Week of Sept 28

Nick's additions

Kendra's additions

Matteo's additions

As you read this week, pay particular attention to the reasons Dewey offered agricultural life as an exemplar for educators in The school and social progress. It will help to compare that essay with themes from My pedagogic creed (1897) & The school and social progress (1899)- How do you think these pieces inform his fun little romp through utopia? 

In other words, why is he offering utopian schooling as an ideal? Dewey’s creed is a more granular perspective on the utopian schooling ideal.  

How is that piece grounded in the other essays? The Utopian Schooling ideal reflects the idealism present in Dewey’s creed. The Utopian school is so obviously grounded in the full integration of the elements of the creed that it is able to realize the abdication of formalized evaluation.

Dewey - My Pedagogic Creed

What the education is

• I believe that all education proceeds by the participation of the individual in the social consciousness of the race.

• Through this unconscious education the individual gradually comes to share in the intellectual and moral resources which humanity has succeeded in getting together.

• This first statement struck me deeply.  

• I believe that the only true education comes through the stimulation of the child's powers by the demands of the social situations in which he finds himself.

• … to emerge from his original narrowness of action and feeling, and to conceive of himself from the standpoint of the welfare of the group to which he belongs. Through the responses which others make to his own activities he comes to know what these mean in social terms.

• I believe that this educational process has two sides-one psychological and one sociological; and that neither can be subordinated to the other or neglected without evil results following.

• Of these two sides, the psychological is the basis. The child's own instincts and powers furnish the material and give the starting point for all education.

• This is the individualistic meets the collectivist, the intrapersonal and the interpersonal - and they’re both so important. 

• “Without insight into the psychological structure and activities of the individual, the educative process will, therefore, be haphazard and arbitrary. If it chances to coincide with the child's activity it will get a leverage; if it does not, it will result in friction, or disintegration, or arrest of the child nature” (p. 1).

• It is a fine balance and I think it involves empathy - the ability to connect with students and get excited about their curiosity.  Building relationships is so important. 

• I believe that knowledge of social conditions, of the present state of civilization, is necessary in order properly to interpret the child's powers.

• The child has his own instincts and tendencies, but we do not know what these mean until we can translate them into their social equivalents.

• Seeing the promise of emerging language in the babbling of a child

• This is the sociocultural component that Brofenbrenner and others cite are so important. It is what we learn as social workers and again, is realized through empathy. And it is important that we look at realize that when we are looking at these “differences,” we are often looking through the eyes of the population in power.  So what we see is viewed through that lens.  Perhaps the child’s “own instincts and tendencies” are not related to poverty but rather are wonderful characteristics of a group of people other than the population in power. When Dewey discusses “their social equivalents,” I see condescension in that statement. 

• I believe that the psychological and social sides are organically related and that education cannot be regarded as a compromise between the two, or a superimposition of one upon the other.

• These two sides are characterized unflatteringly and seemingly diametrically opposed, but complementary. One without the other is hollow (see next note).

• I love how this talks about how they’re “organically related.”  Yes!  Just like you can’t have big without small.  

• “With the advent of democracy and modern industrial conditions, it is impossible to foretell definitely just what civilization will be twenty years from now” (p. 2)

• One of my favorite things that Dewey talks about which I’ve begun to adopt into my own life is how strange it is to think of education as constantly preparing one for the future rather than living and learning each day for that day.  Within schools that I worked in, teachers were constantly chiding students about how they needed to prepare for the following grade.  There were constant warnings about how “this behavior won’t be accepted when you’re in the sixth grade,” etc.  Even then I thought to myself… what about fifth grade?  Why the constant dire threats?  While goal setting and intentionality is important, it is also important to be present in the here and now. 

• I believe that each of these objections is true when urged against one side isolated from the other.

• To prepare him for the future life means to give him command of himself; it means so to train him that he will have the full and ready use of all his capacities… 

• It is impossible to reach this sort of adjustment save as constant regard is had to the individual's own powers, tastes, and interests-say, that is, as education is continually converted into psychological terms.

What the School Is

“I believe that…”

• School is primarily a social institution.

• education is a process of living and not a preparation for future living. (Yes!)  As I mentioned above - how did we get so far away from this? I’m also curious as always about this particular mindset of constantly preparing versus mindfulness and living in the present in other countries/cultures? 

• The school must represent present life

• As real and vital to the child as that which he carries on in the home, in the neighborhood, or on the playground.

• education which does not occur through forms of life is a poor substitute for genuine reality and tends to cramp and to deaden

• “worth living for [its] own sake”

• School, as an institution, should simplify existing social life

• To an embryonic form

• existing life is so complex that the child cannot be brought into contact with it without either confusion or distraction

• School life should grow gradually out of the home life; that it should take up and continue the activities with which the child is already familiar in the home - eventually deepening the values brought from home

• This is certainly opposite to the Humanist viewpoint.  When I think of the goals of Humanists (to support youth in learning classic or traditional knowledge, I do see some value).  

• this is a psychological necessity

• A social necessity because the home is the form of social life in which the child has been nurtured and in connection with which he has had his moral training

• much of present education fails because it neglects this fundamental principle of the school as a form of community life

• Focuses on information, and places value in the remote future

• moral education centers upon this conception of the school as a mode of social life

• Relationship is the locus of moral training. 

• These are truths currently neglected.

• The teacher is not in the school to impose certain ideas or to form certain habits in the child, but is there as a member of the community to select the influences which shall affect the child and to assist him in properly responding to these influences.

• The student should be disciplined through the life of the school as a whole

• The Teacher

• not in the school to impose certain ideas or to form certain habits

• select the influences

• assist him in properly responding

• Determine how the discipline of life shall come to the child

• Evaluation should also be community/socially oriented and driven, and used only to assess the fitness for social life and to determine place in which the individual will be most helpful to the group.

• “I believe that all questions of the grading of the child and his promotion should be determined by reference to the same standard. Examinations are of use only so far as they test the child's fitness for social life and reveal the place in which he can be of the most service and where he can receive the most help.”

• There is quite a bit of evidence around the idea that there shouldn’t be grading.  Andrew Coppens discusses this frequently.  

Subject Matter

• we violate the child's nature and render difficult the best ethical results, by introducing the child too abruptly to a number of special studies, of reading, writing, geography, etc., out of relation to this social life.

• The child’s own social activities should be the center of the subject matter

• Apart from human activity (and experience?) the multiplicity of nature cannot be unified

• Literature ties together the human experience, but cannot be the basis for it

• History is inert unless presented as a perspective on human social interaction

• The child should be given opportunities (expressive, constructive exercises) to enact the emergence of civilization

• Provides a place for manual training, home ec activities, etc.

• Science must be presented as a way to understand experiences already had (scaling of a teapot exercise, etc)

• Language should be presented as a social instrument (lacan - the subconscious is structured like language, wittgenstein - language is a game of comfort and security). Do works have fixed meanings across time, space, and culture?  Vs. Autic perspective on language.

• No succession of studies in the ideal school curriculum

• progress is not in the succession of studies but in the development of new attitudes towards, and new interests in, experience.

• I believe once more that history is of educative value in so far as it presents phases of social life and growth. It must be controlled by reference to social life. When taken simply as history it is thrown into the distant past and becomes dead and inert. Taken as the record of man's social life and progress it becomes full of meaning.

• This is so true.  If we can’t see ourselves within the history or practice empathy (again), we’re disconnected from what we’re learning.  It’s not until we put ourselves in the situation, consider the thoughts, desires, options that people had - and how this connects to how we act today - that “learning history” serves a purpose. 

 

The Nature of Method

• he active side precedes the passive in the development of the child nature

• “I believe that next to deadness and dullness, formalism and routine, our education is threatened with no greater evil than sentimentalism.  I believe that this sentimentalism is the necessary result of the attempt to divorce feeling from action.”

• There is also some calm and stability found in routine that I think is important.  

The School and Social Progress

• Education is the fundamental method of social progress and reform.

• All punitive and systems oriented reforms are futile

• education is a regulation of the process of coming to share in the social consciousness

•  formation of a certain character as the only genuine basis of right living

• Right character is formed through a process of socialization

• In the ideal school we have the reconciliation of the individualistic and the institutional ideals

• The community’s paramount moral duty is to the development and provision of education

• This process also serves to organize society and clarify its priorities

• education … marks the most perfect and intimate union of science and art conceivable in human experience.

 

School and social reform

"Where anything is growing, one former is worth a thousand reformers.” Horace Mann - speaks to Jayson’s feeling that before casting something out it must be understood. 

Utopian Schools

“Is it true, that schools are needed for babies to learn to walk and talk?”

No genuine production without enjoyment

Essentially a communitarian communist credo

Reads like a manual for creating a society like the one in “The Giver.” -- the elimination of shame, discomfort, pain, fear, embarrassment.  Reading this makes me wonder about the importance of these emotions though. Without fear, would we grow?

Does Dewey believe in a perfectable future? It seems like he thinks we’re already living in it, that it is already around us, and it just has to be better realized through some gentle tinkering with pedagogy. His ideas about education delivering the inheritance of a ‘race’ through the miniaturization and eventual deepening of domestic systems, structures, and mores is troubling. Similarly his faith in psychology and science seems unexamined. To where could the measuring of people, evaluating them only to determine their just place in the collective good, possibly lead? He does he frame their importance as only being viable when locked in something of a stable tensegrity with their corresponding humanistic foils but that arrangement seems tenuous and wishful. 

In your blog response, share one insight you gained from Dewey's essays this week (and Westbrook's essay about Dewey) and one question you still have about his work. It will probably be difficult, but try and refrain from imposing current sensibilities (e.g., about race and nature) onto Dewey's work as we seek to understand it. Try and occupy Dewey's mind in the context in which he was writing, which Kliebard captured so well.

Insight/Question 1:

One of my first impressions in learning about the specifics of what occurred in Dewey’s Laboratory School is how similar it is to Project Based Learning (Westbrook, p. 6-8).  It also reminds me quite a bit of IB schooling curriculum.  I would love to see what the curriculum looked like.  Within IB, they have there is a spreadsheet where the content is along the side and the competencies along the top.  I wonder if Dewey organized all the competencies that needed to be learned in each subject area as well as historical movements?  How did he make decisions about what was included in the curriculum?  Who were the other people who were deciding?  Since it was a Laboratory school, how were they measuring whether this “worked”?  What did “success” even look like? I also wonder how students learned to collaborate in these projects and whether this was an intentional teaching or not.  

Question 2:

“Dewey’s philosophy of education came under heavy posthumous attack in the 1950s from the opponents of progressive education, who blamed him for virtually everything that was wrong with the American public school system. Although his actual impact upon American schools was quite limited and conservative critics erred in confusing him with the progressives he had himself attacked, Dewey proved to be a convenient symbol of opprobrium for ‘fundamentalists,’ worried about the decline of intellectual standards in schools and the threat this posed to a nation involved in a Cold War with Communism” (Westbrook, p. 10)

Within this quote, who are the other progressives that Westbrook is referring to? Who were the progressives that Dewey himself attacked? 

Question 3:

What was happening in Dewey’s life when he wrote “My Pedagogic creed”? 

As usual, please reference specific passages/pages so we can refer to them in class. Feel free to refer to prior class work as needed, too. Lastly, what is one agenda item you wish to talk about in class?

My agenda item would be to discuss what others' impressions of Dewey were.  While Nick seemed to have a lot of questions, I resonated with almost every word that Dewey wrote.  

As you read this week, pay particular attention to the reasons Dewey offered agricultural life as an exemplar for educators in The school and social progress. It will help to compare that essay with themes from My pedagogic creed. How do you think these pieces inform his fun little romp through utopia? In other words, why is he offering utopian schooling as an ideal? How is that piece grounded in the other essays?

In Creed, Dewey claims that the only way to reconcile the social and individualistic aspects of education is to have school mirror life as closely as possible. By allowing the student’s interest to lead, and grounding curriculum in the real needs associated with the “social life” of the student, Dewey attempts to ensure the engagement of the student with the curriculum and vice versa. On page 1, paragraph 1 of “Creed” Dewey says that education begins at birth and, in paragraph 2 “that the only true education comes through the stimulation of the child's powers by the demands of the social situations in which he finds himself.” It seems to me that Dewey aims to blur the line between education and daily life as much as possible and, ideally, to the point where it no longer exists. “Utopian schools” seems to be a thought experiment, imagining this tenet in its fullest and most extreme manifestation.

I agree - it seems as though the Utopian School is a dream-like representation of Dewey's Creed.