TAKING SIDES: CLASHING VIEWS ON CONTROVERSIAL EDUCATIONAL ISSUES

1. SHOULD SCHOOLING BE BASED ON SOCIAL EXPERIENCES?

YES-John Dewey

His critique of “traditional” education (p. 4)

- education subjects are made up of bodies of information and of skills worked out in the past; main goal of school is to transmit info and skills to new generation

- moral training is about forming habits that conform to standards and rules of conduct

- pattern of school organization makes school an inst so different from other social insts. (schedules, classifications, judging, rules, etc.)

All this adds up to schools teach conformity and obedience; they do so by engineering textbooks and teachers; what is taught is static, as if future will repeat past (p. 5); this is done unto kids, who aren’t yet able to process this mature way of thinking and understanding

His comparison:

traditional vs. progressive education

Imposition from above vs. expression/cultivation of individuality

External discipline vs. free activity

Learning from texts/teachers vs. learning through experience

Acquiring skills by drills vs. acquiring skills that are relevant through exp.

Preparing for distant future vs. learning that’s relevant to current experience

Learning unchanging curriculum vs. learning about the real/current world

BUT, while there are differences in the “whats” of learning, the processes may still be valid. It shouldn’t necessarily be OLD vs. NEW, or that the new should be the exact opposite of the old; the problem is how to integrate the NEW (or more experience-based learning) to the OLD (traditional).

For example a new idea is to give students more freedom or say in the content of their education…but that doesn’t mean that ANY guidance or help from adults is automatically an “invasion”. Or just because the new wants to be free from the constraints of the past, it shouldn’t totally ignore history or precedent…Don’t just reject the old (negative approach), but use it to build upon and improve (positive approach)

All genuine education comes from experience, but not all experiences are educational; just because education should be enjoyable, doesn’t mean that only fun things should be learned

(p. 8 middle para) Schooling may be about the mechanics (classroom, textbook, teacher, assembly-line curriculum…sound familiar?) but it was not without experiences….however, the quality and type of experience could be improved to facilitate real learning and interest

Quality of an experience depends on (1) aspect of agreeableness or disagreeableness; and (2) its influence on later experiences; in fact the best education is a continuity of experience; a caution for progressive schools might be that just because they want to build on important ideas (culture, discipline, heritage) doesn’t mean they don’t need organization and boundaries (like what they’re opposing in the traditional schools)

1. SHOULD SCHOOLING BE BASED ON SOCIAL EXPERIENCES?

NO-Robert M. Hutchins

A system that merely indoctrinates its youth for obedience is not educational, if its aims are not to improve them for their own sake (function of man as man), and not for their role as citizen in that society

Society will be improved not by tinkering with the social institutions within it, but by improving individuals; to do so would involve his social nature, but it would also require discipline (perhaps here, Hutchins is criticizing what seems to be the YES side’s willingness to let learners be totally free to learn on their own, to let their social experiences guide their education without any discipline…i.e. organization); he says they rely on laboratory experiments/empirical data to symbolize the idea of testing theories and creating new one rather than relying on the past

Three aspects of man: intellectual (schools), moral and spiritual (family)

If all education (as he attributes it to the NEW position) is about experiments, then does that mean that un-“experimentable” subjects like history, art, philosophy and literature no longer exist or are no longer valuable…mere superstition?

He equates the Progressives/Positivists with relativism, scientism, skepticism and anti-intellectualism…he says that they are anti-values, which in turn could be anti-education

What is a “liberal education”? In some ways it is relying on an accepted standard of what should be known…philosophy, literature, economics, history, ethics, art, religion, civics, etc. to make each individual well rounded, and with the powers for judgment and understanding…it isn’t about saying, “this is all that is important to know”, but it’s about equipping youth with the tools to keep learning throughout life. Hutchins seems to ask, why is it a bad thing to want to give these tools to all citizens through an educational system?

Hutchins makes a point to refer to us as “citizens of a republic”…here’s a simplified view of a republic vs. a democracy:

“The founders abhored discussion of their new country as a democracy, which to them was only one step from a mobocracy, in that if you let men's passions run away with them unbridled, they will make decisions which are unwise and unvirtuous, ruining govt and society. But a republic was to correct that. In a republic, in theory, people choose delegates to represent them, these representatives being the most wise and virtuous that the citizenry can offer.” http://classicals.com/federalist/TheSalemhall/read.php?f=24&i=18&t=11&v=f

Therefore his ideal is a republic of learning, and everyone should have a similar foundation of learning, so that they can exist harmoniously

2. SHOULD THE CURRICULUM BE STANDARDIZED FOR ALL?

YES-Mortimer Adler

Children are unequal in their non-educational experiences (family/home environment, SES), so they should all have the same education to achieve greater equality

Basic goals of ed should be: (1) Must prepare indivs to make most of themselves, personal improvement; (2) Must prepare indivs. to understand and participate in government as good citizens; (3) must prepare indivs. to earn a living (not necessarily or a specific job)

These goals can be reached through a liberal and general education, without electives that differentiate/separate kids or distract them from the foundations courses

The Paidea proposal is an actual curriculum guide based on the Maieutic/Socratic method: “a philosophical method of systematic doubt and questioning of another to elicit a clear expression of a truth supposed to be implicitly known by all rational beings” http://www.m-w.com

Table 1: Column 1 goes over subject areas to be focused on (traditional lecture-type delivery); column 2 are the skills to be developed (not lecture, more 1-on-1 type coaching); column 3 are the ways to engage and enlarge the process of learning (more seminar based, equal participation of teacher and student)

The sine qua non of this curriculum is the quality of learning and teaching:

Learning should be student-driven, learning is active, is by discovery

Teaching is about guiding students’ self-discovery, not just giving them answers

But teachers are currently not trained to teach this way; teachers need a broad liberal foundation, they need to do intense supervised student-teaching, they need to have master teachers to keep guiding them once they’re teachers

Adler criticizes specialization as we know it, because we start it too early…we prioritize specializing in something (plumbing, medicine, law) before we’re fully grounded in liberal education…we’re separated from each other too soon, so we can’t live harmoniously

For our society to be able to solve our crises/problems effectively, we need as many (or all) people to be well-educated…followers as well as leaders

2. SHOULD THE CURRICULUM BE STANDARDIZED FOR ALL?

NO-John Holt

There is (or should be) a fundamental right to learning…what/how/when/by whom they want

The “benevolent guise of compulsory universal education” was the government’s way of controlling people’s minds

Holt feels compulsory education (esp. as it’s structured now) is a violation of children’s civil liberties that adults wouldn’t stand for

We’ve created an “education industry”, that if left unchecked, could grow to control adult lives too; Holt would argue that his crusade is a fight for the right to decide what goes into our minds, the right to learn vs. the right to be educated (similar to Gatto’s description of education vs. schooling)

Holt describes a scenario on pgs. 28-29 about how families decide school choices together; WHO is he talking about? What kinds of families can make these choices?

Reflect on the idea that schools are “museums of virtue”. How useful is the museum metaphor?

Are schools “better, more honorable places than the world outside”? Or are they the “most anti-democratic, most authoritarian, most destructive and most dangerous institutions of modern society”?