First let me say that if Dewey where to sit and observe the teaching model in today’s modern public schools he would probably be appalled that so little has changed. Dewey’s concern for children learning from purely didactic lectures based on information from the past is still a problem today. (Dewey, 1963) Children have very little opportunity during a school day to learn by experience other then the walk to and from school.
I have a 14 year old son Steven. Last year I was called into a teachers conference to discuss Steven’s lack of motivation to follow the direction of his history teacher. The teacher began to explain to me that the students were asked to copy facts from a sheet of paper that I could tell was created over 20 years ago and transpose the facts to another sheet of paper. The teacher actually could not understand why my son lacked the motivation to perform this task.
Modern theorists like Kolb (1984) and Merrill (1994) have expanded off of the theories of Dewey to develop models for experiential and task centric teaching models. However, like Dewey, Kolb and Merrill are just as frustrated with the state of instruction in our schools and adult learning centers, as was Dewey at the turn of the century. Merrill (1994) has exclaimed in so many of his papers and lectures that “information is not instruction”, followed by an emphasis on the need for whole task centric instructional strategies.
Other then a few select progressive schools, the scene is generally the same in all of our U.S. based schools. From children in the 1st grade to adults in their first years of college, you can observe students sitting passively in their plastic molded desks, textbooks in hand, listening to the rants of the wise teacher or professor at the front of the room. The books are more colorful and now available in an electronic format, but in reality, very little has changed in a hundred years.
References
Dewey, J. (1963). Experience and education. New York: Collier Books.
Kolb, D. A. (1984). Experiential learning: Experience as the source of learning and development. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall.
Merrill, M.D. (1994) Instructional Design Theory. Englewood Cliffs, N.J: Educational Technology Publications