At 5:00 PM -0500 10/28/97, Eugene Bartoo wrote:
>Lawrence Cremin felt that Dewey's ideas did not develop into very many real
>schools because of the enormous demands made on the teachers. Perhaps.
Everything you've said is very informative. And I think you put your
finger on a key problem with this point about demands made on teachers.
The problems in this case are practical, even if Dewey's philosophical
principles were entirely sound.
My thinking on this is vague and half-baked, but what do you think about
the potentials for contemporary communications and computer technologies to
help make such practical problems more tractable? E.g., what if Ms. Brown
in her second grade class in Akron manages to implement some computer-based
experience domains (at whatever level of sophistication, from simple
symbolic problem solving with instant useful feedback, to intermural
interactive problem solving, to virtual reality, to goodness knows what)
which nevertheless have the same pedagogical effectiveness that activities
in the Deweys' school were intended to have? Does it help -- is it at all
encouraging -- to think that these techniques are easily transferrable to
other schools with similar technical / computational resources at their
disposal? I know that Apple computer, for instance, has set up a publicly
accessible repository for such educational programs -- though their current
holdings (by no means paltry) are no where near what they could be if
teachers in the field -- at all levels -- could get tuned in to using and
developing these kind of technologies. Sounds like just that much more
work? Or would it be a shift of emphasis that would ultimately bring down
the demands made on teachers to manageable levels by placing more power of
technology into their hands?
______________________________________________________________________
Tom Burke URL: http://www.cla.sc.edu/phil/faculty/burket/
Department of Philosophy Phone: 803-777-3733
University of South Carolina Fax: 803-777-9178
_______________________________________________________________________
Tom Burke URL: http://www.cla.sc.edu/phil/faculty/burket/
Department of Philosophy Phone: 803-777-3733
University of South Carolina Fax: 803-777-9178