Zusammenfassung
Zusammenfassung von Schule und Gesellschaft
Für wen es gedacht ist
For teachers, parents, students of education, and anyone curious about why modern classrooms look the way they do. Readers of democratic thought will find ideas about learning by doing, schools as communities, and education joined to real life.
Worum es in diesem Buch geht
The School and Society is a small book with a large aim. In April 1899 John Dewey, then a professor at the University of Chicago, gave three talks to parents and friends of the university's experimental elementary school. He ran that school with his wife Alice and a team of teachers, and the talks described what they were trying and why. They were printed soon after, and later editions added further essays. The book is short, plain in style, and still argued over today.
Dewey's question is simple. Why does school feel cut off from the rest of life, and what would it take to join them again? He answers that the world changed with the factory and the city, while schools kept the habits of an older time. You will hear his account of what children lost when work left the home, his picture of a school as a small working community, and his claim that learning starts from the child's own activity. You will also hear his charge that schools waste a great deal. Let us begin with the change that, for Dewey, set everything else going.
In dieser Zusammenfassung
- 1Industry emptied the home of learningFree
- 2A school should be a small community
- 3Start learning from the child's own activity
- 4Four natural impulses drive a child's growth
- 5Waste comes from splitting school from life
- 6What the vision gave and where it is questioned
Punkt 1 von 6
Industry emptied the home of learning
Dewey opens with history rather than classrooms. He says the great changes of the last century were not in schools but in how people live and work. Machines, factories, railways and cities changed the shape of daily life. Education, he argues, cannot be understood or mended without looking at that change.
He asks you to picture a household a few generations earlier. Spinning, weaving, baking, carpentry and the care of animals were done at home, and children took part. A child saw where food and cloth came from and handled the tools. In doing so the child learned patience, order, responsibility and the plain link between effort and result. This was a real education, even if nobody called it one.
When production moved into factories, that training faded from the home. Goods arrived finished from far away, and children no longer saw the work behind them. Dewey does not weep over the old days. He admits the old life had narrow and hard sides, and he welcomes the new freedoms. His point is that something of value went missing, and the loss has to be made up somewhere.
So the school is asked to carry more than before. It must give back what the household once gave, in a form that fits modern life. For Dewey this is the root of the argument. If the home no longer teaches by doing, the school must find ways for children to make, test and share real tasks. For you as a reader, the lesson is that a school should be judged against the whole of children's lives, not just against its own tests and timetables.
That’s 1 of 6 key points.
The rest of the summary, written and spoken, and the whole book: free to start.
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Questions about Schule und Gesellschaft
What is The School and Society about?
It collects lectures by John Dewey on how schooling should change after the industrial revolution. He argues schools should be like small communities, built on children's activity, and joined to real life rather than cut off from it.
When did Dewey write The School and Society?
It comes from three lectures given in April 1899 and printed soon after. They describe the experimental elementary school Dewey led at the University of Chicago, often called the Laboratory School. Later editions added more essays.
What does the child as the sun mean in Dewey?
Dewey compares the shift he wants to that of Copernicus. Instead of the school and its subjects being the fixed centre, the child's interests, powers and growth become the centre around which teaching is organized.
What does Dewey mean by waste in education?
He means lost effort and lost experience. Children's life outside school is ignored, the stages of schooling do not connect, and subjects are kept apart, so much of what could be learned never takes hold.
Is The School and Society hard to read?
No. It began as talks for parents and general listeners, so the language is fairly plain and the book is short. Some of its examples are from the 1890s, but the argument is easy to follow.