Notes for Week #2: The Philosophy of Education I

The Project Process
Dewey's Democracy and Education
Afterthoughts on Tuesday's discussion and questions about Russell
Israel Scheffler's "Computers at School?"
For next week

The Project Process

• Meeting with sponsoring teacher
• Revised project description
• Begin project page(s)
• Gather materials, schedule observations, and begin the design process.
• Note the dates for storyboard presentations

Dewey's Democracy and Education (1916) and the philosophy of American schooling

As we move from Ullman's contemporary narrative to a book of philosophy, it might be useful to reflect on the age of the text and what social and educational life in the U.S. was like in 1916. For example, adapting two of the questions from last time, in preparation for Dewey, we might ask: 1) What is happening in the U.S. in 1916 and how is schooling/education affected?; and 2) What is elementary and secondary school for and who is it for in 1916?.

Rupali Kotwal sent several questions to the list for us to consider for our discussion of Dewey's chapters 7 and 24.

Here are some notes from last year's discussion of Dewey in CS92, when we read a bit more of the book, much later in the semester.

The philosopher Israel Scheffler, whose chapters on Dewey in his excellent Four Pragmatists (1974) I strongly recommend, wrote that:

"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."

How does Dewey's ideal compare with your own? Are such ideals relevant to discussions of educational technology generally and the use of computers in schools specifically?

Afterthoughts on Tuesday's Discussion and some questions about Russell's 1926 and 1940

• What is the role of democracy is Dewey's theory and what are its implications for a discussion of when/how to segregate students on the basis of age, ability, "learning style", etc.?
• What ends do Dewey and Russell seem to share, and how do their means seem to differ?
• How would the rights and obligations of a secondary school students, teachers and adminsitrators differ in a school that exemplified Dewey's theory from the secondary school you attended?
• Both Dewey and Russell place great value on a certain kind of open-mindedness in education, on the part of teachers as well as students. Russell objected not just to attempts to supress open-mindedness in children by formal institutions (e.g. religions), but also by restrictive social norms (e.g. what he called the "good form" promoted by schools like Eton and Oxford). In the year of Dewey's Democracy and Education, Russell published Principles of Social Reconstruction, in which he wrote:

  "[Good form] is not compatible with fundamental open-mindedness, or with any inward readiness to give weight to the other side. Its essence is the assumption that what is most important is a certain kind of behavior, a behavior which minimizes friction between equals and delicately impresses inferiors wiht a conviction of their own crudity. As a political weapon for preserving the priviledges of the rich in a snobbish democracy it is unsurpassable. As a means of producing an agreeable social milieu for those who have money with no strong beliefs or unusual desires it has some merit. In every other respect it is abominable."

  How does this notion of "good form" get institutionalized (e.g. at Brown) and do you agree with Russell about its detrimental effects?
• What is philosophy and why is the philosophy of education important for this Seminar?

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

• Distiguishing means from ends in education generally, and in the use of edcuational technology specifically.
• Jesse Chan-Norris' questions about the article.
• Scheffler on "The Notion of Information"

For Next Week:

• Read the assigned chapters from Cleary and Schank 1995 for Tuesday and those from Gardner for Thursday.
• Begin revised project descriptions.