Week of 9/21
Reading response questions for 9/21
Black - Nick Purple - Kendra Blue - Matteo
This week in your blogs, please collectively summarize the final movement Kliebard discusses: social meliorism.
According to Rugg and Counts, Social Meliorism was driven by an undercurrent of discontent with the American and Economic Social Systems. There was a general dissatisfaction with the “religion of prosperity” as termed by Dewey (p. 154). School board members were drawn from privileged classes, and undeserved students were not suited to a literary bias in education. Counts argued that although the tax structure stated all students were to be supported, in reality the American school system was only serving a small, privileged few. This movement deplored the standardization of life and social conformity through education and attacked efficiency as the supreme criterion of education.
This movement was in contract to the other two movements - one which sought to prepare children and youth for a distinct life role by training them based on their abilities and future "destinies" (efficiency-based). and the other which viewed curriculum as the opportunity by which children could realize their purpose in life (developmental / experiential).
Meliorism or Reconstructivism?
Rugg, “more effective outcomes will be secured by weaving together—lesson by lesson—the facts, movements, conditions, principles, and social, economic, and political “laws” that depend upon one another and that can be fully comprehended only when they are woven together.”
Alarm over the educators’ propensity to orient themselves “with child-centered experimental schools while neglecting what he [Rugg] regarded as a social crisis”
Then share your individual views on the various ways 'experience' was operationalized during the period Kliebard writes about.
What was your reaction to these initiatives as you read about them?
Initiatives:
Project-based learning: “Kilpatrick’s accomplishment was to take a successful curriculum reform in a restricted area, vocational agriculture, and to recast it so as to make it plausible as a way of reconstructing the entire curriculum.”
Dewey, curriculum
P.134, 137
- Experience Curriculum
- “By the 1930s, the movement [project curriculum] had grown to such proportions that it out- grew its original identification with the project per se and came to be more grandly advertised as the activity curriculum or the experience curriculum”
- “built on the importance of child and adolescent interests, their sense of purpose as a guide to what to study, and on activity, usually overt, replacing what was conventionally seen as the appalling passivity that characterized most school programs.”
- DeBoer: curriculum consisting not of isolated compartments, but an integrated curriculum organized around four major divisions: English, science, social studies, and the arts
- Skeptics: “transfer potency”
Reconstructivism:
Social Science Pamphlets
Stark realism and a just accounting of history and social developments
Adages consistent with progressive thought
Anti capitalist themes
Rugg aligned with this school of thought after the great depression, saying the world was on fire and students had to be able to deal with the “conflagration.”
Resulted in the adoption of Rugg’s textbooks based on the pamphlets
- Hybridization: a potpourri of “once distinct and easily recognizable curriculum positions”
- a strong following among practicing school administrators
- not nearly as politically sensitive, and the public appeal of a curriculum tied directly to the needs of children as well as the duties of life made it a much safer course for school administrators to follow.
Also discuss Dewey's relationship to both social meliorism and the early 'experiential' reforms.
Dewey was not willing to associate with achievement standards and measurement. He saw freedom as no end into itself. He believed individuality does not have to be at odds with directing the conditions under which worthwhile activities are carried out and that curricula designed with input form learners themselves was important. Without the direction of the child’s interests it is difficult to move beyond developmentalist origins.
Along with Bode, Dewey reacted to the possibility of a predetermined social ideal as an end point. Does a known end invite instrumental rationality and means-to-an-end thinking? Bode’s direct critique concerned communistic thinking veiled in American individuality. Dewey also advocated against the siloing of subject matter: {“in a situation where the skills or arts and the subject- matter of knowledge have become interwoven and interdependent,” the persistence of a curriculum “on the basis of many isolated and independent subjects is bound to result in precisely the kind of confusion we have at present”}
Dewey on Projects: Dewey believed that projects frequently involved too short a time span and were often casually arrived at. Ultimately, doubted the transferability and generalizability of project-gained knowledge.
Dewey’s solution: Dewey believed that the “broad fields” organization of the curriculum, a modification of the subject curriculum that attempts to address the problem of the isolation of school subjects from one another by linking together those subjects with some affinity.(ie occupations: farming, cooking, textile manufacture. Dewey believed the tasks of human civilization served as an entry point into the more sophisticated knowledge bodies which support them ie the sciences, language etc. -Matteo) HoHumanists react to reconstitution of subject areas. Dewey did not have enough of a true following in the world of educational practice to make his impact felt.
Dewey seems to be a timid centrist in a lot of ways. -mb I think it lets him step into the role of the Hegelian beautiful soul, possibly the secret (inert action and inaction) to his staying power NB. I wonder if he obfuscates behind sophistication, intellectualization, and abstraction, abdicating his power and influence when it is most needed- MB
Dewey struggles to “...coordinate the psychological with the social…” p.54 or the individual experience with the group experience. Despite the existential and perceptual chasms which bound the individual experience, Dewey cannot seem to escape the material, behavioral demands of our species’ social nature. This dialectical tension can be seen as underlying the arguments of all four movements outlined by Kliebard as they struggle to reconcile the obligation of the school to the individual with the obligation of the school to the group. On one end of the spectrum we find the developmentalists, who, by centering the child, seem to value the experience of the individual over all else. The meliorists, perhaps, come next. Their social justice approach seeks to reform society to meet the needs of the greatest number of individuals by approaching each individual pupil as an opportunity to enact social change. They value the individual experience as a means to change the group experience. The humanists follow, they believe the group experience in the form of the western cannon to be so powerful as to be capable of helping any individual who comes in contact with it. Social efficiency educators are on the opposite end of the spectrum from the developmentalists. They are closely allied with the humanists in that they believe that what is good for the group, is good for the individual. Their ideology is perhaps the most internally valid. By best preparing the individual for their eventual function in society, they believed that they also best served the individual. This approach is individual focused, but does not take into consideration the interests desires or experience of the individual but rather prescriptively dictates learning. As I said above, this closely aligns the social efficiency faction with the humanists. Ultimately, I tend to agree with Kliebard: that the struggle for curriculum is more about interest groups vying for influence over America's youth than it is about operationalizing experience. -MB
This week's response was a little scattershot, so forgive me if I've missed or overlooked a central idea. I'd like first to respond to Nick's assertion that Dewey was a "beautiful soul." I can see how you'd get this impression from the was he is portrayed in the book, which positions him as above and outside the other groups and does not really explain in full his own view. Let me assure you that Dewey was very active, and should rightly be seen as a public intellectual and a social activist. Dewey helped start the AAUP, ACLU, and NAACP. See: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1992/06/25/the-real-john-dewey/. He also opened his lab school precisely to test out his ideas, even though it only lasted 8 years and was at the start of his career. Hopefully when we turn to Dewey next, we can pin him down to some satisfactory degree. I would argue that his staying power is, in the philosophical realm, due to the complexity and reach of his thinking, and in the eduational realm, overstated. If one believes Kliebard, Dewey's actual impact is negligible, which I actually agree with. School was never reconstructed to his liking - as I think you'll see next week in "Dewey outlines utopian schooling."
ReplyDeleteI appreciated Matteo's comparisons of the different interest groups at the end. That is a useful schematic. Your statement at the end matches with Dewey's assessment, which he made in 1938 in Experience and Education, that the traditionalists (read: humanists) and progressives (read: developmentalists) both lacked a sufficient theory of experience. The traditionalists because they ignored it, and the developmentalists because they sentimentalized it. I'm curious to hear your reaction when we get there.
Kendra - I'm curious which of these interest groups/paradigms you align with. It seems the developmentalists? It is curious to me that you used the term "experiential" in your summary of their view. This is probably right, on the one hand, because I think "experientialism" has a similar sentimentality to it. But on the other hand, the term "experiential" didn't really exist yet in the early 1900s - it came after midcentury. It will be interesting to examine what commonalities you see between developmentalism and the human potential movement when we get there later this semester - which is where the term "experiential" comes from.