My pedagogic creed

John Dewey

• Publisher: KKIEN Publ. Int.
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN:
  9788898473106
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Adult Education

My Pedagogic Creed is the "manifesto" of the new schools. By the time a shot was fired in the middle of a swamp pedagogical could not recognize the centrality of the subject in the educational process. Dewey became the theoretical maximum representative of the progressive school. With the new education was occurring a shift of the core around which the educational practices: from the teacher to the child.
The fundamental point of the analysis of pedagogical Dewey is given by a conception of education as a "social participation of the individual consciousness of the species" that is in the principle of democratic life its highest manifestation and meaningful. If the democratic society is the product of the intelligence of men, in turn, the education of intelligence is a decisive factor for democratic life. The democratic life is nourished, in short, through the cultivation of the intellect. The close relationship between democracy and education is the basis of the interactive relationship between school and society. The school is based on the activities and interests of the pupils, ordered as an open community to social reality, agreed not to mold them in a standardized way, but to value them according to their potential, is referred to as the indispensable condition for the emergence of a society in which humans can experience in a personal way democracy.
Dewey writes, "with a top oppose the expression of individuality and culture, the discipline outside the free activity, to learning from books and teachers, the learning through experience; purchase of isolated skills and techniques through exercise opposes the achievement of them as a means to achieve the purpose that meet vital needs, the preparation for a more or less remote future is opposed to the maximum exploitation of the possibilities of the present life to the purposes and opposed to static materials familiarization with a world in motion. " Among these principles, that of learning through experience (learning by doing) occupies a central place in the reflection of the author.
The experience is the starting point of all knowledge and all educational practice. The experience for Dewey denotes everything that is experienced, everything that happens in the world, everything you try and you suffer, it is a a reality that includes everything: includes what is rational and logical as that which is irrational and unconscious.

Article 1 - What Education Is

I believe that all education proceeds by the participation of the individual in the social consciousness of the race. This process begins unconsciously almost at birth, and is continually shaping the individual's powers, saturating his consciousness, forming his habits, training his ideas, and arousing his feelings and emotions. Through this unconscious education the individual gradually comes to share in the intellectual and moral resources which humanity has succeeded in getting together. He becomes an inheritor of the funded capital of civilization. The most formal and technical education in the world cannot safely depart from this general process. It can only organize it or differentiate it in some particular direction.

I believe that the only true education comes through the stimulation of the child's powers by the demands of the social situations in which he finds himself. Through these demands he is stimulated to act as a member of a unity, to emerge from his original narrowness of action and feeling, and to conceive of himself from the standpoint of the welfare of the group to which he belongs. Through the responses which others make to his own activities he comes to know what these mean in social terms. The value which they have is reflected back into them. For instance, through the response which is made to the child's instinctive babblings 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.

I believe that this educational process has two sides-one psychological and one sociological; and that neither can be subordinated to the other or neglected without evil results following. Of these two sides, the psychological is the basis. The child's own instincts and powers furnish the material and give the starting point for all education. Save as the efforts of the educator connect with some activity which the child is carrying on of his own initiative independent of the educator, education becomes reduced to a pressure from without. It may, indeed, give certain external results, but cannot truly be called educative. Without insight into the psychological structure and activities of the individual, the educative process will, therefore, be haphazard and arbitrary. If it chances to coincide with the child's activity it will get a leverage; if it does not, it will result in friction, or disintegration, or arrest of the child nature.

I believe that knowledge of social conditions, of the present state of civilization, is necessary in order properly to interpret the child's powers. The child has his own instincts and tendencies, but we do not know what these mean until we can translate them into their social equivalents. We must be able to carry them back into a social past and see them as the inheritance of previous race activities. We must also be able to project them into the future to see what their outcome and end will be. In the illustration just used, it is the ability to see in the child's babblings the promise and potency of a future social intercourse and conversation which enables one to deal in the proper way with that instinct.

I believe that the psychological and social sides are organically related and that education cannot be regarded as a compromise between the two, or a superimposition of one upon the other. We are told that the psychological definition of education is barren and formal- -that it gives us only the idea of a development of all the mental powers without giving us any idea of the use to which these powers are put. On the other hand, it is urged that the social definition of education, as getting adjusted to civilization, makes of it a forced and external process, and results in subordinating the freedom of the individual to a preconceived social and political status.

I believe that each of these objections is true when urged against one side isolated from the other. In order to know what a power really is we must know what its end, use, or function is; and this we cannot know save as we conceive of the individual as active in social relationships. But, on the other hand, the only possible adjustment which we can give to the child under existing conditions, is that which arises through putting him in complete possession of all his powers. 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; that his eye and ear and hand may be tools ready to command, that his judgment may be capable of grasping the conditions under which it has to work, and the executive forces be trained to act economically and efficiently. It is impossible to reach this sort of adjustment save as constant regard is had to the individual's own powers, tastes, and interests-say, that is, as education is continually converted into psychological terms.

In sum, I believe that the individual who is to be educated is a social individual and that society is an organic union of individuals. If we eliminate the social factor from the child we are left only with an abstraction; if we eliminate the individual factor from society, we are left only with an inert and lifeless mass. Education, therefore, must begin with a psychological insight into the child's capacities, interests, and habits. It must be controlled at every point by reference to these same considerations. 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.

Article 2 - What the School Is

I believe that the school is primarily a social institution. Education being a social process, the school is simply that form of community life in which all those agencies are concentrated that will be most effective in bringing the child to share in the inherited resources of the race, and to use his own powers for social ends.

I believe that education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living.

I believe that the school must represent present life-life as real and vital to the child as that which he carries on in the home, in the neighborhood, or on the playground.

I believe that education which does not occur through forms of life, or that are worth living for their own sake, is always a poor substitute for the genuine reality and tends to cramp and to deaden.

I believe that the school, as an institution, should simplify existing socia...

Table of contents

• Cover
• MY PEDAGOGIC CREED
• Colophon
• Table of contents
• MY PEDAGOGIC CREED
• Article 1 - What Education Is
• Article 2 - What the School Is
• Article 3 - The Subject-Matter of Education
• Article 4 - The Nature of Method
• Article 5 - The School and Social Progress
• John Dewey