The School and Social Progress The first lecture examines the relationship of education and social progress. Dewey argues that, with the coming of the
industrial age, many traditional educative processes had been lost. In a
pre-industrial society, children learned beside their parents, pairing learning with application and industry. Dewey explains that such work built character, fostering independence and initiative, but that "concentration of industry and division of labor" has eroded the possibility of such meaningful, practical learning opportunities in the childhood home. In this environment, a "New Education" that is "part and parcel of the whole social evolution" is needed. Fundamentally, education must follow larger shifts in society rather than implement isolated ideas which are "arbitrary inventions" made by "the over-ingenious minds of pedagogues" to deal with their specific challenges. Such ideas constitute "at the worst transitory fads, and at the best merely improvements in certain details." Where the learning opportunities in the home have disappeared, modern schools must now adapt to fill the gap. The school must become the new "child's habitat, where he learns through directed living." An important part of such an education is "manual training," which includes wood- and metalworking as well as household chores, such as cooking. Dewey tells an extended story of children engaged in sewing at his laboratory school. To do the fiber work they must create raw material from cotton and wool, but in so doing they learn a multitude of lessons in history, geography, engineering, and science. Dewey concludes the story:I need not speak of the science involved in this — the study of the fibres, of geographical features, the conditions under which raw materials are grown, the great centres of manufacture and distribution, the physics involved in the machinery of production; nor, again, of the historical side — the influence which these inventions have had upon humanity. You can concentrate the history of all mankind into the evolution of the flax, cotton, and wool fibres into clothing.Dewey makes a plea that theory and practice not be separated, arguing that if we truly want to provide for a cultured populace that we must introduce into the educational process those activities "which appeal to those whose dominant interest is to do and to make." Since knowledge is moving "in all currents of society" we have no choice but to find ways to reach all students.
The School and the Life of the Child In the second lecture, the relation between schooling and the child is examined. Here Dewey proposes a student-centered curriculum. Authentic learning is valued, and must be centered on the natural interests of children: their desire to communicate with others, to build things, to inquire about things, and to express themselves artistically. Dewey begins by talking about the physical bias of the classroom. Student desks are small, crowded together. They have room to hold a book, room for studying, but no room to create. Rather than being a space to work, the classroom is designed as a place to listen and to read. Both are modes of passive absorption. In addition, students are required not only to listen passively, but to listen "en masse". This "passivity of attitude" and "mechanical massing of children" are due to the rigid curriculum and method, which are still rooted in a "mediæval conception of learning". When the core of a curriculum is listening en masse, then everybody can be tested on the same thing at given intervals. The child in this system is an afterthought; education is structured in a certain way, and the child must bend to it. Dewey proposes a different "center of gravity" for the instruction: the child him- or herself. This, Dewey claims, is how children are educated in an ideal home setting. Children naturally incline to activity, to conversation, creation, and inquiry. The nature of education must be to take that inclination and direct it toward valuable ends for society. As an example, he describes a cooking class which, through a series of questions by the teacher and students, ultimately leads to lessons in organic chemistry and experiments regarding the effects of heat on the
protein in eggs. The impulses of the children are described. They wish to communicate with others. They want to know the nature of things. They enjoy artistic expression and like to make things. After describing a number of other activities from the laboratory school he comes to what he sees as the largest "stumbling block" that traditionalists have with these approaches: Stimulating inquiry and interest is fine, they say, but "how, upon this basis, shall the child get the needed information; how shall he undergo the required discipline?" Dewey's short answer to that question is that the "needed information" and "required discipline" comes about in such settings—that inquiry for its own sake and the requirements of education are not at odds. Dewey's longer answer (and his conclusion to the lecture) is that we are mistaken to think of the imagination of the child as a separate faculty. Imagination and learning cannot be at odds, because "Unless culture be a superficial polish, a veneering of mahogany over common wood, it surely is this -- the growth of the imagination in flexibility, in scope, and in sympathy, till the life which the individual lives is informed with the life of nature and of society."
Waste in Education In the third lecture, Dewey takes on the issue of "waste in education" in a somewhat unusual mode. For Dewey, the primary waste in education is a waste of effort on the part of the school and time and effort on the part of the children. This waste, Dewey claims, is a result of isolation:All waste is due to isolation. Organization is nothing but getting things into connection with one another, so that they work easily, flexibly, and fully. Therefore in speaking of this question of waste in education I desire to call your attention to the isolation of the various parts of the school system, to the lack of unity in the aims of education, to the lack of coherence in its studies and methods.The first isolation Dewey examines is the lack of connections between the stages of a child's school career.
Kindergarten, he argues, comes out of Froebel's synthesis of observation of children's play with the early 19th century idealist symbolism of Schelling. It then becomes difficult to move students from kindergarten into the primary grades, which are organized around the practical concerns of the 16th century: reading and mathematics for commerce. From the primary school to the intermediate school there is another gap, with the intermediate school influenced by the grammar school of the Renaissance, an introduction into culture—at that time Latin and Greek, although in the 19th century other culture as well. Another gap exists between the intermediate school and the high school, which is largely a preparatory academy for entry into universities developed to meet medieval needs around professional study and cultural expansion. While Dewey is careful to emphasize that these institutions have evolved over time, he notes that the patchwork nature of the sequence remains. The solution, according to Dewey, is to unify the sequence by connecting every part of the sequence to the world outside the school. Dewey argues that the only way to unify the curriculum is to increase its connection to the world outside the classroom. Just as home and industry are not separate from the laboratories and research centers of the world, so the curriculum that finds its inspiration in the outside world can also be unified. To illustrate this he provides a detailed description of a school building designed around the principle of these relationships. On the first floor the four corners represent practice, the machine shop, the textile industries, the dining room, and the kitchen. These are arrayed around the central library, illustrating always that the meaning of these activities are not the activities themselves, but the "theory of practical activities" which these activities help explicate. These activities are meaningful in the realm of the home and commerce to the individual, but they gain their social meaning from the collective knowledge of the center. The second floor is similar, but more academic in focus. Arrayed around a central museum the art and music studios and the different libraries relate to one another, but also to the practical pursuits of the first floor. The textile needs of the first floor, for example, relate to the biological research of the second. By relating school as a whole to life as a whole the various aims of the phases of education—the utility of the primary school, versus the culture and professional study of the high school—cease to pull in different directions. The growth of the child in "social capacity and service, his larger and more vital union with life, becomes the unifying aim" and the progression through disciplines merely phases of that growth. == Additional chapters ==