School and Society by John Dewey

1. School and Society by John Dewey 嘉義大學 教育系暨國民教育研究所 王清思 助理教授 Contents partially adapted from Philip Jackson’s “Re-reading John Dewey’s School and Society”（Journal of Elementary Education, 1998, Special Issue on Dewey)

2. The Origin of the Book • In April 1899, three years after the lab school was opened, Dewey delivered a series of three lectures (first three chapters of school and society) to friends, parents and patrons of his experimental school at the U of Chicago. • Colloquial in style; using many concrete examples drawn from his lab school, including student works and curriculum design, to illustrate his points. • Sold very well (7500 copies within months).

3. Historical Context • When Dewey first arrived in Chicago in the fall of 1894, he wrote to his wife: I sometimes think I will drop teaching philosophy directly, and teach it via pedagogy. When you think of the thousands and thousands of young ones who are practically ruined negatively if not positively in the Chicago schools every year, it is enough to make you go out and howl on the stret corners like the Salvation Army.

4. Chapter I: The School and Social Progress

5. Role of Education in Social Change • Earlier view: Education is "the fundamental method of social progress and reform“-----My Pedagogic Creed • Later view: "It is unrealistic, in my view, to suppose that schools can be a main agency in producing the intellectual and moral changes, the changes in attitudes and dispositions of thought and purpose, which are necessary for the creation of a new social order." "While the school is not sufficient condition, it is a necessary condition of forming the understanding and the dispositions that are required to maintain a genuinely changed social order.” -----Education and Social Change

6. The Aim of Education • Breaking the educational myth: Education is merely an “individualistic” affair. • Reconstructing the educational truth: "What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must the community want for all of its children. Any other ideal for our schools is narrow and unlovely; acted upon, it destroys our democracy"

7. Changed Social Circumstances:From Rural Life to Urban Living • Who were being left out? • Children of the new migrants and immigrants. • Of those children in school at that time, he reports, only 5% reached high school, "while more than half [left] on or before the completion of the fifth ... grade."

8. Urban Living: Shortcomings • The gradual loss ofcommunity life • The disappearance of role models for city-bred children to emulate • The absence of any meaningful work for them to perform within the family's economy • The remoteness of physical nature for the city child, and the lack of plants and animals to observe and to care for • The paucity of firsthand acquaintance with "real things and materials"

9. Urban Living: Potential Advantages • The increase in toleration • The increase in breadth of social judgment • The larger acquaintance with human nature, sharpened alertness in reading signs of character and interpreting social situations, greater accuracy of adaptation to differing personalities • Contact with greater commercial activities

10. School: Key to Social Progress • What can be done to compensate for the loss of rural, communal life? • School held the key to provide a program of remediation. • An individual school or classroom might transform itself into "a miniature community, an embryonic society" in which student inhabitants would live and learn conjointly and cooperatively (p. 18).

11. Curriculum of His Lab School • To give substance to his vision of what was possible, Dewey described how geography was currently being taught in his experimental school. He told how and why the enduring occupations of cooking, weaving, sewing, and carpentry had risen to prominence in the school's curriculum.

12. Misunderstandings about manual training • The purpose is not to produce manual workers, but to teach people how to live and learn. • The occupational activities should be introduced "as methods of living and learning, not as distinct studies" (p. 15). • This meant making the students aware of the social significance of what they were doing, helping them to see the connections between their classroom activities and what was going on in the world outside the school.

13. Industrial Revolution v.s. Intellectual Revolution • Literacy is no longer the exclusive possession of a privileged class. • “Learning has been put into circulation.” • “Knowledge is no longer an immobile solid; it has been liquified. It is actively moving in all the currents of society itself."

14. Medieval Conception of Learning • Schools still appeal solely "to the intellectual aspects of our natures, our desire to learn, to accumulate information, and to get control of the symbols of learning." They leave unaddressed "our impulses and tendencies to make, to do, to create, to produce, whether in the form of utility or of art."

15. Balancing the intellectual v.s. the practical • The “distinctively intellectual interest” of a few elites in “the symbolic and the formal” has been dominant. • The “practical impulse and disposition” for the greater majority of human beings who enjoy making and doing have been largely neglected.

16. Chapter II The School and the Life of the Child

17. Ideal Home for Children’s Education • The child learning through social conversation; through participating in household occupations to gain habits of mind (industry, order, regard for the rights and ideas of others) as well as knowledge. • The ideal home would naturally have a workshop where the child could work out his constructive instincts.

18. A child-centered school • Do it mean letting children do as they please? • How are pupils to get the necessary discipline and information? • He assures his audience that in the long run the students in such a school wind up with "the same results, and far more, of technical information and discipline that have been the ideals of education in the past."

19. How does Dewey see a child and the best way for learning? • Children’s natural proclivities and instincts: 1) “The social instinct" (i.e., the wish to communicate with others) 2) “The constructive impulse“ (i.e., the wish to make things), 3) “The instinct of investigation" (i.e., the wish to find out about things), 4) “The expressive impulse" (i.e., the wish to create things). • It is the teacher's job to direct toward worthwhile (i.e., educative) ends.

20. Dewey’s insistence • When we fully appreciate the imaginative richness of the child's world we come to see that "to him there is everywhere and in everything which occupies his mind and activity at all a surplusage of value and significance." Dewey cannot seem to understand why so many people, educators among them, fail to attain that appreciation. "Why are we so hard of heart and so slow to believe?"

21. Characteristics of Lab School Dewey’s Laboratory School: Lessons for Today 1997, Laurel N Tanner: • Social nature of learning • Developmentally appropriate practice • Investing the uninvested capital--children’s interests • Achieving curriculum integration • Project-based instruction • School as a learning community

22. Philip Jackson’s Doubts • Doubt #1: Our social life has undergone a thorough and radical change over the years; our educational system must undergo an equally complete transformation.

23. Philip Jackson’s Doubts • Doubt # 2: If, for every child in the community, we seek anything less than what the best and wisest parent wants for his or her child, our democracy stands in danger of being destroyed.

24. Philip Jackson’s Doubts • Doubts # 3: The children currently being overlooked or poorly served by your schools are psychologically different from those who our schools have traditionally served reasonably well. The former therefore need quite a different kind of education, one that puts a greater emphasis on making and doing than the recitation method and the mastery of written and spoken symbols.

25. Philip Jackson’s Doubts • Doubt #4: In an activity-oriented school students will learn just as much in the way of subject matter knowledge and the skills of literacy as they would in a school in which more traditional methods (drill and recitation) predominated.

26. My own doubts about Dewey • It is not the activities that matter, but the methods that teachers use to instruct pupils that make a huge difference in the learning outcome. • How many of us can really make sure that we are “intellectual” in the way Dewey prescribed?

27. Dewey’s relevance to Today’s Education in a Globalizing World Lost of the Pioneer Spirit? How to regain the pioneer spirit for the 21st century?