What School Is
John Dewey, the father of progressive education, writes here about the role of the teacher, the importance of seeing the student within the context of community and the purpose of education. He writes directly about “what school is,” but it certainly has huge implications regarding what school isn’t. Dewey is brilliant and this provides a nice antidote to the stifling way that we are too often imagining school currently.
I believe that the school is primarily a social institution. Education being a social process, the school is simply that form of community life in which all those agencies are concentrated that will be most effective in bringing the child to share in the inherited resources of the race, and to use his own powers for social ends.
I believe that education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living.
I believe that the school must represent present life – life as real and vital to the child as that which he carries on in the home, in the neighborhood, or on the play-ground.
I believe that education which does not occur through forms of life, forms that are worth living for their own sake, is always a poor substitute for the