Okay, so I got up early in the morning to read Dewey, and I loved it!
The emphasis of school as a "community" and that the school life itself has to be worth living for rather than as a preparation of a future life.
That the teachers are members of community that helps to facilitate learning for the students with the previous experiences and wisdom.
That there are two dimensions of education - sociological and psychological - and that the psychological aspect must come first.
That learning should be in connection with the actual social life that the student is living in.
That under interest lies the power, and the education is about finding that power.
And now as a retrospect my school days, those things were never never never present in the education that I received. The teachings were far too much isolated from the life that I was living - lack of connection to what I can actually use in my daily life, I just thought that someday I might need them. Lack of respect for my interest and the social motives that I had - I had to match my interest and social motives to the ones that were imposed in order to survive.
I have two questions with those in mind.
From what background did Dewey come up with such ideas? Was the education at that time very unproductive and problematic?
Second, how is those ideas appied to real school settings? From Sara's posting below, it seems that there are people who try to appy Dewey's philosophy in the classes but without fidelity. At least they try! (I'm being optimistic this morning.)
I know some "substitute" schools in Korea which have simliar philosophy as Dewey's and I don't know if they are following his idea, but it seemed really nice and helping for the students. They emphasize the school as a community including the principal, teachers and the students, and they emphasize the interest of each child and try to match the learning environment for each student. However, they struggle also, to discipline the students (they have community rules that the students themselves establish...) and to make good standards to get in the university. I don't know how well they do in the entrance examination and how well they adjust to the university environment, (I hope they do well!) but I just was wondering as I was reading the articles, so I see that Dewey's ideas are great, but how can they be applied into the school and the classrooms? Those substitute schools are not public schools and so there are small numbers of students who go to this kind of schools. So I guess that how it is possible to have such revolutionary learning environment. However they still need to educate the students to rise to the social standards. Dewey says that th ideal schools hace reconciliation of the individualistic and the institutional ideals (Article Five, the school and Social Progress). How can this be possible? (Or even, is it at all, possible?)
I know it is hard to realize now, but John Dewey was the dominant educational theorist, and really social theorist, not only in the United States but in the world in the first half of the twentieth century. So many countries looked to base their schooling systems on Dewey's ideas, and so many thinkers were influenced by him. I would argue that what is good in the U.S. education system even today, what has led the U.S. to be a center of innovation, are Dewey's ideas that were integrated into our school system in the 1920s and 30s. It is really what leads to innovation. Even today, if you look at many of the elite private schools in the United States, many of them follow what is essentially a Deweyan philosophy. They are not training the future leaders to be good test takers but to be creative thinker. The question then is why do so few people talk of him, and even fewer read him. What happened to our public school system that Dewey was excised. I think the major thing is that Dewey did not believe you can know things, absolutely know things. He did not believe there was any such things as experts in the world because each problem needed a new way of looking at the world around you. He actually has a book, "Knowing and the Known" where he argues for an emphasis on knowing rather than what is known. People in modern day society can't handle that, they want to know what is known, they want to know what to do to accomplish what they want. Of course there is no such thing, but we crave it any way.
ReplyDeleteTo know what is known is much easier than struggle to know, and it does not give the person anxiety and sense of insecurity that the person might be wrong (or right but different from everybody else.)
ReplyDeleteThe ability to endure that anxiety and the sense of insecurity, is partly exciting but can be very much scary. So. If one wants to know things that are not known, one needs a lot of courage.
If there is no social reward attached to it, then it will become harder. So I come back to thinking, so what we need is an environment and the context where such thinking is rewarded and looked upon and praised. How can we make such environment?