JOVITO A.

MORAL February 8, 2020

John Dewey was as a pragmatist, progressivist, educator, philosopher and a social

reformer. He grew up in a family that was very active in the social community and in the

democratic vision of the political community. These experiences influenced who he was as an

educator and philosopher. Dewey’s ideas made a great impact in education and he was

perhaps one of the most influential educational philosophers until now. He was best known of

the so called Progressive Education wherein the school is seen as an opportunity for children to

develop as individuals and citizens. He was the proponent of learning by doing rather than

learning by passively receiving, for he believes that each child is active, inquisitive and wanted

to learn. His philosophy that children not content should be the focus of the educational process

has left has last a lasting impression on educators.

For him, education is a necessity of life because education it is a process of living and not

a preparation for future living. It is a social process of continuing change and reconstruction of

the individual experience. It is a process that begins at birth with the child gaining

consciousness and gradually developing knowledge to share and partake in the society.

Education is a participation of the individual in the social consciousness of the race. To prepare

the child for the future means to train him that he might have the full ready use of all his

capacities. Since education is a process of living, so the school must represent the present life

so much so that parts of the student’s home life such as moral and ethical education should take

part in the schooling process. Dewey thought that effective education came primarily through

social interactions and that the school setting should be considered a social institution.

Therefore, the curriculum developed should be a reflection of society and interpretations of life.

The material taught in class should be connected to the outside world to develop the children as

problem solvers through critical thinking.

curriculum especially in the Basic Education in three ways. With this, I would like to quote

Dewey’s three key ideas: a) the nature of the child is made as the center of educational process;

b) the theory of self-activity is made as the center or basis of learning; c) the activity is the core

of the curriculum. It is a reality that the school was established because of the learner. In

education, the facilities, resources, strategies and curriculum are very important but without the

child these things are useless. Therefore, the focus should be to the child. The purpose of

education will lose its meaning and purpose if the learner does not involve themselves to the

process. Basic education engages in hands-on activities and experiences because they

cultivate learning. Through these, students are given first-hand information and experiences and

lifelong learning. Our Basic education curriculum integrates inquiry based learning which adapts

various activities so that a child can learn in a natural way. This is exactly John Dewey’s

“learning by doing”. Knowledge acquired through direct experience is highly encouraged

because it is the main method of learning. Thus reports, groups activities, games, experiments,

cultural activities and the like area all important factors that contribute to this lifelong learning.
 For me, the two psychological theories that are very relevant in the foundations K-12

educational foundation of the Department of Education is Jean Piaget’s theory of Cognitive

Development and the Humanism of Carl Rogers.

Jean Piaget focuses on children, from birth through adolescence which

characterizes different stages of development, including language, memory, morals and

reasoning. He said that children build their own knowledge based on their experiences and that

children are motivated to learn by nature. Piaget saw the child as constantly creating and re-

creating his own model of reality, achieving mental growth by integrating simpler concepts into

higher-level concepts at each stage. Most of the foundation in children’s learning and

development is based on the theories of Jean Piaget. He has been very influential in the field of

education due to his beliefs about how children think. He emphasized the use of questioning

that lead children to think philosophically and designed tasks that call upon high-level cognition;

problem solving, reasoning, and understanding of complex concepts. Piaget maintains that

children learn and think naturally because they are designed and have been evolved to do so. In

his Cognitive Development, he believed that intellectual development is influenced by both

maturation and experience. Piaget believed that intelligence develops from action. He believed

that children create knowledge through interactions with the environment. Children are not

passive receivers of knowledge; rather, they actively work at organizing their experience into

more and more complex mental structures. This is very true to one of the 12 key areas of Basic

Education Curriculum which says that the new Curriculum should reinforce mastery of basic

skills moving to more complex skills. For me, Piaget’s principle is a contributing factor to

understand this. For Piaget, learning takes place after development. He insists that children

need to use all their cognitive functions. His theories were designed to form minds which can be

critical, can verify, and not accept everything they are offered. Such beliefs reflect his respect for

children’s thinking. In the classroom, a child should be encouraged to explore and discover
things on his own, as this develops ownership in his discoveries. The child derives much

fulfillment in this, and hence, his self-learning is motivated.

The humanistic theory of teaching and learning is an educational theory that believes in

teaching the ‘whole’ child. It focuses on students’ emotional well-being and view children as

innately good ‘at the core’. It emphasizes on free will that we have free choice to do and think

what we want; on emotions impact learning: that we need to be in a positive emotional state to

achieve our best; on intrinsic motivation: that we generally have an internal desire to become

our best selves; and on Innate goodness that humans are good at the core. He maintained that

people are free and creative beings, capable of growth and self-actualization. In Carl Rogers,

self-actualizing principle, he maintains that all have ambitions to be better. For him, it is

important for students to be freed from the constraints of a school curriculum in order that they

can be free to explore things they are interested in. If we are freed to learn what we choose to

learn we will learn things towards our self-actualization. Rogers believes that we can help

students achieve stronger self-esteem by unconditionally seeing students in a positive light.

Much like a parent who loves their child unconditionally, teachers have to see that their students

are fundamentally good, even when they’re at their worst. And lastly, teachers

become facilitators rather than authority figures so that they can encourage students to seek

new knowledge and provide the materials and support needed.

https://mitchellium.wordpress.com/2017/07/06/deweys-influence-to-philippine-educational-system/
https://www.thepositiveencourager.global/john-deweys-approach-to-doing-positive-work/
https://www.pressreader.com/philippines/sunstar-pampanga/20160422/281659664221016

His “genetic” timetable established by nature for the development of the child’s ability to

think and the four stages in that development are so true even in the educational development

and growth of every child. He described the child during the first two years of life as being in

a sensorimotor stage, chiefly concerned with mastering his own innate physical reflexes and
extending them into pleasurable or interesting actions. During the same period, the child first

becomes aware of himself as a separate physical entity and then realizes that the objects

around him also have a separate and permanent existence. In the second,

or preoperational, stage, roughly from age two to age six or seven, the child learns to

manipulate his environment symbolically through inner representations, or thoughts,

about the external world. During this stage he learns to represent objects by words

and to manipulate the words mentally, just as he earlier manipulated the physical

objects themselves. In the third, or concrete operational, stage, from age 7 to age 11

or 12, occur the beginning of logic in the child’s thought processes and the beginning

of the classification of objects by their similarities and differences. During this period

the child also begins to grasp concepts of time and number. The fourth stage, the

period of formal operations, begins at age 12 and extends into adulthood. It is

characterized by an orderliness of thinking and a mastery of logical thought, allowing

a more flexible kind of mental experimentation. The child learns in this final stage to

manipulate abstract ideas, make hypotheses, and see the implications of his own

thinking and that of others.