The Alternative/Progressive John Dewey Approach
Foundations School Community, an alternative/progressive kindergarten-through-8th grade private school in Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley that stresses innovative, experience-based learning, has based its tremendously successful approach on the teachings of education pioneer John Dewey. Considered by many to be the greatest educational thinker of the 20th century, Dewey’s view continue to strongly influence the design of innovative educational approaches, such as in outdoor education, adult training, and experiential therapies.
In the 1920’s and 1930’s, John Dewey became famous for pointing out that the authoritarian, strict, preordained knowledge approach of modern traditional education was too concerned with delivering knowledge, and not enough with understanding students’ actual experiences. He became the philosophical father of experiential education, or as it was then referred to, progressive education.
How do we engage students in learning? It seems an obvious, but ignored question.
Dewey believed an educator must take into account the unique differences between each student. Each person is different genetically and in terms of past experiences. Even when a standard curricula is presented using established pedagogical methods, each student will have a different quality of experience. Thus, teaching and curriculum must be designed in ways that allow for such individual differences.
For Dewey, education also served a broader social purpose, which was to help people become more effective members of their democratic society. Dewey argued that the one-way delivery style of authoritarian schooling does not provide a good model for life in democratic society. Instead, students need educational experiences that enable them to become valued, equal, and responsible members of society.
The most common misunderstanding about Dewey is that he was simply supporting progressive education. Progressive education, according to Dewey, was a wild swing in the philosophical pendulum, against traditional education methods. In progressive education, freedom was the rule, with students being relatively unconstrained by the educator.
The problem with progressive education, according to Dewey, is that freedom alone is no solution. Learning needs a structure and order, and must be based on a clear theory of experience, not simply the whim of teachers or students. So Dewey proposed that education be designed on the basis of a theory of experience. We must understand the nature of how humans have the experiences they do in order to design effective education. This forms the basis of Foundations School Community’s experience-based, alternative learning approach.
The results of the Dewey approach – happy, productive kindergarten-through-8th graders who go on to some of Los Angeles’ finest high schools and, ultimately, to America’s finest colleges and universities – speak for themselves!
