{"id":2004,"date":"2010-04-17T19:49:42","date_gmt":"2010-04-18T02:49:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.leftyparent.com\/blog\/?p=2004"},"modified":"2011-02-16T18:07:06","modified_gmt":"2011-02-17T02:07:06","slug":"education-alternatives-102-mann-dewey-lane","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.leftyparent.com\/blog\/2010\/04\/17\/education-alternatives-102-mann-dewey-lane\/","title":{"rendered":"Education Alternatives 102: Mann, Dewey & Lane"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>
Education Innovators Horace Mann, John Dewey & Homer Lane<\/figcaption><\/figure>Following up on my recent \u201cSchool Alternatives 101\u201d<\/a> post, I want to share some quotes from three great educational innovators who were \u201cparents\u201d (in this case, all \u201cfathers\u201d) of the three types of educational alternatives I talked about in my post. I want to focus on their visions\u2019 of who drives the educational process, which I believe is a key way to distinguish these three approaches from each other. This may seem like \u201ceducation-wonk\u201d stuff to some of you, but I think it is really important, even from a parent\u2019s point of view, when considering educational options for your and other kids.
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\nThe three innovators I am talking about are…
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\n1. Horace Mann<\/a>, the progenitor of the American public school system in the early 19th Century.
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\n2. John Dewey<\/a>, who set the philosophical basis of American secular\/progressive\/liberal education in the early 20th Century.
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\n3. Homer Lane<\/a>, a lesser know Briton and contemporary of Dewey, who was the mentor of A.S. Neill and the \u201cfree school\u201d movement.
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\nThe inspiration for this post was an article by Ronald Swartz in the most recent Spring 2010 Education Revolution Magazine<\/em><\/a> (which is edited by my friend and colleague Ron Miller). Swartz\u2019s piece is titled \u201cJohn Dewey and Homer Lane: The Odd Couple among Educational Theorists\u201d and focuses on this issue of who drives the educational process. According to Swartz, \u201cDewey and Lane are the founding fathers of two distinct twentieth century educational reform movements.\u201d
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\nDewey and Lane represent key \u201cparents\u201d to two of the educational alternatives, \u201cholistic\u201d and \u201cfree\u201d schools that I talked about in my previous piece. To enhance and complete the comparison, I think it is useful to compare the ideas of these two to the words of Horace Mann, a Unitarian (like me), and an educational visionary who has had arguably more impact on the American education system over the past 180 years than anyone else. Besides his role launching universal mandatory education of youth in our country, his words speak clearly to the vision of \u201cinstructional\u201d schools, the alternative that is clearly predominant in America.
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\nAgain, in reading their quotes, we are looking at the process of education, that is, who drives the direction of a kid\u2019s education. Every kid is different, and if the kid that you are concerned about does not seem to be thriving in the conventional instructional school, you may want to try and find and consider a holistic or even a free school.
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\nNote that the italics <\/em>below are all mine to highlight certain words or phrases in their quotes.
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\nHorace Mann and State-Driven Instructional Education<\/strong>
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\nI get my Mann quotes from a site called \u201cBrainy Quote\u201d<\/a>…
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\nOn education as a tool of societal social engineering…<\/p>\n

\n1. A house without books is like a room without windows. No man has a right <\/em>to bring up his children without surrounding them with books, if he has the means to buy them.<\/p>\n

2. Education alone <\/em>can conduct us to that enjoyment which is, at once, best in quality and infinite in quantity.<\/p>\n

3. Education is our only <\/em>political safety. Outside of this ark all is deluge.<\/p>\n

4. Education then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is the great equalizer <\/em>of the conditions of men, the balance-wheel of the social machinery.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

On the moralistic basis for education as social engineering and reform…<\/p>\n

5. Let us not be content to wait and see what will happen, but give us the determination to make the right things happen<\/em>.<\/p>\n

6. Be ashamed <\/em>to die until you have won some victory for humanity.<\/p>\n

7. If evil is inevitable, how are the wicked accountable? Nay, why do we call men wicked at all? Evil is inevitable, but is also remediable<\/em>.<\/p>\n

8. Jails and prisons are the complement of schools; so many less as you have of the latter, so many more must you have of the former.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And on the teaching process…<\/p>\n

9. A teacher who is attempting to teach without inspiring the pupil with a desire to learn is hammering on cold iron.<\/p>\n

10. Manners <\/em>easily and rapidly mature into morals.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I can clearly see in Mann\u2019s quotes his vision that education must be driven by the state, and in fact he was successful in getting his home state of Massachusetts to pass the first universal compulsory education, which inspired other states to follow. Schools alone can save our democracy by instructing all kids on exactly what they need to know to be righteous American citizens.
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\nI think it is particularly interesting that the father of our public school system was not at all about reading, writing and arithmetic (which later became the staples of public education and are the featured skills today in most high-stakes testing). Mann was about instructing all of America\u2019s children \u2013 Protestant, Catholic or Heathen \u2013 in good non-sectarian Protestant values \u2013 on which to build a unifying moral basis for American society (Protestant style, of course).
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\nIt was American Catholics, migrating to the U.S. in ever greater numbers throughout the 19th Century, who led the fight to eventually remove this religious indoctrination from the public schools. It was replaced by the \u201cThree Rs\u201d (which facilitated the education of the worker-bees of the Industrial Revolution) that still dominate state-standardized instructional education today.
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\nJohn Dewey and the Teacher-Driven Holistic Vision<\/strong>
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\nFrom Dewey\u2019s book, Experience and Education…<\/p>\n

1. Unless a given experience leads out into a field previously unfamiliar no problems arise, while problems are the stimulus to thinking… it is part of the educator\u2019s responsibility<\/em> to see equally to two things: First, that the problem grows out of the conditions of the experience being had in the present, and that it is within the range of the capacity of students; and secondly, that it is such that it arouses in the learner an active quest for information and for production of new ideas<\/em>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

From Dewey\u2019s essay, \u201cThe Child and the Curriculum\u201d…<\/p>\n

2. The value of the formulated wealth of knowledge that makes up the course of study is that it may enable the educator to determine the environment of the child, and thus, by indirection, to direct. Its primary value, its primary indication, is for the teacher, not the child.<\/em> It says to the teacher; Such and such are capacities, the fulfillments, in truth and beauty and behavior, open to these children. Now see to it that day by day the conditions are such that their own activities move inevitably in this direction, toward such culmination of themselves.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Swartz notes in his article that, \u201cFor Dewey, the teacher was a behind-the-scenes authority who should help students learn those ideas and values which society considered to be important.\u201d Dewey added this element of the teacher as the highly talented artist that would direct their students own sense of inquiry to obtain the knowledge that society wanted to have, which is beyond Mann\u2019s more external vision of compulsion.
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\nHomer Lane and the Student-Led Free School Vision<\/strong>
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\nIn his book, Talks to Parents and Teachers (page 109), Lane says…<\/p>\n

The relationship between teacher and child should be pure democracy \u2013 the child should not be on the defensive, but should be free to ask all questions<\/em>… self-government must be given, both in the team play of games and still more in team play made possible for work… We must give responsibility for, say, history and get the class to discuss the syllabus and the allotment of time to the part of it, and to assume responsibility for getting through it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Swartz calls Lane\u2019s approach \u201cthe policy of personal responsibility\u201d, and definitely speaks to an educational curriculum and process driven by the student and not by the state, that breaks radically from both Mann and Dewey. As a contemporary of Dewey, though across the ocean, he was the alternative road less taken to the conventional instructional model put in motion by Mann. Lane was the educational mentor of A.S. Neill<\/a>, who later started Summerhill, the most famous free school in the world, which has inspired many others, including Sudbury Valley.
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\nAs a parent, I think you should know about these three very different types of schools, though many or most families do not have the resources to send their kids to alternative schools, which generally are tuition-based rather than public (tax-based). Depending on your own expectations and your kid\u2019s proclivities for self-direction, learning style and integration of education in real life, you may want to consider these options or add your voice to the beginning effort to broaden the range of public charter school choices.
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\nMy partner Sally and I had the resources to homeschool our kids during their high school years in a free school type approach generally called \u201cunschooling\u201d. (See my post titled \u201cUnschooling Rather than High Schooling\u201d<\/a> about how our son Eric took to this approach.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Following up on my recent \u201cSchool Alternatives 101\u201d post, I want to share some quotes from three great educational innovators who were \u201cparents\u201d (in this case, all \u201cfathers\u201d) of the three types of educational alternatives I talked about in my post. I want to focus on their visions\u2019 of who drives the educational process, which […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[786,37,788,779,789,782,780,785,783,781,784,790,791,787,6],"class_list":["post-2004","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-our-ongoing-strategy-for-learning","tag-a-s-neill","tag-alternative-education","tag-alternative-pedagogy","tag-education-alternatives","tag-education-revolution-magazine","tag-free-schools","tag-holistic-schools","tag-homer-lane","tag-horace-mann","tag-instructional-schools","tag-john-dewey","tag-john-dewey-and-homer-lane","tag-ronald-swartz","tag-summerhill-school","tag-unschooling"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.leftyparent.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2004","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.leftyparent.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.leftyparent.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.leftyparent.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.leftyparent.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2004"}],"version-history":[{"count":23,"href":"https:\/\/www.leftyparent.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2004\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2658,"href":"https:\/\/www.leftyparent.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2004\/revisions\/2658"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.leftyparent.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2004"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.leftyparent.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2004"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.leftyparent.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2004"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}