The school and society
Subtitle: & the child and the curriculum
By: John Dewey
Contributors: Dewey, John, 1859-1952
Publisher: [Publisher not identified]
Published: 2014
Place of publication: [Place of publication not identified]
Language: eng
Number of pages: 96
ISBN-13: 9781495913129
Subjects: History; Education; Philosophy; Educational sociology; Child development; Aims and objectives; University of Chicago. Laboratory Schools; University of Chicago
Other titles: School and society and the child and the curriculum; School and society; Child and the curriculum.
Description: Abandon the notion of subject-matter as something fixed and ready-made in itself, outside the child's experience; cease thinking of the child's 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 Dewey's 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 child's 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 child's 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.
Notes: First work originally published: Rev. ed. Chicago, Ill. : University of Chicago Press, 1915. 2nd work originally published: Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1902.