Dewey's Laboratory School


Book Description

Laurel Tanner examines closely the practices and policies of Dewey’s Laboratory School from their inception to the current day. Dewey’s Laboratory School: Lessons for Today provides a wealth of practical guidance on how schools today can introduce Deweyian reforms the way they were originally—and successfully—practiced. It is filled with fascinating excerpts from the school’s teachers’ reports and other original documents. It will be an indispensable text in graduate courses in foundations, curriculum and instruction, early childhood education, instructional supervision, and philosophy of education and for professors, researchers, and general readers in these fields. Selected Topics: Dewey’s Developmental Curriculum—An Idea for the Twenty-First Century • Dewey’s School as a Learning Community • What Have We Learned from Dewey’s School? • Looking at Reform the Dewey Way “The most readable account published of Dewey’s Laboratory School and its lessons for American schools today.” —Elliot W. Eisner, Chair, Curriculum Studies and Teacher Education, Stanford University School of Education “In this fascinating account of the Dewey School, we can almost imagine ourselves as teachers in those fabled classrooms.” —Vivian Gussin Paley, Author and teacher “Laurel Tanner has written the book we should have had decades ago.” —John I. Goodlad, Co-Director, Center for Educational Renewal and President, Institute for Educational Inquiry “Tanner highlights what can be learned today from the setbacks and successes of John Dewey and the teachers at the [Laboratory School at the] University of Chicago.” —Lilian G. Katz, Director, ERIC Clearinghouse on Elementary and Early Childhood Education




The Dewey School


Book Description

This book talks of perhaps one of the greatest education experiments in the history of America. In 1894 John Dewey moved his position as Chairman of the Philosophy Department at the University of Michigan to assume the position as Chairman of the Department of Philosophy, Psychology, and Pedagogy at the University of Chicago. He would remain there until 1904, his departure prompted in great part by his dissatisfaction regarding his wife's treatment by the administration in her role of principal of the Laboratory School. At this time Dewey was anxious to translate his more abstract ideas into practical form and he saw the position at Chicago affording him a rare opportunity to do this.The school itself was conceived by Dewey as having an organic functional relation to the theoretical curriculum. Just as Dewey was anxious to merge philosophy and psychology and to relate both of these disciplines to the theoretical study of education, similarly he saw the school as a laboratory for these studies analogous to the laboratory used in science courses. This effort to merge theory and practice is perhaps the major characteristic of Dewey's entire professional career. In the opening sentence of Dewey's remarks in his essay in this volume, "The Theory of the Chicago Experiment," we see the extent to which this problem preoccupied him: "The gap between educational theory and its execution in practice is always so wide that there naturally arises a doubt as to the value of any separate presentation of purely theoretical principles."This book is an accurate and detailed account of one of the most interesting experiments ever undertaken in America. It provides the reader with the complexity of John Dewey's abstract philosophy experimentalism.




The Education of John Dewey


Book Description

During John Dewey's lifetime (1859-1952), one public opinion poll after another revealed that he was esteemed to be one of the ten most important thinkers in American history. His body of thought, conventionally identified by the shorthand word "Pragmatism," has been the distinctive American philosophy of the last fifty years. His work on education is famous worldwide and is still influential today, anticipating as it did the ascendance in contemporary American pedagogy of multiculturalism and independent thinking. His University of Chicago Laboratory School (founded in 1896) thrives still and is a model for schools worldwide, especially in emerging democracies. But how was this lifetime of thought enmeshed in Dewey's emotional experience, in his joys and sorrows as son and brother, husband and father, and in his political activism and spirituality? Acclaimed biographer Jay Martin recaptures the unity of Dewey's life and work, tracing important themes through the philosopher's childhood years, family history, religious experience, and influential friendships. Based on original sources, notably the vast collection of unpublished papers in the Center for Dewey Studies, this book tells the full story, for the first time, of the life and times of the eminent American philosopher, pragmatist, education reformer, and man of letters. In particular, The Education of John Dewey highlights the importance of the women in Dewey's life, especially his mother, wife, and daughters, but also others, including the reformer Jane Addams and the novelist Anzia Yezierska. A fitting tribute to a master thinker, Martin has rendered a tour de force portrait of a philosopher and social activist in full, seamlessly reintegrating Dewey's thought into both his personal life and the broader historical themes of his time.




The School and Society


Book Description




Democracy and Education


Book Description

. Renewal of Life by Transmission. The most notable distinction between living and inanimate things is that the former maintain themselves by renewal. A stone when struck resists. If its resistance is greater than the force of the blow struck, it remains outwardly unchanged. Otherwise, it is shattered into smaller bits. Never does the stone attempt to react in such a way that it may maintain itself against the blow, much less so as to render the blow a contributing factor to its own continued action. While the living thing may easily be crushed by superior force, it none the less tries to turn the energies which act upon it into means of its own further existence. If it cannot do so, it does not just split into smaller pieces (at least in the higher forms of life), but loses its identity as a living thing. As long as it endures, it struggles to use surrounding energies in its own behalf. It uses light, air, moisture, and the material of soil. To say that it uses them is to say that it turns them into means of its own conservation. As long as it is growing, the energy it expends in thus turning the environment to account is more than compensated for by the return it gets: it grows. Understanding the word "control" in this sense, it may be said that a living being is one that subjugates and controls for its own continued activity the energies that would otherwise use it up. Life is a self-renewing process through action upon the environment.




Experience And Education


Book Description

Experience and Education is the best concise statement on education ever published by John Dewey, the man acknowledged to be the pre-eminent educational theorist of the twentieth century. Written more than two decades after Democracy and Education (Dewey's most comprehensive statement of his position in educational philosophy), this book demonstrates how Dewey reformulated his ideas as a result of his intervening experience with the progressive schools and in the light of the criticisms his theories had received. Analyzing both "traditional" and "progressive" education, Dr. Dewey here insists that neither the old nor the new education is adequate and that each is miseducative because neither of them applies the principles of a carefully developed philosophy of experience. Many pages of this volume illustrate Dr. Dewey's ideas for a philosophy of experience and its relation to education. He particularly urges that all teachers and educators looking for a new movement in education should think in terms of the deeped and larger issues of education rather than in terms of some divisive "ism" about education, even such an "ism" as "progressivism." His philosophy, here expressed in its most essential, most readable form, predicates an American educational system that respects all sources of experience, on that offers a true learning situation that is both historical and social, both orderly and dynamic.




The Dewey School the Laboratory School of the University of Chicago 1896-1903


Book Description

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.




John Dewey and the Decline of American Education


Book Description

The influence of John Dewey’s undeniably pervasive ideas on the course of American education during the last half-century has been celebrated in some quarters and decried in others. But Dewey’s writings themselves have not often been analyzed in a sustained way. In John Dewey and the Decline of American Education, Hank Edmondson takes up that task. He begins with an account of the startling authority with which Dewey’s fundamental principles have been—and continue to be—received within the U.S. educational establishment. Edmondson then shows how revolutionary these principles are in light of the classical and Christian traditions. Finally, he persuasively demonstrates that Dewey has had an insidious effect on American democracy through the baneful impact his core ideas have had in our nation’s classrooms. Few people are pleased with the performance of our public schools. Eschewing polemic in favor of understanding, Edmondson’s study of the “patron saint” of those schools sheds much-needed light on both the ideas that bear much responsibility for their decline and the alternative principles that could spur their recovery.




Dewey's Dream


Book Description

Realizing Dewey's vision of making public schools the seedbed of a democratic society.




How We Think


Book Description

Our schools are troubled with a multiplication of studies, each in turn having its own multiplication of materials and principles. Our teachers find their tasks made heavier in that they have come to deal with pupils individually and not merely in mass. Unless these steps in advance are to end in distraction, some clew of unity, some principle that makes for simplification, must be found. This book represents the conviction that the needed steadying and centralizing factor is found in adopting as the end of endeavor that attitude of mind, that habit of thought, which we call scientific. This scientific attitude of mind might, conceivably, be quite irrelevant to teaching children and youth. But this book also represents the conviction that such is not the case; that the native and unspoiled attitude of childhood, marked by ardent curiosity, fertile imagination, and love of experimental inquiry, is near, very near, to the attitude of the scientific mind. If these pages assist any to appreciate this kinship and to consider seriously how its recognition in educational practice would make for individual happiness and the reduction of social waste, the book will amply have served its purpose. It is hardly necessary to enumerate the authors to whom I am indebted. My fundamental indebtedness is to my wife, by whom the ideas of this book were inspired, and through whose work in connection with the Laboratory School, existing in Chicago between 1896 and 1903, the ideas attained such concreteness as comes from embodiment and testing in practice. It is a pleasure, also, to acknowledge indebtedness to the intelligence and sympathy of those who coöperated as teachers and supervisors in the conduct of that school, and especially to Mrs. Ella Flagg Young, then a colleague in the University, and now Superintendent of the Schools of Chicago.