For about eight years at the turn of the Twentith Century, John Dewey and a group of dedicated teachers ran the labratory school at the University of Chicago. They were especially interested in working out the practical implications of Dewey's ideas about education. We show below a sketch of the scope and sequence of the school's curriculum that Dewey and his co-workers developed and refined during their time at the school.
Orientation of the School
Purpose of the School
Principles for Organizing the School
1. In all educative relationships, the starting point is the child's impulse to action (i.e., the desire to respond to stimuli in concrete form).
2. The educative process is to supply the materials, the positive and negative conditions, so that the child's expression, intellectually controlled, may take a normal direction that is social in both form and feeling.
Scope and Sequence of the Curriculum
* Curriculum must minister to the child's changing needs and interests - - it must be developmenally appropriate. At each age level, curriculum content or subject matter focuses on what the child is ready for. The focus for the youngest children is the home and the work people do to maintain family life. For slightly older children, the horizon widdens to take in -- first locally and then further afield -- occupations serving the home and community. At the time children develop a sense of time past versus time present, the curriculum content focuses on the remote past. The remainder of the school curriculum centers on a sequence of time periods up to the present.
* Curriculum involves the careful arrangement of the physical and social set up of the school. The school should provide space for children to act -- both mentally and physically: places to meet and discuss, places to work with one's hands, places for quite reflection, place to experiment or be messy.
* Curriculum involves a careful and discriminating search for subject matter.
* Subject matter (in agreement with the developing child) links what is valuable in the past experience, the present, and the future.
* As a child's growth is largely a matter of adaptations to group situations, both the content and the processes of the the curriculium should be social in nature.
Reference: Mayhew, K.C. and Edwards, A.C. (1936) The Dewey School. New York: Appleton-Century Croft Co.
The school that Dewey established exists today. You may visit it at http://www.ucls.uchicago.edu/