“John Dewey’s Laboratory School at the University of Chicago put into practice the new educational doctrines of its founder. His emphasis on providing for the social and individual needs for the child in the school environment, as well as on the importance of education as “process” rather than preparation, marked him as one of the greatest innovators in American education. His “progressive education” marked American educational literature for the next fifty years.” After reading his credo below you will immediately recognize how blatantly the teachers’ unions have violated every “progressive” principle established by their own mentor during these last two years of politically-induced psychosis:
“I believe that all education proceeds by the participation of the individual in the social consciousness of the [population]. This process begins unconsciously 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 social life of the child is the basis of concentration, or correlation, in all his training or growth. The social life gives the unconscious unity and the background of all his efforts and of all his attainments.”
“The individual who is to be educated is a social individual and 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 with an inert and lifeless mass. Education, therefore, must begin with a psychological insight into the child’s capacities, interests, and habits. 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.”
“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 community and to use his own powers for social ends.”
“School life should grow gradually out of home life; that it should take up and continue the activities with which the child is already familiar in the home. This is a psychological necessity, because it is the only way of securing continuity in the child’s growth, the only way of giving a background of past experience to the new ideas given in school. It is also a social necessity, because the home is the form of social life in which the child has been nurtured and in connection with which the child has had his moral training. It is the business of the school to deepen and extend his sense of the values bound up in his home life.”
“Moral education centers upon this conception of the school as a mode of social life, that the best and deepest moral training is precisely that which one gets through having to enter into proper relations with others in a unity of work and thought. The present educational systems, so far as they destroy or neglect this unity, render it difficult or impossible to get any genuine, regular moral training.”
“Far too much of the stimulus and control proceeds from the teacher because of neglect of the ideas of the school as a form of social life.”
“The teacher’s place and work in the school is to be interpreted from this same basis (a form of social life). The teacher is not in the school to impose certain ideas or to form certain habits in the child, but is there as a member of the community. . .” – John Dewey: My Pedagogic Creed, 1897; Annals Vol. 12, p. 125
