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John Dewey: The School and Society: Chapter 3 : Waste in Education

Tags: 4052, notes, highered, Professional_Development, professors on 2008-05-14 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Consider the training schools for teachers
They are isolated from the higher subject-matter of scholarship, since, upon the
whole, their object has been to train persons how to teach, rather than w/at to teach;
while, if we go to the college, we find the other half of this isolation -- learning what
to teach, with almost a contempt for methods of teaching.
But the lack of fundamental unity is
witnessed in the fact that one study is still considered good for discipline, and another
for culture; some parts of arithmetic, for example, for discipline and others for use,
literature for culture, grammar for discipline, geography partly for utility, partly for
culture; and so on. The unity of education is dissipated, and the studies become
centrifugal; so much of this study to secure this end, so much of that te secure another,
until the whole becomes a sheer compromise and patchwork between contending aims and
disparate studies.
From the standpoint of the child, the great waste in the school comes from his
inability to utilize the experiences he gets outside the school in any complete and free
way within the school itself; while, on the other hand, he is unable to apply in daily
life what he is learning at school.
When we think that we
all live on the earth, that we live in an atmosphere, that our lives are touched at every
point by the influences of the soil, flora, and fauna, by considerations of light and
heat, and then think of what the school study of geography has been, we have a typical
idea of the gap existing between the everyday experiences of the child, and the isolated
material supplied in such large measure in the school
as true in the school as in the university that
the spirit of inquiry can be got only through and with the attitude of inquiry.
If the four corners represent practice, the interior represents the theory of the
practical activities. In other words, the object of these forms of practice in the school
is not found chiefly in themselves, or in the technical skill of cooks, seamstresses,
carpenters and masons, but in their connection, on the social side, with the life without;
while on the individual side they respond to the child's need of action, of expression, of
desire to do something, to be constructive and creative, instead of simply passive and
conforming
These are the two great things in breaking down isolation, in getting
connection -- to have the child come to school with all the experience he has got outside
the school, and to leave it with something to be immediately used in his everyday life.
The
isolation of studies as well as of parts of the school system disappears.
But there are only one or
two that have tried to make a connection between theory and practice. They teach for the
most part by theory, by lectures, by reference-to books, rather than through the actual
work of teaching itself. At Columbia, through the Teachers' College, there is an extensive
and close connection between the University and the training of teachers.