The Greatest Works of John Dewey. Джон Дьюи
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of comparing and discriminating at large so that they may be transferred to any use. A child is not born with faculties to be unfolded, but with special impulses of action to be developed through their use in preserving and perfecting life in the social and physical conditions under which it goes on.
If, accordingly, the child in an American progressive school does not usually have as much freedom of moving about and of choice of his time for doing work, the explanation does not consist in a less degree of belief in the value of liberty. The emphasis falls on the larger freedom of using and testing senses and judgment in situations typical of life. Because these situations are social, they require that children work more together in common pursuits; because they are social they permit and often require the teacher’s aid, just as one gains assistance from others in the ordinary affairs of life. Help from others is not to be feared as an encroachment upon liberty, but that kind of help which restricts the use of the children’s own intelligence in forming ends and using ingenuity, initiative and inventiveness in the selection and adaption of materials. The limitation of material to performing exercises calculated to train an isolated sense—a situation that never presents itself in life—seems to the American teacher a greater limitation of freedom than that which arises from the need of coöperation with others in the performance of common activities. It is desirable not merely that the child should learn not to interfere with others as they execute their own ends, but also that he should learn to work with them in an intelligent way. Hence the scope of the material should not be limited to training the discriminations and comparisons of a single sense (however valuable this may be with very young children who are incapable of coöperative activity and whose main business is to master the use of their organs),1 but should be varied enough to offer typical problems calling for the kind of comparison and discrimination used in ordinary life-situations. And when pupils are making real things for real uses, or finding out about the activities and materials of out-of-school life, several children need to work at the same thing and keep at one thing with some consecutiveness.
But if the educators of this country differ with Montessori as to the existence of innate faculties which can be trained for general application by special exercises designed only for training and not for the accomplishment of results in which training is incidental, they welcome her efforts to secure that degree of freedom in the schoolroom which will enable teachers to become acquainted with the real powers and interests of the child and thus secure the data for a scientific method in education. They appreciate the force of her point that artificial conditions of restraint prevent teachers from getting true knowledge of the material with which they are dealing, so that instruction is limited to repetition of traditional processes. They perceive that her insistence upon touch associated with muscular movement as a factor in learning to write and read, is a real contribution to the technique of elementary instruction. She has become a most important factor in the popularizing of the gospel of liberty as indispensable to any true education.
With a wider understanding of the meaning of intellectual and moral freedom, and the accompanying breakdown of the negative and coercive ideas of discipline, the chief obstacle to the use of the teacher’s own powers of observation and experimentation will disappear. The scientific interest which requires personal observation, reflection, and experimental activity, will be added to the teacher’s sympathetic interest in the welfare of children. Education that associates learning with doing will replace the passive education of imparting the learning of others. However well the latter is adapted to feudal societies, in which most individuals are expected to submit constantly and docilely to the authority of superiors, an education which proceeds on this basis is inconsistent with a democratic society where initiative and independence are the rule and where every citizen is supposed to take part in the conduct of affairs of common interest. It is significant of the wide-reaching development of the democratic spirit that the voice most influentially identified at the present time with the ideal of liberty in education should sound forth from Italy.
1. It is significant that many who have experimented with the apparatus hold that its value is greatest with quite young children—three and four years old.
Chapter VII
The Relation Of The School To The Community
Work is essentially social in its character, for the occupations which people carry on are for human needs and ends. They are concerned with maintaining the relations with things and with others which make up the world we live in. Even the acts that are concerned with keeping alive are arranged to fit into a social scheme which has modified all man’s instinctive acts and thoughts. Everything about this scheme is dependent upon the ability of people to work together successfully. If they can do this a well-balanced, happy and prosperous society results. Without these occupations, which are essentially social life—that is human life—civilization can not go on. The result is a sort of social education by necessity, since every one must learn to adapt himself to other individuals and to whole communities. When it is left to circumstances this education, although necessary, is haphazard and only partial. We send children to school supposedly to learn in a systematic way the occupations which constitute living, but to a very large extent the schools overlook, in the methods and subject-matter of their teaching, the social basis of living. Instead of centering the work in the concrete, the human side of things, they put the emphasis on the abstract, hence the work is made academic—unsocial. Work then is no longer connected with a group of people all engaged in occupations, but is isolated, selfish and individualistic. It is based on a conception of society which no longer fits the facts, an every-man-for-himself society which ceased to exist a hundred years ago. The ordinary school curriculum ignores the scientific democratic society of to-day and its needs and ideals, and goes on fitting children for an individualistic struggle for existence, softened by a little intellectual “culture” for the individual’s enjoyment.
Schools started in this country in pioneer days, when a comparatively small number of people were scattered over an immense country that offered them unlimited and unexplored opportunities. The pioneer was dependent upon his own ability in seizing these opportunities, in getting ahead, in his use of nature’s raw material. He lived much alone and for himself; no one was really dependent upon his relations with others; for there were few people, endless material, and unorganized communities, without traditions or institutions. The welfare of the country was dependent upon the spread of the doctrines of getting on, and every man for himself. It was entirely natural that the new schools should reflect this ideal and shape their work to drive home the lesson. Our early settlers came from countries with traditions of culture and “learning”; and it was natural that they should look to their schools to keep alive these transplanted ideals in the midst of their struggle with nature. Culture did not mean to them a harmonious development of all the child’s faculties, but it meant rather the storing up of historical facts and the acquiring of knowledge and the literatures of the past. Learning, too, did not mean finding out about the things around them or about what was going on in other parts of the world; it meant reviewing the achievements of the past, learning to read the dead languages, the deader the language the greater the reputation for “learning.” The school curriculums were principally devoted, therefore, to turning the eyes of the pupils to the past, where alone they could find things worth studying and where, too, they might find the refinements of esthetic and intellectual development. A knowledge of the “three R’s” and a little natural “smartness” was all the social equipment the child needed, all the preparation that was necessary for him to begin to get on in the world. Once he had that equipment the schools could then turn their attention to giving him culture.
However interesting or enlightening such culture might be to the individual, obviously the first business of the public school is to teach the child to live in the world in which he finds himself, to understand his share in it, and to get a good start in adjusting himself to it. Only as he can do these things successfully will he have time or inclination to cultivate purely intellectual activities.
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