Chapter 9

Dewey and his colleagues founded an experimental school. Imagine you were given the resources and opportunity to create an experimental school:

• How would you design the buildings and environment?
• What background and expertise would you want the staff to have, both individually and collectively? Who else might be involved in the provision of education?
• What means would you use to evaluate the successes and failures of your experiment?
• Write down the three key aims of your experimental school, noting any influences from ideas and practices you have either read about or experienced yourself, and explain the thinking behind your aims to a colleague.
• What do you consider to be the risks of your experiment and how will you try to minimize their effects?

Compare and discuss your ideas with others in your classes. Collate these ideas and bring them to your reading of this and other chapters in this book.

Search online to find out about the educational philosophies of ‘alternative’ schools in the independent sector, such as Summerhill School, Suffolk (www.summerhillschool.co.uk), The Sands School, Ashburton (www.sands-school.co.uk), Brockwood Park School, Hampshire (www.brockwood.org.uk), and The Small School, Hartland (www.thesmallschool.org.uk).

The term ‘curriculum’ is used in all kinds of ways and it is useful to pause and consider the various usages as we think about Dewey’s experimental approach.

The term derives from the Latin word ‘currere’, meaning ‘to run’, and has been used to describe a course of study or a life course, as well as the content of a university or school programme of study.

In education circles it is often used to describe the activities and experiences that policy makers, theorists and practitioners believe to be desirable for children to grow into adults and to fully participate in public and social life and the world of work and community. The content of the curriculum is hotly contested, as you will realize from your reading of the educational press.

Further uses of the term include the formal or official curriculum, including the documented accounts of intended teaching and learning and hoped-for outcomes, and the informal or hidden curriculum, describing the complex matter of what students actually experience during their education, regardless of what is officially documented. The hidden curriculum sometimes includes experiences that are at odds with the formal programme of study.

For further discussion of curriculum, please read the section on Curriculum Theory and Practice at: http://infed.org/mobi/curriculum-theory-and-practice

Read this extract on Dewey’s account of his pedagogy below. What criticism do you think the current Education Minister would make of it?

As to methods, the aim is to keep alive and direct the active inquiring attitude of the child, and to subordinate the amassing of facts and principles to the development of intellectual self-control and of power to conceive and solve problems. Immense damage is done whenever the getting of a certain quantity of information or the covering of a certain amount of ground is made the end, at the expense of mastery by each child of a method of inquiry and reflection. If children can retain their natural investigating tendencies unimpaired, gradually organizing them into definite methods of work, when they reach the proper age, they can master the required amount of facts and generalizations easily and effectively. Whereas, when the latter are forced upon them at so early a period as to crush the natural interest in searching out new truths, acquiring tends to replace inquiring.

The Dewey School, The Laboratory School Of The University Of Chicago 1896-1903, Part 1, Chapter 2: Experimental Basis of the Curriculum: www.archive.org/stream/deweyschoolthela008095mbp/deweyschoolthela008095mbp_djvu.txt