John Dewey’s Education for Democracy Reconsidered.In: Between Claim and Reality: Critical Studies on John Dewey's Theory of Education (forthcoming). Hier ein Auszug:
[...] 3.
Democracy at the Laboratory School
Dewey was
not only an educational philosopher; he also tried to put his theory into
practice. Although his Laboratory School existed just 7½ years, it still ranks
among the most innovative and advanced experimental schools of the progressive
education era. The scientific approach Mayhew and Edwards adopt in The Dewey School (1936) is in some
respects objectionable since the authors do not always adhere to the facts and occasionally
ignore, twist, embellish them (Knoll 2014). Even though, their documentary
report informs us reasonably accurate about questions that are of interest to
us at present: how were democratic attitudes to be acquired at the Laboratory School,
what role did the teachers play, how much freedom did the students have?
Dewey’s notion that the
teacher had to take the lead without falling back on dictatorial or
authoritarian behavior was accepted by the Laboratory School faculty. “The teacher,” Mayhew and Edwards observe, “sets
the stage for the moving drama of the child’s life, supplies the necessary
properties when needed, and directs the action both toward the immediate goal
of the child and also towards the direction of that far-away end which is clear
in her mind, but as yet unseen by the child” (DS: 253). Albeit somewhat
camouflaged, there is ample evidence that the teacher was always in charge and
did not adjust her lessons to the children’s whims and wishes. With the term “stage
director” (p. 402), Mayhew and Edwards convey that the teachers followed a
script and proceeded along a curriculum to ensure stringency, continuity and
sustainability within the learning process. The Laboratory School had indeed a mandatory curriculum whose existence is mentioned by Dewey himself just once (MW 1:
318), by Mayhew and Edwards – and their adherents – not a single time (see
figure 1). The Outline of the Course of Study of the then so-calledUniversity of Elementary School of June
1899 was, as usual, subdivided into age groups, subjects and topics and dealt successively
with all the fields of learning traditionally covered in schools: reading,
writing and arithmetic, English literature, Roman history and American geography,
plant physiology, food chemistry, mechanical physics. Complying with
Dewey’s didactic approach, it stressed the
close relationship between school and life, explained the importance of the
correlation of subject matter and emphasized that “growth” of “knowledge,” “character”
and “mental power” had to be striven for before anything else (Outline 1899, p.
1). Yet, the aspect of social learning, so important for Dewey, is not
addressed here. Above all, there exists no single reference in the Outline of the Course of Study or the prospectuses
of the Laboratory School that conceded the students any right of self- or
co-determination.
At the Laboratory
School, as in other progressive schools of the time (Cuban, 1984), the teachers
took the opportunity to talk with the students about the aims, contents and
methods of the up-coming lesson. However, the daily conversation of maximal
15-minutes did not serve to select a topic or determine the course of study.
The “morning circle,” like any other class conference, had – in good Herbartian
fashion – the purpose of attuning the students to the work ahead: to arouse
their interest, to activate their prior knowledge and to obtain their “whole-hearted”
approval (see figure 2). In contrast to the project method of William H.
Kilpatrick and Ellsworth Collings (Knoll, 1996; 2012), the submission of proposals
and the voting on alternatives was not part of the group discussions, by Mayhew
and Edwards mistakenly stylized to “council meetings” as if teacher and
students were partners and would negotiate on an equal footing (DS: 75). Only
twice, the students themselves seized the “initiative” to carry out their own group
projects, namely when they built a “playhouse” for younger classmates and when
they put up the much-admired “club house” for their own use (pp. 233, 264). And
apparently, only once did they have the chance of undertaking a larger task
independently and individually. This experiment with free work took place in manual
training. According to Mayhew and Edwards, it was not repeated since some of
the students “showed a lack of ambition to undertake any worth object; some
were more ambitious beyond their skill; and some lacked decision and perseverance”
(p. 240).
Within a
given assignment, however, the students were free to decide what they wished to
do. For example, in the shop they were allowed to potter a jug for milk, juice
or flowers, in geography to draw the boundaries on a union map by means of lines,
strokes or points, in history to report on the arrival of the pilgrim fathers in
America, their everyday life or their first encounter with the Indians (DS:
160, 212, 378). Self-activity and social commitment were also in demand when
they – under the direction of the teacher, alone or in groups – had to think up
mathematical problems, write poems, compose songs, conceive dramas and perform
them (pp. 352-362). At lunch, the students “took entire charge of setting the
table, serving, waiting upon each other, and washing and putting away the
dishes.” The teachers, however, saw “no need to stimulate the child’s interest
by allowing him to choose the particular things to be cooked” (pp. 57, 299).
Health and the development of taste had priority over fast food and sweet
treats. Each group had a “leader” who took on little tasks such as observing
the daily schedule, being in charge of the group in the absence of the teacher
and escorting the classmates from one school room to another. One would expect the
appointment to be a free and democratic act (Bohnsack, 2005 p. 97), yet in
actual fact, the “leader of the class for the day” was not democratically
elected, rather his office – like the one of the “waiter” at lunch time – rotated
“by alphabetical order” (DS: 377).
These
measures, and similar ones, were educationally well-founded and undoubtedly furthered
social learning and the development of order, care and fellowship, but in
reality, they had little to do with democratic choice, equal rights and mutual decisions.
In addition to Dewey’s more general rationales, Mayhew
and Edwards give a very practical reason why the students were denied vital
opportunities of formal cooperation, participation and partnership. For the teachers of the Laboratory School, co-determination
was plainly a waste of time at the expense of performance, efficiency and excellence.
They preferred, Mayhew and Edwards argue, thereby severely criticizing
more liberal colleagues like John T. Ray and Charles W. French of neighboring Chicago
public schools (Harper, 1899, pp. 227-229), that the
children put all their energy “into better planning of [their] work and
forwarding of [their] skill in techniques” than “in running the school, as
sometimes happens in schools of this freer type” (DS: 377).
