Thursday, November 3, 2016
Nov. 7...Dewey's Democratic Education (This is optional)
Post a question or thought that you have related to Chapter 7 of Democracy and Education. We agreed that there would be no required blog this week so this is entirely optional. I have posted it so that if you want to ask a question or make a comment, I (and everyone else) can see it and think about it prior to class...
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Ok, my first question is actually NOT from Chapter 7, but from My Pedagogic Creed. At the very end of the selection, Dewey throws in some God-this and God-that and gets suddenly religious and it seems forced. Was this a problem for him? Was he viewed as not religious enough or was he a religious person. Just curious.
ReplyDeleteIn Chapter 7, the first thing that jumped out at me was Dewey's mention of Plato and his definition of slavery. It reminds me of our discussion into Alienation of Labor, and as Dewey expands on the point he seems to describe that concept himself without giving it any sort of title. It also makes me think a lot about the "new policies" we are seeing at my program of employment...
Also of note "The superficial explanation is that a government resting upon popular suffrage cannot be successful unless those who elect
and who obey their governors are educated." pg. 5. I find it funny that given the current political climate that we are striving to uphold the uneducated as candidates for leadership. This also makes me think of the praxis between P12 and researchers, as we have often discussed in these courses, in that one would THINK a democratic education would yield those elected to lead educational systems (school boards, etc.) would be EDUCATED but again, that is not always the case, or, they are not educated in the area in which they are asked to make decisions: education.
And...could Plato's Philosophy in section three be used to advocate for Vocational Education?
I also was reminded of Marx and the idea of alienation of labor, and also of the idea of false consciousness, when he says "everywhere else the mind is distracted and misled by false valuations and false perspectives," and goes on about how power interests lead thought astray. Marx/Engels wrote before Dewey... ~ Carolyn
DeleteHey, it's Laurie.
DeleteBri, this made me think of my job, too.
At one point in Chapter 7, Dewey says, “Efficiency in production often demands division of labor. But it is reduced to a mechanical routine unless workers see the technical, intellectual, and societal relationships involved in what they do, and engage in their work because of the motivation furnished by such perceptions.”
At my awesome (because everything on the Internet is public) day job, there are people who are engaged in the work and use logic and reason – and we suffer for it on the regular, beaten down by bureaucracy and The Work Instructions. There are also seemingly content people who blindly do as they’re told, memorizing/referring to/quoting The Work Instructions and never really seeing (or even wondering) how their efforts fit into the big picture.
My question is, how do you prepare your students for the very real possibility they’ll wind up in a cube farm, alienated from their labor and discouraged from using those critical thinking skills you so diligently taught them? Do you want them to be frustrated critical thinkers or unthinking cogs with a little bit of job security?
Or is that completely off topic and I just need to find a different job?
It's Jodi... I agree with Brianne, I was wondering the reasoning for adding the last few sentences in the Creed! Maybe is was just a metaphor but one I am unsure about...
DeleteAs for Ch. 7, the Human Association paragraphs reminded me of discussions we have had in class as well as in small groups about social class/groups. It is true that there are many groups within a community but usually they are seen as a part of the same class. The area where this tends to blur is in schools that pull from a variety of areas within a larger community. As we see in the School to Prison Pipeline the students tend to continue the cycle of their home environments continuing the line of poverty, crime, low academic achievement and other factors. I am wondering in the big picture how this could be truly changed? Adding zero tolerance and metal detectors and officers in schools was not the answer in most schools to turn this around. How do we set a new pedagogy for dealing with this tragedy? The students in the schools are not seen as unique individuals but as a mass society of delinquents in need to being sent to jail as a means to an end. What about teaching intrinsic motivation as a reward and treating them like humans for a change? I suppose this is more of a political philosophy in which social change is must.
Are we still stuck back at Plato? Do we believe that a society is at its best when each individual is doing that for which s/he has a natural aptitude in such a way as to be useful to others or contribute to society, and that the purpose of education should be to discover and develop these talents, BUT since individuals are still bound to a small number of fixed social classes, and since there is still “no recognition that an individual constitutes his own class,” this educational ideal is still not realizable? ~ Carolyn
ReplyDeleteKim here:
ReplyDelete“Each generation is inclined to educate its young so as to get along in the present world instead of with a view to the proper end of education: the promotion of the best possible realization of humanity as humanity. Parents educate their children so that they may get on; princes educate their subjects as instruments of their own purposes.”
This part of Democracy and Education had me thinking about a piece in John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight about de facto school segregation. In the segment, parents often expressed concern over desegregating school policies because of anxiety over the social mobility or safety of their child. Obviously, there is a lot going on here and assumptions abound, but for the purposes of this topic on Democracy and Education, these parents were solely concerned about their child’s ability to “get on” and not worrying about the trajectory of humanity’s realization. Desegregated schooling is in the interest of the realization of the best possible humanity. As Dewey suggested, we need a “freer interaction between social groups” to create a more democratic society. If children continue to have experiences where they do not interact with people outside their own culture or values, we are continuing to cultivate an environment ripe for prejudice and intolerance. How do we convince parents who resist desegregating schooling policies that desegregation is in the best interest of democracy and the best possible realization of humanity to promote diverse interactions among our nation’s youth?
Kim,
DeleteThis is an interesting dilemma that was brewing in my neighborhood in Chesterfield County last school year. The talk of desegregation and integrating students from a variety of areas that some families were "not at all comfortable with" because they didn't "want their children exposed to 'those kinds of kids'". I was having a hard time in these conversations because of the ignorance and intolerance that was going on where I live. I think educating families of the benefits of blending social groups is a big step and being able to answer questions to calm their fears may be a help for some. I tried my best with some neighbors in these conversations to open their hearts and minds but felt the push back. The anxieties that families who have not interacted with other social classes was very evident. The few that have friends and acquaintances in other social groups were more open.
The convincing is the hardest part. If the Board makes the decision then they will have to live with it.
Jodi
While reading Dewey, I saw an interesting push and pull between the critical and the functional. Early on in chapter 7, he basically says its our duty to be critical about what we see in our community, since education should reflect all of larger society. He says "but, as we have just seen, the ideal cannot simply repeat the traits which are actually found. The problem is to extract the desirable traits of forms of community life which actually exist, and employ them to criticize undesirable features and suggest improvement." That sounds good to me, but at the same time, there's some functionalist rhetoric in My Pedagogic Creed, as he stresses the importance of knowing how a child can contribute to society and how that should be the basis of education. While talking about children and their natural capabilities, he says "...these powers, interests, and habits must be continually interpreted - we must know what they mean. They must be translated into terms of their social equivalents - into terms of what they are capable of in the way of social service.” To me it sounds a little like assessing a puzzle and using the school to figure out how the students fit into this pre-exsisting puzzle, for the sake of the entire puzzle (the puzzle being society). Maybe I'm taking it too far. We all do have to function into the societies in which we live, but how far is functionalism from conditioning?
ReplyDeleteDoes Dewey explicitly theorize power in his work?
ReplyDeleteReading these chapters was a very interesting experience for me. I realized that while I read authors who reference Dewey and authors Dewey reference, I have yet to hear about him from his own voice. In turn, I spent a lot of time pulling the truth of my perception of him through these chapters. One piece that struck me in particular was how clearly he expressed some of his assumptions and I look forward to seeing how these manifest throughout his work. Specifically I am thinking of his comment, "apart from human activity, nature itself is not a unity." This is a very interesting way to position the person and speaks to what I consider his somewhat constructionist interpretation of the psychological and sociological being.
ReplyDeleteI was struck by Dewey's statement that "It is not enough to see to it that education is not actively used as an instrument to make easier the exploitation of one class by another. School facilities must be secured of such amplitude and efficiency as will in fact and not simply in name discount the effects of economic equalities , and secure to all the wards of the nation equality of equipment for their future careers." Dewey could literally mean equipment-supplies and technology, but I see equipment to mean curriculum (involving social justice education and critical theory) as vital in today's classrooms to equip students with necessary skills to navigate society and their future experiences. How is this still not part of professional developments? Aren't we in many classrooms just naming the problem, putting some technology in place to mask any inequity, and moving on? I think that when people see computers or other token resources, they believe that students are getting a high quality education, but I think that there must be more in place. Students should be equipped with critical analysis skills and be exposed to various perspectives in order to experience success in life.
ReplyDelete~Brionna
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