Dewey Outlines Utopian Schools»»
[First published in New York Times, 23 April 1933, Education section, p. 7, from
an address on 21 April 1933 to the Conference on the Educational Status of the
Four- and Five-Year-Old Child at Teachers College, Columbia University.]
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The most Utopian thing in Utopia is that there are no
schools at all. Education is carried on without anything of the
nature of schools, or, if this idea is so extreme that we cannot
conceive of it as educational at all, then we may say nothing of
the sort at present we know as schools. Children, however, are
gathered together in association with older and more mature
people who direct their activity.
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The assembly places all have large grounds, gardens, orchards,
greenhouses, and none of the buildings in which children and
older people gather will hold much more than 200 people, this
having been found to be about the limits of close, intimate
personal acquaintance on the part of people who associate together.
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And inside these buildings, which are all of them of the nature
of our present open-air schools in their physical structure, there
are none of the things we usually associate with our present
schools. Of course, there are no mechanical rows of screweddown
desks. There is rather something like a well-furnished
home of today, only with a much greater variety of equipment
and no messy accumulations of all sorts of miscellaneous
furniture; more open spaces than our homes have today.
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Then there are the workshops, with their apparatus for
carrying on activities with all kinds of material--wood, iron, textiles.
There are historic museums and scientific laboratories, and books
everywhere as well as a central library.
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The adults who are most actively concerned with the young
have, of course, to meet a certain requirement, and the first thing
that struck me as a visitor to Utopia was that they must all be
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married persons and, except in exceptional cases, must have had
children of their own. Unmarried, younger persons occupy places
of assistance and serve a kind of initiatory apprenticeship.
Moreover, older children, since there are no arbitrary divisions into
classes, take part in directing the activities of those still younger.
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The activity of these older children may be used to illustrate
the method by which those whom we would call teachers are
selected. It is almost a method of self-selection. For instance, the
children aged say from about 13 to 18 who are especially fond
of younger children are given the opportunity to consort with
them. They work with the younger children under observation,
and then it soon becomes evident who among them have the
taste, interest and the kind of skill which is needed for effective
dealing with the young.
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As their interest in the young develops, their own further
education centres more and more about the study of processes of
growth and development, and so there is a very similar process of
natural selection by which parents are taken out of the narrower
contact with their own children in the homes and are brought
forward in the educational nurture of larger numbers of children.
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The work of these educational groups is carried on much
as painters were trained in, say, Italy, when painting was at its
height. The adult leaders, through their previous experience and
by the manner of their selection, combine special knowledge of
children with special gifts in certain directions.
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They associate themselves with the young in carrying on some
line of action. Just as in these older studios younger people were
apprentices who observed the elders and took part along with
them in doing at first some of the simpler things and then, as they
got more experience, engaged directly in the more complex
forms of activity, so in these directed activities in these centres
the older people are first engaged in carrying on some work in
which they themselves are competent, whether painting or music
or scientific inquiry, observation of nature or industrial
cooperation in some line. Then the younger children, watching them,
listening to them, begin taking part in the simpler forms of the
action--a minor part, until as they develop they accept more and
more responsibility for cooperating.
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Naturally I inquired what were the purposes, or, as we say now,
the objectives, of the activities carried on in these centres. At first
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nothing puzzled me more than the fact that my inquiry after
objectives was not at all understood, for the whole concept of the
school, of teachers and pupils and lessons, had so completely
disappeared that when I asked after the special objectives of the
activity of these centres, my Utopian friends thought I was asking
why children should live at all, and therefore they did not take
my questions seriously.
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After I made them understand what I meant, my question was
dismissed with the remark that since children were alive and
growing, "of course, we, as the Utopians, try to make their lives
worth while to them; of course, we try to see that they really do
grow, that they really develop." But as for having any objective
beyond the process of a developing life, the idea still seemed to
them quite silly. The notion that there was some special end
which the young should try to attain was completely foreign to
their thoughts.
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By observation, however, I was led to the conclusion that what
we would regard as the fundamental purposes were thoroughly
ingrained in the working of the activities themselves. In our
language it might be said to be the discovery of the aptitudes, the
tastes, the abilities and the weaknesses of each boy and girl, and
then to develop their positive capacities into attitudes and to
arrange and reinforce the positive powers so as not to cover up the
weak points but to offset them.
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I inquired, having a background of our own schools in mind,
how with their methods they ever made sure that the children
and youth really learned anything, how they mastered the
subject matter, geography and arithmetic and history, and how they
ever were sure that they really learned to read and write and
figure. Here, too, at first I came upon a blank wall. For they asked,
in return to my question, whether in the period from which I
came for a visit to Utopia it was possible for a boy or girl who
was normal physiologically to grow up without learning the
things which he or she needed to learn--because it was evident
to them that it was not possible for any one except a congenital
idiot to be born and to grow up without learning.
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When they discovered, however, that I was serious, they asked
whether it was true that in our day we had to have schools and
teachers and examinations to make sure that babies learned to
walk and to talk.
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It was during these conversations that I learned to appreciate
how completely the whole concept of acquiring and storing away
things had been displaced by the concept of creating attitudes by
shaping desires and developing the needs that are significant in
the process of living.
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The Utopians believed that the pattern which exists in
economic society in our time affected the general habits of thought;
that because personal acquisition and private possession were
such dominant ideals in all fields, even if unconsciously so, they
had taken possession of the minds of educators to the extent that
the idea of personal acquisition and possession controlled the
whole educational system.
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They pointed not merely to the use in our schools of the
competitive methods of appeal to rivalry and the use of rewards and
punishments, of set examinations and the system of promotion,
but they also said that all these things were merely incidental
expressions of the acquisitive system of society and the kind of
measure and test of achievement and success which had to
prevail in an acquisitive type of society.
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So it was that we had come to regard all study as simply a
method of acquiring something, even if only useless or remote
facts, and thought of learning and scholarship as the private
possession of the resulting acquisition. And the social change which
had taken place with the abolition of an acquisitive economic
society had, in their judgment, made possible the transformation of
the centre of emphasis from learning (in our sense) to the
creation of attitudes.
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They said that the great educational liberation came about
when the concept of external attainments was thrown away
and when they started to find out what each individual person
had in him from the very beginning, and then devoted themselves
to finding out the conditions of the environment and the kinds of
activity in which the positive capacities of each young person
could operate most effectually.
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In setting creation, productivity, over against acquiring, they
said that there was no genuine production without enjoyment.
They imagined that the ethics of education in the older period
had been that enjoyment in education always had to be
something deferred; that the motto of the schools, at least, was that
man never is, but always is to be, blest; while the only
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education that really could discover and elicit power was one which
brought these powers for immediate use and enjoyment.
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Naturally, I inquired what attitudes they regarded as most
important to create, since the formation of attitudes had taken the
place with the young of the acquisition of information. They had
some difficulty in ranking attitudes in any order of importance,
because they were so occupied with an all-around development
of the capacities of the young. But, through observation, I should
say that they ranked the attitude which would give a sense of
positive power as at least as basic and primary as the others, if
not more so.
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This attitude which resulted in a sense of positive power
involved, of course, elimination of fear, of embarrassment, of
constraint, of self-consciousness; eliminated the conditions which
created the feeling of failure and incapacity. Possibly it included
the development of a confidence, of readiness to tackle
difficulties, of actual eagerness to seek problems instead of dreading
them and running away from them. It included a rather ardent
faith in human capacity. It included a faith in the capacity of the
environment to support worthwhile activities, provided the
environment was approached and dealt with in the right way.