Session One

Introduction

• Website

• Email List

• Syllabus

• Assign Topics

• What are some issues that you feel are currently facing education- List three

• Examine f they match he syllabus

John Dewey

• Was opposed to traditional educational practices

• He saw them as imposing learning on children

• Focused on textbooks and passing on information rather than teaching children to think

• Focused on standards and rules• Limited creativity• Taught conformity

• He thought that schools were structured through and unnatural patterns of organization– Strict time schedules– Rules of order – Classification of individuals– Opposite a natural organizations like a family

Dewey’s Philosophy

• Rather than imposition from above is cultivation of individuality

• Rather than external discipline is free activity

• Rather than learning from texts and teachers is learning through experience

• Rather than learning isolated skills and techniques by drill and practice, is gaining skills by ends that make direct connections

• Rather than preparing for a remote future to making the most of opportunities of present life

• Rather than preparing for a static life, prepare for a constantly changing world

• Dewey believes that traditional schools try to impose values of a mature person on a immature learner that is not ready to learn them

• All education causes some type of experience, Dewey believes that often traditional education produces experiences that have negative affects.

Those opposed to Dewey

• The purpose of education is to improve Humankind

• WE cannot discover the difference between bad and good in a laboratory or through an experiment

• Governments improve not by forcing programs through schools, but by improving the citizens that make up the country

• Man by nature is free, in order for him to succeed, he needs discipline.

• Education must recognize that values are necessary part of societies

• A liberal education is for everybody• An education is not for training for a better

job, but for becoming a better person• Liberal education of the young is all about

teaching them the habits, ideas and techniques they will need to continue to educate themselves throughout their lives.

• You can only be a good citizen once you have developed your intelligence

• Learning does not stop once you become an adult

Conclusion

Dewey’s critics• Intellectual training

– Feel the focus on social emotional detracts from intellectual mission of the schools

Dewey-• Social-emotional

growth– Can not develop

intelligence without developing social emotional

Adler vs. Holt

• Mortimer Adler feels that democracy is best served when public schools have a uniform curriculum objectives for all students

• John Holt feels that imposed curriculum damages the individual and usurps a basic human right to select one’s own path of development

Adler• Paideia proposes one curriculum that would

be used for everyone• Some basic components of this include the

following• Increased preschool education• Common objectives for all children which

included– Opportunities for personal development– All children become full fledged citizens– When grown all children will work

• To achieve these objectives, schooling must be general and liberal

• One single 12 year course of study• One elective- what world language(modern)• No specialization, no electives• There would be organized into three

main columns of teaching and learning– Acquisition of organized knowledge– Develop intellectual skills– Enlarge the understanding of ideas and

values

• !2 years of Physical education

• Homework

• Good teaching

• Learning needs to be active

• Teachers must help students process discovery

John Holt

• Children should have the right to decide what they want to learn, by whom, when and how much they should learn

• Each of us has the right to control our own learning

• Why should children be forced to go to school, do homework when adults are not forced

• Children should control their own right to educate themselves, should control what and when something goes into their mind

• Schools are terrible institutions, far worse than many institutions than any on the outside

• Teachers are given too much power, no one should have that much power

• Schools are completely authoritarian• The law in this country is beginning to see

schools in this light

Behaviorism Vs. Humanism

B.F. Skinner• Proponent of

behaviorism

• Carl Rodgers• Believed in the

human side of of motivation

Behaviorism

• When a behavior is followed by a consequence that is reinforcing it will induce the behavior

• A hot person gets reinforced by coolness when they go into the shade

• If the behavior is first associated with a stimulus you can change a behavior operant conditioning

• Negative reinforcement is the removal of a negative. If you get a A, you will not have to take out the trash

•Are people free if they are controlled by reinforcers?

• What about salaries, gifts ?

• Skinner believes that all effective causes of behavior lie outside the body

Rodgers

• Believes in psychotherapy• Freedom to do what is needed is an dinner

thing• Everything can be taken from a man except

for his ability to choose his attitude• Man has the ability to choose and is free