The Child and the Curriculum
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Clean text
- Extent:
- ~7,790 words · 37 passages
Cite this work
- APAJohn Dewey. (n.d.). The Child and the Curriculum. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/john-dewey/the-child-and-the-curriculum
- MLAJohn Dewey. "The Child and the Curriculum." SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/john-dewey/the-child-and-the-curriculum.
- ChicagoJohn Dewey. The Child and the Curriculum. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/john-dewey/the-child-and-the-curriculum.
What it is about
The Child and the Curriculum (1902): how to dissolve the false opposition between following the child's interest and teaching a subject.
Context and history
Short and decisive. Dewey argues the dilemma is badly posed: the subject matter is the child's own experience seen from the far end of the road, not something alien to it.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
Profound differences in theory are never gratuitous or invented. They grow out of conflicting elements in a genuine problem--a problem which is genuine just because the elements, taken as they stand, are conflicting. Any significant problem involves conditions that for the moment contradict each other. Solution comes only by getting away from the meaning of terms that is already fixed upon and coming to see the conditions from another point of view, and hence in a fresh light. But this reconstruction means travail of thought. Easier than thinking with surrender of already formed ideas and detachment from facts already learned is just to stick by what is already said, looking about for something with which to buttress it against attack. Thus sects arise: schools of opinion. Each selects that set of conditions that appeals to it; and then erects them into a complete and independent truth, instead of treating them as a factor in a problem, needing adjustment. The fundamental factors in the educative process are an immature, undeveloped being; and certain social aims, meanings, values incarnate in the matured experience of the adult. The educative process is the due interaction of these forces. Such a conception of each in relation to the other as facilitates completest and freest interaction is the essence of educational theory. But here comes the effort of thought. It is easier to see the conditions in their separateness, to insist upon one at the expense of the other, to make antagonists of them, than to discover a reality to which each belongs. The easy thing is to seize upon something in the nature of the child, or upon something in the developed consciousness of the adult, and insist upon _that_ as the key to the whole problem. When this happens a really serious practical problem--that of interaction--is transformed into an unreal, and hence insoluble, theoretic problem. Instead of seeing the educative steadily and as a whole, we see
What is The Child and the Curriculum about?Summarize The Child and the Curriculum brieflyWhat are the key ideas in The Child and the Curriculum?
← Back to John Dewey