Educational Themes

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WEEK 8: THEMES BY WILLIAM MOLNAR PhD EDUCATION: GENERAL WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE FREE? (ADLER) 1. Freedom equals discipline 2. Freedom is doing what one pleases 3. Freedom is identical with duty 4. Freedom is political liberty through the disciplines of laws 5. Freedom is rights and duty 6. Free is economic freedom 7. If one is accorded all the rights and privileges which are due him in strict justice, he is free 8. The right to be governed as an equal means to be free

9. The right to have a voice in one’s own government (free government) 10. Moral freedom: liberty under the direction and discipline of the moral virtues 11. Free is the lack of tyranny and vice allowing us to use our free will properly 12. Free is a good education, an education for freedom only when freedom is properly understood as a

function of rights and duties both founded upon justice. 13. Free is living under a just government; justice is the root of political, moral, and economic

freedom

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WHAT IS THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN INDIVIDUAL FREEDOM AND SOCIETY? (ADLER) 1. Individual freedom is political liberty achieved through the discipline of laws 2. Individual freedom is discipline 3. Individual freedom is the right to be governed as an equal, not only as the equal of other men who

are his fellow citizens, but also, as the equal of those among his fellow citizens who exercise the authority and power of governing. 4. Individual freedom consists of duties; he must be unrestrained from doing what he ought to do and he must not be coerced into doing what he ought not to do 5. If man lives under a just government that is politically free, they have individual freedom 6. Justice is the root of freedom 7. Moral and economic freedom brings out individual freedom and society HOW DOES EDUCATION CONTRIBUTE TO THE FREEDOM OF INDIVIDUALS? (ADLER)

1. Education for freedom must be dissociated from that false liberalism which makes a travesty of liberal education 2. Liberal education is education for freedom only in so far as it is revolutionary against every form of injustice 3. Liberal education is developed only when a curriculum can be devised which is the same for all me and should be given to all men 4. Each student is a man and his characteristic powers are reason and free will 5. Education for freedom cannot itself be instituted until the educators understand the principles of freedom, until they realize that freedom is not an end in itself but a consequence of justice and an affair of rights and duties

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WHAT TYPE OF EDUCATION BEST PREPARES CITIZENS TO MAINTAIN THE FREEDOM THAT WE CHERISH IN OUR CULTURE? (ADLER) 1. A just regulation of economic process. 2. An education for freedom 3. Liberal education 4. The elective system 5. Living under a just government 6. The abolition of the elective system 7. Freedom is not an end in itself but a consequence of justice and an affair of rights and duties

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WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE FREE? (DEWEY)

1. The idea of a “New Education” 2. Changed social conditions 3. The application of science resulting in the great inventions that have utilized the forces of nature on a vast and inexpensive scale 4. The household and neighborhood system 5. Training in habits of order and of industry and the idea of responsibility 6. Continual training of observation, of ingenuity, constructive imagination of logical thought and of the sense of reality acquired through first hand contact with actualities 7. Manual training, shop-work, and the household arts 8. Girls stay at home and boys were our educational system only adequately rounded out into trade schools for their future vocations 9. The need of common and productive activity 10. The need to not prepare the future members of the social order in a medium in which the conditions of the social spirit are imminently wanting

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WHAT IS THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN INDIVIDUAL FREEDOM AND SOCIETY? (DEWEY 1. There is no obvious social motive for the acquirement of mere learning, 2. There is no clear social gain in success threat 3. School work consists in simply learning lessons, mutual assistance, instead of being the most natural form of cooperation and association 4. A spirit of free communication of interchange of ideas, suggestions, results, both successes and failures of previous experiences 5. A sense of order which is relative to an end. If the end in view is the development of a spirit of social cooperation and community life, discipline must grow out of and be relative to this 6. Under the industrial regime, the child, after all, shared in the work not for the sake of the sharing but for the sake of the product 7. The world without its relationship to human activity is less than a world 8. Having children doing household chores such as sewing on buttons and making patches, it gives us the point of departure from which the child can trace and follow the progress of mankind in history, getting an insight also into the materials used and the mechanical principles of mankind in history

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HOW DOES EDUCATION CONTRIBUTE TO THE FREEDOM OF INDIVIDUALS? (DEWEY) 1. With regards to the teaching of science, Dewey states that under present conditions, all activity, to be successful, has to be directed somewhere and somehow by the scientific expert- it is an ease of applied science 2. When occupations in the school are conceived in this broad and generous way…..such occupations are out of place in the school because they are materialistic, utilitarian, or even menial in their tendency. 3. Each one of us shall have had the education which enables him to see within his daily work all there is in it or large and human significance 4. There needs to be a change in the attitude of the school one of which we are as yet far from realizing the full force 5. Our school methods and our curriculum are inherited from the period when learning and command of certain symbols affording as they did the only access to learning were all important 6. Our present education which is highly specialized, one sided and narrow. It is an education dominated almost entirely by the medieval conception of learning. 7. Education must pass through an equally complete transformation 8. Modifications of our school system to be mere changes of detail, mere improvement within the school mechanism are in reality signs and evidences or evolution. 9. Make each one of our schools an embryonic community life, active with types of occupations that reflect the life of the larger society and permeated throughout with the spirit of art, history and science.

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WHAT TYPE OF EDUCATION BEST PREPARES CITIZENS TO MAINTAIN THE FREEDOM THAT WE CHERISH IN OUR CULTURE? (DEWEY) 1. Looking at the school from an individualistic standpoint as something between teacher and pupil and between teacher and parent. 2. Only by being true to the full growth of all the individuals who make it up, can society by any chance

be true to itself. And in the self-direction thus given, nothing counts as much as the school 3. The type of education that best prepares citizens to maintain freedom that we cherish in our cultures is what Dewey defines as the “New Education”. 4. The industrial education- the application of science resulting in the great inventions that have utilized

the forces of nature on a vast and inexpensive scale: the growth of a world-wide market as the object of production of vast manufacturing centers to supply this market of cheap and rapid means of communication and distribution between all its parts 5. The household and neighborhood system 6. The one of the most striking tendencies at present is toward the introduction of the so-called manual

training, shop-work, and the household arts- sewing and cooking.

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WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE “FREE”? (ILLICH) 1. The need of schooling for the poor 2. Channeling dollars away from the institutions which now treat health, education, and welfare 3. Economic development and competitive consumption 4. The necessity to have universal schooling 5. The stopping of the existence of school discouraging and disabling the poor from taking control of their own learning. 6. School is seen as an institution which specializes in education and that the failures of school are taken by most people as a proof that education is a very costly, very complex, always arcane, and frequently almost impossible tasks. This attitude needs to change. 7. Freedom from obligatory schooling 8. The deschooling os schools 9. Enforcing laws that forbid discrimination on the basis of prior schooling 10. Learning taking place as a result of teaching 11. Measurable progress in learning skills 12. Opportunities of skill-learning with an open market 13. Schools are the wrong places for leaning a skill and are even worse places for getting an education thus the need for deschooling to be free 14. The exchange of skills and matching of partners based on the assumption that education for all means education by all

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WHAT IS THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN INDIVIDUAL FREEDOM AND SOCIETY? (ILLICH) 1. With regards to the poor, they have been powerless and the increasing reliance on institutional care adds a new dimension to their helplessness 2. In the United States, the black and even the migrant can aspire to a level of professional treatment 3. The poor depend on outside agencies such as truant officers and doctors but this care only makes the individual increasingly incapable of organizing their own lives around their own experiences and resources within their own communities 4. The individual poor in the U.S. inner city can demonstrate from their own experience the fallacy on which social legislation in a “schooled” society is built. 5. The poor child can seldom catch up with a rich one even with schools of equal quality 6. With regards to the first amendment, to make this disestablishment effective, we need a law forbidding discrimination in hiring, voting, or admission to centers of learning based on previous attendance at some curriculum. 7. Society would be available if we open the “market” HOW DOES EDUCATION CONTRIBUTE TO THE FREEDOM OF INDIVIDUALS? (ILLICH) 1. Welfare bureaucracies claim a professional, political, and financial monopoly over the social imagination, setting standards of what is valuable and what is feasible. 2. The poor in the U.S. inner city can demonstrate from their own experience the fallacy on which social legislation in a schooled society is built 3. Educational disadvantage cannot be cured by relying on education within the school 4. Education is not equal between the rich and poor individual. The poor child can seldom catch up with a rich one in a school of equal quality 5. The belief that universal schooling is absolutely necessary is most firmly held in those countries where the fewest people have been and will be served by schools 6. All over the world, the school has an antieducational effect on society; school is recognized as the institution which specializes in education 7. With regards to the individual, the failures of school are taken as a proof that education is a very costly, very complex, always arcane, and frequently almost impossible task 8. For the individual, work, leisure, politics, city living, and even family life depend on schools for

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the habits and knowledge they presuppose, instead of becoming themselves the means of education 9. For the individual roles are assigned by setting a curriculum of conditions which the candidate must meet if he is to make the grade.

WHAT TYPE OF EDUCATION BEST PREPARES CITIZENS TO MAINTAIN THE FREEDOM THAT WE CHERISH IN OUR CULTURE? (ILLICH) 1. The one type of education that prepares citizens to maintain a freedom that we cherish our culture is an institution that we finance 2. The added funds enabled schools to cater disproportionately to the satisfaction of the relatively

richer children who were disadvantaged by having to attend school in the company of the poor 3. For our culture, the type of education that best prepares citizens is an obligatory school 4. For the citizen, school appropriates the money, men, and good will available for education and in addition discourages other institutions from assuming educational tasks. 5. To maintain the freedom that we cherish, we need to look to the obligatory school which polarizes a society and also grades the nations of the world according to an international caste system 6. In today’s culture the school has become the world religion of a modernized proletariat and makes

futile promises of salvation to the poor of the technological age 7. The best type of education that prepares citizens to maintain the freedom that we cherish is

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learning and the assignment of social roles melted into schooling 8. A learning that happens casually and as a by-product of some other activity defined as work or leisure