The School and Society: Being three lecturesDewey, John
Philosophy
The School and Society: Being three lectures
Dewey, John
Education; Education -- Philosophy; Educational psychology; University of Chicago. University Elementary School
But all this means a necessary change in the attitude of the school, one
of which we are as yet far from realizing the full force. 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. We sometimes hear the
introduction of manual training, art and science into the elementary,
and even the secondary schools, deprecated on the ground that they tend
toward the production of specialists—that they detract from our present
scheme of generous, liberal culture. The point of this objection would
be ludicrous if it were not often so effective as to make it tragic. It
is our present education which is highly specialized, one-sided and
narrow. It is an education dominated almost entirely by the mediæval
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 of art. The very fact that
manual training, art and science are objected to as technical, as
tending toward mere specialism, is of itself as good testimony as could
be offered to the specialized aim which controls current education.
Unless education had been virtually identified with the exclusively
intellectual pursuits, with learning as such, all these materials and
methods would be welcome, would be greeted with the utmost hospitality.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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