John Dewey and Education

...In the centuries preceding the renaissance, the dominant ideal in education was to train every person to fit somewhere in the industrial and social structure...

...It is the renaissance, with its revival of the classics and its emphasis on book-learning and on wide curiosity, that has been justly credited as a first manifestation of the movement toward wider education along bookish and cultural lines...

...Professor Dewey's colleagues at Columbia University have also psid signal heed to his anniversary, by means of two intellectual feasts at Horace Mann Auditorium and an honest-to-goodness dinner at a prominent hotel...

...There are several points in this panorama of educational philosophy that show that the camera was out of focus...

...4.That the school is a social institution...

...Salutary as the universalizing of the power to read, write and compute undoubtedly has been, it has dragged in after it, in the last event, an insistence that all children stay in school long past the time when most of them can profit by further purely intellectual tasks, and a long-pervading formalism in the education of the many that has produced countless thousands who are too normal in brain power to use in their lives the Euclidean geometry they have been taught, and too untrained in more useful arts and in taking care of themselves to find a place in the adult world...

...In the above principles at least, John Dewey seems to have uncovered long-buried truths and to have led the movement to apply them to modern education according to the needs of our civilization...

...The renaissance, although its Erasmus and its More were given no honor, was at least credited with a recrudescence of interest in education, responsible for the reemergence of the genus "educational philosopher" in the form, for example, of Locke and Herbart and John Dewey...

...JOHN DEWEY AND EDUCATION By HELEN M. McCADDEN THE secular newspapers of New York, especially the Sunday editions, have been giving great publicity to the seventieth birthday of Professor John Dewey, whose name is found in the histories of education as well as in the books on modern philosophy...

...The unique educational achievement of Professor Dewey, we are told at his seventieth birthday celebration, was to see the following four great principles: 1.That the school must develop the child's abilities...

...At the first two of these gatherings the works of John Dewey as a philosopher and as an educator were rehearsed, by men famous in the American thinking world, with an enthusiasm fully equal to the auspiciousness of the occasion...

...The first thirteen centuries of the Christian era, in spite of such educators as Saint Augustine, Abelard, Saint Thomas and others, were passed over as negligible, presumably because the teachers of that period adhered to the more concrete teachings and more thorough methods of Aristotle, and adapted the more purely philosophic notions of Plato to their own system of the universe...

...The attack led by Professor Dewey was against this stiffness and impracticability of compulsory universal education...

...It is interesting to note that in the much-scorned times when the school was the shop of the master, the court of the lord, or the library of the monastery, and before the renaissance "reawakened" the world, these principles were actually in practice, although there were no educational philosophers now accredited as such to formulate them...

...A professor's recent advice to college students to "make high-powered rifles of their minds instead of waste-baskets," which is fast becoming proverbial, is quoted as being the keynote of Dewey's contribution to education...

...What the term "educational philosopher" should be taken to signify is a mystery...

...This rings strangely like advice to return to the system of purposeful learning used many centuries ago, with modifications, of course, to meet an industrially far more complex society...

...If, moreover, the term be extended to designate any person who has held original and generally applicable educational ideas, it should certainly include also the persons who evolved and established the mediaeval system of training the young-the most workable educational system that we have record of...

...Instead, every child was trained, from the dawning of his reason, in the knowledge and skill that would stand him in good stead in his adult life...

...Make the subject real to the child" is the watch-word hung before the modern teacher, and interpreted, if the teacher is sensible, to man, "Teach only those parts of the subject that will make the child better equipped for life...

...If it designates a man who has written a book with sound educational theories, the omission of tens of other names is inexplicable, and the inclusion of a man like Socrates is to be explained only because it makes the company more illustrious...

...On the evening devoted to Professor Dewey's contributions to education, it was boldly stated by a leading western educator that there had been no educational philosopher from Socrates and Plato to Locke, Herbart and Dewey...

...Although the hero of the speakers' songs was indeed a man who had attained a wide and deserved popularity, it might well have seemed to their less inspired listeners that the lenses of their perception were marred by sections of opaqueness...

...2.That education is the process of experiencing, toward which the school must provide problems as a stimulus for thinking...

...From page to squire and then to knight, from apprentice to journeyman and then to master, or from school-child to student and then to teacher, the child passed to his goal in steady stages of useful education...

...Aristotle, because his ideas on education were more immediately practicable and less idealistic than those of the Socratic myth and the Republic of Plato, was denied the name of philosopher, at least in the educational field...

...By the minimizing or neglecting of certain past facts the glory of the man of the hour was made the greater by the men chosen to eulogize him...

...3.That interest and effort are secured by identifying objects of learning with the growth of the child...

...There was little waste in education under this regime...

...The grown man, trained to his tasks and his place in life by a class system that came close to the Platonic ideal, was not superior to the ordinary work of life and not threatened by the bugaboo of unemployment that haunts the semi-useless...

...There were no laws compelling every child to study composition, algebra, Latin and philosophy until he was grown to maturity...