In Democracy and Education, Deweys primary

concern is the relationship between society and

education.
Education is a deliberate process of bringing the
immature person into cultural participation by
providing the necessary symbolic and linguistic tools
needed for group interaction and communication.
Education is conservative because it provides cultural
continuity by transmitting the heritage from adults to
children, the immature members of the group.
As a transmitter of the cultural heritage, education is
the means by which the group reproduces the cultural
type and thus perpetuates itself.
In the Deweyite context, the child is socialized by
acquiring and using the cultural instruments and
values through association with the members of the
group.
Education become the instrument or process whereby
the group transmits its cultural skills, knowledge, and
values and reproduces the desired cultural type of
person, who will perpetuate the heritage.
The very cultural instrumentalities such as the
language and technology that were imposed upon
the young carried the possibilities for altering or
changing the inherited culture.
Formal education was one of societys means of
purifying and selecting those aspects of the cultural
heritage that were worthy of perpetuation.
For Dewey, the school is a specialized environment
established to enculturate the young by deliberately
bringing them into cultural participation.
As a social institution, the school is a selective agency
that while transmitting the culture, also seeks to
reconstruct it to meet contemporary needs.
The schools threefold functions were to simplify,
purify and balance the cultural heritage.
Simplification meant that the school, really
curriculum-makers and teachers as social agents,
select elements of the heritage and reduce their
complexity by designing units for learning that are
appropriate to the learners maturity and readiness.
As a purifying agent, the school selects and transmits
the elements of the cultural heritage that enhanced
and human growth and eliminated unworthy aspects
that limited human growth.
Balancing the cultural heritage referred to integrating
the experiences that had been selected and purified
into harmoniously integrated core of human
experience.
The school was a simplified, purified, and integrated
(balanced) community in which learners encountered
each other in a socially charged environment and dealt
with each other in an open and democratic manner.
Group experience is a cooperative enterprise to which
all the participants share their experiences.
The more sharing that occurs, the greater the
possibilities for growth.
Deweys school society, based on mutually shared
activities, is designed to be the embryo of an
associative democracy.
Deweys conceptions of the democratic social
arrangements and democratic education are related to
an experimenting society that uses a process-
oriented philosophy.

In the sociological context, Deweys democratic

society was one in which its members shared the
widest possible variety of interests. Any impediment or
barrier to group interaction, such as racial, religious, or
economic segregation, interfered with group sharing.
Deweys emphasis on human association embraced
three key elements: the common, communication, and
community.
The common, representing shared objects,
instruments, values, ideas, arises in the context of
group experience.
Communication occurs when people frame and
express their shared experiences in symbolic patterns,
in a common language.
Community, was the human association that results as
individuals come together to discuss their common
experience and problems through means of shared
communication.
Participation in group activities contributed to the
developing social intelligence. Deweys school and
classroom were conceived as an embryonic community
in which learners worked together , in common to
solve mutually shared problems.
In Individualism: Old and New, Dewey, in examining
problems created by the demise of rural society and
the emergence of a technological society, concluded
that the era of technology would be corporate, that is,
individuals would work together in large industrial-
technological-managerial aggregates.
He criticized laissez-faire capitalism, which he
believed had enabled a few rich individuals to profit by
exploiting the majority of the population.
Dewey saw Experimentalism as a social and
educational philosophy that could enable people to
live in and contribute to the technological but still
democratic corporate society.
The democracy of Deweys great community
embraced a degree of corporateness.
The corporateness of the great community would
provide needed services to its members.
Dewey preferred an internal discipline designed to
cultivate self directing and self-disciplining persons.
The teacher as a resource person guided the situation.
The starting point of any activity was the learners felt
needs.
Educational aims were two kinds: intrinsic and
extrinsic.
Intrinsic aims arise from the problem or the task while
extrinsic aims are extraneous to the persons problem,
task or interest.
For Dewey, intrinsic aims are always superior to
extrinsic ones because they are personal, problematic,
and related to the individual learners own self-
direction, self-control, and self-discipline.
The teachers role is primarily that of guiding learners
who need advice and assistance.
As resource persons, teachers need to allow students
to make errors to experience the consequences of their
actions.
Education as a process has no end beyond growth.
Desirable experiences lead to further experience,
whereas undesirable ones inhibit and reduce the
possibilities and reduce the possibilities for
subsequent experience.
Growth means that the individual is gaining the
ability to understand the relationships and
interconnections between various experiences,
between one learning episode to another.
According to the doctrine of preparation, students
learn their lessons and master subject matter to
prepare for events or situations that are to occur after
the completion of school.
Dewey opposed that the view of the child was
depraved or deprived because of an inherited flaw or
weakness in human nature.
For Dewey, childhood was a developmental phase of
human life.
Dewey wanted children to acquire a socially
intelligent method for dealing with environment that
would enable them to grow as human beings
throughout life.
Dewey emphasized that methodology was intimately
related to the curriculum when, in Democracy and
Education, he recommended three levels of curricular
organization: (1) making and doing: (2) history and
geography: and (3) organized sciences.
Making and doing, the first curricular level, engaged
students in activities or projects based on their direct
experience and which required the using and
manipulating of raw materials.
History and geography, the second curricular level,
Dewey regarded as two great educational resources of
enlarging the scope and significance of the childs
temporal and spatial experience.
Organized subjects or sciences consist of bodies of
tested beliefs or warranted assertions.
For Dewey, good education was the reconstruction of
experience that added to the meaning of and directed
the course of future experiences.
Reasoning was thus construed as a process of
combining meanings, or symbols, so as to draw
conclusions from their manipulation.
The reconstruction of experience could be both
personal and social.
As a result of reconstructing experience, the deviant
particular was brought into the context of the
experiential continuum.
Dewey held that conclusions were tentative and
subject to further evaluation and reconstruction.