JOHN DEWEY'S SCHOOL AND SOCIETY

							      JOHN DEWEY’S
       SCHOOL AND SOCIETY


CHAPTER 2:
THE SCHOOL AND THE LIFE OF THE CHILD
Luz Carime Bersh, Ph. D.
National-Louis University
Dewey’s critique to the traditional
school:
   Desks set up in rows: Designed for children to listen,
    to assume a passive role in education.
   Mechanical massing of children. No consideration of
    individual needs.
   Education is teacher-centered.
   Uniformity of method and curriculum.
   “ The moment children act they individualize
    themselves; they cease to be a mass, and become
    the intensely distinctive beings that are acquainted
    with out of school, in the home, the family, on the
    playground, and in the neighborhood.”
                                Dewey (p. 49)
According to Dewey:
   The child learns and acquires knowledge based
    on what interests him and through experience.
   Education starts at home: Discussions with adults,
    inquiries about the child’s immediate world,
    experiences through participation in household
    chores.
   It is very important to provide contact within
    different social settings.
If the child is intrinsically motivated by working
on what he is interested in,

   He will face obstacles and work around them.
   He will become acquainted with materials.
   He will develop patience, persistence, alertness and
    self-discipline.
   He will develop more knowledge, skills, and
    problem solving strategies than if asked to follow
    directions.
Dewey’s educational model is based on the
innate child’s instincts:
    1. The social instinct: through conversation,
     personal intercourse and communication.
    2. The instinct of making:through play,
     movement, gesture, and make believe. The instinct
     of investigation grows of this constructive impulse
     and conversational.
    3. The art instinct: the impulse to express also
     evolves from the communicating and constructive
     instincts.
The purposes of the Lab School:
(based only on this chapter)
   “To utilize this (the child’s)
    interest so that it shall
    become an ends of seeing
    the progress of the human
    race.” (p.62)
   “The interest of the child in
    people and their doings is
    carried on into the larger
    world of reality”
     (p. 63)
   Integration of subject areas based on needs of
    child’s interest.
   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 simply for the sake of
    discipline.”
Dewey also points out,
   The “absurdity” (p.66) of teaching language as
    a thing by itself, of “recitation”-the memorization
    of facts, just for that purpose.
   Dewey calls out for allowing spontaneity in
    children’s conversations, to encourage freedom of
    oral communication within the classroom. That is
    how language is developed in a useful, continual
    contact with reality.
Allowing this development of language will have
as a result:

   The child has something to say, thought to express,
    “and a thought is not a thought unless it is one’s
    own.” (p.66)
   “The child who has a variety of materials and facts
    wants to talk about them, and his language becomes
    more refined and full, because it is controlled and
    informed by realities. Reading and writing, as well as
    the oral use of language, may be taught on this
    basis.” (p.67)
   “That our children shall live- not that they shall be
    hampered and stunted by being forced into all kinds
    of conditions, the most remote consideration of which
    is relevancy to the present life of the child.”
   “If we identify ourselves with the real instincts and
    needs of childhood, and ask only after its fullest
    assertion and growth, the discipline and information
    and culture of adult life shall all come in their due
    season.” (p. 71)
   “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.”
                                          (p.73)