"With the advent of democracy and modern industrial conditions, it is impossible to foretell definitely just what civilization will be twenty years from now. Hence it is impossible to prepare the child for any precise set of conditions. To prepare him for the future life means to give him command of himself; it means so to train him that he will have the full and ready use of all his capacities..." - John Dewey (http://dewey.pragmatism.org/creed.htm)
Dewey understood that the world was changing rapidly. In the ultra modern society of the early 1900s, Dewey noted, "it is impossible to foretell definitely just what civilization will be twenty years from now." To adequately prepare students for the future, we have to assume that the future is not a static thing and we need to know the perspective each individual brings with them.
Reading about Dewey, I'm struck with how many of his ideas of teaching methods resonate with me. In the science classroom, real knowledge is less about learning what has been done and more about what remains to be discovered. While the background knowledge is important (one doesn't want to start from nothing), we should be training future-looking citizens aiming to anticipate the world to come.
You and I both pulled out one of the same quotes from Dewey's creed. It reminded me of a list of things:
ReplyDelete=> http://www.xkcd.com/1227/ (The pace of Modern life)
=> The Noddings book and the author's fixation on the idea that the 21st Century is somehow new and dynamic, while the 20th Century was static.
=>"That which has been is what will be,
That which is done is what will be done,
And there is nothing new under the sun." ECC 1:9 KVJ
The world is always changing but does it ever really change?
Can I just say that I love the fact that you reference xkcd? Perhaps there are more ways to bring this beautiful comic into the classroom...
DeleteI don’t know if it makes you feel better or worse, but the bolts still exist in some public school classrooms in Nicaragua.
ReplyDeleteAs far as background knowledge goes, I agree with Dewey:
“History is of use in that it presents phases of social life and growth…When taken simply as history…becomes dead and inert. Taken as a record of man’s social life and progress, it becomes full of meaning.”
We do have a story that we can learn from. Although, as Richard Pipes explains that Russian historians taught their citizens “Revisionist” history as fact, I’m sure there are many things we’ve learned as fact that aren’t necessarily so. I guess that’s part of our responsibility as teachers, to do our best to find out what is fact, and teach accordingly.
Yea, the bolts still exist all over. I guess that's the thing about "progress". It's a LONG process focusing on cumulative change. We can't expect everything to suddenly be fixed or even to see the effect of our efforts...but it's comforting to know that the march of progress ALWAYS continues.
DeleteDavid, I also wanted to add that another framing of Dewey's pedagogical thinking is something called the cycle of reflective thought, an idea that he first outline in his 1910 work, "How We Think." The basic outline has us starting with a problem, which we then look at in light of experi-ence and, based on that experience, we draw a hypothesis which we test via experi-ment (both words share the same Latin root--experiri--meaning to try) and this then leads to a decision about the meaning/validity/inadequacy of the experiment, which creates a new problem to be examined. You, of course, will recognize the structure of the scientific method herein.
ReplyDeleteWords are amazing! This is an interesting way to draw parallels between many different topics. A random aside...look at the root word for herpetology (study of reptiles and amphibians) and herpes (the disease). The root word comes from herptos, meaning "creepy, crawly". There is something there regarding WHEN the terms came into existence and our scientific understanding at the time.
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