Word: deweyitis
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Long Shadow of John Dewey" is the most concise and comprehensive statement on U.S. education since Sputnik. Could it not be that a hierarchy of educationists has distorted and stretched Dewey's shadow to a shape and length he himself never intended...
Thirty years of "life adjustment" by the followers of Progressive Educator John Dewey have left U.S. education over adjusted, ill-equipped to quicken intellectual life. This week, in "The Deeper Problem in Education," LIFE takes stock of the situation...
...Dewey and his disciples revolted against this certitude, which had indeed grown more than a little ossified in its teaching methods. But history records no more egregious case of throwing out the baby with the bath water. "We agree," Dewey once said, "that we are uncertain as to where we are going and where we want to go, and why we are doing what we do." In a kind of country-club existentialism, Dewey and his boys genially contended that the traditional ends of education, like God, virtue and the idea of "culture," were all highly debatable and hence...
...With Dewey's world so demonstrably in tatters, one might think the educationists would run up the white flag. Far from it. Entrenched in public school administrations, they defend with the adhesiveness of a band of brothers every article of their gobbledygook canons. In Holland, Mich, the Christian' High School, a respected institution of impeccable academic standards, has recently been denied accreditation by the North Central Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools because it refused to dilute its academic standards with shop and cooking courses. A sample of the canons by which such schools are judged...
...most of all, we need to do some thinking about the true ends of education. The worthwhile innovations in method brought by Dewey's educationists should be kept. But their exclusive devotion to techniques and group adjustment should never again be allowed to hide the fact that American education exists first of all to educate the individual in a body of learning, with a tradition and purpose behind...