by ardent curiosity, fertile imagination,

and love of experimental inquiry

is near, very near,

to the attitude of the scientific mind.

If these pages assist any to appreciate this kinship

and to consider seriously how its recognition in educational practice would make for individual

happiness and the reduction of social waste, the book will amply have served its purpose.

It is hardly necessary to enumerate the authors to whom I am indebted.

My fundamental indebtedness is to my wife, by whom the ideas of this book were inspired, and through whose work in connection

...