Context
As mentioned below, I see the two most crucial documents in the history and philosophy of Active Learning as Ralph Waldo Emerson’s American Scholar Address (1837) and John Dewey’s “The Child and the Curriculum” (1902). Dewey did not have Emerson’s rhetorical powers but he was a strong conceptual thinker and it’s unfortunate the essay did not have the careful readership it deserved when it was published. The posting below provides an introduction to the piece, which you can all now read on-line since it’s in the public domain.
Dewey’s work with his laboratory school at the University of Chicago provides a context for Dewey’s essay “The Child and the Curriculum,” which I view as second only to “The American Scholar” as a central manifesto for the active learning. Like the entire tradition of active learning, it shows us ways out of the stalemate between student-centered and traditional approaches. Dewey begins with the issue of conflict and contradiction in educational policy:
Any significant problem involves conditions that for the moment contradict each other. Solution comes only by getting away from the meaning of terms that is already fixed upon and coming to see the conditions from another point of view, and hence in a fresh light. . . . Easier than thinking with surrender of already formed ideas and detachment from facts already learned, is to just stick by what is already said, looking about for something with which to buttress it against attack.
Dewey here is following in the footsteps of Emerson who said, “By going one step farther back in thought, discordant opinions are reconciled, by being seen to be two extremes of one principle.” It is the brilliance of Dewey’s essay to show how convincingly the notion can be applied to the opposition set forth in the title and the parallel terms associated with each:
“Discipline” is the watchword of those who magnify the course of study; “interest” that of those who blazon “The Child” upon their banner. The standpoint of the former is logical; that of the latter psychological. The first emphasizes the necessity of adequate training and scholarship on the part of the teacher; the latter that of need of sympathy with the child, and knowledge of his natural instincts. “Guidance and control” are the catchwords of one school; “freedom and initiative” of the other. Law is asserted here; spontaneity proclaimed there. The old, the conservation of what has been achieved in the pain and toil of the ages, is dear to the one; the new, change, progress, wins the affection of the other. Inertness and routine, chaos and anarchism are accusations bandied back and forth.
Before trying to reconcile them, Dewey goes even further to show the opposition between the children’s ways of knowing and the kind that the curriculum would force on them. The child’s world is narrow and personal; it is integral and unified as he or she passes from one activity to another without being aware of abrupt transitions. The universe is “fluid and fluent; its contents dissolve and re-form with amazing rapidity.” In school, on the other hand, the various studies “divide and fractionalize the world. . . Facts are torn away from their original place in experience and rearranged with reference to some general principle.” The world becomes vastly extended in time and space, but in doing so becomes abstract, compartmentalized, impersonal.
Dewey takes pains to extensively formulate each position. The adherents of the curriculum say:
Ignore and minimize the child’s individual peculiarities, whims, and experiences. . . . As educators our work is precisely to substitute for these superficial and casual affairs stable and well-ordered realities; and these are found in studies and lessons. Subdivide each topic into studies; each study into lessons; each lesson into specific facts and formulae. Let the child proceed step by step to master each one of these separate parts, and at last he will have covered the entire ground.
The other group says “The child is the center, and the end,. His development, his growth, is the ideal. . . . Learning is active. In involves reaching out of the mind. It involves organic assimilation starting from within.”
One of the reasons Dewey can so well ventriloquize both positions is that he had close ties to each. To fully appreciate the genius of Dewey’s solution, we must recontextualize it, reinstate it in its historical moment. By the late 1890s the curriculum as the shaping force in education had found an eloquent philosophical spokesman in the person of William Torrey Harris, whom we have already encountered. Harris, whom we first saw as a young enthusiast of Alcott, was a Hegelian, editor of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, the first philosophical journal in America not affiliated with a religious group. He accepted Dewey’s first three articles and his belated but commendatory acceptance of the first had encouraged the young man to pursue his inclination to enroll in graduate study in philosophy. Harris went on be become first superintendent of schools for St. Louis, and then US commissioner of education. He viewed the elementary curriculum as the “five windows of the soul”—arithmetic, geography, history, grammar, and literature—which rescued the young mind from its immediate narrowness and made it a part of the collective development of the race. Through this process the child’s will and impulse control were also strengthened.
Opposed to Harris’s sense of education as bringing children as efficiently as possible into the adult world were advocates of “child-study,” led by one of Dewey’s teachers at Johns Hopkins, G. Stanley Hall, and supported by American followers of the German educational philosopher Johann Herbart, a group with which Dewey was for a time allied. These child-study adherents combined a Rousseau-like sentimentality about nature and children with a kind of anthropological Darwinism that saw every individual recapitulating in his or her development the cultural history of the race. Younger children should be engaged with “primitive” cultures, adolescents with feudalism, and so on, although as Dewey pointed out, in practice this engagement often took only the vitiated form of reading later literary imitations of these cultures, such as Longfellow’s Hiawatha. The main problem for Dewey, though, was the way this group placed their own abstract and sweeping theory over direct observation of the children before them. Although Dewey felt a certain affinity towards the notion of inner development, the imposition of this theory on the curriculum was no less arbitrary and a priori than that of the Hegelians. Further, Dewey was disturbed by the intrinsic anti-intellectualism of the movement, where the child’s well being was stressed over any directed development of the mind. For Dewey health was only a precondition for real mental growth, not an end in itself.
It is not that both sides were completely wrong-headed but more that each side had only part of the truth and that partiality created a distorted and stunted education. Dewey’s solution combined a sense of bipolar unity like that of Coleridge with an epistemological twist on the recapitulation theory:
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. Just as two points define a straight line, so the present standpoint of the child and the facts and truths of studies define instruction. It is continuous reconstruction, moving from the child’s present experience out into that represented by the organized bodies of truth that we call studies. . . the initial and final terms of one reality.
As the child engages in social and intellectual activities (the two as we have seen are nearly synonymous in Dewey’s thought since social effort requires linguistic formulation), his or her mind will of itself move in the direction of the symbolic and abstract. The need for communication and the urge towards mastery will generate the same processes by which the human race created and developed culture. Conversely, the curriculum itself is merely a cross-section or snapshot of a point in time of this cultural advancement. What traditional education does is simply to take this snapshot and present it to students as a finished product in the most formal and abstract way.
What happens, as Emerson earlier suggested in “The American Scholar,” is that the abstractions mean nothing to students when they are divorced from the processes from which they arose. To make the point that both Dewey’s critics and his progressive followers often miss, Dewey is not against teaching children the intellectual constructs they need, only against the divorce of these constructs from a comprehensible context, one that transforms them from isolated, reified givens into instruments with which to pursue further thought:
There is a sense in which it is impossible too value to highly the formal and the symbolic. The genuine form, the real symbol, serve as methods in the holding and discovery of truth. They are tools by which the individual pushes out most surely and widely into unexplored areas. They are the means by which he brings to bear whatever of reality he has succeeded in gaining in past searching. But this happens only when the symbol really symbolizes—when it stands for and sums up in shorthand actual experiences which the individual has already gone through.
Dewey, like Emerson, has seemed anti-intellectual to some in stressing the concrete and experiential, but both do so only because formal schooling has overstressed the opposite qualities.
The central task of education, then, is to immerse the child in the total process of symbol construction, of reenacting the source of the symbol by restoring the conditions that led to its creation—much like the experience of my children learning multiplication through manipulatives. Education becomes a two-way street: the culture in general and the particular adults involved refresh their thinking by engaging in its etymology, just as Emerson’s poet restores to language its initial specificity and dynamism. At the same time we introduce our concepts to children, our own sense of them becomes unstiffened. In Democracy and Education Dewey writes: “With respect to the development of powers devoted to coping with specific scientific and economic problems we may say that the child should be growing in manhood. With respect to sympathetic curiosity, unbiased responsiveness, and openness of mind, we may say that the adult should be growing in childlikeness.” A specific case of Dewey himself learning from the children is given in “The School and Society”: “I did not know until the children told me, that the reason for the late development of the cotton industry as compared with the woolen is that cotton fibre is so very difficult to free by hand from the seeds.”
Dewey’s school was structured on the notion of letting the students’ minds follow this entire cycle from action to thought back to action and so on. Dewey mediated between the textbook based instruction endorsed by Harris and the culture-epoch sequence of child study by organizing his activities around basic occupations of the human race. While the activities constantly move back and forth between the tangible and the conceptual, there is an overall movement both within the scope of the activity and in the larger arc of each student’s education toward the largesocietal and scientific implications.