From experience to understanding: Dewey’s pedagogic creed
Shrijita Sengupta
“The introduction into the school of various forms of active occupation is that through them the entire spirit of the school is renewed. It has a chance to affiliate itself with life, to become the child’s habitat, where he learns through directed living, instead of being only a place to learn lessons having an abstract and remote reference to some possible living to be done in the future.” – John Dewey
John Dewey was an American philosopher and educator who helped found pragmatism, a philosophical school of thought that he made popular at the beginning of the 20th century. He was also instrumental in the progressive movement in education, strongly believing that the best education involves learning through doing and with the child governing the learning process.
He believed that education should stem from the present needs of the child. Dewey did not believe in an ultimate aim of education. He only spoke of immediate or proximate aims. To him, education is experience which is subject to constant change. The process of education is a continuous process of growth and of life-long learning.
“I believe that education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living.” John Dewey, My Pedagogic Creed (1897)
It was at the University of Chicago in 1896 that Dewey began to formalize his educational philosophy that would contribute so heavily to the school of thought known as pragmatism. It was at this university that he began his renowned University Elementary School or Laboratory School, where he was able to directly apply his pedagogical theories.
Due to his belief in pragmatism, Dewey believed knowledge is socially constructed and is based on one’s experiences. From his educational point of view, this means that students must interact with their environment in order to adapt and learn. He defined the educational process as a “continual reorganisation, reconstruction and transformation of experience”. He believed that it is only through experience that man learns about the world and only by the use of his experience that man can maintain and better himself in the world. He says that every experience prepares a person for later experiences of a deeper and more expansive nature. A fully integrated personality exists only when experiences are integrated with one another. According to Dewey, the educative process would be incomplete without insight into the psychology and activity of the individual.
Dewey wanted this exploration to happen in school, which he referred to as a miniature society. The school is where a child first begins her socialization process outside the home. He believed schools should be designed like small communities where students can thrive socially and academically by working on projects and occupations. Projects and occupations were the means to develop physical, intellectual, creative and aesthetic values in the child. He was the first to propound the ‘Project Method’ of education. This method involved working through concrete activities or experiments collaboratively according to a student’s interest and abilities. The principles underlying the Project Method were purposiveness, freedom, activity, reality and utility with each of these having their own set of guidelines and objectives for the student and teacher to follow. Projects were thus purposeful learning activities proceeding in a social context.
The project method promoted a democratic way of learning and the development of lifetime qualities like self-confidence, patience, responsibility, resourcefulness, self-dependence, inter-dependence and co-operation. According to Dewey, the aim of education is the development of social efficiency which is reflective, creative and responsible thought and action. The project method translates this idea of education through occupations into a form suitable for the ordinary school.
The starting place in Dewey’s philosophy and educational theory was the world of everyday life. Dewey favored an education by, of and for experience. Every new experience is education. Dewey continually pointed out, however, that some experiences were more valuable than others. Teachers must be able to justify the educational activities, rather than simply let people do their own thing. Some experiences are merely passive affairs, pleasing or painful but not educative. An educative experience, according to Dewey, is an experience in which a student makes a connection between what we do to things and what happens to them or us as a result. The value of an experience lies in perceiving the relationships or continuities among events and things. It is this natural form of learning from experience, by doing and then reflecting on what happened that Dewey made central in his approach to schooling. Reflection was a key step used in the Dewey classroom to strengthen present learning and to carry it forward into future experiences.
Dewey argued that students were not detached from their environments that traditional schools were built on and had a constructivist understanding of learning. He says learners construct knowledge rather than just passively take in information. In Experience and Education (1938), Dewey observes powerful educational experiences are a result of two fundamental principles: continuity and interaction. Continuity refers to how experiences, both past and present, influence future understanding, while interaction refers to how ones’ current situations influence their experiences.
According to Dewey’s instrumentalist and constructivist view of education, he put equal importance to both action and thought for the development of the learner in coming up with his pedagogical systems. In School and Society (1899), Dewey explains occupation does not mean any kind of “busy work” or exercises that may be given to a child in order to keep her out of mischief or idleness when seated at her desk. By occupation he means a mode of activity on the part of the child which reproduces or extends from, some form of work carried on in social life. In the University Elementary School these occupations were represented by experimenting, planning and reinventing in connection with shop work with wood and tools, cooking, sewing, and textile work to name a few.
The fundamental point in the psychology of an occupation is that it maintains a balance between the intellectual and the practical phases of an experience. In ‘The Psychology of Occupations’ chapter of School and Society, Dewey writes, as occupation is active and motor; it finds expression through the physical organs – the eyes, hands, etc. But it also involves continual observation of materials, and continual planning, decision-making and learning, in order that the practical side may be successfully carried out. Occupation as thus conceived must therefore, be carefully distinguished from work which educates primarily for a trade. It differs because its end is in itself; in the growth that comes from the interaction of ideas and their embodiment in action, and not in external utility. Active self-expression takes place through the hands, eyes, observation, planning and reflection. These give a new orientation to the whole personality of the child. Children, by nature, are interested in occupations.
Dewey had no faith in the traditional curriculum as it could not fulfil the aims of education set forth by him. He did not believe in the faculty theory of psychology which divided the mind into different compartments such as memory, imagination, perception, judgement, etc. He considered the mind as an organic whole. So he did not like the division of knowledge into isolated branches or special studies. He believed the problem comes first and learning happens incidentally through one’s engagement with it. Principles, skills and methods are acquired by the pupil, as she/he experiences the need for them. According to Dewey, interests are the signs and symptoms of growing power. Accordingly, the constant and careful observation of interests in children is of utmost importance in educating. He believed that learning proceeds from concrete to the general. Uniform methods cannot possibly produce uniform results in education, hence the methods should be individualized.
He believed in a curriculum that focuses on connecting multiple subjects, where students are allowed to freely move in and out of the classroom as they pursue their interests and construct their own paths to knowledge. The role of the teacher in this setting would be to serve more as a facilitator than as an instructor. In Dewey’s view, the teacher should observe the interest of the students, observe the directions they naturally take, and then serve as someone who helps develop their problem-solving and analytical skills. The role of the teacher is to plan ahead, observe and encourage. Dewey believed that students should be involved in real-life tasks and challenges in school, as the school itself is an embodiment of society. Maths could be learnt via learning proportions in cooking. History was not just past information, but to understand the present in context of the past and how we came to be. Dewey’s school was a place where moral education was provided not in the form of separate lessons and precepts but through practical experience, purposeful activities and reflections comprising standard factors of social life. He thinks that “the best and deepest moral and social training is precisely that which one gets through having to enter into proper relations with others in a unity of work and thought in school.” The school must enable the child to be aware of himself and of the society; a doing school where both morals and occupations were learnt from doing. Dewey had a gift for suggesting activities that captured the essence of what his classes were studying.
Conclusion
Dewey propounded a democratic system of education which means development of individuality without obstacles from the school. Learners were actively encouraged to become a useful part of their environment. This development is self-directed through learning from experiences. According to Dewey, children are individuals whose freedom should be respected. Hence, they are provided with a great degree of freedom of action and discussion.
In a democratic system of education, children will be trained to think, to act, develop qualities of initiative, independence and of an intelligent citizen. As regards methods, the children will actively participate in the learning process. In a democracy, the child’s views will be acknowledged. Discipline in a democratic system of education will be free and through self-government in the school. To Dewey it is only through a democratic system that an individual can reach the full potential of his/her personality.
To repeat one of Dewey’s famous quotes, “Education is not a preparation for life, education is life itself.” To Dewey, the school should be organized in such a way that the spontaneous order of the outer world merges with the inner workings of the school. Education takes place with the participation of the individual in constructive activities and in relationships with her fellow human beings. The school should thus align itself with social and democratic values, with the experiences of the learners at the centre of their learning.
Though Dewey is continuously described as one of the greatest thinkers of education with his focus on progressive education, constructivism, learner-centered theory, and experiential knowledge, his ideas remain absent in vision boards of schools and thus in classrooms. With education in the United States being focused on the Common Core Standards and on passing standardised tests and exams, uniform classrooms have become the norm for young learners. Education in most classrooms today is what Dewey would have described as traditional classroom setting which he believed was not developmentally appropriate for young learners. A few alternative educational programmes in the US incorporate Dewey’s theories in their curricular concepts like Responsive Classrooms which is an SEL (social-emotional learning) based programme, Place-Based Education and so on, but his theories remain completely absent in the main schools across the country.
The author has a Masters’ in Education from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Hyderabad. She has worked as a Subject Matter Expert for English Textbooks, Workbooks and Assessments for schools at Xamcheck, Pune. She is interested in alternative education models. She can be reached at shrijitasg@gmail.com.
