Week 2 - due 9/14
Reading response questions 9/14
Please address the following topics on your blog. This week, please just produce one collective response. (You should 'sign' your personal contributions somehow though.)
1) Summarize/outline the different movements Kliebard introduces to this point: Humanism, developmentalism, and social efficiency (you may also choose to refer to the perspective of mental discipline, whose influence was waning). Refer to specific pages in the text so we have them on hand on Monday.
2) How do you think Kliebard is relating Dewey to these movements?
3) In 1951, as Dewey wrote about revising his 1925 book Experience and nature, he lamented that the "wholeness" of his concept of experience was "corrupted and destroyed" because it had become "effectively identified with experiencing in the sense of the psychological, and the psychological had become established as that which is intrinsically psychical, mental, private" (Later works, volume 1, p. 362). By that time he came to believe that the concept of culture would better suit his goals. Please review and interpret one another's 9/7 definitions of experience. In what ways do you see culture reflected in your definitions?
4) What is one agenda item you'd like to discuss from this week's readings?
Hi folks, tonight we'll tackle some troubleshooting related to the blogs so they technical issues can get worked out. In the future it would be great to have all the posts composed on one single page, reserving the comment section for classmates' and my responses. This is not only easier to manage, it is more conducive to dialogue with the group, using the blog as a medium.
ReplyDeleteTonight we'll put a finer point on the different interest groups Kliebard writes about and we'll also start to get our heads around Dewey's notion of experience and how it shaped his educational prescriptions. To get there, we should spend some time identifying (a) which aspects of the other traditions he overlapped with (I won't say agreed with), and (b) which aspects he criticized. You're right, experience and culture are slippery notions, and for Dewey, pinning them down was critical for any serious educational philosophy and program, for ultimately, to open a school (or create a nationwide system of education, for that matter), one needs an idea that is both philosophically robust and practically operational.
I'll just close by saying that pragmatism, in Dewey's case, is a philosophical tradition that emphasizes consequences. It doesn't just mean "practical." This is important for understanding his criticisms of the other educational positions - they each had unintended consequences that would play out in practice to yield antidemocratic ends. As we approach the discussion tonight, consider- what were those consequences, and why did Dewey regard them as antidemocratic?