Tom Burke writes--
>This really interests me. Is it possible to have a fourth position in
>this fray---or rather, a non-position---which truly reflects Dewey's views?
>The real questions are, then, what is that position (cf. Bob Talisse's refs
>for an answer?) and how does it get cashed out in concrete terms? The
>three paradigms you mention are relatively "concrete" but also (and maybe
>because of the fact that) they are conceptually straightforward (simple,
>manageable, etc). Unfortunately there seems to be an inverse relationship
>between concreteness and conceptual sophistication.
Finding out what the Dewey position was [historically] as manifest in
concrete terms in schools still seems to be puzzling to some extent. That
is why there is some digging still going on as to what happened in the lab
school in Chicago. All there was from Dewey himself was SCHOOL AND
SOCIETY. Daniel and Laurel Tanner have probably done the most work in
contemporary digging.
Shortly after the turn of the century Dewey and his wife Evelyn published a
book on contemporary "good" educational practices [I forget the exact
title, but it was something like "The Schools of Tomorrow"] which I would
infer represented schools doing things that fit with Dewey's views. In it
were the Lowell MA [?] schools run by Col. Thom. Parker, the Gary [IN]
schools, and some others. At that time what hung these practices together,
other than they came to Dewey's attention, was their attempts to base the
curriculum on non-traditional, non-passive instructional practices. It was
very early in the so-called progressive reform era and any reform seemed to
be notable. But it was a mixed bag, as developments proved. The Gary
Indiana situation was instructive, I think.
Gary was an industrial town near Chicago and represented the exemplar of
contemporary urban America that Dewey saw as a place for the antithesis of
the scholastic schooling model dominating educational thinking. It had
squalor, immigrants, class differences, routinized work, and numbers. The
occupations of people represented to Dewey the key to matching the
organization of the curriculum to the epistemological development of the
disciplines [which by-the-way, Dewey saw as the sine qua non of the
curriculum - not something to be debased as he was accused of doing by
sundry critics up to the present]. He was quite taken with the Herbartian
idea of cultural epochs represented by occupational developments as the
units of the school curriculum, but felt that the Herbartians were too
bookish in their instructional activities and too isomorphic in matching
the development of these epochs. So Dewey leaned more toward school
children actually engaged in a kind of simulation of the cultural
conditions and the primary occupational problem-solving indicative of the
particular epoch. It was in this setting that a kid would move from the
concrete and practical engagement with problems at a young age to the more
abstract wrestling with the disciplines at a later age. This would lead to
a student who would, at graduation, have a more intimate, real, and
emotional satisfying understanding of work and its connection to the mind.
However, Dewey's notion of educating children about work became bastardized
into manual training and vocational education in which adult work skills
would be taught to the young so that they would be employable upon
graduation. The classroom activities lost their educational meaning and
interior cohesiveness.
Vocational education wasn't the only example. Progressive schools became
chi chi for the rich and upper middle class kids went to so-called
progressive schools where permissiveness reigned in a weird amalgam of what
people thought Dewey [or Rousseau] meant. A quite different example [and
relatively small in number] were the Montessori schools. I have heard it
said that the Montessori high school would have been the proper Dewey
model. Yet [I seem to remember having read somewhere] that Dewey had
severe problems with the Montessori approach; primarily, I believe, in its
mystical cosmological threads.
I think there are several contemporary examples of general Deweyan
practices, but no cohesive child-to-adult school program. Primary
education has been fairly Deweyan for quite sometime. Things change at
about third or fourth grade when the disciplines intrude in more pure form
rendered accessible primarily through texts. The early childhood folks
that are struggling with developmentally appropriate practices may be on
the right track, but can be easily misled by an overly psychological view
of development. At the high school level I think the Foxfire program was
quite Deweyan but only for the English curriculum at Rabun Gap. At the
adult level I have often thought the Danish folk schools developed by
Grundtvig [its American manifestation was the adult school run by Myles
Horton here in Tennessee] were good Deweyan examples.
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.
Certainly the mass production and efficiency values [promoted ironically by
the Gary experience] that leave little time and energy for teachers work on
their teaching problems. It would have been interesting to see what would
have happened had Dewey stayed with his lab school in Chicago for decades
instead of a few years. Had he done so, of course, we would not have the
corpus of his thinking that we have. And had he done so he would have had
to compromise his ideas to meet the demands made on him that drove him out
of Chicago. He was a philosopher, not a school headmaster. I don't think
one can find "pure form" school practices much of anywhere. The
Montessorians try to keep their form pure, but have given up as the variety
of training programs for teachers has increased. They seem to be reduced
to haggling over who is the more philosophically loyal to the ideas of
Maria as if it were some theology.
--Gene
Eugene Bartoo
UT Chattanooga
ebartoo who-is-at cecasun.utc.edu