"Education is a social process. Education is growth. Education is not a preparation for life; education is life itself."


Taught in HS for two years
University of Michigan for ten years
University of Minnesota one year
Teacher's College at Columbia
Lab school in Chicago
Columbia university
Dept of philosophy

Civil War to the Cold War




United States changed from a rural to an urban society, from an agricultural to an industrial economy, from a regional to a world power.


Immigration, industrialization
Ethnic, class, and religious diversity -might have prepared him for his experiences with diverse cultures that he ends up seeking out for the rest of his life


Vermont

Dewey saying major problem with ethics. World concerned with how society should be organized and not personal decisions of individuals

Dewey advocated numerous social reforms

Main focus of Dewey's social ethics concerns
Institutional arrangements to conduct moral inquiry intelligently

schools and civil society




Dewey argued that the primary problems for ethics in the modern world concerned the ways society ought to be organized, rather than personal decisions of the individual.


Dewey advocated numerous social reforms


The main focus of Dewey's social ethics concerns the institutional arrangements that influence the capacity of people to

conduct moral inquiry intelligently. Two social domains are critical for promoting this capacity: schools, and civil society.





experimental inquiry;

widespread communication of the consequences of instituting norms,

extensive sympathy, so that the consequences of norms for everyone are treated seriously in appraising them





Both needed to be reconstructed so as to promote experimental intelligence and wider sympathies.


He was a leading advocate of the comprehensive high school, as opposed to separate vocational and college prepatory schools. This was to promote the social integration of different economic classes, a prerequisite to enlarging their mutual understanding and sympathies.




Civil society needed to be reconstructed along more democratic lines.
Communication among citizens and between citizens and experts, therefore public opinion could be better informed by the experiences and problems of citizens from different walks of life, and by scientific discoveries (PP).

Dewey regarded democracy as the social embodiment of experimental intelligence informed by sympathy and respect for the other members of society.
Democratic - institutionalize feedback mechanisms (free speech) for informing officeholders of the consequences for all of the policies they adopt, and for sanctioning them (periodic elections) if they do not respond accordingly.


To implement this method requires institutions that facilitate three things: (1) habits of critical, and imagining and adopting alternatives. The main institutions needed to facilitate these things are progressive schools and a democratic civil society. Experimentalism in ethics leads to a democratic political philosophy.



YDewey's ethics replaces the goal of identifying an ultimate end or supreme principle that can serve as a criterion of ethical evaluation with the goal of identifying a method for improving our value judgments. Dewey argued that ethical inquiry is of a piece with empirical inquiry more generally. It is the use of reflective intelligence to revise one's judgments in light of the consequences of acting on them. Value judgments are tools for enabling the satisfactory redirection of conduct when habit no longer suffices to direct it. As tools, they can be evaluated instrumentally, in terms of their success in guiding conduct. We test our value judgments by putting them into practice and seeing whether the results are satisfactory — whether they solve the problems they were designed to solve, whether we find their consequences acceptable, whether they enable successful responses to novel problems, whether living in accordance with alternative value judgments yields more satisfactory results. We achieve moral progress and maturity to the extent that we adopt habits of reflectively revising our value judgments in response to the widest consequences for everyone of living them out. This pragmatic approach requires that we locate the conditions of warrant for our value judgments in human conduct itself, not in any a priori fixed reference point outside of conduct, such as in God's commands, Platonic Forms, pure reason, or “nature,” considered as giving humans a fixed telos. To do so requires that we understand different types of value judgments in functional terms, as forms of conduct that play distinctive roles in the life of reflective, social beings. Dewey thereby offers a naturalistic metaethic of value judgments, grounded in developmental and social psychology.

Ignored students unique personalities

Curriculum did not promote individual differences

Repeat information- written or orally

memory vs. understanding

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=opXKmwg8VQM
55 seconds

http://www.ucls.uchicago.edu

Sensory and motor actions of a child
Context in which situation occurs
Past experiences, environment takes place, level of engagement (how involved in the experience)

Pragmatic theory of truth - process of discovery, experimental and creative capacities of human experience

Studied how children learn most effectively


Craft school to "revolutionize the American schooling system"

Curriculum always changing

Humans learn best in real-life activities with people

Rejects memorization, recitation

Provides more engaging and active experiences for learners

Student's experiences should be taken into account when teaching

Curriculum should be based on student interests

Active curriculum should be integrated rather than divided into subject matter
Theory of experience
Continuity each experience is stored whether positive or negative and carried into the future
Interaction- using past experiences when dealing with present situations

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=opXKmwg8VQM
2:30
learning by doing

3;30
lunch project
reading - what to buy
buying at store - arthmetic and money
cooperation in preparing lunch
butter made from cream, cream from cows
brings further discussions/projects
while waiting to eat lesson in self respect


8-9 yr old
manage school store
business

12-14
buses to observe outside world
airplanes

creative education not neglected

K-high school
seeing believing
knowledge learned from an experience - best understood, doing, instead of seeing


A school truly based on Dewey’s philosophy would foster an environment in which students have meaningful experiences that lead to growth—that open them up to more, higher-level experiences, its ultimate goal could not be achieved solely by a curriculum that used activities as a means of acquiring “systematized knowledge which the adult already possessed”

Empiricism

the theory that all knowledge is derived from sense-experience. Stimulated by the rise of experimental science, it developed in the 17th and 18th centuries, expounded in particular by John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume.