Children must be given the tools for solving problematic situations in an ever-changing world. But in order to reconstruct their experience, children need also to look back to the past, not as a monument to be valued for its own sake, but as a guide for future activity. Schools, according to Dewey, should not pretend to reproduce but to reconstruct the existing social order. The ideal social order for Dewey is a structure that allows maximum self-development of all individuals. As Larry Hickman has pointed out, Dewey was a philosopher individualism, but he held that individual growth can only be the product of common effort .
Common effort is what better defines democracy as a way of life.
It implies that no one is left out in the free exchange of ideas, in the resolution of actual or potentially problematic situations. Democracy, for Dewey, is necessary from the standpoint of both the general social welfare and the full development of human beings as individuals . Dewey was also against the view of superior ways of knowledge , as sometimes people tend to think of science. For Dewey, the only difference between ordinary and scientific forms of knowledge is the precision of the methods for controlling data of the latter, and the refinement of its hypotheses. Science is not a value-free activity, as opposed to the arts and to religion.