Theories of Knowledge

       In brief, the function of knowledge is to make one experience freely available in other experiences.  The word 'freely' marks the difference between the principle of knowledge and habit.  Habit means that an individual undergoes a modification through an experience, which modification forms a predisposition to easier and more effective action in a like direction in the future... Within certain limits, it performs this function successfully.  But habit, apart from knowledge, does not make allowance for change of conditions, for novelty... for habit assumes the essential likeness of the new situation with the old.  Consequently it often leads astray, or comes between a person and the successful performance of his task, just as the skill, based on habit alone, of the mechanic will desert him when something unexpected occurs in the running of the machine.  But a man who understands the machine is the man who knows what he about.  He knows the conditions under which a given habit works, and is in a position to introduce the changes which will adapt it to new conditions.
        In other words, knowledge is a perception of those connections of an object which determine its applicability in a given situation. ...
       An ideally perfect knowledge would represent such a network of interconnection that any past experience would offer a point of advantage from which to get at the problem presented in a new experience.
     

 Democracy and Education, pp. 395-7