Notes for Week #2: The Philosophy of Education I

Roger B. Blumberg, CS92/ED89, 227 CIT
http://www.cs.brown.edu/courses/cs092/2001/cs92.rbb3.html

The Project Process
Dewey's Experience and Education
The Revised Project Description
Scheffler's "Computers at School?"

The Project Process

John Dewey's Experience and Education (1938)

In 1998 and 1999, students in the Seminar were assigned Dewey's Democracy and Education, published in 1916. You can see the materials from the 1998 and 1999 discussions of that book, but starting last year we read a later Dewey text, more concerned with the analysis of education than with its place in society (see Bolon's questions about Experience and Education from last year). For those unfamiliar with Dewey, however, it may be worthwhile to read the following passage from Israel Scheffler's Four Pragmatists (1974) concerning Dewey's vision of the good society:

"And ideal society, for Dewey, is an association that allows for maximum growth of each person, through his own activity and self-development. Such an association aims to institutionalize intelligence in matters of conduct, as natural science institutionalizes intelligence in investigations of nature. It is free of artificial barriers dividing its members from one another, it fosters the free exchange of ideas, and it treats the ideas underlying its common activities as hypotheses -- open to the test of experience, criticizable by all whom such activities affect, and revisable by procedures enlisting their common consent."

If you consider the events that have shaped education since 1939, you realize that Dewey's framing of the issues in Experience and Education has been overshadowed if not overwhelmed by the demands of nationalism (during and after WWII, and during the Cold War) and domestic social policy (with the rise of the Civil Rights and "counter-culture" movements) for at least 60 years. Now that at least some of the 20th century's smoke has cleared, and we seem to be left without the post-War/Cold War justifications for why we do what we do in school, does Dewey's approach strike you as a promising one for the new century? (How) Have changes in culture(s) and society in the United States, and in our ideas about the significance of terms like "culture", "society" and "civilization" (e.g. since 1938), influenced basic assumptions concerning the aims of education, and schooling in particular, in the US?

The Revised Project Description

If you look at the revised project descriptions from past years (they are included on the project pages) you will see that different teams have structured them differently, some with more and some with less detail. But here are some kinds of information that you should consider making clear in the revised project descriptions:

Israel Scheffler's "Computers at School?" (1986 )

  1. The Illusion of Givenness
  2. Distinguishing Means from Ends
  3. The Uses of Computers at School
  4. The Notion of Information in Educational Thought

For Next Week:


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