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The North American pragmatist philosopher John Dewey,
arguably the most influential educational thinker of the
20th century, put forward the idea that the aim of education
should be to provide students with the skills to lead the
most fulfilling life possible.
It was not about obedience and discipline.
It was not even about providing the skills for
taking one's place in the workforce, although Dewey did
consider gainful employment as an important objective,
largely because it made people feel valued and worthwhile.
For Dewey, what educators should do is first of all,
identify each child's unique potentials, both in their
physical, their intellectual, and in the aesthetics spheres.
They should also encourage the habit of learning itself, to
encourage students to see life's problems as challenges
to be solved, often in collaboration with others.
This would encourage them to see that human beings needed
each other.
Dewey also argued that students should be encouraged
to think seriously about the world that they shared with
others, to see their own private troubles as never just
that, but rather as public concerns that they shared with
other people.
This, he suggested, would be good for both the student
themselves and for democracy, because democracy required
citizens that were prepared and capable of engaging in
debates over matter of public concern.
In the 1920s, Dewey in conjunction with Ella Flagg
Young, established the Chicago Laboratory School at Chicago
University.
This was designed to put some of his teaching principles
into practise.
Here, teachers were encouraged to build bridges between the
curriculum and the life experiences and interests of
their students.
Dewey had no problem with the curriculum of his time.
He felt that this embodied a vast history of human beings
solving problems.
What he did have a problem with was the way it was
taught, that it tended to taught abstractly, that it was
placed into history books and therefore removed from the
living context in which it had vitality and usefulness.
Accordingly, Dewey argued that the curriculum needed to be
made more relevant to the interests and the life
experiences of the students themselves.
If they saw that the knowledge that they were acquiring was
useful, well, then they would value it far more as having a
bearing on the practical activities that they were
engaged in every day.
So for example, students would be taught about geography
through the practise of growing a garden, where they
would be encouraged to consider the soil and the
impact this had on the plants, as well as the weather.
Accordingly, they were picking up knowledge
of the local geography.