Education and intelligence: Reconstructing John Dewey’s theory of intelligence from an educational perspective

The dissertation presents a philosophical inquiry into the concept of intelligence by reconstructing John Dewey’s theory of intelligence and investigating its educational implications. It presents three critiques of educational practices and theories that, from a Deweyan point of view, are built on misconceptions or oversimplifications of intelligence.

The dissertation implies that rather than holding onto the idea of individual intelligence, education and those who are being educated might benefit from focusing on the social practices and contexts that enable intelligence. Also, it suggests that conceiving intelligence as something that can be universalized, taken out of context, and then redistributed is problematic.

Dewey’s theory is based on the observation that people are rich with experience-based contextualized intelligence. The dissertation suggests that to make the most of this intelligence, education needs to provide people with a robust theory of knowledge and an aspiration to be informed about the world in multiple and diverse ways. Learning the habit and processes of different kinds of inquiries could benefit societies by contributing to creative and intelligent democratic problem-solving in the inevitably unknown contexts of the future.