John Dewey on Education
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[edit] John Dewey on Education
From the Essay, “The School and Society,” 1915, Expanded Edition, Jackson, Philip W. 1990, The University of Chicago
The New Learning see also New Learning - EPS 415 movement is not new; its underpinnings reside in the teaching methods and pedagogy John Dewey first professed at the turn of the 20th century. It was the industrial age, a time when the social fabric of the American landscape was changing dramatically; moving from its traditions as an agrarian society into a new world as an economic and political power. The transition was dramatic. Today’s changing environment is no less dramatic with globalization of industries and markets and an evolution of the industrial age beyond its manufacturing roots into an era where knowledge industries take hold of the American economic landscape.
Dewey’s proposals for modifying the school and school work are still valid today. More so because much of the school environment, governance, curriculum and the methods used to teach children remain mired in a pre-industrial mode. To that end, a review of Dewey’s comments is worthwhile for educators’ to reflect on, particularly his commentary on the need for change in order to meet the challenges facing students today.
But for Dewey, school reform demanded more than incremental change, the system itself had to be reviewed as he wrote, “Whenever we have in mind the discussion of a new movement in education, it is especially necessary to take the broader, or social view. Otherwise, changes in the school institution and tradition will be looked at as the arbitrary inventions of particular teachers, at the worst transitory fads, and at best merely improvements in certain details—and this is the plane upon which it is too customary to consider school changes.”(7)
What follows is a brief encapsulation of what Dewey proposed in his essay. The topic areas covered are core tenets of the New Learning initiatives that are gaining traction in schools. It is important to note that while written almost 100 years ago, much of what Dewey describes remains pertinent today. The discussion is divided into four broad areas, as follows:
On-School
On School as a life lesson
On the Physical Structure of School
On Learning Preferences
[edit] On Schooling
Industrialization was made possible by the extension of information. Dewey was very aware of this change. “Printing was invented; it was made commercial. Books, magazines, papers were multiplied and cheapened.” “The result has been an intellectual revolution.” (25) He was very aware that the fluidity of knowledge was no longer held captive by an elite minority. “Knowledge is no longer an immobile solid; it has been liquefied. It is actively moving in all the currents of society itself.” (25) But, he saw schools as operating as if knowledge and information were still scarce resources. “Our school methods, and to a very considerable extent our curriculum, are inherited from a period when learning and command of certain symbols, affording as they did only access to learning, were all-important.” (26) The result, in Dewey’s mind, was that schools and the methods used to deliver education remained in a pre-industrial era. Pedagogy was focused on rote memorization, not in meeting the needs of the child to create and do. Schools focused on theory, not practice and practice was a better method for learning. “It is education dominated almost entirely by the mediaeval conception of learning. It is something which appeals for the most part simply to the intellectual aspect of our natures, our desire to learn, to accumulate information, and to get control of the symbols of learning; not to our impulses and tendencies to make, to do, to create, to produce, whether in the form of utility or art.” (26) By changing the methods of instruction, by involving the child and his/her interests in the learning process, schools would be more interesting and students would be favorabliy inclined to participate. “When school introduces and trains each child of society into membership within such a little community, saturating him with the spirit of service, and providing him with the instruments of effective self-direction, we shall have the deepest and best guaranty of a larger society which is worthy, lovely, and harmonious.”(29) Developing a student centered approach based upon an active participation in “doing” is a principal tent of the New Learning initiative.
[edit] On School as a life lesson
Dewey viewed education as best served using the model of producing a product. By assigning a task, such as sewing, the student besides learning a life skill, would have the opportunity to explore the relationship of fabric to needle, the geography of where the fabric was spun, grown and produced, and the markets that held the fabric valuable. In such a lesson, the student was prepared to enter the larger world. The learning process in schools was devoid of such methods. Schools did not take into account the change in the social and economic structure occurring at the time and as a result, there was no modification of the product based upon the changed social situation.
The industrial revolution changed the social situation, much like the impact the information revolution and creation of the knowledge industry has on today’s learning environment. “The change that comes first to the mind, the one that overshadows and even controls all others, is the industrial one—the application of science resulting in great inventions that have utilized the forces of nature on a vast and inexpensive scale: the growth of a world-wide market as the object of production, of vast manufacturing centers to supply this market, of cheap and rapid means of communication and distribution between all its parts.” “That this revolution should not affect education in some other than a formal and superficial fashion is inconceivable.” (9)
Dewey saw that the traditional school setting eliminating the purpose for learning for many students and as a result, lost its meaningfulness. Learning was best accomplished when it was similar to an apprenticeship; when there was a use of all the child’s senses in the discovery process. “No training of the sense organs in school, introduced for the sake of training, can begin to compete with the alertness and fullness of sense-life that comes through daily intimacy and interest in familiar occupations. (11)
Dewey saw a growing disconnect between formal education’s methods and the informal process of learning that seemed so successful. But he understood that in the changing social situation, apprenticeships, like the agrarian society would not fit into the school setting. “Yet there is a real problem: how shall we retain these advantages, and yet introduce into the school something representing the other side of life—occupations which exact personal responsibilities and which train the child in relation to the physical realities of life? (12)
While the public school may not be able to provide apprenticeships for all (although he was an early proponent of vocational education), the methods of inquiry related to “doing,” the work related to occupations was a valuable component of education that should and could be emulated in the school. “But out of occupation, out of doing things that are to produce results, and out of doing these in a social and co-operative way, there is born a discipline of its own kind and type. Our whole conception of school discipline changes when we get this point of view.” “…is that got through life itself. That we learn from experience, and from books or the sayings of others only as they are related to experience, are not mere phrases.” (17) His focus was on the end-result of the educational venture—the production of something that was real and useful. School is not a domain separate from the world. Its charge is not to be a place where learning takes place in a vacuum for the sake of learning, but for the application of learning to the larger needs of society. “…in short, as instrumentalities through which the school itself shall be made a genuine form of active community life, instead of a place set apart in which to learn lessons.” (14)
Schools needed to create an environment and develop pedagogy whereby application led to discovery of a broader framework of knowledge. The process of creating a product (occupational exercise) created an opportunity to grow awareness not limited by the task. “In educational terms, this means that these occupations in the school shall not be mere practical devices or modes of routine employment, the gaining of better technical skills as cooks, seamstresses, or carpenters, but active centers of scientific insight into natural materials and processes, points of departure whence children shall be led out into a realization of the historic development of man.” (19)
[edit] On the Physical Structure of School
Dewey expands on his student centered model and takes the physical structure of schools to task. Much of what follows has application today. Schools remain facilities designed for masses of children expected to sit and listen passively during the school day. Dewey describes a search for classroom desks for his room and gets a response from an equipment dealer, “You want something at which the children may work; these [desks] are all for listening.” (31)
Schooling is too often a passive activity, the current structure is built for listening—not doing. “…dependency of one mind upon another. The attitude of listening means, comparatively speaking, passivity, absorption.”(32)
The layout of most school rooms with 30 desks facing forward is such that as Dewey describes, “…everything is arranged for handling as large numbers of children as possible; for dealing with children en masse, as an aggregate of units; involving, again, that they be treated passively.” “…uniformity of method and curriculum. If everything is on a listening basis, you can have uniformity of material and method.” “It is response to this demand that the curriculum has been developed from the elementary school through college.” (33)
Of course, Dewey believed that the environment for schools should provide a basis for activity, exploration and student directed learning. Further more, Dewey chided the organization of coursework as dived to meet the needs of primary and secondary school structures. The curriculum was designed to feed it in small amounts over the life of the school experience, expecting it to be consumed, and therefore learned. “Now give the children every year just the proportionate fraction of the total, and by the time they have finished they will have mastered the whole.” (33) Said in jest, he did assume one small fact, that children would remember each piece and thus be able to build on prior knowledge.
On schools, he returns to a common theme that structured the way they are, they are built for those who run the school, not those for which it was designed in the first place— the student. “…the old education, its passivity of attitude, its mechanical massing of children, its uniformity of curriculum and method. It may be summed up by stating that the center of gravity is outside the child. It is the teacher, the textbook, anywhere and everywhere you please except in the immediate instincts and activities of the child himself.” (34)
[edit] On Learning Preferences
Children do not learn passively is a core tenet of Dewey’s pedagogy. They must be involved personally in their own education, to the point of being able to direct it. This student-centered approach is critical. Moreover, a structure that mandates passivity obviates the natural instincts that students have to learn. Dewey describes the learning preferences of children as deriving from a social instinct to communicate and a natural desire to “mess around.” Add to this natural desire another, Dewey called the art impulse, and you have a vessel ready to be shaped and led, with a natural “desire to tell, to represent.” (47) “…the interest in conversation, or communication; in inquiry, or finding out things; in making things, or construction; and in artistic expression—we may say they are the natural resources, the uninvested capital, upon the exercise of which depends the active growth of the child.” (48)
Dewey questions what the traditional methods of instruction are doing with this natural desire. “What are we to do with this interest—are we to ignore it, or just excite and draw it out? Or shall we get hold of it and direct it to something ahead, something better?” (48)
In a student centered environment, it is the teacher and schools responsibility to invoke the natural instincts for learning. The method he proposes is the laboratory setting for all forms of inquiry. “The point I wish to make is that there is abundant opportunity thus given for actual study, for inquiry which results in gaining information.” (53)
But even today, the concern is how to manage the environment. Would not discipline become an issue? Not if students were offered the opportunity to explore on their own and determine their own outcomes. In other words, to “produce” a product that is their own. As Dewey says, “As to discipline, they get more training of attention, more power of interpretation, of drawing inferences, of acute observation and continuous reflection, than if they were put to working out arbitrary problems for the sake of discipline.” (54)
For Dewey, “The imagination is the medium in which the child lives.” (61) School should support the child’s natural instincts for learning. Instead of presenting a drudgery of classes e of a student, Dewey suggests that, “When nature and society can live in the schoolroom, when the forms and tools of learning are subordinated to the substance of experience, then shall there be an opportunity for this identification, and culture shall be the democratic password.” (62)
“…but the school is not the place where the child lives.” (34)
