John Dewey The Child And The Curriculum Analysis

Midterm Exam – The Child and the Curriculum John Dewey’s The Child and the Curriculum, written over a century ago, poses a question that can still prove relevant to teachers in this day and age. His primary question that he attempts to tackle in his paper, is simple: should education be tailored to a child’s specific needs, or to a set curriculum? Throughout the paper, he argues that the tug of war between child and curriculum is ultimately futile; choosing one over the other will still prove detrimental. Ultimately, Dewey says “all depends upon the activity which the mind itself undergoes in responding to what is presented from without” (Dewey, 1906, p.39). In other words, Dewey believes that experience is the key to learning, and the ideal curriculum should focus on …show more content…
31). Elliott herself states that she needed to “deal with [the topic of discrimination] in a concrete way, and not just talk about it. [She] had talked about racism since the first day of school” (Peters, 1985). Riceville, at that time, both when the experiment had been conducted with this particular third-grade class, and when the Frontline documentary had been filmed, was a very small, predominately-white Christian community, where the children, while they had a vague idea of what discrimination was, did not seem to truly grasp the concept when Elliott had first brought it up to them. So in order to most effectively teach them, according to The Child and the Curriculum, Elliott would have to “psychologize it—that is, […] to take it and to develop it within the range and scope of the child 's life” (Dewey, 1906, p. 38). By running this experiment, she is doing just that—she is establishing a small society right in her own classroom, complete with the discrimination and inequality that one would have seen leveraged toward people of color, and by exposing her students to