The Child and the Curriculum Including, the School and Society

John Dewey

Nov 2008 · Cosimo, Inc.

About this ebook

Abandon the notion of subject-matter as something fixed and ready-made in itself, outside the childs experience; cease thinking of the childs experience as also something hard and fast; see it as something fluent, embryonic, vital; and we realize that the child and the curriculum are simply two limits which define a single process. from The Child and the Curriculum In this single volume, readers will find two of John Deweys insightful essays on education in America. He considered proper education to be fundamental to a functioning democracy. The problem, according to Dewey in The School and Society, with the old education model was that elementary schools did not encourage exploration and curiosity in their students. In The Child and the Curriculum, Dewey expands upon his definition of the ideal teaching method. A childs life, he says, is an integrated whole. A child will flow from one topic to another, taking a natural interest in subjects and dealing with a world of direct experience. School, on the other hand, addresses a world disconnected from a childs life. A more reasonable approach would be to strive to integrate their experience with the vast body of knowledge that society wishes them to know. By honoring the individual, both the student and the subject matter will come together in a process that produces a mature adult. American educator and philosopher JOHN DEWEY (18591952) helped found the American Association of University Professors. He served as professor of philosophy at Columbia University from 1904 to 1930 and authored numerous books, including How We Think (1910), Experience and Nature (1925), Experience and Education (1938), and Freedom and Culture (1939).

About the author

John Dewey was born in 1859 in Burlington, Vermont. He founded the Laboratory School at the University of Chicago in 1896 to apply his original theories of learning based on pragmatism and "directed living." This combination of learning with concrete activities and practical experience helped earn him the title, "father of progressive education." After leaving Chicago he went to Columbia University as a professor of philosophy from 1904 to 1930, bringing his educational philosophy to the Teachers College there. Dewey was known and consulted internationally for his opinions on a wide variety of social, educational and political issues. His many books on these topics began with Psychology (1887), and include The School and Society (1899), Experience and Nature (1925), and Freedom and Culture (1939).Dewey died of pneumonia in 1952.