Dewey's Curriculum
Dewey: Curriculum
Overall aim
The curriculum should ultimately produce students who can deal effectively with the modern world.
Child-based curriculum
- The curriculum should include the child’s own preconceptions and incorporate how the child views their world.
- The curriculum should build an orderly sense of the world where the child lives.
Activities of life in the classroom
Dewey combined subject areas and materials, making connections between subjects and the child’s life rather than presenting subjects as isolated specialisms.
Four impulses of children’s behaviour
Dewey identified four basic impulses that characterise children’s behaviour:
- Social.
- Constructive.
- Expressive.
- Artistic.
Dewey’s curriculum is shorter to describe than his philosophy because the philosophy does most of the work of determining what the curriculum should look like. Once education is centred on the child, organised around real inquiry, and aimed at continued growth, the curriculum follows fairly directly. The article works through the specific commitments that emerged from the Dewey School and that have shaped progressive curricula ever since.
The aim of the curriculum
Dewey’s overall criterion for the curriculum is direct. The curriculum should ultimately produce students who would be able to deal effectively with the modern world.
The test is functional. A curriculum is good to the extent that its graduates can handle the actual world they enter. A curriculum is bad to the extent that its graduates cannot. Other measures (coverage, rigour, credentialism, prestige) are secondary or irrelevant. The test is whether the people the curriculum produces can do the work of living in the modern world well.
The word modern matters. Dewey was writing in a rapidly changing American century. The world the curriculum was preparing students for was not the world of the curriculum’s designers. It would be a different world by the time the students graduated, and a different world again twenty years after that. A curriculum locked to a fixed picture of the past world would produce graduates who could not handle the actual world they met.
The implication is that the curriculum must be designed for change. The specific content students learn matters less than the capacities they develop. A student who has developed the capacities to inquire, to learn, to adapt can handle a changing world. A student who has memorised a fixed body of content for a fixed world cannot. This is part of why Dewey’s curriculum emphasised method and habits of mind over specific subject content; the methods and habits would transfer to whatever the modern world turned out to require.
Whether its graduates can deal effectively with the actual modern world
The test is functional. A curriculum is good if its graduates can handle the world they enter, bad if they cannot. Other measures (coverage, rigour, credentialism, prestige) are secondary. The modern world is also changing, so the curriculum must be designed for change: specific content matters less than the capacities to inquire, learn, and adapt that students develop.
The child-based curriculum
Dewey’s curriculum is child-based in two specific senses, each of which corresponds to one of his core commitments.
First, the curriculum should include the child’s own preconceptions and should incorporate how the child views their world. The child does not arrive at school as a blank slate. They arrive with ideas about how the world works, ideas about why people do what they do, ideas about themselves and their place in things. These ideas are partial, sometimes wrong, and often unexamined. The curriculum’s job is not to ignore them and impose a finished adult worldview; the job is to engage with them, develop them, correct them where they need correction, and build the more mature understanding on top.
The contrast with the older view is sharp. The older view treated the child’s preconceptions as obstacles to learning. The student arrived with confused or wrong ideas; the teacher’s job was to push these aside and install the correct ideas in their place. Dewey reverses this. The preconceptions are the starting point. They are how the child currently makes sense of the world, and the curriculum has to engage with them on their own terms before it can move beyond them.
Second, the curriculum should build an orderly sense of the world where the child lives. The student needs to develop, across the years of schooling, a coherent picture of the world: how its parts fit together, why things happen as they do, how the student fits into the whole. The picture should be orderly, not chaotic, and it should be of the world the student actually lives in, not of an abstract world that exists nowhere.
The orderliness is built through the curriculum’s structure. Topics are introduced in sequences that build on each other. Connections between topics are made visible. The student is helped to see that what they learned in one subject connects to what they are learning in another. The orderly picture grows out of the curriculum’s design.
A curriculum that engages with the child’s existing preconceptions and builds an orderly picture of the child’s world
(1) The curriculum includes the child’s own preconceptions about how the world works rather than ignoring them. The preconceptions are the starting point; the curriculum engages with them, develops them, corrects where needed, and builds mature understanding on top. (2) The curriculum builds an orderly sense of the world the child actually lives in. The orderly picture is constructed through the curriculum’s sequencing and connections.
Combining subjects with life
Dewey combined subject areas and materials, making connections between subjects and the child’s life. The older curriculum kept subjects strictly separate: mathematics in one period, history in another, science in a third. Each subject had its own time slot, its own teacher, and no contact with the others. The student was expected to integrate the separate subjects in their own head, somehow.
Dewey’s curriculum integrated the subjects directly. A project on building a model of a town might involve mathematics (measurement and scale), science (materials and structures), history (how the town came to be), social studies (how the town is organised), and language (writing up the work). The student worked on the project as a single piece; the subjects appeared in the project where they were needed. The integration was built into the work itself.
The point is not just efficiency, though there is some of that. The point is that the world the student lives in is not divided into separate subjects. A real-world problem usually involves multiple disciplines at once. A student who has only experienced subjects as separate cannot easily put them back together when a real problem demands it. A student who has experienced subjects as integrated through real problems is in a much better position to handle the integration the world will demand of them.
The Dewey School in Chicago developed this integration in detail. The published records of the school show project work that involved many subjects at once, sustained over weeks or months, with each subject contributing what it could to the larger work. A modern teacher inspired by Dewey can read these records and see the integration being done.
The modern movement called project-based learning is Dewey’s integration with a new name. The pedagogical pattern is recognisably the same: students work on extended projects that require multiple subjects, the teacher facilitates rather than lectures, the learning happens through the work rather than alongside it.
Through integrated projects that bring multiple subjects to bear on a single real problem
The older curriculum kept subjects strictly separate, each in its own time slot. Dewey integrated them through project work that required multiple subjects at once. A project on building a model town might involve mathematics, science, history, social studies, and language all together. The student experiences the subjects as integrated parts of real work, which prepares them to handle the multi-disciplinary problems the real world will pose.
The four impulses
Dewey identified four basic impulses or instincts that characterise children’s behaviour and that the curriculum should engage with. The four are social, constructive, expressive, and artistic.
The social impulse is the child’s drive to be with other people, to share what they are doing, to communicate, to collaborate. A child playing alone often invents an imaginary companion or narrates their play to an absent audience; the social impulse is operating even when no other person is present. The curriculum should give the social impulse plenty of room. Group work, paired projects, classroom conversation, and shared problem-solving are not extras added to the academic work; they are the work, conducted in a form that the social impulse engages with.
The constructive impulse is the drive to build, to make, to put things together. A child given materials will spontaneously start constructing. The curriculum should give the constructive impulse real materials and real building tasks. The Dewey School included workshops with tools where children built things; modern Deweyan schools include maker spaces, gardens, kitchens, and other settings where the constructive impulse can find expression in real work.
The expressive impulse is the drive to communicate what one is thinking, feeling, and experiencing. The expression can be in words, gesture, drawing, music, drama, or any other medium. The curriculum should make room for the expressive impulse rather than treating it as a frill. A student who has practised expressing themselves clearly in school will be able to do so in adult life; one who has not, will not.
The artistic impulse is the drive to make things beautiful, to attend to form and balance and pattern. It overlaps with the constructive and expressive impulses but is distinct from them. The artistic impulse is what makes a child arrange the pebbles they have collected into a pleasing pattern rather than just a heap, or sing a tune rather than just speak. The curriculum should give the artistic impulse work to do: drawing, music, design, the cultivation of taste and form across all subjects.
The four impulses are not curriculum subjects in the conventional sense. They are channels of energy that the curriculum can use. A curriculum that ignores the four impulses is fighting the energy that would otherwise have done much of the educational work. A curriculum that uses the four impulses moves with the student’s own drives rather than against them.
Social, constructive, expressive, and artistic
(1) Social: the drive to be with others, communicate, collaborate. (2) Constructive: the drive to build, make, put things together. (3) Expressive: the drive to communicate what one thinks, feels, experiences. (4) Artistic: the drive to make things beautiful and to attend to form and pattern. The four are channels of energy the curriculum can use; a curriculum that ignores them is fighting the energy that would otherwise do much of the educational work.
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