The child and his school: An interpretation of elementary education as a social process.

Abstract

^His .school certain powers or faculties existing in themselves and needing only to be exercised hy and upon presented subjectmatter, the presented subject-matter must mean something complete in its ready-made and fixed separateness.Objects, facts, truths of geography, history, and science not being conceived as means and ends for the intelligent development of experience, are thought of just as stuff to be learned.Reading, writing, figuring are mere external forms of skill to be mastered. Even the artsdrawing, singingare thought of as meaning so many ready-made things, pictures, songs, that are to be externally produced and reproduced. . . . Some means must be found to overcome the separation of mind and subject-matter; problems of methods in teaching are reduced to various ways of overcoming a gap which exists only because a radically wrong method had already been entered upon.'' (John Dewey, Interest and Effort in Education, p. 94.*) *' Philosophers have debated concerning the nature and method of knowledge. It is hardly cynical to say that positiveness of assertion on those points has been in proportion to the lack of any assured method of knowing in actual operation. The whole idea and scope of knowledge-getting in education has reflected the absence of such a method, so that learning has meant, upon the whole, piling up, worshiping, and holding fast to what is handed down from the past with the title of knowledge. But the actual practice of knowing has finally reached a point where learning means discovery, not memorizing traditions; where knowledge is actively constructed, not passively absorbed; and where men's beliefs must be openly recognized to be experimental in nature, involving hypothesis and testing through being set at work. Upon the side of subject-matter, the ideas of energy, process, growth, and evolutionary change have become supreme at the expense of the older notions of permanent substance, rigid fixity, and uniformity. The basic conceptions which form men's standards of interpretation and valuation have thus undergone radical altera-*By permission Houghton Mifflin Co. Copyright 1913 by John Dewey. THE CHILD AND HIS SCHOOL the question. It is an anachronism. . . . Our school methods, and to a very considerable extent our curriculum, are inherited from the period when learning and command of certain symbols, affording as they did, the only access to learning, were all-important. The ideals of this period are still largely in control, even where the outward methods and studies have been changed . . . our present education ... is highly specialized, one-sided and narrow. It is an education dominated almost entirely by the mediaeval conception of learning. It is something which appeals for the most part simply to the intellectual aspect of our natures, our desire to learn, to accumulate information, and to get control of the symbols of learning; not to our impulses and tendencies to make, to do, to create, to produce, whether in the form of utility or art. . . . *' While training for the pro...

John Dewey, New Education, and Social Control in the Classroom

“…(Pratt, 1948, p. 24). Manufacturing and selling of her wooden dolls and toys, however, never was a success, and Pratt who in 1908 had left teaching manual training returned to teaching again in 1913 when she established her own school -Play School, in Greenwich Village, later renamed City and Country School. Hartman (1921) fully agreed with Pratt"s views about work and play. However, she added that education should represent "a gradual development from the play to the work interest" (p. 108).…”

“…As stated, Hartman (1921) envisioned play interest develop into work interest. Schools should therefore select activities that fit the children.…”