Philosophy and Psychological Foundations in Management (mini Series Book 7)
One obvious criticism of fair equality of opportunity is that it does not prohibit an educational distribution that lavished resources on the most talented children while offering minimal opportunities to others. So long as untalented students from wealthy families were assigned opportunities no better than those available to their untalented peers among the poor, no breach of the principle would occur. Even the most moderate egalitarians might find such a distributive regime to be intuitively repugnant. All citizens must enjoy the same basic liberties, and equal liberty always has moral priority over equal opportunity: Further, inequality in the distribution of income and wealth are permitted only to the degree that it serves the interests of the least advantaged group in society.
But even with these qualifications, fair equality of opportunity is arguably less than really fair to anyone. But surely it is relevant, given that a principle of educational justice must be responsive to the full range of educationally important goods. Suppose we revise our account of the goods included in educational distribution so that aesthetic appreciation, say, and the necessary understanding and virtue for conscientious citizenship count for just as much as job-related skills.
An interesting implication of doing so is that the rationale for requiring equality under any just distribution becomes decreasingly clear. That is because job-related skills are positional whereas the other educational goods are not Hollis If you and I both aspire to a career in business management for which we are equally qualified, any increase in your job-related skills is a corresponding disadvantage to me unless I can catch up.
Positional goods have a competitive structure by definition, though the ends of civic or aesthetic education do not fit that structure. If you and I aspire to be good citizens and are equal in civic understanding and virtue, an advance in your civic education is no disadvantage to me. On the contrary, it is easier to be a good citizen the better other citizens learn to be. At the very least, so far as non-positional goods figure in our conception of what counts as a good education, the moral stakes of inequality are thereby lowered.
In fact, an emerging alternative to fair equality of opportunity is a principle that stipulates some benchmark of adequacy in achievement or opportunity as the relevant standard of distribution. But it is misleading to represent this as a contrast between egalitarian and sufficientarian conceptions. Philosophically serious interpretations of adequacy derive from the ideal of equal citizenship Satz ; Anderson This was arguably true in A Theory of Justice but it is certainly true in his later work Dworkin The debate between adherents of equal opportunity and those misnamed as sufficientarians is certainly not over e.
Further progress will likely hinge on explicating the most compelling conception of the egalitarian foundation from which distributive principles are to be inferred. In his earlier book, the theory of justice had been presented as if it were universally valid. But Rawls had come to think that any theory of justice presented as such was open to reasonable rejection.
A more circumspect approach to justification would seek grounds for justice as fairness in an overlapping consensus between the many reasonable values and doctrines that thrive in a democratic political culture.
1. Problems in Delineating the Field
Rawls argued that such a culture is informed by a shared ideal of free and equal citizenship that provided a new, distinctively democratic framework for justifying a conception of justice. But the salience it gave to questions about citizenship in the fabric of liberal political theory had important educational implications. How was the ideal of free and equal citizenship to be instantiated in education in a way that accommodated the range of reasonable values and doctrines encompassed in an overlapping consensus? Political Liberalism has inspired a range of answers to that question cf.
Callan ; Clayton ; Bull Other philosophers besides Rawls in the s took up a cluster of questions about civic education, and not always from a liberal perspective. As a full-standing alternative to liberalism, communitarianism might have little to recommend it. But it was a spur for liberal philosophers to think about how communities could be built and sustained to support the more familiar projects of liberal politics e. Furthermore, its arguments often converged with those advanced by feminist exponents of the ethic of care Noddings ; Gilligan One persistent controversy in citizenship theory has been about whether patriotism is correctly deemed a virtue, given our obligations to those who are not our fellow citizens in an increasingly interdependent world and the sordid history of xenophobia with which modern nation states are associated.
The controversy is related to a deeper and more pervasive question about how morally or intellectually taxing the best conception of our citizenship should be. The more taxing it is, the more constraining its derivative conception of civic education will be. Contemporary political philosophers offer divergent arguments about these matters. The need arises from the obligation of reciprocity which they like Rawls believe to be integral to citizenship. Because I must seek to cooperate with others politically on terms that make sense from their moral perspective as well as my own, I must be ready to enter that perspective imaginatively so as to grasp its distinctive content.
Many such perspectives prosper in liberal democracies, and so the task of reciprocal understanding is necessarily onerous. Still, our actions qua deliberative citizen must be grounded in such reciprocity if political cooperation on terms acceptable to us as diversely morally motivated citizens is to be possible at all.
This is tantamount to an imperative to think autonomously inside the role of citizen because I cannot close-mindedly resist critical consideration of moral views alien to my own without flouting my responsibilities as a deliberative citizen. Civic education does not exhaust the domain of moral education, even though the more robust conceptions of equal citizenship have far-reaching implications for just relations in civil society and the family.
The study of moral education has traditionally taken its bearings from normative ethics rather than political philosophy, and this is largely true of work undertaken in recent decades. The major development here has been the revival of virtue ethics as an alternative to the deontological and consequentialist theories that dominated discussion for much of the twentieth century. The defining idea of virtue ethics is that our criterion of moral right and wrong must derive from a conception of how the ideally virtuous agent would distinguish between the two.
Virtue ethics is thus an alternative to both consequentialism and deontology which locate the relevant criterion in producing good consequences or meeting the requirements of moral duty respectively. The debate about the comparative merits of these theories is not resolved, but from an educational perspective that may be less important than it has sometimes seemed to antagonists in the debate. To be sure, adjudicating between rival theories in normative ethics might shed light on how best to construe the process of moral education, and philosophical reflection on the process might help us to adjudicate between the theories.
There has been extensive work on habituation and virtue, largely inspired by Aristotle Burnyeat ; Peters But whether this does anything to establish the superiority of virtue ethics over its competitors is far from obvious. Related to the issues concerning the aims and functions of education and schooling rehearsed above are those involving the specifically epistemic aims of education and attendant issues treated by social and virtue epistemologists.
The papers collected in Kotzee and Baehr highlight the current and growing interactions among social epistemologists, virtue epistemologists, and philosophers of education. There is, first, a lively debate concerning putative epistemic aims. This cluster of views continues to engender ongoing discussion and debate. Its complex literature is collected in Carter and Kotzee , summarized in Siegel , and helpfully analyzed in Watson A further controversy concerns the places of testimony and trust in the classroom: Does teacher testimony itself constitute good reason for student belief?
For very young children who have yet to acquire or develop the ability to subject teacher declarations to critical scrutiny, there seems to be little alternative to accepting what their teachers tell them. For older and more cognitively sophisticated students there seem to be more options: That said, all sides agree that sometimes believers, including students, have good reasons simply to trust what others tell them.
There is thus more work to do here by both social epistemologists and philosophers of education for further discussion see Goldberg ; Siegel , A further cluster of questions, of long-standing interest to philosophers of education, concerns indoctrination: How if at all does it differ from legitimate teaching? Is it inevitable, and if so is it not always necessarily bad?
First, what is it? As we saw earlier, extant analyses focus on the aims or intentions of the indoctrinator, the methods employed, or the content transmitted. In this way it produces both belief that is evidentially unsupported or contravened and uncritical dispositions to believe. It might seem obvious that indoctrination, so understood, is educationally undesirable. But it equally seems that very young children, at least, have no alternative but to believe sans evidence; they have yet to acquire the dispositions to seek and evaluate evidence, or the abilities to recognize evidence or evaluate it.
Thus we seem driven to the views that indoctrination is both unavoidable and yet bad and to be avoided. It is not obvious how this conundrum is best handled. One option is to distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable indoctrination. Another is to distinguish between indoctrination which is always bad and non-indoctrinating belief inculcation, the latter being such that students are taught some things without reasons the alphabet, the numbers, how to read and count, etc. In the end the distinctions required by the two options might be extensionally equivalent Siegel He must have a thorough grounding in philosophy.
Philosophy and Educational Administration. Educational administration is also not untouched by philosophical doctrine.
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Mental tests and personality tests, which occupy a very prominent place in the field of educational administration, also require a definite philosophy. Evaluation is the continuous process of measuring the educational achievements in the light of educational aims already determined. Educational aims are determined by philosophy of life. Hence the first step of evaluation is the clear knowledge of educational aims. Thus, we find that philosophy affects both the theoretical and practical aspects of education.
For individual and social development first of all we must have clear and definite educational objectives. Philosophy helps to solve the problem. We are in urgent need of a comprehensive philosophy of education, without it a teacher cannot work creatively and efficiently. Education takes place in society constituted of individuals. It is a social process. It has a social function as well as social relevance.
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A school is created by the society and the society is shaped and moulded by the school. Thus, education is both a cause and product of society. It originates in the society and it must fulfill the needs and aspirations of the society. There is thus an intimate relationship between education and society. Modern education has two-fold functions.
John Dewey
It must help in individual development as well as social progress. An individual can only develop in the right direction in social environment. Education helps to solve the multifarious social problems. Meaning and Nature of Sociology. Hence scientific study of society is commonly known as sociology.
Society is more than a mere assemblage of individuals. It involves interaction and interrelation between individuals and groups. In fact, society exists only in the articulate consciousness of human beings. On the other hand, the individual depends upon the society for his existence and self-development. It is society that acts as the selective agent and determines which of the possibilities will be allowed to develop through interaction with social groups and situations the original tendencies are modified, coordinated and shaped into individual is influenced by social direction.
Sociology aims at explaining the inter-personal and group relationships. It explains occupational, religious or social groups, the nation or the state. It studies various social changes that are taking place within group life and analyses such processes of interaction as competition, Conflict, co-operation, accommodation and assimilation. It examines social change and social control, analyses the concepts of civilization and culture and deals with such social problems as crime juvenile delinquency, poverty and other social evils with a view to their solution. Meaning and Definition of Educational Sociology.
Emile Durkheim, the French sociologist, for the first time felt the need of sociological approach to Education. Every society with its own changing socio-cultural needs will require an education to meet those needs. Since needs, change continuously therefore education must also change.
The needs of different societies differ therefore education should be dynamic. Educational sociology is a branch of sociology, which is confronted with the problems of relationship between society and education. It makes an effort to achieve the aims of sociology through educational process, which is nothing but an interaction between the individual and the society. The knowledge of social interaction is one of the most important elements for social progress. Thus the development of the individuality is dependent on the reaction of the individual to his social environment.
According to Brown, Educational Sociology is the study of interaction of the individual and his cultural environment. Thus social interaction is the key area of educational sociology. The individual becomes a person as a product of this interaction. Educational Sociology is particularly interested in finding out how to manipulate the educational process for better personality development. John Dewey emphasized the importance of the socialization of the individual for education.
He considered that through the participation of the individual in social process the complete development of education takes place. The educational process is nothing but a social process. The school is a social institution, which purifies the society, progress it and makes the individual conversant with the society. Thus, Educational Sociology is the study of those phases of sociology that are of significance for educative processes. Education sociology treats the school problems as of greatest importance to the nation. They are the problems of society and all social institutions, social direction, individual motivation and of effective group-actions.
Educational sociology analyses and evaluates the groups and institutions in which learning takes place and the social process involved in learning and teaching. It analyses and evaluates the social trends and ideologies, which affect education. It helps us to understand that education is a means of social change. It throws light on human interaction and relationships within the school and the community. It emphasizes that learning is a social process. It is the total cultural milieu in which and through which the learning experience is acquired and organized. Scope of Educational Sociology.
The scope of education sociology is very vast. It takes into account the various social forces and agencies like the school, the home, the religious organization, the play groups, It also studies the different processes of social interaction such as conflict, co-operation, competition etc. It also induces such topics as the role of the press, the T. The other themes include social change and social control. It deals with the impact of sociology on the aims of education, the curricula, the school organization and the mythology of teaching. However, for the central personality development of the learner some specific social problems are also included in the scope of educational sociology.
Impact of Educational Sociology on Education. Educational sociology plays a vital role on the modern educational theories and practices the aims of education, the principles of curriculum construction, the methods of teaching, the school organization and administration. Education is not mere schooling or instruction imposed by the elders on the younger ones.
It is equivalent to the development of character or personality by means of the social life of education institutions. The social life includes all kinds of out-of-class activities. Man acquires experience throughout his life. This acquisition of experience is education. This process of acquiring experience is a social process and it is related to and influenced by social factors. Education is thus a social process and its function is not only to preserve the social heritage but also to enrich it.
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Learning is the result of social interaction and social motivation. Education helps to develop this social self so that an individual may become an effective and useful member of the society. Education is a process of directed learning. Education sociology focuses upon the social forces through which the individual gains experience.
Education sociology has its indirect impact on the aims and objectives of education. Educational sociologists think that education is a social process and it should be directed to social welfare. With this view the determination of the objectives of education is highly needed. The sociologists attach equal importance to the individual and social aspects of education.
Philosophy of Education (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
The aim of modern education is individual development as well as social advancement. Education enables an individual to make his life better both as an individual and as a member of his society. Education now emphasizes total development of an individual. This total development includes intellectual, social, moral, aesthetic, cultural, physical development. Education should bring about a change not only in the amount of knowledge gained but in abilities to do, to acquire habits, skills, interests and attitudes which characterize a person who is society accepted, personally well-adjusted and socially responsible.
Thus, educational sociology emphasizes the social aims of education. According to Payne, from the point of view of educational sociology the functions of education are mainly three a transmission of social and cultural heritage, b development of new social patterns, and c creative and constructive role. Education is to help in transmitting the cultural heritage with the help of such agencies as the school, the home, the religious organization, the radio, the T.
But education is not only to transmit the past cultural heritage but also to develop new social patterns in such areas as health, leisure, vocation, home-life etc. Thus from the sociological point of view, education be regarded as a conservative force, a creative force and a critical force. The impact of educational sociology on the principles of curriculum construction cannot be ignored. In ancient age the child was regarded as an adult. The adults used to frame the curriculum and imposed it on the young learners.
This curriculum was obviously the brainchild of the adults. The child, his interests and inclinations were not taken into consideration. But in the modern age all these traditional views of curriculum construction have been totally rejected as unscientific. The curriculum is now in conformity with the general aims of education and it must help in the total development of the child. In the modern sense the curriculum is not mere a bundle of subjects but includes all types of activities in the school, which provide diverse experiences to the child.
It is now the sum total of the experiences gathered by the child through social interactions in the school. Modern curriculum thus emphasizes the social need of education. Activity Principle in Education. Nothing can be taught, everything is to be learnt is the main idea of present-day education. The children are no longer passive recipients of knowledge they are now active participants in the learning process. This means that every useful productive work has learning value.
Finally, Dewey called for extending democracy, conceived as an ethical project, from politics to industry and society". Dewey believed that a woman's place in society was determined by her environment and not just her biology. On women he says, "You think too much of women in terms of sex. Think of them as human individuals for a while, dropping out the sex qualification, and you won't be so sure of some of your generalizations about what they should and shouldn't do".
With growing support, involvement of the community grew as well as the support for the women's suffrage movement. As commonly argued by Dewey's greatest critics, he was not able to come up with strategies in order to fulfill his ideas that would lead to a successful democracy, educational system, and a successful women's suffrage movement. While knowing that traditional beliefs, customs, and practices needed to be examined in order to find out what worked and what needed improved upon, it was never done in a systematic way.
Persons do not become a society by living in physical proximity any more than a man ceases to be socially influenced by being so many feet or miles removed from others. His work on democracy influenced B. Ambedkar , one of his students, who later became one of the founding fathers of independent India. Several themes recur throughout these writings.
Dewey continually argues that education and learning are social and interactive processes, and thus the school itself is a social institution through which social reform can and should take place. In addition, he believed that students thrive in an environment where they are allowed to experience and interact with the curriculum, and all students should have the opportunity to take part in their own learning. The ideas of democracy and social reform are continually discussed in Dewey's writings on education.
Dewey makes a strong case for the importance of education not only as a place to gain content knowledge, but also as a place to learn how to live. In his eyes, the purpose of education should not revolve around the acquisition of a pre-determined set of skills, but rather the realization of one's full potential and the ability to use those skills for the greater good. He notes that "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" My Pedagogic Creed , Dewey, In addition to helping students realize their full potential, Dewey goes on to acknowledge that education and schooling are instrumental in creating social change and reform.
He notes that "education is a regulation of the process of coming to share in the social consciousness; and that the adjustment of individual activity on the basis of this social consciousness is the only sure method of social reconstruction". In addition to his ideas regarding what education is and what effect it should have on society, Dewey also had specific notions regarding how education should take place within the classroom. In The Child and the Curriculum , Dewey discusses two major conflicting schools of thought regarding educational pedagogy.
The first is centered on the curriculum and focuses almost solely on the subject matter to be taught. Dewey argues that the major flaw in this methodology is the inactivity of the student; within this particular framework, "the child is simply the immature being who is to be matured; he is the superficial being who is to be deepened" , p. At the same time, Dewey was alarmed by many of the "child-centered" excesses of educational-school pedagogues who claimed to be his followers, and he argued that too much reliance on the child could be equally detrimental to the learning process.
In this second school of thought, "we must take our stand with the child and our departure from him. It is he and not the subject-matter which determines both quality and quantity of learning" Dewey, , pp. According to Dewey, the potential flaw in this line of thinking is that it minimizes the importance of the content as well as the role of the teacher. In order to rectify this dilemma, Dewey advocated for an educational structure that strikes a balance between delivering knowledge while also taking into account the interests and experiences of the student.
He notes that "the child and the curriculum are simply two limits which define a single process. Just as two points define a straight line, so the present standpoint of the child and the facts and truths of studies define instruction" Dewey, , p. It is through this reasoning that Dewey became one of the most famous proponents of hands-on learning or experiential education , which is related to, but not synonymous with experiential learning. Problem-Based Learning PBL , for example, a method used widely in education today, incorporates Dewey's ideas pertaining to learning through active inquiry.
Dewey not only re-imagined the way that the learning process should take place, but also the role that the teacher should play within that process. Throughout the history of American schooling, education's purpose has been to train students for work by providing the student with a limited set of skills and information to do a particular job. The works of John Dewey provide the most prolific examples of how this limited vocational view of education has been applied to both the K—12 public education system and to the teacher training schools who attempted to quickly produce proficient and practical teachers with a limited set of instructional and discipline-specific skills needed to meet the needs of the employer and demands of the workforce.
In The School and Society Dewey, and Democracy of Education Dewey, , Dewey claims that rather than preparing citizens for ethical participation in society, schools cultivate passive pupils via insistence upon mastery of facts and disciplining of bodies. Rather than preparing students to be reflective, autonomous and ethical beings capable of arriving at social truths through critical and intersubjective discourse, schools prepare students for docile compliance with authoritarian work and political structures, discourage the pursuit of individual and communal inquiry, and perceive higher learning as a monopoly of the institution of education Dewey, ; For Dewey and his philosophical followers, education stifles individual autonomy when learners are taught that knowledge is transmitted in one direction, from the expert to the learner.
For Dewey, "The thing needful is improvement of education, not simply by turning out teachers who can do better the things that are not necessary to do, but rather by changing the conception of what constitutes education" Dewey, , p. Dewey's qualifications for teaching—a natural love for working with young children, a natural propensity to inquire about the subjects, methods and other social issues related to the profession, and a desire to share this acquired knowledge with others—are not a set of outwardly displayed mechanical skills.
Rather, they may be viewed as internalized principles or habits which "work automatically, unconsciously" Dewey, , p. Turning to Dewey's essays and public addresses regarding the teaching profession, followed by his analysis of the teacher as a person and a professional, as well as his beliefs regarding the responsibilities of teacher education programs to cultivate the attributes addressed, teacher educators can begin to reimagine the successful classroom teacher Dewey envisioned.
For many, education's purpose is to train students for work by providing the student with a limited set of skills and information to do a particular job. As Dewey notes, this limited vocational view is also applied to teacher training schools who attempt to quickly produce proficient and practical teachers with a limited set of instructional and discipline skills needed to meet the needs of the employer and demands of the workforce Dewey, For Dewey, the school and the classroom teacher, as a workforce and provider of a social service, have a unique responsibility to produce psychological and social goods that will lead to both present and future social progress.
As Dewey notes, "The business of the teacher is to produce a higher standard of intelligence in the community, and the object of the public school system is to make as large as possible the number of those who possess this intelligence. Skill, ability to act wisely and effectively in a great variety of occupations and situations, is a sign and a criterion of the degree of civilization that a society has reached. It is the business of teachers to help in producing the many kinds of skill needed in contemporary life.
If teachers are up to their work, they also aid in the production of character. According to Dewey, the emphasis is placed on producing these attributes in children for use in their contemporary life because it is "impossible to foretell definitely just what civilization will be twenty years from now" Dewey, MPC, , p. However, although Dewey is steadfast in his beliefs that education serves an immediate purpose Dewey, DRT, ; Dewey, MPC, ; Dewey, TTP, , he is not ignorant of the impact imparting these qualities of intelligence, skill, and character on young children in their present life will have on the future society.
While addressing the state of educative and economic affairs during a radio broadcast, Dewey linked the ensuing economic depression to a "lack of sufficient production of intelligence, skill, and character" Dewey, TAP, , p. As Dewey notes, there is a lack of these goods in the present society and teachers have a responsibility to create them in their students, who, we can assume, will grow into the adults who will ultimately go on to participate in whatever industrial or economical civilization awaits them.
According to Dewey, the profession of the classroom teacher is to produce the intelligence, skill, and character within each student so that the democratic community is composed of citizens who can think, do and act intelligently and morally. Dewey believed that the successful classroom teacher possesses a passion for knowledge and an intellectual curiosity in the materials and methods they teach.
For Dewey, this propensity is an inherent curiosity and love for learning that differs from one's ability to acquire, recite and reproduce textbook knowledge. According to Dewey, it is not that the "teacher ought to strive to be a high-class scholar in all the subjects he or she has to teach," rather, "a teacher ought to have an unusual love and aptitude in some one subject: The classroom teacher does not have to be a scholar in all subjects; rather, a genuine love in one will elicit a feel for genuine information and insight in all subjects taught.
In addition to this propensity for study into the subjects taught, the classroom teacher "is possessed by a recognition of the responsibility for the constant study of school room work, the constant study of children, of methods, of subject matter in its various adaptations to pupils" Dewey, PST, , p. For Dewey, this desire for the lifelong pursuit of learning is inherent in other professions e. As Dewey notes, "this further study is not a side line but something which fits directly into the demands and opportunities of the vocation" Dewey, APT, , p.
According to Dewey, this propensity and passion for intellectual growth in the profession must be accompanied by a natural desire to communicate one's knowledge with others. To the 'natural born' teacher learning is incomplete unless it is shared" Dewey, APT, , p. For Dewey, it is not enough for the classroom teacher to be a lifelong learner of the techniques and subject-matter of education; she must aspire to share what she knows with others in her learning community.
The best indicator of teacher quality, according to Dewey, is the ability to watch and respond to the movement of the mind with keen awareness of the signs and quality of the responses he or her students exhibit with regard to the subject-matter presented Dewey, APT, ; Dewey, As Dewey notes, "I have often been asked how it was that some teachers who have never studied the art of teaching are still extraordinarily good teachers.
The explanation is simple. They have a quick, sure and unflagging sympathy with the operations and process of the minds they are in contact with. Their own minds move in harmony with those of others, appreciating their difficulties, entering into their problems, sharing their intellectual victories" Dewey, APT, , p. Such a teacher is genuinely aware of the complexities of this mind to mind transfer, and she has the intellectual fortitude to identify the successes and failures of this process, as well as how to appropriately reproduce or correct it in the future.
Perhaps the most important attributes, according to Dewey, are those personal inherent qualities which the teacher brings to the classroom. As Dewey notes, "no amount of learning or even of acquired pedagogical skill makes up for the deficiency" Dewey, TLS, p. According to Dewey, the successful classroom teacher occupies an indispensable passion for promoting the intellectual growth of young children.
In addition, they know that their career, in comparison to other professions, entails stressful situations, long hours and limited financial reward; all of which have the potential to overcome their genuine love and sympathy for their students. For Dewey, "One of the most depressing phases of the vocation is the number of care worn teachers one sees, with anxiety depicted on the lines of their faces, reflected in their strained high pitched voices and sharp manners.
While contact with the young is a privilege for some temperaments, it is a tax on others, and a tax which they do not bear up under very well. And in some schools, there are too many pupils to a teacher, too many subjects to teach, and adjustments to pupils are made in a mechanical rather than a human way.
Human nature reacts against such unnatural conditions" Dewey, APT, , p. It is essential, according to Dewey, that the classroom teacher has the mental propensity to overcome the demands and stressors placed on them because the students can sense when their teacher is not genuinely invested in promoting their learning Dewey, PST, Such negative demeanors, according to Dewey, prevent children from pursuing their own propensities for learning and intellectual growth. It can therefore be assumed that if teachers want their students to engage with the educational process and employ their natural curiosities for knowledge, teachers must be aware of how their reactions to young children and the stresses of teaching influence this process.
Dewey's passions for teaching—a natural love for working with young children, a natural propensity to inquire about the subjects, methods and other social issues related to the profession, and a desire to share this acquired knowledge with others—are not a set of outwardly displayed mechanical skills.
According to Dewey, teacher education programs must turn away from focusing on producing proficient practitioners because such practical skills related to instruction and discipline e. As Dewey notes, "The teacher who leaves the professional school with power in managing a class of children may appear to superior advantage the first day, the first week, the first month, or even the first year, as compared with some other teacher who has a much more vital command of the psychology, logic and ethics of development. But later 'progress' may with such consist only in perfecting and refining skill already possessed.
Such persons seem to know how to teach, but they are not students of teaching. Even though they go on studying books of pedagogy, reading teachers' journals, attending teachers' institutes, etc. Unless a teacher is such a student, he may continue to improve in the mechanics of school management, but he cannot grow as a teacher, an inspirer and director of soul-life" Dewey, , p.
For Dewey, teacher education should focus not on producing persons who know how to teach as soon as they leave the program; rather, teacher education should be concerned with producing professional students of education who have the propensity to inquire about the subjects they teach, the methods used, and the activity of the mind as it gives and receives knowledge. According to Dewey, such a student is not superficially engaging with these materials, rather, the professional student of education has a genuine passion to inquire about the subjects of education, knowing that doing so ultimately leads to acquisitions of the skills related to teaching.
Such students of education aspire for the intellectual growth within the profession that can only be achieved by immersing one's self in the lifelong pursuit of the intelligence, skills and character Dewey linked to the profession. As Dewey notes, other professional fields, such as law and medicine cultivate a professional spirit in their fields to constantly study their work, their methods of their work, and a perpetual need for intellectual growth and concern for issues related to their profession.
As Dewey notes, "An intellectual responsibility has got to be distributed to every human being who is concerned in carrying out the work in question, and to attempt to concentrate intellectual responsibility for a work that has to be done, with their brains and their hearts, by hundreds or thousands of people in a dozen or so at the top, no matter how wise and skillful they are, is not to concentrate responsibility—it is to diffuse irresponsibility" Dewey, PST, , p.
For Dewey, the professional spirit of teacher education requires of its students a constant study of school room work, constant study of children, of methods, of subject matter in its various adaptations to pupils. Such study will lead to professional enlightenment with regard to the daily operations of classroom teaching. As well as his very active and direct involvement in setting up educational institutions such as the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools and The New School for Social Research , many of Dewey's ideas influenced the founding of Bennington College and Goddard College in Vermont, where he served on the Board of Trustees.
Dewey's works and philosophy also held great influence in the creation of the short-lived Black Mountain College in North Carolina, an experimental college focused on interdisciplinary study, and whose faculty included Buckminster Fuller , Willem de Kooning , Charles Olson , Franz Kline , Robert Duncan , Robert Creeley , and Paul Goodman , among others. Since the mids, Deweyan ideas have experienced revival as a major source of inspiration for the public journalism movement.
Dewey's definition of "public," as described in The Public and its Problems , has profound implications for the significance of journalism in society. As suggested by the title of the book, his concern was of the transactional relationship between publics and problems. Also implicit in its name, public journalism seeks to orient communication away from elite, corporate hegemony toward a civic public sphere. Dewey gives a concrete definition to the formation of a public. Publics are spontaneous groups of citizens who share the indirect effects of a particular action.
Anyone affected by the indirect consequences of a specific action will automatically share a common interest in controlling those consequences, i. In The Public and its Problems , Dewey presents a rebuttal to Walter Lippmann 's treatise on the role of journalism in democracy. Lippmann's model was a basic transmission model in which journalists took information given to them by experts and elites, repackaged that information in simple terms, and transmitted the information to the public, whose role was to react emotionally to the news.
In his model, Lippmann supposed that the public was incapable of thought or action, and that all thought and action should be left to the experts and elites. Dewey refutes this model by assuming that politics is the work and duty of each individual in the course of his daily routine. The knowledge needed to be involved in politics, in this model, was to be generated by the interaction of citizens, elites, experts, through the mediation and facilitation of journalism.
In this model, not just the government is accountable, but the citizens, experts, and other actors as well. Dewey also said that journalism should conform to this ideal by changing its emphasis from actions or happenings choosing a winner of a given situation to alternatives, choices, consequences, and conditions , [54] in order to foster conversation and improve the generation of knowledge.
Journalism would not just produce a static product that told what had already happened, but the news would be in a constant state of evolution as the public added value by generating knowledge.