John Dewey’s Theories of Education

John Dewey is known for a progressive thinker. The educational reformers of

the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries dealt with the two distinct aspects of
children’s problems:

1. One concerned the claims of childhood as a specific and independent

stage in human growth. This perennial problem arises from the efforts
of adults to subject growing children to ends foreign to their own
needs and to press them into molds shaped, not by the requirements of
the maturing personality, but by the external interests of the ruling
order.
2. Involved efforts to reshape the obsolete system of schooling to make it fit
the revolutionary changes in social life. These two problems were closely
connected. The play school, for example, was devised not only to care for
the specific needs of very young children but also to meet new needs which
had grown out of the transformations in the family affected by industrial and
urban conditions; it was no longer a unit of production as in feudal and
colonial times but became more and more simply a center of consumption.

Dewey sought to supply that unifying pattern by applying the principles and
practices of democracy, as he interpreted them, consistently throughout the
educational system. First, the schools would be freely available to all from
kindergarten to college. Second, the children would themselves carry on the
educational process, aided and guided by the teacher. Third, they would be trained to
behave cooperatively, sharing with and caring for one another.

Dewey aimed to integrate the school with society, and the processes of
learning with the actual problems of life, by a thoroughgoing application of the
principles and practices of democracy. The school system would be open to all on a
completely free and equal basis without any restrictions or segregation on account of
color, race, creed, national origin, sex or social status. Group activity under self-
direction and self-government would make the classroom a miniature republic where
equality and consideration for all would prevail.

This type of education would have the most beneficial social consequences. It
would tend to erase unjust distinctions and prejudices. It would equip children with
the qualities and capacities required to cope with the problems of a fast-changing
world. It would produce alert, balanced, critical-minded individuals who would
continue to grow in intellectual and moral stature after graduation.

The Progressive Education Association, inspired by Dewey’s ideas, later

codified his doctrines as follows:
 1. The conduct of the pupils shall be governed by themselves, according to
the social needs of the community.

2. Interest shall be the motive for all work.

3. Teachers will inspire a desire for knowledge, and will serve as guides in the
investigations undertaken, rather than as task-masters.

4. Scientific study of each pupil’s development, physical, mental, social and

spiritual, is absolutely essential to the intelligent direction of his development.

5. Greater attention is paid to the child’s physical needs, with greater use of
the out-of-doors.

6. Cooperation between school and home will fill all needs of the child’s
development such as music, dancing, play and other extra-curricular activities.

7. All progressive schools will look upon their work as of the laboratory type,
giving freely to the sum of educational knowledge the results of their experiments in
child culture.

[ CITATION Gai60 \l 1033 ]

Bibliography
Gaido, D., & Walters, D. (1960). https://www.marxists.org/archive/novack/works/1960/x03.htm.
Retrieved November 9, 2020, from By W. F. Warde (George Novack) John Dewey’s Theories of
Education: https://www.marxists.org/archive/novack/works/1960/x03.htm