SPIRITUALITY & WELLNESS

Lloyd Den Boer

However, no school influenced me as much as one that closed long ago— the University of Chicago lab school founded by John Dewey in 1896. I discovered this experimental school in the pages of the 1936 The Dewey School written by two of its teachers. Admittedly, the school’ s approach to education might strike you as odd, even careless; however, the accomplishments of its students may win you over, just as they did me.

One example is what the school’ s eight-yearolds learned while role-playing the daily life of ancient Phoenicians. The students intuited that their tribe’ s location— a rocky coast backed by mountains— required them to develop fishing and maritime trading for it to prosper. Accordingly, the students set about designing, building, and testing a model of a suitable ship. They addressed their need for shelter by experimenting with masonry mortars to hold together stones quarried from the mountains. As the students traded goods with other tribes around the Mediterranean Sea, they saw that writing and arithmetic would help to manage trade. Once the students’ desire for writing and arithmetic emerged, their teachers transitioned them from their improvised

systems to conventional numbers and letters. Soon, the students recognized that travel for trade would be more efficient if their boat could cross the Mediterranean Sea rather than hug its coastline. To do so, they explored navigation, and, focusing on the usefulness of the night sky, they developed and built a rudimentary astrolabe. As the students constructed solutions to the problems their tribe faced, their teachers reinforced knowledge drawn from economics, physics, chemistry, reading and writing, math, and astronomy.

Although this remarkable performance had very little to do with learning the history of ancient Phoenicia, Dewey wanted students to develop something he called social imagination. His was an age of rapid industrialization, when people from the countryside flowed into cities to work in emerging factories. For many, settled life in small, face-to-face communities, where every member directly contributed to the community, was over. Dewey foresaw that people newly thrown together in cities and working indistinguishable jobs would feel unnoticed and isolated, and believed that if lived experience could no longer show children how each person fit into the social fabric of their communities, then schools should. Students

22 | arta. net IMAGINE