As I read through this article, the first thought that popped in my head was “Wow, this guy was so far ahead of his time, it’s not even funny.” John Dewey has hit the nail on its head with his points about education, school, subject matters, and the nature of method. Dewey was a pioneer for early childhood education by realizing that children’s education doesn’t start in kindergarten but rather is an ongoing process that starts immediately after birth.
In Dewey’s first article on education, he gives the example of a child naturally babbling, through which “the child comes to know what those babblings mean; they are transformed into articulate language and thus the child is introduced into the consolidated wealth of ideas and emotions which are now summed up in language” (p. 77). While reading this example, I immediately reflected on a particularly meaningful lecture I attended in my child psychology class as an undergraduate student. I was very fortunate to have a leading child psychologist and researcher, Dr. Martha Ann Bell, as my professor that semester. As an 18 year old, I didn’t understand that she was the “top dog” in her field; I just thought she told the more engrossing stories from her many studies in child psychology. Even now, almost twenty years later, I can picture that day in class as clearly as I was sitting there now; that class period had a huge impact on me. Dr. Bell was lecturing on the influence of parents on their children developing language, behaviors, etc. She started to tell us a tale of how one of her studies involved having volunteer mothers be observed behind two-way glass as they entertained their baby in a high chair while preparing a meal. As expected, most of the mothers tossed some Cheerios on the high chair tray and babbled to their babies while making some food. The mothers make comments like “Those Cheerios are good, aren’t they? Would you like some more? Look at how you pick them up on your finger so well!” The babies cooed and babbled back in response. Dr. Bell described how one mother was observed putting her baby into the high chair and spreading the Cheerios onto the tray and then doing something Dr. Bell had never seen before—turning the high chair around into the corner while the mother prepared the meal. The mother worked at the stove top silently for over twenty minutes while her baby sat in the high chair facing the wall, quietly eating Cheerios. At that point in the lecture, Dr. Bell teared up and told us that she had never seen anything like this mother and she hoped she never would again in her career. The mother was failing miserably at the process described by Dewey of introducing her child to appropriate emotion and language by responding to her attempts at communication. Not only was I watching Dewey’s lesson in action while listening to this lesson, Dr. Bell was giving her students a personal inflection that transformed that lesson from a basic lecture to an endearing example that has stuck with me for almost two decades. I learned more about child psychology that day than on any other day from that semester. Not surprisingly, it was one of the only classes I remember from college.
Having an educational reformer like Dewey describe school as a “social institution” is probably a dream come true for most middle and high school students! Dewey states that “it is the business of the school to deepen and extend his sense of values bound up in his home life” (p. 80) in relation to a child’s moral training. As a middle school teacher, I couldn’t agree more. A child’s moral training cannot begin with the introduction of “character words” in elementary school. Morals must be an integral part of the child’s home life from birth so that the child has morals engrained in their upbringing from the beginning in order to embrace those morals in his or her lifestyles and choices throughout his or her life. School fails to complete its purpose of educating students when it only prepares students for a theoretical future instead of providing “a model of social life, that the best and deepest moral training is precisely that which one gets through having to enter into proper relations with others in a unity of work and thought” (p. 80).
As I reflect on my own middle school education, I can clearly agree with Dewey’s point that “far too much of the stimulus and control proceeds from the teacher” (p. 80). The teachers that insisted on direct instruction through lecture provided the least-memorable lessons for me. In fact, as a lifelong honor roll student, I was mortified to earn my first “D” in seventh grade social studies. I cried for days! Looking back on that experience now, I’m not surprised at all that I failed to excel in that class. The teacher was one year away from retirement (and made sure we knew it every day) and basically read the textbook to us while handing out huge packets of worksheets. To this day, I have a dislike of social studies classes. No wonder! The classes I performed best in were the ones where I got to move around while learning, such as science, where my teacher had us do the “mitosis square dance” and act as elements in the process of chemical bonding. “You’re a sodium, go find a chlorine! Go bond!” she yelled as we ran around the room, matching up according to our valence electrons. Since I just used the term “valence electron” accurately, you can bet that particular lesson and that particular teacher stuck with me, creating a true educational experience.
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