Product Description
These two short, influential books, which grew out of Dewey’s hands-on experience in administering the laboratory school at the University of Chicago, represent the earliest authoritative statement of his revolutionary emphasis on education as an experimental, child-centered process. In The School and Society, he declares that we must “make each one of our schools an embryonic community life, active with types of occupations that reflect the life of the larger society and permeated with the spirit of art, history, and science.” In The Child and the Curriculum he stresses the importance of the curriculum as a means of determining the environment of the child, and allowing the teacher to guide children in asserting themselves, exercising their capacities, and fulfilling their own nature. 8 black-and-white illustrations.
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 Important Book ( nuwanda17 )
Dewey is not exactly light reading, and this little book is pretty heavy. But it's also vitally important in understanding how kids learn. I'm a college coach, but I took much away from Dewey's principle of authentic learning. This is standard reading for any educator, but I'd press coaches, mentors and anyone else involved with improving young lives to read this. Dewey is so classic is almost cliche...but there's good reason for that.
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Another Dewey classic - wait, two classics in one! ( plantsandbooks )
This great book contains two Dewey classics: (1) The School and Society; and, (2) The Child and the Curriculum. This text is like most Dewey works: concise and to the point. This text focuses on the effects and the power that teachers should have in affecting student lives. There is much discussion on Dewey's classic "educative" experiences and how education should be hands-on learning. Dewey also asserts that curriculum should emulate real life challenges and "occupations" of everyday life. Learning occurs in doing and not in repeating facts and figures on multiple-choice tests.
We wonder why the greatest young minds are thrown into math and science courses instead of being encouraged to explore the arts and music. This book continues to show why coursework should not be limited to multiple-choice, fill-in-the-blank, and other methods of factoid memorization but rather coursework should include the exploration of skill-sets and also how the curriculum should provide a catalyst for knowledge and skill exploration.
Like most Dewey books, this should be required reading for all education programs and for all educators. Considered by many to be the only true American philosopher, Dewey once again provides a clear look at why education in America is sub-par in quality and effectiveness.
Also recommended: "Experience and Education," by John Dewey.
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 Ivory tower crackpot theories. ( jonnnyt )
No intellectual can afford to be unacquainted with the immortal John Dewey and his "experimental school." Who would dare impute the legendary researcher permanently linked with the doctrine of the irreproachable "progressivism?" Somebody has to. It has to be I.
Dewey's conception of the child as learner assumes that the green mind most effectively comes to knowledge by directing its own education through spontaneous curiosity stemming from nature study. This he then expects will blossom into a more expanded consideration of the various academic subjects. The role of the teacher lies mostly in facilitating transitions and answering the child's self-posed questions along the way. The problems in Dewey's model begin with his science fair-meets-museum-meets-playground-meets-lecture hall school design: the model is untested on any significant scale and the startup plus upkeep costs are prohibitively expensive. Classes are small and require several specialists and non-reusable materials. As if kids didn't have enough problems with basic skills and content already, Dewey would have them heavily involved in shop and home economics. Even more outrageous in Dewey's model is the premise that we ought not force students to study what they do not like. Their own intellectual prejudices reign supreme and by implication, teachers are discouraged from evaluating against solid standards. Experienced teachers know that kids can easily hide their shortcomings even when required to study their weak subjects, and that remediation is hard to implement before they slip further behind. Dewey's recommendation to cater so exclusively to the child's intrinsic likes is at best a risky gamble which exacerbates low performance in students too immature to understand the value of education. It's no small wonder why the public's perception of teacher authority has dropped even in good districts with approaches like this floating around schools of education administration.
"The School and Society," like many other off-the-wall manifestos of educational theory, denies well-understood behavioral science when it glosses over psychological patterns in man. It depicts formulaic teaching and learning as fundamentally faulty and generalized curricula as harmful to student individuality. Nothing could less representative of quality research conducted, particularly Project Follow Through: the great skeleton in the student-centered advocates' closet. I for one would like to see Dewey's updated plan for seamlessly moving kids who come into class with their "natural inquisitiveness" programmed by TV, rap music, and other mass media, into colonial American history, calculations of hyperbolic asymptotes, Tennessee Williams, and the "plus-que-parfait" tense. But of course, such leaps of interest are unnecessary if we utterly throw out the "old-fashioned" academic corpus along with the old-fashioned school system.
90% of students in high schools today report that they do NOT feel adequately challenged. Maybe the answer doesn't lie in yielding to children's lack of intellectual discipline but in tapping their potential to control that uninformed caprice. "The School and Society" relies upon the circular contradiction of allowing an uneducated mind educate the teacher on its own education. The apparent absurdity of it all leads me to conclude that sane people latch onto its ideals to maintain an escapist fantasy in light of dismally high drop-out rates, lowered standards, and social discord. But a radical solution is not necessarily synonymous with a good one.
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 What to teach
Dewey, a profound contributor to the field of education, displays some of his beliefs of the best methods to teach children in The Child and the Curriculum. To begin Dewey's discussion, the child's world is examined. In this examining, a sense of how the child's world operates is formed. Children learn through the process of experiencing things, life. In this book Dewey, finds that the schools in which children are educated contradict their very learning style by nature. "The child's life is an integral, a total one," (p.183, 1902). The way the school disseminates the curriculum is not the most optimal method for students to learn.
A child's life collects all the experiences, thus the child learns. Dewey postulates a change in the formula for teaching children, the curriculum. Why change the curriculum? As Dewey states, children need to be intertwined in the process of doing. Children will learn by doing, making clothes to wear, furniture to sit on, and growing food to eat. The idea of the separate subject area is a key area Dewey analyzes because of how children learn. When a child wants to build a chair to sit on, they examine disciplines across the realm of mathematics, science, and language skills while building the chair. Instead of separating this activity into different disciplines, it is woven throughout the activity. Throughout this book, it is stated that their needs to be a link to what the child is learning and what the child sees as a benefit to themselves.
As an educator, it is important to be exposed to varying ideas as to how the school systems have functioned and are functioning today. There are ideas in this book that a pre-service or current educator should consider during their teaching career. Are Dewey's ideas relevant for today's society? I believe this is a question one has to answer for themselves, construct your own meaning.
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Why going to school ? ( blemen_s )
From a high school student's point of view, reading Dewey couldn't provide something else than hope for educational systems, most of which, despite the efforts of making a school a more living atmosphere, organizations still remain too mechanical in learning procedures and detached from social applications regarding the capabilities they serve.Originally from Cameroon, I've had the opportunity to explore three educational systems from different cultural influence each. It was an advantage that surely opened my mind to different perspectives by interacting with different cultures in different social contexts, but especially carried me out to realize how the so called "education" - in general, but in high school in particular - shortly addresses fundamental needs as much individually as socialy, since people tend to ignore its essential functions or misunderstand the concepts it involves, precisely because their implications are so general that they shouldn't be analyzed in separated contexts, school and society, as far as they are, with respect, one a component of the other but the other being the expression of the first one in a long term. By observing both components as a whole, Dewey proposes a model that doesn't necessarily apply to actual issues or give factual solutions, but at least redefines "education" by integrating inherent aspects to human nature in its double acception - as a group as much as an individual -, which reveals the values traditional education still mostly hides. I delibarately took the initiative of question what high school didn't explained to me, and probably often forget to ask itself. In what ways education serves people in the aim of blooming personally and socially ? which role schools are therefore supposed to play and in which patterns ? The questions are so simple that the answers appear obvious. In fact, they should be when the problematic is carefully put. this is the reason most people can get it wrong and sometimes don't even try to question what is already established. Dewey was an excellent starting point for my research and I recommend it to EVERYONE, not especially those concerned with education because it shouldn't be a matter of a restricted segment of people. Education is everywhere. Sorry for my english :)
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