I am really enjoying my grad classes at Ashland. One of the classes is strictly about the clashing views on educational issues and has given me a chance to evaluate my own opinions on the topics.

We read an article/essay by the great philosopher and pioneer in education, John Dewey. After teaching in Columbus Public for a year, everything has a new frame of reference. Dewey, in the 1930s, had suggested a reconsideration of traditional approaches to schooling. Schools needed to give more attention to the social development of the learner and the quality of his or her total experience. “Dewey charts what he considers a necessary shift from the abstractness and isolation of traditional schooling to the concreteness and vitality of the newer concept” (Dewey 434). I agree with Dewey in that experiences provided by schools should be meaningful extensions of the normal social activities of my students…but what if the normal social activities are inappropriate and noneducational? How do you have the processes of learning and experiencing go hand-in-hand when the social factors are perverse? THAT’S the frustrating problem for this equally inexperience inner-city school teacher.

The argument against progressive education suggests that every man has a function as a man, within the society as a citizen. Educational systems are meant “to improve man as man” through the gaining of “intellectual powers” (Hutchins 145). If the society is bad (i.e. the Nazis), the educational system will aim at the same bad ends. Educator Hutchins argues that any system that tries to make students “bad” is not education. So, does that make me NOT an educator because I am boxed into parameters that crank out into a non-improving society unprepared students at an alarming rate? Just some questions I can’t help but thinking about…

Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, “Action springs not from thought, but from a readiness for responsibility.”

Should schooling be based on social experiences? Yes or No?