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)