View unanswered posts | View active topics It is currently Thu Mar 28, 2024 7:47 am



Reply to topic  [ 4 posts ] 
 Process of living 
Author Message
Semi-pro
Semi-pro
User avatar

Joined: Thu Jan 11, 2007 9:01 am
Posts: 26
John Dewey's article "The Pedagogic Creed" had some very interesting beliefs. The idea that "education, there, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living" really caught my eye. I feel that this statement is very true and that many teachers are taught to teach to the latter. Many public schools are only focused on the grades and the eogs and the things that are considered "preparation for future living." Personally, in grade school i was more concerned with socialization and getting through the week. I think Dewey makes some great points to state that the school is a community for social learning and we need to teach what students are interested in at that moment. I was just wondering how everyone esle felt about Dewey's statement of education being a process of living.

_________________
Amanda Nicole Ricketts


Fri Jan 19, 2007 3:49 pm
Profile
All-star
All-star
User avatar

Joined: Tue Jan 09, 2007 5:01 pm
Posts: 30
Location: probably @ the library
Post 
yes! John Dewey in 1897 = rock star. I like how comprehensive and integrated his idea of education is. When you think about it, how can you separate education from just...the fact of being alive? I came across Dewey in researching Watauga College a couple of years ago, and it's interesting to see how his influence has played out over the last century. The existence of programs like Watauga--2 year, interdisciplinary, residential learning communities of freshmen and sophomores--are usually credited to Dewey and the kinds of ideas he lays out for us here. This is not altogether true, though...Dewey's contemporary and counterpart, a guy named Alexander Meiklejohn, was more directly responsible for these "experimental" colleges. Interesting dynamic between these guys...despite sharing many ideas about the role and purpose of education in society, they were frequently--and publicly--at odds over fundamental political and philosophical issues. Not the least of these was Dewey's behaviorism (evident in all of the phrases Dewey uses here to refer to the careful control and structuring of the child's environment) against the value Meiklejohn placed on a person's ability to think, decide, act rationally and morally, etc.

....Strange, both saw education as integral to democracy, but they disagreed over the best way to get to a democratic society through education. It's almost as if, for Dewey, "education" truly IS the experience of school itself, as a systematic and controlled development of certain behaviors; whereas "education" for Meiklejohn is cultivating the individual's critical/mental skills. Both wanted education to foster a sense of social responsibility/participation in people, but Dewey thought the key was in conditioning behaviors and Meiklejohn thought it was in developing the ability to think. Classic divide.

Interesting supplement to this essay--> Dewey's behaviorist approach was extraordinarily attractive to early 20th century American capitalists, such as Rockefeller, who were quite keen on the idea that schools could be intentionally organized to condition people in ways that would be favorable to their purposes, which included insuring access to a large body of potential workers. John Taylor Gatto recently published a very cool but depressing book called, "The Underground History of American Education," where he lays out the path by which American businessowners, allied with a veritable army of behavioral psychologists--including Dewey--organized in the 1920's-30s to help produce what we now recognize as compulsory institutional education, which was aimed from the beginning at the production of a large, docile class of workers whose "education" was to consist primarily in behavioral conditioning. School would produce complacent, obedient individuals who would already be accustomed to organizing their lives around things like timetables and who would excel at repetitive tasks, and thus the transition from school to work would appear entirely natural--essentially, Gatto argues that school was made in the image of work, that the actual content of education was/is worker-preparation (not the cultivation of the mind or the development of "critical thinking" skills, values, character, etc.), and that the whole thing was meant to serve the expansion of American capitalist enterprises. In a way, John Dewey unwittingly sold the American population out to the economic interests of a few wealthy people and their corporations. Ouch.

"What's Wrong With Teachers," "Why Johnny Can't Disobey," "The Classroom..."--all of the criticisms we've encountered, by this account, seem justified, all of the bad things about school are true! ...and John Dewey helped make it happen ;[ If he were around today, I don't think he'd approve of what's happened as a result of how well his ideas have worked. It's eerie to read the "Pedagogic Creed" now and see how these ideas, which are so inspiring and seem dead-on at times, had within them the seeds of exactly the kind of educational experience we see so many people fighting against today.

This sheds quite a different light on his comment about education being a "process." We'd like to think, idealistically, that this process is one of curiosity, investigation, critique, and that "education is a process" has something to do with developing a love of learning itself and learning how to learn. That's what I usually think of, anyway. The process of "education" that Dewey's ideas may have actually produced in our schools, on the other hand, is the process by which children are subjected to a calculated system of psychological conditioning and control. The implication is that this is what it really means to say that someone is "educated" in our society...just like the observation on another thread that it is only after we become educated that we seem unable to tell when obedience or adherence to the "norm" has gone too far....education is the process by which obedient populations are produced and controlled?...

Here's the link to Gatto's website, where you can actually read most of the chapters from his book. If you're interested, the stuff on Dewey can be found in chapter 13, starting with the section called "The New Thought Tide" http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/index.htm

Sorry for the long post, I got carried away ;x One last thing--in light of Gatto's depiction of how John Dewey's ideas were used to structure schooling in a way that would be favorable to the production of workers, check out this paragraph from the "Pedagogic Creed" and see what you think:

"In sum, I believe that the individual who is to be educated is a social individual and that society is an organic union of individuals. If we eliminate the social factor from the child we are left only with an abstraction; if we eliminate the individual factor from society, we are left only with an inert and lifeless mass. Education, therefore, must begin with a psychological insight into the child's capacities, interests, and habits. It must be controlled at every point by reference to these same considerations. These powers, interests, and habits must be continually interpreted--we must know what they mean. They must be translated into terms of their social equivalents--into terms of what they are capable of in the way of social service."


Mon Jan 22, 2007 1:14 am
Profile
Semi-pro
Semi-pro
User avatar

Joined: Sun Jan 14, 2007 11:09 pm
Posts: 24
Post 
I agree with what Amanda was saying about how education is a process of living. I know that I am in college because I want to get a job, but personally I just love learning. I love to interact with other students and learn not only in the classroom, but just in the atmosphere of the university. One of my biggest concerns when I really get out there to begin teaching is the fact that there is so much pressure put on children to do well on EOGs and having the teach to the test. I think that teaching/learning should be fun and that it should be interesting to the students. I also agree that social learning is extremely affective and just making students sit at their desks silently all the time is not giving them the best environment for them to learn at their highest potential. I have younger siblings (11 years old and younger) and it makes me sad that they are so discouraged to reading. I want them to have a passion to read and expand their minds, but because of how their school system works it makes reading seem like such work it is not fun anymore.

_________________
Krystal Tarnaski


Mon Jan 22, 2007 10:02 pm
Profile
Semi-pro
Semi-pro
User avatar

Joined: Wed Jan 10, 2007 9:50 pm
Posts: 24
Post 
I think that its true that public schools in this country focus their energy on the wrong things. Test scores and school preformance pit schools against other schools and the pressure falls on teachers to concern themselves with good grades on the finals rather than whether or not their students will go on to the next year with knowledge and skills that they didn't have before. Last semester I had an internship at Wilkes Central High School and it was depressing. The teacher that I worked with spent a lot of time complaining about the SCOS requirements and told me that I had better be prepared to have my test scores under a microscope, especially since I am teaching Chemistry (one of the more competetive subjects). I was like great.. thanks for the pep talk. It has made me worry that all of my supervisors are going to try to mold me into some kind of test score robot like so many of the teachers that I knew in high school.

_________________
Diana Zong


Tue Jan 23, 2007 4:34 pm
Profile
Display posts from previous:  Sort by  
Reply to topic   [ 4 posts ] 

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 7 guests


You cannot post new topics in this forum
You cannot reply to topics in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum
You cannot delete your posts in this forum
You cannot post attachments in this forum

Search for:
Jump to:  
cron
Powered by phpBB® Forum Software © phpBB Group
Designed by ST Software for PTF.