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.