Customer Reviews

The School and Society and The Child and the Curriculum (Centennial Publications of The University of Chicago Press)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Dewey, a profound contributor to the field of education, displays some of his beliefs of the best methods to teach children in The Child and the Curriculum. To begin Dewey's discussion, the child's world is examined. In this examining, a sense of how the child's world operates is formed. Children learn through the process of experiencing things, life. In this book Dewey, finds that the schools in which children are educated contradict their very learning style by nature. "The child's life is an integral, a total one," (p.183, 1902). The way the school disseminates the curriculum is not the most optimal method for students to learn.
A child's life collects all the experiences, thus the child learns. Dewey postulates a change in the formula for teaching children, the curriculum. Why change the curriculum? As Dewey states, children need to be intertwined in the process of doing. Children will learn by doing, making clothes to wear, furniture to sit on, and growing food to eat. The idea of the separate subject area is a key area Dewey analyzes because of how children learn. When a child wants to build a chair to sit on, they examine disciplines across the realm of mathematics, science, and language skills while building the chair. Instead of separating this activity into different disciplines, it is woven throughout the activity. Throughout this book, it is stated that their needs to be a link to what the child is learning and what the child sees as a benefit to themselves.
As an educator, it is important to be exposed to varying ideas as to how the school systems have functioned and are functioning today. There are ideas in this book that a pre-service or current educator should consider during their teaching career. Are Dewey's ideas relevant for today's society? I believe this is a question one has to answer for themselves, construct your own meaning.

This great book contains two Dewey classics: (1) The School and Society; and, (2) The Child and the Curriculum. This text is like most Dewey works: concise and to the point. This text focuses on the effects and the power that teachers should have in affecting student lives. There is much discussion on Dewey's classic "educative" experiences and how education should be hands-on learning. Dewey also asserts that curriculum should emulate real life challenges and "occupations" of everyday life. Learning occurs in doing and not in repeating facts and figures on multiple-choice tests.

We wonder why the greatest young minds are thrown into math and science courses instead of being encouraged to explore the arts and music. This book continues to show why coursework should not be limited to multiple-choice, fill-in-the-blank, and other methods of factoid memorization but rather coursework should include the exploration of skill-sets and also how the curriculum should provide a catalyst for knowledge and skill exploration.

Like most Dewey books, this should be required reading for all education programs and for all educators. Considered by many to be the only true American philosopher, Dewey once again provides a clear look at why education in America is sub-par in quality and effectiveness.

Also recommended: "Experience and Education," by John Dewey.

From a high school student's point of view, reading Dewey couldn't provide something else than hope for educational systems, most of which, despite the efforts of making a school a more living atmosphere, organizations still remain too mechanical in learning procedures and detached from social applications regarding the capabilities they serve.

Originally from Cameroon, I've had the opportunity to explore three educational systems from different cultural influence each. It was an advantage that surely opened my mind to different perspectives by interacting with different cultures in different social contexts, but especially carried me out to realize how the so called "education" - in general, but in high school in particular - shortly addresses fundamental needs as much individually as socialy, since people tend to ignore its essential functions or misunderstand the concepts it involves, precisely because their implications are so general that they shouldn't be analyzed in separated contexts, school and society, as far as they are, with respect, one a component of the other but the other being the expression of the first one in a long term.

By observing both components as a whole, Dewey proposes a model that doesn't necessarily apply to actual issues or give factual solutions, but at least redefines "education" by integrating inherent aspects to human nature in its double acception - as a group as much as an individual -, which reveals the values traditional education still mostly hides.

I delibarately took the initiative of question what high school didn't explained to me, and probably often forget to ask itself. In what ways education serves people in the aim of blooming personally and socially ? which role schools are therefore supposed to play and in which patterns ? The questions are so simple that the answers appear obvious. In fact, they should be when the problematic is carefully put. this is the reason most people can get it wrong and sometimes don't even try to question what is already established. Dewey was an excellent starting point for my research and I recommend it to EVERYONE, not especially those concerned with education because it shouldn't be a matter of a restricted segment of people. Education is everywhere. Sorry for my english :)

Do not buy this "readaclassic.com" edition. It is TERRIBLE. There are a ridiculous amount of typesetting errors, dropped words, missing characters, etc. They didn't even place the diagrams in the correct place.

Honestly, it appears that they did a quick Optical Character Recognition from the scanned Google book, then didn't actually check. Terrible! They should be ashamed.

This book will never go out of style. As a future educator we talk about John Dewey and his work in class all the time. I always keep this book handy in the classroom!

Dewey is not exactly light reading, and this little book is pretty heavy. But it's also vitally important in understanding how kids learn. I'm a college coach, but I took much away from Dewey's principle of authentic learning. This is standard reading for any educator, but I'd press coaches, mentors and anyone else involved with improving young lives to read this. Dewey is so classic is almost cliche...but there's good reason for that.

No "expert" on education can afford to be unacquainted with the immortal John Dewey and his experimental school. Who would dare impugn the legendary educator often synonymous with the word "progressivism" itself? I am surely going to take a lot of flak for calling the emperor naked.

Dewey's conception of the child as learner assumes that the green mind most effectively comes to knowledge through spontaneous curiosity stemming from nature study. This, Dewey then expects, will blossom into a more expanded study of the various academic subjects. The role of the teacher lies mostly in facilitating transitions, and answering the child's self-posed questions along the way. Even if his theories were acceptable, The devil is in the details for Dewey: his science fair-meets-museum-meets-playground-meets-lecture hall school design is untested on any significant scale and the start up plus upkeep costs would be prohibitively expensive.
But it gets worse. As if kids (and I mean pre-high school) didn't have enough problems with basic skills and content, Dewey would have them heavily involved in shop and home economics. Even more outrageous in Dewey's model is the premise that we ought not force students to study what they do not like, because this turns them off to learning and harms the "learning community". Childrens' own intellectual take enormous precedence and by implication, teachers are discouraged from evaluating their progress against solid standards. Experienced teachers know that when working with a group, even good kids can hide their shortcomings in weak subjects, and that remediation becomes hard to implement if direct intervention is ignored for too long. Dewey's recommendation to cater so exclusively to what the child will understand as practically useful and intellectually stimulating at the moment is at best a risky gamble which worsens low performance in students too immature to understand the value of education. It's no small wonder why the teacher turnover is so high even in better districts with approaches like this floating around schools.

"The School and Society," like many other off-the-wall manifestos of educational theory, denies established behavioral science when it glosses over or ignores well understood psychological patterns in children. It depicts formulaic teaching and learning as fundamentally faulty and generalized curricula as harmful to student individuality. Nothing could less representative of quality research conducted, particularly Project Follow Through. I for one would like to see Dewey's updated plan for seamlessly moving kids who come into class with their "natural inquisitiveness" programmed by video games, and Twitter, into colonial American history, calculations of hyperbolic asymptotes, Tennessee Williams, and the "plus-que-parfait" tense. But of course, such leaps of interest are unnecessary if we just throw out the "old-fashioned" curriculum along with the old-fashioned school system. Have skimping on the basics in lieu of language/culture classes for our latest GDP competitor nation, and labs in the hottest technology in the name of a more "practical" and "world-conscious" education produced any statistically significant educational gains or more confident and employable students?

A fairly recent study remarked that the majority of high school grads today report that they did not feel adequately challenged. Let's say it was really only 25%. Is that acceptable? Maybe the answer doesn't lie in justifying our educational failures by apologizing for and papering over our children's undisciplined minds. I for one do not believe that kids today are fundamentally less able to behave, sit still, and learn as their grandparents did at their age; many of them have so many more advantages.
"The School and Society" relies upon the circular contradiction of allowing an uneducated mind direct the teacher on its own education. From the apparent absurdity of it all, I can only conclude that sane people latch onto these ideas as part of an escapist fantasy from dismal drop-out rates, lowered standards, and social discord. But a radical solution is not necessarily a good one.