1902
THE CHILD
AND
CURRICULUM
by
John Dewey
"THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
The R. W.B.Jackson
I Library
OISE
LIBRARY
THE ONTARiO INSTITUTE
FOR STUD'E CATION
TORONTO C A DA
V / "
D5I1
AUG 9 1356 *
THE CHILD
AND
THE CURRICULUM
by
John Dewey
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
CHICAGO & LONDON
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS, CHICAGO & LONDON
The University of Toronto Press, Toronto 5, Canada
Copyright 1902 by The University of Chicago. All rights
reserved. Published 1902. Twenty-eighth Impression 1966
Printed in the United States of America
THE CHILD AND THE CURRICULUM
THE CHILD AND THE
CURRICULUM
The Child and the Curriculum
Profound differences in theory are never gratuitous or invented.
They grow out of conflicting elements in a genuine problem a
problem which is genuine just because the elements, taken as
they stand, are conflicting.jAny significant problem involves con
ditions that for the moment contradict each other. Solution
comes only by getting away from the meaning of terms that is
already fixed upon and coming to see the conditions from an-
The Child and the Curriculum
other point of view, and hence in a fresh light. But this recon
struction means travail of thought. Easier than thinking with sur
render of already formed ideas and detachment from facts already
learned is just to stick by what is already said, looking about for
something with which to buttress it against attack.
Thus sects arise: schools of opinion. Each selects that set of
conditions that appeals to it; and then erects them into a com
plete and independent truth, instead of treating them as a factor
in a problem, needing adjustment.
The fundamental factors in the educative process are an im
mature, undeveloped being; and certain social aims, meanings,
values incarnate in the matured experience of the adult. The
educative process is the due interaction of these forces. Such a
conception of each in relation to the other as facilitates com-
pletest and freest interaction is the essence of educational theory.
> But here comes the effort of thought. It is easier to see the
conditions in their separateness, to insist upon one at the expense
of the other, to make antagonists of them, than to discover a
reality to which each belongs. The easy thing is to seize upon
something in the nature of the child, or upon something in the
developed consciousness of the adult, and insist upon that as the
key to the whole problem. When this happens a really serious
practical problem that of interaction is transformed into an
unreal, and hence insoluble, theoretic problem. Instead of seeing
The Child and the Curriculum
the educative steadily and as a whole, we see conflicting terms.
We get the case of the child vs. the curriculum; of the individual
nature vs. social culture. Below all other divisions in pedagogic
opinion lies this opposition.
The child lives in a somewhat narrow world of personal con
tacts. Things hardly come within his experience unless they
touch, intimately and obviously, his own well-being, or that of
his family and friends. His world is a world of persons with their
personal interests, rather than a realm of facts and laws. Not
truth, in the sense of conformity to external fact, but affection and
sympathy, is its keynote. As against this, the course of study met
in the school presents material stretching back indefinitely in
time, and extending outward indefinitely into space. The child is
taken out of his familiar physical environment, hardly more than
a square mile or so in area, into the wide world yes, and even to
the bounds of the solar system. His little span of personal
memory and tradition is overlaid with the long centuries of the
history of all peoples.
Again, the child's life is an integral, a total one. He passes
quickly and readily from one topic to another, as from one spot
to another, but is not conscious of transition or break. There is
no conscious isolation, hardly conscious distinction. The things
that occupy him are held together by the unity of the personal
and social interests which his life carries along. Whatever is
5
The Child and the Curriculum
uppermost in his mind constitutes to him, for the time being, the
whole universe. That universe is fluid and fluent; its contents
dissolve and re-form with amazing rapidity. But, after all, it is the
child's own world. It has the unity and completeness of his own
life. He goes to school, and various studies divide and fractionize
the world for him. Geography selects, it abstracts and analyzes
one set of facts, and from one particular point of view. Arith
metic is another division, grammar another department, and so
on indefinitely.
Again, in school each of these subjects is classified. Facts are
torn away from their original place in experience and rearranged
with reference to some general principle. Classification is not a
matter of child experience; things do not come to the individual
pigeonholed. The vital ties of affection, the connecting bonds of
activity, hold together the variety of his personal experiences.
The adult mind is so familiar with the notion of logically ordered
facts that it does not recognize it cannot realize the amount of
separating and reformulating which the facts of direct experience
have to undergo before they can appear as a "study," or branch
of learning. A principle, for the intellect, has had to be distin
guished and defined; facts have had to be interpreted in relation
to this principle, not as they are in themselves. They have had to
be regathered about a new center which is wholly abstract and
ideal. All this means a development of a special intellectual in-
The Child and the Curriculum
terest. It means ability to view facts impartially and objectively;
that is, without reference to their place and meaning in one's
own experience. It means capacity to analyze and to synthe
size. It means highly matured intellectual habits and the com
mand of a definite technique and apparatus of scientific inquiry.
The studies as classified are the product, in a word, of the science
of the ages, not of the experience of the child.
These apparent deviations and differences between child and
curriculum might be almost indefinitely widened. But we have
here sufficiently fundamental divergences: first, the narrow but >
personal world of the child against the impersonal but infinitely
extended world of space and time; second, the unity, the single
wholeheartedness of the child's life, and the specializations and
divisions of the curriculum; third, an abstract principle of logical
classification and arrangement, and the practical and emotional
bonds of child life.
From these elements of conflict grow up different educational
sects. One school fixes its attention upon the importance of the
subject-matter of the curriculum as compared with the contents
of the child's own experience. It is as if they said: Is life petty,
narrow, and crude? Then studies reveal the great, wide universe
with all its fulness and complexity of meaning. Is the life of the
child egoistic, self-centered, impulsive? Then in these studies is
found an objective universe of truth, law, and order. Is his ex-
The Child and the Curriculum
perience confused, vague, uncertain, at the mercy of the mo
ment's caprice and circumstance? Then studies introduce a world
arranged on the basis of eternal and general truth; a world where
all is measured and defined. Hence the moral: ignore and mini
mize the child's individual peculiarities, whims, and experiences.
They are what we need to get away from. They are to be obscured
or eliminated. As educators our work is precisely to substitute for
these superficial and casual affairs stable and well-ordered realities;
and these are found in studies and lessons.
Subdivide each topic into studies; each study into lessons; each
lesson into specific facts and formulae. Let the child proceed step
by step to master each one of these separate parts, and at last he
will have covered the entire ground. The road which looks so
long when viewed in its entirety is easily traveled, considered as
a series of particular steps. Thus emphasis is put upon the logical
subdivisions and consecutions of the subject-matter. Problems of
instruction are problems of procuring texts giving logical parts
and sequences, and of presenting these portions in class in a simi
lar definite and graded way. Subject-matter furnishes the end,
and it determines method. The child is simply the immature be
ing who is to be matured; he is the superficial being who is to be
deepened; his is narrow experience which is to be widened. It is
his to receive, to accept. His part is fulfilled when he is ductile
and docile.
8
The Child and the Curriculum
J I Not so, says the other sect. The child is the starting-point, the
*
center, and the end. His development, his growth, is the ideal. It
alone furnishes the standard. To the growth of the child all stud
ies are subservient; they are instruments valued as they serve the
needs of growth. Personality, character, is more than subject-
matter. Not knowledge or information, but self-realization, is the
goal. To possess all the world of knowledge and lose one's own
self is as awful a fate in education as in religion. Moreover, sub
ject-matter never can be got into the child from without. ^Learn
ing is active. It involves reaching out of the mind. It involves
organic assimilation starting from within. Literally, we must take
our stand with the child and our departure from him. It is he
and not the subject-matter which determines both quality and
quantity of learning.
The only significant method is the method of the mind as it
reaches out and assimilates. Subject-matter is but spiritual' food,
possible nutritive material. It cannot digest itself; it cannot of its
own accord turn into bone and muscle and blood. The source of
.j
whatever is dead, mechanical, and formal in schools is found pre
cisely in the subordination of the life and experience of the child
to the curriculum. It is because of this that
"study" has become
a synonym for what is irksome, and a lesson identical with a taski.
This fundamental opposition of child and curriculum set up
by these two modes of doctrine can be duplicated in a series of
The Child and the Curriculum
other terms.
"Discipline*' is the watchword of those who mag
nify the course of study; "interest" that of those who blazon
"The Child" upon their banner. The standpoint of the former is
logical; that of the latter psychological. The first emphasizes the
necessity of adequate training and scholarship on the part of the
teacher; the latter that of need of sympathy with the child, and
knowledge of his natural instincts. "Guidance and control" are
the catchwords of one school; "freedom and initiative" of the
other. Law is asserted here; spontaneity proclaimed there. The
old, the conservation of what has been achieved in the pain and
toil of the ages, is dear to the one; the new, change, progress, wins
the affection of the other. Inertness and routine, chaos and an
archism, are accusations bandied back and forth. Neglect of the
sacred authority of duty is charged by one side, only to be met by
counter-charges of suppression of individuality through tyranni
cal despotism.
Such oppositions are rarely carried to their logical conclusion.
Common-sense recoils at the extreme character of these results.
They are left to theorists, while common-sense vibrates back and
forward in a maze of inconsistent compromise. The need of get
ting theory and practical common-sense into closer connection
suggests a return to our original thesis: that we have here condi
tions which are necessarily related to each other in the educative
process, since this is precisely one of interaction and adjustment.
10
The Child and the Curriculum
What, then, is the problem? It is just to get rid of the preju
dicial notion that there is some gap in kind (as distinct from
degree) between the child's experience and the various forms of
subject-matter that make up the course of study. From the side
of the child, it is a question of seeing how his experience already
contains within itself elements facts and truths of just the same
sort as those entering into the formulated study; and, what is of
more importance, of how it contains within itself the attitudes,
the motives, and the interests which have operated in developing
and organizing the subject-matter to the plane which it now oc
cupies. From the side of the studies, it is a question of interpret
ing them as outgrowths of forces operating in the child's life, and
of discovering the steps that intervene between the child's pres
ent experience and their richer maturity. ^
Abandon the notion of subject-matter as something fixed and
ready-made in itself, outside the child's experience; cease think
ing of the child's experience as also something hard and fast; see
it as something fluent, embryonic, vital; and we realize that the
child and the_oirriculum_are simply two limits which define a
single process. Just as two points define a straight line, so the
present standpoint of the child and the facts and truths of stud
ies define instruction. It is continuous reconstruction, moving/
from the child's present experience out into that represented by
the organized bodies of truth that we call studies.
11
The Child and the Curriculum
On the face of it, the various studies, arithmetic, geography,
language, botany, etc., are themselves experience they are that
of the race. They embody the cumulative outcome of the efforts,
the
strivings, and the successes of the human race generation after
generation. They present this, not as a mere accumulation, not as
a miscellaneous heap of separate bits of experience, but in some
organized and systematized way that is, as reflectively formu
lated.
Hence, the facts and truths that enter into the child's present
experience, and those contained in the subject-matter of studies,
are the initial and final terms of one reality. To oppose one to the
other is to oppose the infancy and maturity of the same growing
life; it is to set the moving tendency and the final result of the
same process over against each other; it is to hold that the nature
and the destiny of the child war with each other.
If such be the case, the problem of the relation of the child
and the curriculum presents itself in this guise: Of_ what use, ed
ucationally speaking, is it to be able to see the end in the begin
ning? How does it assist us in dealing with the early stages of
growth to be able to anticipate its later phases? The studies, as
we have agreed, represent the possibilities of development inher
ent in the child's immediate crude experience. But, after all, they
are not parts of that present and immediate life. Why, then, or
how, make account of them?
12
The Child and the Curriculum
Asking such a question suggests its own answer. To see the
outcome is to know in what direction the present experience is
moving, provided it move normally and soundly. The far-away
point, which is of no significance to us simply as far away, be
comes of huge importance the moment we take it as defining a
present direction of movement. Taken in this way it is no remote
and distant result to be achieved, but a guiding method in deal
ing with the present. The systematized and defined experience of
the adult mind, in other words, is of value to us in interpreting
the child's life as it immediately shows itself, and in passing on
to guidance or direction.
Let us look for a moment at these two ideas: interpretation
and guidance. The childXpresent experience is in no way self-
explanatory. It is not final, but transitional. It is nothing com
plete in itself, but just a sign or index of certain growth-tenden
cies. As long as we confine our gaze to what the child here and
now puts forth, we are confused and misled. We cannot read its
meaning. Extreme depreciations of the child morally and intel
lectually, and sentimental idealizations of him, have their root in
a common fallacy. Both spring from taking stages of a growth or
movement as something cut off and fixed. The first fails to see
the promise contained in feelings and deeds which, taken by
themselves, are uncompromising and repellent; the second fails to
see that even the most pleasing and beautiful exhibitions are but
13
The Child and the Curriculum
signs, and that they begin to spoil and rot the moment they are
treated as achievements.
What we need is something which will enable us to interpret,
to appraise, the elements in the child's present puttings forth and
fallings away, his exhibitions of power and weakness, in the light
of some larger growth-process in which they have their place.
Only in this way can we discriminate. If we isolate the child's
present inclinations, purposes, and experiences from the place
they occupy and the part they have to perform in a developing
experience, all stand upon the same level; all alike are equally
good and equally bad. But in the movement of life different ele
ments stand upon different planes of value. Some of the child's
deeds are symptoms of a waning tendency; they are survivals in
functioning of an organ which has done its part and is passing
out of vital use. To give positive attention to such qualities is to
arrest development upon a lower level. It is systematically to
maintain a rudimentary phase of growth. Other activities are
signs of a culminating power and interest; to them applies the
maxim of striking while the iron is hot. As regards them, it is
perhaps a matter of now or never. Selected, utilized, emphasized,
they may mark a turning-point for good in the child's whole ca
reer; neglected, an opportunity goes, never to be recalled. Other
acts and feelings are prophetic; they represent the dawning of
flickering light that will shine steadily only in the far future. As
14
The Child and the Curriculum
regards them there is little at present to do but give them fair and
full chance, waiting for the future for definite direction.
Just as, upon the whole, it was the weakness of the "old educa
tion" that it made invidious comparisons between the immatu
rity of the child and the maturity of the adult, regarding the for
mer as something to be got away from as soon as possible and as
much as possible; so it is the danger of the "new education" that
it regard the child's present powers and interests as something
finally significant in themselves. In truth, his learnings and
achievements are fluid and moving. They change from day to day
and from hour to hour.
It will do harm if child-study leave in the popular mind the
impression that a child of a given age has a positive equipment
of purposes and interests to be cultivated just as they stand. In
terests in reality are but attitudes toward possible experiences; ^^
they are not achievements; their worth is in the leverage they af
ford, not in the accomplishment they represent. To take the phe-
.nomena presented at a given age as in any way self-explanatory
or self-contained is inevitably to result in indulgence and spoiling, j
Any power, whether of child or adult, is indulged when it is takea
'
on its given and present level in consciousness. Its genuine mean- >,
ing is in the propulsion it affords toward a higher level. It is just
something to do with. Appealing to the interest upon the present
plane means excitation; it means playing with a power so as con-
15
The Child and the Curriculum
tinually to stir it up without directing it toward definite achieve
ment. Continuous initiation, continuous starting of activities that
do not arrive, is, for all practical