THE POST IS MY SUMMARY FROM THE SECTION ON MODERN EDUCATION(CHAPTER 7) IN "THE DIM HYPOTHESIS :WHY THE LIGHTS OF WEST ARE GOING OUT"[1] BY DR PEIKOFF
Started by Dewey[2], this movement is still influential at all levels, and has changed education radically. Dewey held that action has primacy over thought. Implication on education being that child learns by doing, like making things, growing plants, etc. Emphasizing that there should not be lecturing or structured lessons by teachers. Education in this vision is no longer the process of transmitting acquired knowledge in order to prepare child for life. Education instead is participation in life. Since certainty according to him is impossible, so teacher can only give non-compulsory suggestions and moderate the discussions of students. Parents also should not discipline the child, but allow him to do whatever he feels like doing. Child's interest, desires, and impulses being fundamental, because child develops by internally directed self-development. Contrasting from Aristotle and previous educators who regarded education as a painful process, Dewey wants child to learn by playing, so that he can experience full range of feelings.
More fundamental than child's feelings however is adaptation to interests and desires of the peers. Such that the child realizes himself as a servant of a larger entity, instead of nurturing traditional individualism. To implement such requirements, group projects are given where each individual in the group is given common grade regardless of individual contribution. Often the grade and also school rules, policies etc. are decided by students' majority vote, where no weightage is given to the experience of teachers. Thus child soon learns another aspect of social adaptation, that his peers collectively have near absolute power over him. So while initial years will involve self-gratification, school will gradually reshape child so that he is not able to gain such satisfaction on his own. For Dewey, child and teachers alike are uncertain actors deprived of contact with an independent reality, and thus left with no option but to make decisions together, by consensus. But still individual can dissent and try to change consensus. Either way he will identify himself with collective unit.
Teaching principles and intellectual systems like scientific theories may sometimes have an auxiliary role. But as a rule these are just the words to a student, because they are irrelevant to his immediate projects. The real problems of life, the student learns, are too complex for any neat set of words to be dealt with. The wide abstractions are unrelated to concrete requirements of today's action, since child for particular project might need inputs from several subjects. Therefore we need to make the system child centered by scrapping or at least making subjects auxiliary.
In teaching of traditional subjects also commitment to concretes apart from abstractions is applied. Child learns whole word as a concrete without learning the sounds of individual letters. No principle[like principle of phonics discussed just after] is taught to relate sound of one word to the sound of other word[which is possible only after learning individual letters]. Phonics requires focus on individual letters, each grasped by selective attention, abstraction that is, and then integrated with other, similar letters[integration implicit in the concept of vowels and consonants]. Phonics are rejected because they are regarded as unreal, unreal here meaning conceptual. In science concrete experiments are performed without any theoretical context. In mathematics, abstract principles [like borrow] are not emphasized enough, leading to cases where even for double digit subtraction child used drawing of men.
Progressives accept the criticism that child in their system does not graduate knowing the body of facts and truths. But they reject its evaluation as negative. They reject because there is no social motive in acquirement of learning. Thus progressive program is a demolition of fundamental system of education which includes subjects, facts, lessons, structure, intellect, teaching and learning. It is anti-conceptual mentality embracing the pre-conceptual child, and training him to remain in that state for life.
[1]http://www.amazon.com/dp/0451234812
[2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dewey#On_education
Started by Dewey[2], this movement is still influential at all levels, and has changed education radically. Dewey held that action has primacy over thought. Implication on education being that child learns by doing, like making things, growing plants, etc. Emphasizing that there should not be lecturing or structured lessons by teachers. Education in this vision is no longer the process of transmitting acquired knowledge in order to prepare child for life. Education instead is participation in life. Since certainty according to him is impossible, so teacher can only give non-compulsory suggestions and moderate the discussions of students. Parents also should not discipline the child, but allow him to do whatever he feels like doing. Child's interest, desires, and impulses being fundamental, because child develops by internally directed self-development. Contrasting from Aristotle and previous educators who regarded education as a painful process, Dewey wants child to learn by playing, so that he can experience full range of feelings.
More fundamental than child's feelings however is adaptation to interests and desires of the peers. Such that the child realizes himself as a servant of a larger entity, instead of nurturing traditional individualism. To implement such requirements, group projects are given where each individual in the group is given common grade regardless of individual contribution. Often the grade and also school rules, policies etc. are decided by students' majority vote, where no weightage is given to the experience of teachers. Thus child soon learns another aspect of social adaptation, that his peers collectively have near absolute power over him. So while initial years will involve self-gratification, school will gradually reshape child so that he is not able to gain such satisfaction on his own. For Dewey, child and teachers alike are uncertain actors deprived of contact with an independent reality, and thus left with no option but to make decisions together, by consensus. But still individual can dissent and try to change consensus. Either way he will identify himself with collective unit.
Teaching principles and intellectual systems like scientific theories may sometimes have an auxiliary role. But as a rule these are just the words to a student, because they are irrelevant to his immediate projects. The real problems of life, the student learns, are too complex for any neat set of words to be dealt with. The wide abstractions are unrelated to concrete requirements of today's action, since child for particular project might need inputs from several subjects. Therefore we need to make the system child centered by scrapping or at least making subjects auxiliary.
In teaching of traditional subjects also commitment to concretes apart from abstractions is applied. Child learns whole word as a concrete without learning the sounds of individual letters. No principle[like principle of phonics discussed just after] is taught to relate sound of one word to the sound of other word[which is possible only after learning individual letters]. Phonics requires focus on individual letters, each grasped by selective attention, abstraction that is, and then integrated with other, similar letters[integration implicit in the concept of vowels and consonants]. Phonics are rejected because they are regarded as unreal, unreal here meaning conceptual. In science concrete experiments are performed without any theoretical context. In mathematics, abstract principles [like borrow] are not emphasized enough, leading to cases where even for double digit subtraction child used drawing of men.
Progressives accept the criticism that child in their system does not graduate knowing the body of facts and truths. But they reject its evaluation as negative. They reject because there is no social motive in acquirement of learning. Thus progressive program is a demolition of fundamental system of education which includes subjects, facts, lessons, structure, intellect, teaching and learning. It is anti-conceptual mentality embracing the pre-conceptual child, and training him to remain in that state for life.
[1]http://www.amazon.com/dp/0451234812
[2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dewey#On_education
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