PRAGMATISM IN EDUCATION

PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION - ED 501

Reina Danica D. Delos Reyes MA Ed Mathematics
January 12, 2013

I. Education as a Social Institution

John Dewey pointed out that education is scarcely anything at all unless it is a social institution.

Pragmatism must approach education first and foremost a social phenomenon. Society must have an institution whose reason for existence is to carry learning activities forward.

What makes the school necessary?

1. It supplies the volume of learning each new generation needs.

2. The heritage of the past may function fruitfully in the present. 3. Language symbols are means by which heritage is communicated.

What are the functions of the school?

1. It can represent society to the child in a simplified form which makes learning possible. 2. The school can be selective in a qualitative, (if not ethical) manner as it represents the society to the young. 3. It has the responsibility of giving the child a balanced and genuinely representative acquaintance with society.

II. The Pupil

Biological

Psychological

Sociological

The Pupil
Pupil evolves into a distinct and concrete center of experience who must be guided.
Individuality is a primary consideration. (Individual differences) There are no passive receivers; they are ever and always reaching out to engage in the flow of experience.

The Pupil
He is an organism who participates in meanings and therefore value experiences which animals do not have.

Emergence of selfhood which will lead to (1) retention of experience, (2) gaining of meanings from the other experiences of other groups, and (3) carrying over of the learning from the past experiences of generations.

III. The Objectives of Education

More Education!

The Objectives of Education

1. Learning situations, both informal and within the schools, always are episodes of continuous movement.
2. Give the learner experience in effective experiencing. 3. Wherever growth may lead, there must be continuity in the means by which objectives are reached.

The Objectives of Education

4. Freedom of activities which involves the selection of activities which have a longerterm value than the expression of impulse.
5. It must always start from a social and human center. 6. Social efficiency which mean many sided effectiveness in maintaining social relations of all kinds.

IV. The Educative Process

A) A Reform in Education
Traditional too formal Pragmatists View cycle of learning is not mechanical

education of imposition
subject matter were contained in books / heads of elders operate on assumptions

greater freedom of activity

paralleled learning from texts and teachers with learning through experience acquisition of skills by making skills a means of realizing ends direct acquaintance of the world as changing

static

B. The Educative Use of Experience

1. All learning begins in experience.

2. The unit of study is not necessarily a given class period or given course.

3. Learning will go beyond the walls of the school.

The problems grows out of the conditions of experience being had in the present, and that it within the range of the capacity of the students, and
It arouses in the learner an active quest for information and for production of new ideas.

4. Continuity and connectedness of experience. It must:

arouse curiosity.

strengthen initiative.
set up desires and purposes that are sufficiently intense to carry a person over dead places in the future.

C. The Teacher
The responsibility of the teacher is more complex. They act like parents at home they give guidance. They plan for learning but in a different way.

The teacher
1. is a member of the learning group who must assess the capacities and the needs of the learner. 2. must arrange conditions which provide the subject matter and content for experiences that satisfy these needs and develops their capacities.

The teacher
3. must respect the freedom of the pupils. 4. calls for a careful deliberation of pupils action. 5. understands that occasional improvisation will be a normal part of the free play of intelligence, on the part of both teacher and pupil.

D. Method
Creative and constructive projects Discussions

Conventional Laboratory works

Educational trips

Scientific Approach The Experimental Method

1.Always begin with experience.

2.Discovering of the problem.

3.Examining the problem.

4.Formulating of hypothesis.
5.Forming and working out of tentative solutions. 6.Resolution.

THE END.
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