(Host) Great thoughts and philosophies from Vermonters have shaped our state and sometimes influenced the nation. Today, commentator Ruth Page explores John Dewey’s ideas about education.
(Page) “Don’t stand in front of the classroom and lecture. Don’t ask pupils to ‘recite’ back what you tell them, because memorized facts will fade. To teach children you must start with the child. Memorizing facts is not what brains are for; puzzling out real-world challenges is what they’re for. Children who do that will remember without memorizing. They learn best by doing.”
That is the core of what world-famous John Dewey, born in Burlington, Vermont in 1859, believed about teaching. In those days, it was earthshaking. Even in the early days of the 20th century, teachers simply told the children what they needed to know, and children recited it back. They had to sit quietly at their desks and await their turn to speak. The disobedient were often punished by having the teacher smack their hands with her ruler. That certainly got their attention, but hardly instilled a love of learning.
Dewey’s ideas are now widely accepted and almost seem old hat. After graduating from the University of Vermont at a time when there were just 100 students in the whole college, he pursued his education further and wrote, sometimes in pretty dense prose, his philosophy of teaching and learning. His many books were translated worldwide.
Dewey was a well-known professor in several states, and was also a moral philosopher. He wanted schools to help children adopt ethical principles, and wanted all girls and boys to be taught the same things, at least up to age 13.
Though Dewey was practical, his philosophy went much deeper than that. Unfortunately, as schools spread and flourished, some reduced his advice to its bare bones and even suggested he wanted children to learn only what they wanted to, without discipline.
Absolutely wrong. He abhorred the chaos that could result from misunderstanding what “liberal education” meant. Wise discipline was essential. Children must develop a solid understanding of the world they lived in. He called for small classes and very knowledgeable, imaginative teachers. That’s something we still seek, but it’s costly. In Dewey’s day, fewer than half the people in this country had as much as five years of schooling and only 7% went to high school. Alan Ryan, one of Dewey’s many biographers, says, “From 1894 to 1904, Dewey became the nation’s leading philosopher of education, and remained so for the next 50 years of his life.”
This is Ruth Page, reviewing the teaching philosophy of the famous Vermonter who said, “Teachers must work with the grain of the child, not against it.”
VPR’s commentary series, “Great Thoughts of Vermont,” examines the big ideas that came out of a small state. Learn more about the Great Thoughts of Vermont commentary series.