Richard Hake wrote:
(2) Would anyone, care to comment on Kieran Egan's opinion that (a) both Dewey and Piaget were "wrong from the start", and (b) heavily influenced by Herbert Spencer?",
I haven't read the paper, so I don't know Egan's reasons for saying so, but knowing what I currently do about Dewey (I just finished making a documentary about the founding of the Chicago functionalist school), my impression is that the progressivist character of Dewey's approach to evolution came from his prior Hegelian training at the hands of his Johns Hopkins PhD supervisor, and later Michigan boss, George Sylvester Morris (There was an excellent article about this in _History of Psychology_ by Andrew Backe a few years ago.). Moreover, I think one could argue that Dewey's *social* progressivism (not to be confused with his evolutionary progressivism) was a response *against* Spencer's rather dark vision of the implications of evolutionary theory for social change, attempting to show that one could accept evolution and not immediately draw Malthusian conclusions from it.
(3) If Dewey was and still is WRONG, why is Dewey-like pedagogy so seemingly successful in introductory physics education?
Again, I haven't read the paper, but there is an enormous political backlash underway right now against Dewey's educational theory by neoconservatives (who recently listed _School and Society_ among the 100 most dangerous book of the 20th century. So beware of the political sources behind proclamations of this sort. What Dewey actually did, in historical context, was to argue that centering school on tasks like learning dead languages and rote memorization of arcane grammatical rules were not the best things school could be doing in a time when America -- Chicago in particular -- were in the midst of ethnic and labor strife that was threatening to bring down the country (recall, Grover Cleveland sent in HALF of the standing US army to bring and end to the Pulman train boycott in Chicago in 1894). Instead, he argued, the school system should, first and foremost, teach kids how to get along with each other by cooperatively engaging in concrete, hands-on projects in which they could jointly succeed.
Regards, -- Christopher D. Green Department of Psychology York University Toronto, Ontario, Canada M3J 1P3 e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] phone: 416-736-5115 ext. 66164 fax: 416-736-5814 http://www.yorku.ca/christo/ ============================ . --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [email protected] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
