Dewey-related quasi hypotheses

Jane Addams, Dewey’s wife, and quite a few others –see prior entry– had quite a bit to do with the deepening with the early Dewey. He’s a collaborator, perhaps the strongest one , perhaps not, who records what a community of thinkers and valuers have jointly constructed together. Read about Addams in the Stanford Encylopedia of Philsophy.

What did Dewey have with schooling that he didn’t take to conclusion that others did take to conclusion. What was/were th final steps of belief and understading that he couldn’t?(a negative compulsion), wouldn’t?(a negative valuing) or hadn’t learned to (an absence of understanding) make?

Progressive Education

Initial notes from http://www.uvm.edu/~dewey/articles/proged.html

the term “progressive education” has been used to describe ideas and practices that aim to make schools more effective agencies of a democratic society. Although there are numerous differences of style and emphasis among progressive educators, they share the conviction that democracy means active participation by all citizens in social, political and economic decisions that will affect their lives. The education of engaged citizens, according to this perspective, involves two essential elements:

(1). Respect for diversity, meaning that each individual should be recognized for his or her own abilities, interests, ideas, needs, and cultural identity, and

(2). the development of critical, socially engaged intelligence, which enables individuals to understand and participate effectively in the affairs of their community in a collaborative effort to achieve a common good.

These elements of progressive education have been termed “child-centered” and “social reconstructionist” approaches, and while in extreme forms they have sometimes been separated, in the thought of John Dewey and other major theorists they are seen as being necessarily related to each other.

Parker’s Work (from http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory)

Late-nineteenth-century Chicago, home of a new university and one of the first settlement houses, Hull House, was unusually receptive to new ideas. It is no surprise, therefore, that it became a major center for the development of progressive education, the ideology that would become a dominant form in American educational thought for much of the twentieth century.

Parker came to Chicago in 1883 as principal of Cook County Normal School and its Practice School. Before coming to Chicago, Parker had developed an approach to education that rejected rote learning and enlisted the natural curiosity of children in the schooling process. John Dewey was also dissatisfied with traditional forms of schooling and when he came to the University of Chicago in 1894, he enrolled his children in Parker’s school. A frequent visitor at Hull House, Dewey was deeply influenced by Jane Addams’s social concerns. With his wife, Alice, Dewey established a laboratory school at the University of Chicago in which he could evaluate new approaches to teaching. He was greatly aided in this enterprise by Ella Flagg Young, who had been assistant superintendent of schools in Chicago before becoming a faculty member at the University of Chicago; she supervised the instruction in the lab school. Parker (whom Dewey thought of as “the father of progressive education”) also joined the faculty at Chicago in 1901, shortly before his death.

Progressive philosophy was based on an optimistic view of human nature. Progressive schools avoided the regimentation that characterized most schools of the era. The children who attended progressive schools learned in informal settings. These schools enlisted the spontaneous interests of the pupils and adapted the curriculum to the interests and needs of each child. The authoritarian approach was replaced by a more democratic mode and the ultimate goal, in Dewey’s terms, was for the classroom to be an “embryonic community” that would provide a model for a more democratic larger society.

After Parker’s death in 1902 and Dewey’s departure from Chicago, their ideas continued to influence educational practices for many years. The school Parker founded and that bears his name is still in existence; so is Dewey’s lab school. Young went on to become superintendent of schools in Chicago from 1909 to 1915. Carleton Washburne (whose mother had worked for Parker and who was also a friend of Dewey) served as superintendent of the suburban Winnetka schools. In the 1920s and 1930s, under the leadership of Washburne, Winnetka became a much-visited model of how progressive practices could be implemented. With Flora J. Cooke (who had taught Dewey’s son in the first grade at Cook County’s elementary school) and Perry Dunlap Smith (a former student at Parker’s school) Washburne founded the Winnetka Teachers College to prepare teachers to teach in the progressive tradition. After he left Chicago in 1904, Dewey devoted less of his attention to educational issues, but he continued to write about educational matters and served as president of the Progressive Education Association.

By the 1940s, progressive ideology and rhetoric (but not necessarily progressive practices) had become (in historian Lawrence Cremin’s words) the “conventional wisdom” in American classrooms. In the cold-war atmosphere of the 1950s, however, educational progressivism came under serious attack. Progressive education was seen as endorsing Dewey’s relativist ethics and as being insufficiently patriotic. Progressive curricula were held responsible for a lag in preparation for scientific and technological careers, culminating in the Sputnik crisis of 1957.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, progressive ideas reemerged in the “open classroom” movement whose ideology was more closely tied to the romanticism of the 1960s than the ideas of Dewey and Parker. That movement proved to be short-lived. A new reaction against progressive ideology emerged with the recession and tax revolt of the 1970s, followed by the publication of the report A Nation At Risk (1983), which led to a new emphasis on basics, national learning standards, and improving results on standardized tests, all of which went counter to the ideas of Dewey and Parker.

See references to early feminist pragmatists’ influences for example here:(http://www.purpleslurple.net/ps.php?theurl=http%3A%2F%2Fplato.stanford.edu%2Fentries%2Ffemapproach-pragmatism%2F#purp419) and throughout article.-referencing is extensive.

Influential partipants in movement

Jane Addams

from Nobelprize.org

(Laura) Jane Addams (September 6, 1860-May 21, 1935) won worldwide recognition in the first third of the twentieth century as a pioneer social worker in America, as a feminist, and as an internationalist.

She was born in Cedarville, Illinois, the eighth of nine children. Her father was a prosperous miller and local political leader who served for sixteen years as a state senator and fought as an officer in the Civil War; he was a friend of Abraham Lincoln whose letters to him began «My Dear Double D-’ed Addams». Because of a congenital spinal defect, Jane was not physically vigorous when young nor truly robust even later in life, but her spinal difficulty was remedied by surgery.

In 1881 Jane Addams was graduated from the Rockford Female Seminary, the valedictorian of a class of seventeen, but was granted the bachelor’s degree only after the school became accredited the next year as Rockford College for Women. In the course of the next six years she began the study of medicine but left it because of poor health, was hospitalized intermittently, traveled and studied in Europe for twenty-one months, and then spent almost two years in reading and writing and in considering what her future objectives should be. At the age of twenty-seven, during a second tour to Europe with her friend Ellen G. Starr, she visited a settlement house, Toynbee Hall, in London’s East End. This visit helped to finalize the idea then current in her mind, that of opening a similar house in an underprivileged area of Chicago. In 1889 she and Miss Starr leased a large home built by Charles Hull at the corner of Halsted and Polk Streets. The two friends moved in, their purpose, as expressed later, being «to provide a center for a higher civic and social life; to institute and maintain educational and philanthropic enterprises and to investigate and improve the conditions in the industrial districts of Chicago»1.

Miss Addams and Miss Starr made speeches about the needs of the neighborhood, raised money, convinced young women of well-to-do families to help, took care of children, nursed the sick, listened to outpourings from troubled people. By its second year of existence, Hull-House was host to two thousand people every week. There were kindergarten classes in the morning, club meetings for older children in the afternoon, and for adults in the evening more clubs or courses in what became virtually a night school. The first facility added to Hull-House was an art gallery, the second a public kitchen; then came a coffee house, a gymnasium, a swimming pool, a cooperative boarding club for girls, a book bindery, an art studio, a music school, a drama group, a circulating library, an employment bureau, a labor museum.

Francis w. Parker in Chicago Years (1896-1904)

Ella Flagg Young in Chicago years (1896-1904) –worked with Deweys in lab school

Alice Chipman Dewey

John Dewey

Students , colaborators, appreciators who later spread the word/did something

Jane Addams — Settlement House

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

William H. Kilpatrick

Margaret Namburg (the Child and the World)

George Counts — politically oriented progressive educator

Elsie Ripley Clapp (1882-1965)

Lucy Spraque Mithcell (1878-1967)

Took classes from Dewey at Teachers College, later she and husband were personal friends of Deweys

Bank Street School

Boyd Bode: Progressive Education at the Crossroads (1938)

Caroline Pratt: I Learn from Children (1948)

Carlton Washburne : What is Progressive Education (1952)

Goodlad: Non Graded schools (late 1950’s)

Theodore Sizer’s network of “essential schools”

Elliot Wigginton’s Foxfire Project (http://www.foxfire.org/)

Deborah Meier’s student centered Central Park East schools

Paul Goodman, George Dennsion… free school movement

Herb Kohl, George Dennison : Open Classroom Movement

Alfie Kohn

Studying and Communicating About Character

Emotions and

their generation

their processing

Self Image

Definitions of Character

Nurturance/Antinurturance factors in character growth

Developmental studies of character development in childhood through young adulthood

Philosophy of character development — Deweyan analysis and others

Character’s part in the facilitation/inhibition of learning

Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotions

Robert Plutchik created a “Wheel of Emotions” in 1980. It is so constructed to illustrate what he considered to be basic and composite emotions. (source article in Wikipedia)

Basic emotions:

Anger

Low: annoyance

High: rage

Disgust

Low: boredom

High:loathing

Sadness

Low: pensiveness

High: grief

Surprise

Low: distraction

High: amazement

Fear

Low: apprehension

High: terror

Trust

Low: acceptance

High: admiration

Joy

Low: serentiy

High: ecstasy

Anticipation

Low: interest

High: vigilance

Each of the basic emotions can be expressed over a range of intensity.

Advanced emotions are combinations of basic emotions

Optimism (Anticipation +Joy) with oppositie: Disappointment

Love = Joy + Acceptance with Remorse as opposite

Submission= Acceptance plus Fear with Contempt as opposite

Awe = Fear+Surprise with oppposite being Aggressiveness

Disappointment=Surprise +Sadness with opposite being Optimism

Remorse= Sadness plus Disguste with oppositie beng Love

Contempt = Disgust + anger with opposite being Submission

Aggressiveness = Anger + Anticipation with Oppositie being Awe

Then there are grouped emotions

Love

Affection

Lust

Longing

Joy

Cheerfulness

Zest

Contentment

Pride

Optimism

Entrallment

Relief

Surprise

Anger

Sadness

Fear

8:13 am 9/22 –>TO BE finished

We are closing in on grant submission

Today I have written my endorsement of the project for submission with the grant proposal. My aim was to show a literate and value-based commitment to the project and to participation therein.

Learning Cycles in Ever Larger Circles from Individual and Up

Time Scale: am/pm, Day, Week, Month: there are cycles for each. Each cycle will have its learning activities, some individual some group which ocur within these cycles. And, each cycle will have its consequences for group and individual. After each cycle there is feedback to the individual and group and teacher and grade and school

Level of learning unit: Individual, group (which may vary by subject or topic), class, grade, school. There is someone accountable at each level: School=Principal, Grade level=Team Leader, Classroom=Teacher, Group: Group Leader, Individual= Self and Parents.

Subject matter of learning: character-related/self-understanding, character-related/social observation, basic skills such as reading, history, arithmetic, physical education, music, etc.

Now that we have time scales and subjects and learning “units” the metatask is simple; namely, at each level the unit endeavors to get better at accurate and timely generation of appropriate behavior given the objectives which are presently being tackled. For any subject and any level of organization, from individual up to school, the idea is to have a summary by subject ,and for the cluster of all subjects, to improve upon: the result, for whichever level involved is both more accurate and more timely performance. We want the behavior that is being generated to improve in both quality and fluency since the last comparable measurement was made. [ comparable time unit: day-to-day, week to week , hour to hour, month to month, etc]. If the present rate of appropriate response compares poorly to unit in the recent past, then problem solving and change occur until an upward sloping learning line is retrieved.

At each level the investment of time and of problem solving activity and of celebration relates directly to the achievement of growth. Growth in social skill, growth in academic skill, growth in unit level “character” [which will have to be defined in terms that are objectively observed and charted].

Success, then, for all is measured in terms of meaningful academic and social growth.

The Character Questions

The following should be asked of any theory or view of character

How do you define character

What areas of human behavior involve character

Are there areas that are never or only unusually affected by/expressive of character

How do you explain character

As it is “expressed” ,in both highest and lowest forms, in the present- descriptive/transactional

As it is formed or evolved over time– developmental

As it is determined by various sub-elements –constitutional

RawlsmodelforMoralProcessing(2)

Continuing thoughts from and about “Reviving Rawls’ Linguistic Analogy [Hauser, Young, Cushman, Harvard/Cambridge]-In Press

First I’ll add more of the author’s material.. dissected a bit to show main thoughts. I’ll follow the outline with one or two questions about implications. [I've inserted modifications to the language/morals parallel based on findings about language learning research concerning early learning of 2nd & 3rd languages]

Hypothesis:(what follows is my dissection of the authors’ words) our moral faculty is equipped with a universal set of principles,

“with each culture setting up particular exceptions by means of tweaking the relevant parameters.

We want to understand the universal aspects as well as the degree of variation, what allows for it and how it is constrained. Many questions remain open.

Does the child’s environment provide her with enough information to construct a moral grammar, or

Does the child show competences that go beyond her exposure?

For example, does the child generate judgments about fairness and harm in the absence of direct pedagogy or indirect learning by watching others? If so, then this argues in favor of an even stronger analogy to language, in which the child produces grammatically structured and correct sentences in the absence of positive evidence, and despite negative evidence.

Thus, from an impoverished environment, the child generates a rich output of grammatical utterances in the case of language, and judgments about permissible actions in the case of morality.

Further, in the same way that we rapidly and effortlessly acquire our native language, [acquire 2nd and 3rd languages with relative ease before, say, 7 years of ag[[SPH]] and then slowly and agonizingly acquire second languages later in life,

does the acquisition of moral knowledge follow a similar developmental path?

Do we acquire our native moral norms with ease [and 2nd & third culture norms before 7] and without instruction, while

[after,say,7 years of age[SPH]]painstakingly trying to memorize all the details of a new culture’s mores, recalling the faux pas and punishable violations by writing them down on index cards? “

How did the moral faculty evolve?

We can look at intelligent mammals and examine their own apparent moral precepts. Do dogs, chimpanzees, gorillas, whales, dolphins, etc. distinguish between expectation followers and violators, does apparent intention have an influence on the judgement.

For example if a chimpanzee kills another accidentally while falling out of a tree… is that treated in a more forgiving fashion than if the chimpanzee ambushed another with a rock and killed her/him.

Sociobiology (Wilson in 70’s) focuses on similar territory but from a distinct position, one which starts from the premise that “moral systems evolved “to regulate temptation, with emotional responses designed to facilitate cooperation and to incite aggression toward those who cheat.

Where Rawls is interested in “how we act and how we think we ought to act” Wilson was interested in “the adaptive significance of such psychological mechanisms”. One is about mechanism (Rawls) and the other about adaptive significance (Wilson). They are distinct and complementary approaches.

Evidence for Rawlsian Approach?

RawlsmodelforMoralProcessing

“Reviving Rawls’ Linguistic Analogy [Hauser, Young, Cushman, Harvard/Cambridge]-In Press

Remember Chomsky’s prearticulate language processor that “automagically” bridges between thought and articulated langage; there is lingistic competence (“Language competence refers to the unconscious and inaccessible principles that make sentence production and comprehension possible” p 5

Rawls(1971) had analogy, Adam Smith, before him, (1759/1976) “argued for something akin to a moral grammar, and … The logic of the argument, however, comes from Noam Chomsky’s thinking on language specifically and the nature of knowledge more generally (1986; 1988; 2000; Saporta, 1978)”

The analogy led them to posit a moral grammar within a moral faculty and to voice the following questions

How can moral grammarians uncover its structure?

Are we aware of our moral grammar, its methods and moement to moment functionings within our judgements

Is there a “universal” moral grammar that allows each child to build a particular –ie personal– moral grammar

How does a child acquire that moral grammer — does the grammar that is constructed depend on the impoverishment or enrichment of the childs morally relevant experiences?

“Are there certain forms of brain damage that disrupt moral competence, but leave other forms of reasoning intact? (p3)

Is it localized in neural structures or particular tissues or processes?(SPH)

How did this processing (within the brain structures, and as a process)

This linguistic/organo/neurochemical postulate…. that said that there is, in effect, an “organ” that “learns,perceives and produces language. It contains a drive to acquire language and a set of prellinguistic principles for growing a language.

Perhaps it’s not yet clear where this is going but, hold on, the parallel if it exists has huge implications:–

“Prior to the revolution in linguistics ignited by Chomsky, it was widely held that language could be understood as a cultural construction learned through simple stimulus-response mechanisms. It was presumed that the human brain was more or less a blank slate upon which anything could be imprinted, including language. Chomsky, among others, challenged this idea with persuasive arguments that human knowledge of language must be guided in part by an innate faculty of the mind the faculty of language. It is precisely because of the structure of this faculty that children can acquire language in the absence of tutelage, and even in the presence of negative or impoverished input.”

“When linguists refer to these principles as the speaker’s grammar, they mean the rules or operations that allow any normally developing human to unconsciously generate and comprehend a limitless range of well formed sentences in their native language. When linguists refer to universal grammar they are referring to a theory about the set of all principles available to each child for acquiring a natural language. Before the child is born, she doesn’t know which language she will meet; and she may even meet two if she is born in a bilingual family. But she doesn’t need to know. What she has is a set of principles and parameters that prepares her to construct different grammars that characterize the world’s languages—dead ones, living ones, and those not yet conceived. The environment feeds her the particular sound patterns [or signs for those who are deaf] of the native language, thereby turning on the specific parameters that characterize the native language. “

“In sum this child, any child, comes equipped with a language learning and generating faculty . The “faculty of language” is divided into linguistic competence (“unconscious and inaccessible principles that make sentence production and comprehension possible”(4) and language performance:”What we say, to whom, and how, is the province of linguistic performance, and includes many other players of the brain, and many factors external to the brain, including other people, institutions, weather, and distance to one’s target audience.”(5)

Now consider the possibility that there is a parallel (similarly structured and operating, part-unconscious, part conscious and articulated&acted, structure behind what we know and do in the realms of behavior that involve ethics and morality. In this scenario, as with language “The child is born knowing the principle, even though she is not consciously aware of the knowledge she holds. The principle is operative but not expressed.” or expressible.

I find this analogy enlightening . There have been acts by children and animals, e.g. dogs, chimpanzees and other primates, which entailed risk and possibly sacrifice (e.g.,dog for human, wolf for pack, and child for child/adult/pet/sibling); by many measures they were heroic. that by this explanation the genesis of such acts came from a form of compassion that is not part of the talking and language-based centers of the actor, when there are such bases(i.e., dogs don’t talk or rationalize yet are capable of heroism). There have also been ethical epiphanies and consequent actions from children that those children would not be, were not in fact able, to explain. Yet those acts were not well explained or rationalized after the fact. A distinct “moral action engine” which generates moral acts quite apart from the person’s (dog/chimpanzee’s,etc) powers to explain those actions help explain what has been observed to this point.

Dual stations

I now have both computers (desk and portable) firing their outline at my opmlweblog. Plus have made initial efforts to get a twitter log going for activity and small thought tracking.

The stations’ outlines will not show the unified results but the website (http://spikehopmlblog.wordpress.com) will.

If I can figure out how — it would be good to have the twitter thoughts accumulated totally at one place and the last five on this site. In a sidebar.