The School and Society: Being three lectures — John Shaqi
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
Within this organization is found the principle of school discipline or
order. Of course, order is simply a thing which is relative to an end.
If you have the end in view of forty or fifty children learning certain
set lessons, to be recited to a teacher, your discipline must be devoted
to securing that result. But if the end in view is the development of a
spirit of social coöperation and community life, discipline must grow
out of and be relative to this. There is little order of one sort where
things are in process of construction; there is a certain disorder in
any busy workshop; there is not silence; persons are not engaged in
maintaining certain fixed physical postures; their arms are not folded;
they are not holding their books thus and so. They are doing a variety
of things, and there is the confusion, the bustle, that results from
activity. But out of occupation, out of doing things that are to produce
results, and out of doing these in a social and coöperative way, there
is born a discipline of its own kind and type. Our whole conception of
school discipline changes when we get this point of view. In critical
moments we all realize that the only discipline that stands by us, the
only training that becomes intuition, is that got through life itself.
That we learn from experience, and from books or the sayings of others
_only_ as they are related to experience, are not mere phrases. But the
school has been so set apart, so isolated from the ordinary conditions
and motives of life, that the place where children are sent for
discipline is the one place in the world where it is most difficult to
get experience—the mother of all discipline worth the name. It is only
where a narrow and fixed image of traditional school discipline
dominates, that one is in any danger of overlooking that deeper and
infinitely wider discipline that comes from having a part to do in
constructive work, in contributing to a result which, social in spirit,
is none the less obvious and tangible in form—and hence in a form with
reference to which responsibility may be exacted and accurate judgment
passed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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