The following excerpts from Ida DePencier's History of the Lab School (Chapter 1)
(the full text of 100 years of Learning at The University of Chicago Laboratory Schools by William Harms and Ida DePencier available at http://www.ucls.uchicago.edu/about/history/education.shtml)--
Dewey built on the Work of Froebel and Pestalozzi, G. Stanley Hall. In Chicago Dewey worked with Colonel Francis Wayland Parker... who after the Civil War and wounding studied under Froebel and Pestalozzi and then revolutionized the Quincy, Massachusetts schools.
"Colonel Parker was convinced that the strict formalism of the schools was not in keeping with children's needs. Self-development, he believed, was of primary importance, and a child should grow naturally and freely, learning by doing rather than being fettered by a desk and seat. He infected his teachers with his fervent interest in each child as a person, and their enthusiasm took the drudgery out of teaching the three R's. Pupils interspersed work with activity; learning came from- the outdoors as well as from books. Geography, history, and nature study were the central unifying subjects, and other studies were correlated with these. Geography, for example, was no longer a dull memorizing of facts about places, but an effort to understand the whole physical world." [Chapter 1]
He then moved to the Cook County Normal School in Chicago where he trained faculty.
Henry Holms Beifield was another innovator who entered Chicago and started "a manual training school" at Twelft Street and Michigan Avenue.
"Belfield's school and other manual training schools covered the subjects in the high school curriculum but trained the hands as well as the head. Thus in the latter part of the nineteenth century, education was in a state of ferment activated by enlightened, imaginative leaders who believed that children, in order to learn, needed freedom-freedom to move about, to investigate, to inquire, to experiment. This freedom was not wild and uncontrolled. On the contrary, it was freedom with discipline, discipline imposed by the child's interest, his bent, his self-direction. For the teachers who grasped the real meaning of this new freedom, there was joy in teaching-a deep satisfaction which matched the children's own happiness in school. And for the children they taught, school was no longer a repining misery. To many adults, however, it was unthinkable that children should actually enjoy school. They misunderstood the real meaning of freedom to learn, and their misunderstanding later brought ill repute to the new teaching methods. Yet slowly, in small ways, these methods penetrated classrooms here ad there, changing practices or philosophy. At the present time, most of what the pioneer proponents advocated has been incorporated into elementary school teaching, especially in the primary grades."
He and Parker worked the same philosophical venue, one magnetically and intuitively, Dewey.. more analytically.
Perhaps the principles were not ready-made nor the ideas put into immediate practice, but principles and ideas there were, and they became evident in the practices of the school. Not all of them are indicated here but some of them are as follows: First, there was to be no break between the child's home activities and his first contact with the school. He was to be introduced to the school through activities connected with the home as a center of shelter, protection, comfort, and food supply-through handwork (manual training), cooking, and sewing-and from these he would gain social experience. Reading, writing, arithmetic, and spelling would come later, growing out of his need to get information and communicate with others. He would begin by learning to prepare and cook his noonday lunch, to sew, and to construct needed materials by sawing, planing, and nailing. He would learn through experience-free to move about, communicate with others, and get help from the teacher and from his classmates. Mr. Dewey held that when a child was using a saw or plane it was not necessary to concoct artificial ways of holding his attention. His senses were already on the alert, since he must use them in order to do something. This was the psychological reason for starting the child's education with activities.
The home activities would form a basis for number work because measurement was constantly required in cooking, in carpentry, and in sewing. Thus arithmetic would be taught as a means through which some activity could be made more orderly and effective. Reading, writing, and spelling would be taught incidentally, as an outgrowth of the child's activities and his need to communicate.
Second, the child would learn to live in the present rather than preparing for adult life in the future. He would learn to be part of a group, taking his turn, helping his co-workers as well as getting help from them and from his teacher. The school would be a community in which the child had a responsible role, instead of just a place for learning lessons from a book. His feelings of success came from being a part of a cooperative enterprise instead of being the winner in a competitive field. One of the weaknesses of the schools of that time, John Dewey believed, was that they tried to prepare pupils for social living in a situation where, he stated in School and Society, "the conditions of social spirit are eminently wanting."
Third, the school was to be a place where the child's curiosity would be aroused by problems, where he would be challenged to find solutions by his own methods as far as possible, using his own inventiveness and creativity. There was to be no rote learning, no answers to be committed to memory. Quite possibly the child would use considerable time in trial and error before finding a solution to his problem, but that was the way to gain knowledge-knowledge that would remain with him. Learning the multiplication facts could be accomplished faster by drill, but an appreciation of number relationships, though it would take longer to acquire by investigation, would result in more fundamental learning.
Fourth, the problem itself would discipline the child by holding him to his self-set task. No prizes, no false incentive, no standards imposed by adults would be used-or needed. And his learning would be interesting, challenging, and geared to his abilities.
Fifth, the teacher was to bear in mind that the child, not the subject matter, was the center of all teaching, his growth-mental, physical, and social-the objective of all endeavor. The teacher was expected to be aware of each child's ability to learn, of his strengths and limitations, and give these consideration in the daily planning. The teacher's task was thus to select really worthwhile experiences for the child, choosing problems which would arouse his curiosity, stimulate him to investigate, and challenge him to look at the world about him.
Over the preceding years, the school curriculum had become crowded with more and more factual material until the amount was staggering to both teacher and pupil. The teacher's problem, as Mr. Dewey saw it, was to make appropriate selections from this great body of facts, but always to be ready to alter or discard whatever experiences proved unchallenging. Teacher and pupil were to work together-questioning, investigating, planning. The teacher was to serve as a counselor, as a leader, and, when the child met a frustrating blockade, as a helper.
Furthermore, continuity was to be maintained-so that the pupil would progress from a certain activity to a related one. In this way there would be no haphazard learning, and each pupil's previous experiences would be steppingstones to future ones. There were other principles as well in Mr. Dewey's scheme of education, all deviating markedly from those followed}owed in traditional schools. Devoted teachers were needed to plan the Dewey School program and stand firm against the criticism that was bound to come from adherents of time-honored methods. To explain that every pupil would learn to read, write, and spell through an- interest in literature and history; to explain that he would learn arithmetic as he needed to learn it for measurements in cooking, sewing, weaving, and woodwork must have demanded dedication and staunch belief in Mr. Dewey's ideas. The teachers' explanations met with incredulity. Allow the pupils freedom to move around the room, to investigate and talk with one another about their investigations, to get help from one another as well as give help? It was almost unthinkable. no competition? No prizes for giving back to the teacher what he had given them? No memorizing? No rote learning? No-discipline except as it was imposed by problems? Even with Colonel Parker's work at Cook County Normal as a precedent, it took courage to stand up to the criticism, misunderstanding, and often ridicule that were directed at the Dewey School.
It was these thoughts of Ms. Pencier's that caught my attention. Take them and move them to secondary education … forget college prep based on Carnegie Credits and … follow the Minnesota alt ed design of Ron Newell et al and you have something very similar to what Ms. Pencier describes above.
*Dewey's Pragmatism Link:http://dewey.pragmatism.org/
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