This article analyzes the relation between the cultivation of reflective thinking and the growth of individual freedom, based mainly on John Dewey's work "How we think" (1933). For Dewey, the end of education is to form free individuals, capable of directing their own conduct and of adapting environmental conditions to their benefit. In this case, the growth of freedom is an effect of education that stimulates the individual to the continuous exercise of reflective thinking. The present discourse intends to show the reason why Dewey's evolutionary concept of freedom is more efficient than the educational theory criticized by him, which confuses freedom with spontaneity, and for this reason, considers the child free to direct his/her activities. This confusion results in the condemnation of the teacher's authority and in the dangerous idea that immature human beings do not need external direction to achieve freedom.
Dewey; freedom; reflective thinking; education