Dewey school and society summary. John Dewey: The School and Society: Chapter 3 : Waste in Education 2022-10-24
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John Dewey was an American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer who was a leading figure in the progressive movement in education in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In his influential work "School and Society," Dewey argued that education should be focused on the needs and interests of the individual student, rather than on the transmission of a predetermined body of knowledge.
According to Dewey, the purpose of education is not just to prepare students for future employment, but to help them become active and engaged members of society. He believed that education should be experiential, with students learning through hands-on activities and problem-solving rather than through rote memorization.
Dewey also argued that the traditional model of education, which separated students by age and subject matter, was outdated and failed to take into account the unique needs and abilities of each student. Instead, he proposed a model of education in which students were grouped by ability and worked together on interdisciplinary projects that allowed them to apply their knowledge to real-world problems.
In addition to his ideas about the purpose and structure of education, Dewey also believed that the school should be an integral part of the community and that students should be exposed to the diverse perspectives and experiences of those around them. He argued that the school should be a place where students could learn about and engage with the issues and challenges facing their community and the wider world.
Overall, Dewey's ideas about education have had a lasting impact and continue to be influential in modern educational theory and practice. His emphasis on the individual student and on experiential learning has helped to shape the way that schools and educators approach teaching and learning, and his ideas about the role of the school in society have helped to shape the way that schools and communities interact.
The school and society Dewey Notes
The world in which most of us live is a world in which everyone has a calling and occupation, something to do. Of those indicated by the changed attitude of the children I shall indeed have something to say in my next talk, when speaking directly of the relationship of the school to the child. Any other ideal for our schools is narrow and unlovely; acted upon, it destroys our democracy. As one enters a busy kitchen in which a group of children are actively engaged in the preparation of food, the psychological difference, the change from more or less passive and inert recipiency and restraint to one of buoyant outgoing energy, is so obvious as fairly to strike one in the face. That we learn from experience, and from books or the sayings of others only as they are related to experience, are not mere phrases. The common needs and aims demand a growing interchange of thought and growing unity of sympathetic feeling. But all this means a necessary change in the attitude of the school, one of which we are as yet far from realizing the full force.
John Dewey: School and Society: Chapter 6: The Psychology of Occupations
It has to work unhampered, with all the needed resources at command. Instructors are permitted to reproduce this material for educational use by their students. These things enter in, but the fundamental organization is that of the school itself as a community of individuals, in its relations to other forms of social life. It ought to be in a garden, and the children from the garden would be led on to surrounding fields, and then into the wider country, with all its facts and forces. Whence does the culture arise? This is the fundamental fact, and from this arise continuous and orderly sources of instruction.
John Dewey: The School and Society: Chapter 3 : Waste in Education
It is only where a narrow and fixed image of traditional school discipline dominates, that one is in any danger of overlooking that deeper and infinitely wider discipline that comes from having a part to do in constructive work, in contributing to a result which, social in spirit, is none the less obvious and tangible in form -- and hence in a form with reference to which responsibility may be exacted and accurate judgment passed. There is always some need, coming from an end to be reached, that makes one look about to discover and discriminate whatever will assist him. It lasts, not only for days, but for months and years. Dewey concludes the story: I need not speak of the science involved in this — the study of the fibres, of geographical features, the conditions under which raw materials are grown, the great centres of manufacture and distribution, the physics involved in the machinery of production; nor, again, of the historical side — the influence which these inventions have had upon humanity. For Dewey, the primary waste in education is a waste of effort on the part of the school and time and effort on the part of the children. The significance of geography is that it presents the earth as the enduring home of the occupations of man.
They enjoy artistic expression and like to make things. When asking what is democracy, the answer is never truly defiente. While I was visiting in the city of Moline a few years ago, the superintendent told me that they found many children every year, who were surprised to learn that the Mississippi river in the text-book had anything to do with the stream of water flowing past their homes. Both are modes of passive absorption. The great problem in education on the administrative side is to secure the unity of the whole, in the place of a sequence of more or less unrelated and overlapping parts and thus to reduce the waste arising from friction, reduplication and transitions that are not properly bridged. At present, the impulses which lie at the basis of the industrial system are either practically neglected or positively distorted 39 during the school period.
When we turn to the school, we find that one of the most striking tendencies at present is toward the introduction of so-called manual training, shop-work, and the household arts -- sewing and cooking. Just as home and industry are not separate from the laboratories and research centers of the world, so the curriculum that finds its inspiration in the outside world can also be unified. It sometimes seems to me that those who make these objections must live in quite another world. The difference that appears when occupations are made the articulating centers of school life is not easy to describe in words; it is a difference in motive, of spirit and atmosphere. What we want is to have the child come to school with a whole mind and a whole body, and leave school with a fuller mind and an even healthier body. It is our social problem now, even more urgent than in the time of Plato, that method, 38 purpose, understanding, shall exist in the consciousness of the one who does the work, that his activity shall have meaning to himself.
Children of twelve and thirteen years of, age go through gain and loss calculations, and various forms of bank discount so complicated that the bankers long ago dispensed with them. The unity of all the sciences is found in geography. Partly from seeing all these things reflected through the medium of their scientific and historic conditions and associations, whereby the child learns to appreciate them as technical achievements, as thoughts precipitated in action; and partly because of the introduction of the art idea into the room itself. The child can carry over what he learns in the home and utilize it in the school; and the things learned in the school he applies at home. All art involves physical organs, the eye and hand, the ear and voice; and yet it is something more than the mere technical skill required by the organs of expression. Amy Gutmann's Theory Of Education Essay 1908 Words 8 Pages Amy encourages participation from all three groups but notes that the government and parents should have limited contributions due to their lack of knowledge of the occurrences in the classroom. As an occupation it is active or motor; it finds expression through the physical organs — the eyes, hands, etc.
John Dewey: The School and Society: Chap. 1 The School and Social Progress
They have room to hold a book, room for studying, but no room to create. The library and museum are at hand. They are doing a variety of things, and there is the confusion, the bustle, that results from activity. But out of occupation, out of doing things that are to produce results, and out of doing these in a social and cooperative way, 31 there is born a discipline of its own kind and pet Our whole conception of school discipline changes when we get this point of view. Within this organization is found the principle of school discipline or order.
It has a chance to affiliate itself with life, to become the 32 child's habitat, where he learns through directed living; instead of being only a place to learn lessons having an abstract and remote reference to some possible living to be done in the future. The supply of flour, of lumber, of foods, of building materials, of household furniture, even of metal ware, of nails, hinges, hammers, etc. It is easy to see that this revolution, as regards the materials of knowledge, carries with it a marked change in the attitude of the individual. It differs because its end is in itself; in the growth that comes from the 132 continual interplay of ideas and their embodiment in action, not in external utility. Thus there sprang up the prototype of the grammar school, more liberal than the university so largely professional in character , for the purpose of putting into the hands of the people the key to the old learning, that men might see a world with a larger horizon. That which interests us most is naturally the progress made by the individual child of our acquaintance, his normal physical development, his advance in ability to read, write, and figure, his growth in the knowledge of geography and history, improvement in manners, habits of promptness, order, and industry -- it is from such standards as these that we judge the work of the school. Where the school work consists in simply learning lessons, mutual assistance, instead of teeing the most natural form of cooperation and association, becomes a clandestine effort to relieve one's neighbor of his proper duties.
