The Greatest Works of John Dewey - Джон Дьюи

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on which to base her plans of instruction.

      Since a child lives in a social world, where even the simplest act or word is bound up with the words and acts of his neighbors, there is no danger that this liberty will sacrifice the interests of others to caprice. Liberty does not mean the removal of the checks which nature and man impose on the life of every individual in the community, so that one individual may indulge impulses which go against his own welfare as a member of society. But liberty for the child is the chance to test all impulses and tendencies on the world of things and people in which he finds himself, sufficiently to discover their character so that he may get rid of those which are harmful, and develop those which are useful to himself and others. Education which treats all children as if their impulses were those of the average of an adult society (whose weaknesses and failures are moreover constantly deplored) is sure to go on reproducing that same average society without even finding out whether and how it might be better. Education which finds out what children really are may be able to shape itself by this knowledge so that the best can be kept and the bad eliminated. Meantime much is lost by a mere external suppression of the bad which equally prevents the expression of the better.

      If education demands liberty before it can shape itself according to facts, how is it to use this liberty for the benefit of the child? Give a child freedom to find out what he can and can not do, both in the way of what is physically possible and what his neighbors will stand for, and he will not waste much time on impossibilities but will bend his energies to the possibilities. The physical energy and mental inquisitiveness of children can be turned into positive channels. The teacher will find the spontaneity, the liveliness, and initiative of the pupil aids in teaching, instead of being, as under the coercive system, nuisances to be repressed. The very things which are now interferences will become positive qualities that the teacher is cultivating. Besides preserving qualities which will be of use to the man and developing habits of independence and industry, allowing the child this freedom is necessary if pupils are really to learn by doing. Most doing will lead only to superficial muscle training if it is dictated to the child and prescribed for him step by step. But when the child’s natural curiosity and love of action are put to work on useful problems, on finding out for himself how to adjust his environment to his needs, the teacher finds that the pupils are not only doing their lessons as well as ever, but are also learning how to control and put to productive use those energies which are simply disturbing in the average classroom. Unless the pupil has some real work on which to exercise his mind by means of his senses and muscles, the teacher will not be able to do away with the ordinary disciplinary methods. For in a classroom where the teacher is doing all the work and the children are listening and answering questions, it would be absurd to allow the children to place themselves where they please, to move about, or to talk. Where the teacher’s rôle has changed to that of helper and observer, where the development of every child is the goal, such freedom becomes as much a necessity of the work as is quiet where the children are simply reciting.

      Learning to live through situations that are typical of social life. (Teachers College, N. Y. City.)

      At present, the most talked of schools in which freedom and liberty are necessary for the children’s work are the schools of Madame Maria Montessori in Italy and those of her pupils in this country. Madame Montessori believes, with many educators in this country, that liberty is necessary in the classroom if the teacher is to know the needs and capabilities of each pupil, if the child is to receive in school a well-rounded training making for the best development of his mind, character, and physique. In general, her reasons for insisting upon this liberty, which is the basis of her method, correspond with those outlined above, with one exception. She holds that liberty is necessary for the child if a scientific education is to be created, because without it data on which to base principles can not be collected; also that it is necessary for the physical welfare of the pupils and for the best development of their characters in training them to be independent. The point of difference between the Italian educator and most reformers in this country lies in their respective views of the value of liberty in the use of material, and this point will be taken up later.

      Madame Montessori believes that repressing children physically while they are in school and teaching them habits of mental passivity and docility is mistaking the function of the school and doing the children real harm. Scientific education not only needs freedom for the child in order to collect data, but liberty is its very basis; “liberty is activity,” says Madame Montessori in her book called “The Montessori Method.” Activity is the basis of life, consequently training children to move and act is training them for life, which is the proper office of the schoolroom. The object of liberty is the best interests of the whole group; this becomes the end of the liberty allowed the children. Everything which does not contribute to it must be suppressed, while the greatest care is taken to foster every action with a useful scope. In order to give the pupils the largest possible scope for such useful activity, they are allowed a very large amount of freedom in the classroom. They may move about, talk to each other, place their tables and chairs where they please, and, what is of more significance, each pupil may choose what work he will do, and may work at one thing as long or as short a time as he wishes. She says, “A room in which all the children move about usefully, intelligently, and voluntarily, without committing any rough or rude act, would seem to me a classroom very well disciplined indeed.” Discipline, in short, is ability to do things independently, not submission under restraint.

      In order to bring about this active discipline, which allows free scope for any useful work, and at the same time does not stifle the spontaneous impulses of the child, the ordinary methods of discipline are done away with, and a technique is developed to emphasize the positive, not the negative, side of discipline. Montessori has described it in this way: “As to punishments, we have many times come in contact with children who disturbed the others, without paying any attention to our corrections. Such children were at once examined by the physician. When the case proved to be that of a normal child, we placed one of the little tables in a corner of the room, and in this way isolated the child, having him sit in a comfortable little armchair, so placed that he might see his companions at work, and giving him those games and toys to which he was most attracted. This isolation almost always succeeded in calming the child; from his position he could see the entire assembly of his companions, and the way in which they carried on their work was an object-lesson much more efficacious than any words of the teacher could possibly have been. Little by little he would come to see the advantages of being one of the company working so busily before his eyes, and he would really wish to go back and do as the others did.” The corrections which the teachers first offer never take the form of scoldings; the child is quietly told that what he is doing is not polite or disturbs the other children. Then he is told how he ought to behave to be a pleasant companion, or his attention is diverted to a piece of work. Because children are working on something of their own choice, and when they want to, and because they may move and talk enough so that they do not get nervously tired, there is very little need for any “punishment.” Except for an isolated case of real lawlessness, such as Montessori refers to in the quotation just cited, the visitor to one of her schools sees very little need of negative discipline. The teachers’ corrections are practically all for small breaches of manners or for carelessness.

      Activity founded on liberty being the guiding principle of the Montessori schools, activity is expended by the child on two sorts of material. Montessori believes that the child needs practice in the actions of daily life; that, for example, he should be taught how to take care of and wait on himself. Part of the work is accordingly directed to this end. She also believes that the child possesses innate faculties which should be allowed to develop to their fullest; consequently part of the work is designed to give adequate expression to these faculties. These exercises for the culture of the inner potentialities of the child she considers the more important of the two. The child needs to know how to adjust himself to his environment in order to be independent and happy; but an imperfect development of the child’s faculties is an imperfect development of life itself; so the real object of education consists in furnishing active help to the normal expansion of the life of the child.

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