References
- Two recent proponents of this point of view are Patricia White, Beyond Domination ( London : Routledge & Kegan Paul , 1983 ), and Colin Wringe, Democracy, Schooling and Political Education (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1984). One of the earliest and most persuasive defenses of student decision making in groups can be found in John Dewey, Democracy and Education (New York: Macmillan, 1916), especially in chapters 7, 10, 22, and 26. Alice Miel described a study spanning several years (1945–1948) involving schoolteachers in a number of cities and consulting staff of the Horace Mann-Lincoln Institute for School Experimentation. These educators had assumed a necessary relation between the attitudes and skills needed for cooperative work and the development of maturity in a democracy. They initiated, evaluated, and reported their efforts to promote cooperative student participation in a wide range of public school settings. See, Alice Miel, Cooperative Procedures in Learning (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1972).
- John Stewart Mill , Essays on Politics and Culture , ed. Gertrude Himmelfarb ( Garden City , N.Y. : Doubleday , 1962 ), p. 186 .
- Perhaps the best statement of the reciprocal influence of education and participation was made by Carole Pateman in Participation and Democratic Theory ( New York : Cambridge University Press , 1970 ). for maximum participation by all the people at that level socialisation, or ‘social training’, for democracy must take place in other spheres in order that the necessary individual attitudes and psychological qualities can be developed. This development takes place through the process of participation itself. The major function of participation in the theory of participatory democracy is therefore an educative one, educative in the very widest sense, including both the psychological aspect and the gaining of practice in democratic skills and procedures, (p.42) The existence of representative institutions at national level is not sufficient for democracy; Paulo Friere carries this point of view into adult education for literacy and liberation in Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Herder and Herder, 1971).
- Landon E. Beyer , “Schooling for Moral and Democratic Communities,” Issues in Education 4 (Summer, 1986 ). If the schools are to play a central role in developing the culture of democracy, opportunities to realize the value and meaning of this culture must be provided in those institutions in which our children spend so large a portion of their lives. [Unfortunately,] we have constructed most classrooms around principles that seek to divide, classify, and sort students rather than those that unite them into genuine communities, (p. 14)
- White , Beyond Domination , p. 95 .
- On these grounds James B. Conant could argue, in The American High School Today ( New York : McGraw-Hill , 1959 ), that a primary objective of requiring academic studies of all students was the production of democratic citizens. Standard practice in American schools, then and especially now, would appear to support this belief.
- Gray and Chanoff have discussed the remarkably salutary effects of a school, in which virtually all curriculum decisions were made by students, upon those students' subsequent educational and occupational careers. A carefully designed study of the graduates of the Sudbury Valley School is reported in Peter Gray and David Chanoff , “Democratic Schooling: What Happens to Young People Who Have Charge of Their Own Education?” American Journal of Education 94 (February, 1986 ): 182 – 213
- Robert M. Hutchins , The Higher Learning in America ( New Haven , Conn. : Yale University Press , 1936 ).
- E.g., Stephen M. Cahn , The Eclipse of Excellence ( Washington , D. C : Public Affairs Press , 1973 ).
- Mortimer J. Adler , The Paideia Proposal ( New York : Macmillan , 1982 ).
- This question was seriously pursued by Alice Miel and her associates in the mid-1940s (Miel, Cooperative Procedures). The question has more recently been investigated in a number of ways in Robert Slavin, Shlomo Sharan, Spencer Kagan, Rachel Hertz Lazarowitz, Clark Webb, and Richard Schmuck, eds., Learning to Cooperate, Cooperating to Learn (New York: Plenum Press, 1985).
- See, e.g., White , Beyond Domination , pp. 8 – 9
- What is not intended here is the collapse of a consideration of people's interests into a consideration of what is in their interest, as, e.g., in R. S. Peters , Ethics and Education ( Atlanta : Scott, Foresman , 1967 ), p. 94 .
- White , Beyond Domination , pp. 89 – 96
- Ibid. , pp. 84 – 86
- Robin Barrow , Common Sense and the Curriculum ( London : George Allen and Unwin , 1976 ), pp. 52 – 59
- Here is a brief sampling of descriptions of schools and teachers who utilized the interests of children: Katherine Camp Mayhew and Nna Camp Edwards , The Dewey School ( New York : D. Appleton-Century , 1936 ); C. T. Zyre, ed., Willingly to School (New York: Round Table Press, 1934); John and Evelyn Dewey, Schools of Tomorrow (New York: E. p. Dutton, 1962); Miel, Cooperative Procedures; and Glenn Haas, ed., Curriculum Planning (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1977).
- See, White , Beyond Domination , pp. 94 – 95 on activities involving choices and decisions in political education.
- Peters , in Ethics and Education, says that the conditions for a “serious” pursuit of what is really worth doing are “a degree of disinterestedness and detachment.” (p. 81) But the conditions that foster such an inquiry are just the opposite, for when interests are competing, that competition is felt, and it requires not detachment but commitment to arriving at a decision. The conditions of urgency and immediate practical meaning are a necessary aspect of the rational inquiry that Peters espouses. But those conditions are conveniently forgotten in the classroom where standards of objectivity are so important that the problem itself fails to engender students' interests. The consequences are that rational inquiry and scientific method come to be associated with academic performances that have little or nothing to do with the problematic conflicts of interest that citizens must face in the real world .
- Donald Arnstine , “Curiosity,” Teachers College Record 67 ( May 1966 ): 595 – 602
- Donald Arnstine , “Learning Without Teaching: Aesthetic Impact of the Popular Arts,” in Culture as Education , ed. Vincent Crockenburg and Richard LaBrecque ( Dubuque , Iowa : Kendall/Hunt , 1977 ), pp. 180 – 184
- Ibid. , pp. 198 – 204
- Barrow , in Common Sense and the Curriculum , urges study of the fine arts because they are complex, and children need instruction in order to understand that complexity. He believes that such understanding leads one to gain pleasure from art (p. 135). While Barrow explicitly eschews cultivating a sympathetic response to art in favor of “helping the child to recognize features of various works [and] helping him to understand” art works (p. 133), he gives no hint whatever about why he thinks students will stay awake long enough to benefit from such instruction. The current popularity of “cognitive science” and achievement testing (at least in the United States) has convinced educators in the arts to turn away from aesthetic considerations and to emphasize the cognitive. Their strategy is then to claim, as Barrow does, that cognitive achievement produces aesthetic results. Hence, as Smith wrote, “contemporary speculation is beginning to assert that only the systematic building of relevant cognitive and evaluative maps in … art instruction is likely to develop aesthetic sensibility …” [Ralph Smith, “Preface” in Aesthetics and Criticism in Art Education , ed. Ralph Smith ( Chicago : Rand McNally , 1966 ), p. x .] This point of view does not confront the fact that, for most people, learning proceeds in the opposite direction.
- In a recent recording, the British rock group, Dire Straits, sings about a wide range of topics worth anyone's serious concern, from the dissatisfactions of unfulfilling careers that are expressed in the envy of celebrities (“ Money For Nothing ”) to the exploration of the impact of making war on the character of the warrior (“The Man's Too Strong,” “Brothers in Arms”). This music has immediate appeal, yet the rich and complex relations between the music, the lyrics, and the world are not always investigated by the young people who buy the records.
- White , Beyond Domination , pp. 104 – 110
- Bernard Crick and Ian Lister , “Political Literacy,” in Political Education and Political Literacy , eds. Bernard Crick and Alex Porter ( London : Longman , 1978 , pp., 38.
- Ibid. , p. 32 .
- See, e.g., David W. Johnson and Roger T. Johnson , Learning Together and Alone ( Englewood Cliffs , N.J. : Prentice-Hall , 1975 ); Shlomo Sharan and Yael Sharan, Small-Group Teaching (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1976); Robert E. Slavin, Cooperative Learning (New York: Longman, 1983); and Slavin et. al, Learning to Cooperate.