Making a Difference

In their book, Multiple Voices, Multiple Texts the authors, Dornan, Rosen, and Wilson, provide great examples of how education has changed. Education has changed to adjust to society as the centuries go by. There are still some Middle Eastern countries that do not provide a big emphasize on education. Of course there are a lot of differences in education from country to country, but Multiple Voices, Multiple Texts deals with education in the United States. Toward the nineteenth century education began having drastic changes. Dornan, Rosen, and Wilson write, “The traditional view had been that the only effective education methodology was a step-by-step procedure that instructed in manageable increments.” Children would first have to master one part of the lesson to be able to move on to the next. This provided for a lot of many bored kids, very often referred to as trouble makers in the nineteenth century. In the nineteenth century there were no programs that were offered to advanced kids. There were a lot of people that tried to counter this method amongst them was John Dewey.

Since I did not know who John Dewey was I decided to do a little bit of research about him. Wikipedia describes John Dewey as, “an important early developer of the philosophy of pragmatism and one of the founders of functional psychology. He was a major representative of the progressive and progressive populist philosophies of schooling during the first half of the 20th century in the USA.” Dewey was one of the philosophers that impacted education in the twentieth century. Dewey came up with educational theories that were presented in a few of his books among them, My Pedagogic Creed and The Child and the Curriculum. Through his different writing he carried on a similar theme, he argued that education and learning are social and interactive process, thus social reform had to take place in the school. Dewey believed that preparing kids for the future gave them authority over themselves.

I agree with John Dewey’s belief that more real-life lessons should be applied to school. I think that critical thinking is one of the most important aspects of education. Without critical thinking all we can do is answer several multiple choice questions or answer a question that is bluntly addressed in the textbook. I have met a lot of students who can read something out of a textbook and answer one of the questions perfectly, sometimes they do not even read the textbook they just go on a scavenger hunt for the answer. Although these students can answer these questions and memorize dates or facts for exams they have a hard time with critical thinking, with answering a question that is not directly answered in the book. I think that we need to make students stronger critical thinkers as opposed to having them go on scavenger hunts everyday as part of their education. By doing this, children are getting robbed of a strong foundation.