Understanding the New School Concept and Its Criticism
Concept of the New School
The ideals that inspired the New School are synthesized in the seven principles of the International League of New Schools and in the thirty principles of the International Office of New Schools.
Seven Principles of the New School
- The main aim of all education is the supremacy of spirit.
- Must respect the child’s individuality.
- Studies and learning of life must give free rein to the innate interest in children.
- Every age has its own character. It is necessary for personal and collective discipline to be organized by the children themselves with the help of teachers.
- Competition should disappear from education and be replaced by cooperation.
- Co-education involves a partnership that allows each sex to freely exert a salutary influence over the other.
- New education prepares the child not only to be a future citizen, capable of performing their duties, but also a human being conscious of their dignity.
Ferriere gives a definition of the New Schools, acting as a “minimum program,” which meets the conditions necessary to synthesize the 30 principles of the International Office of New Schools:
“The school is primarily a New Family Range located in the Campo, where the child’s personal experience is the foundation of both intellectual education, particularly for the use of manual labor, as well as moral education through the practice of the relative autonomy of the students.“
Criticism of the New School
- Elitist Experience for Children of Social Groups with Economic Power: In many cases, the New School facilities were private and charged for their teachings.
- Slaughter of the Concept of the Image: Work of the senses but not the ability to concentrate.
- The Anti-intellectualism of the New School: This turns the school into a recreation center.
- Education Focuses on Pleasure and Play: This occurs regardless of the educational value of work and effort.
- Libertarian Education: This forgets the social value of discipline.
- Progressive education is an unplanned improvisation.
- The School is Not Life: It is an artificial microcosm that has little to do with reality.
- The Teacher Becomes the Guardian of Children: This shifts the focus away from education.
- We Forget the Importance of Drills and Rote Tasks: These repetitive but essential tasks are often overlooked.
The term progressive school in the U.S. is equivalent to the European New School. This current arises as a protest against American Traditional School, which is teacher-centered and based on classical education principles. The Progressive School movement revolved around the philosophy of Dewey.
John Dewey (1859-1952)
U.S. philosopher John Dewey taught at several universities, including Chicago, where he taught pedagogy. In 1904, he moved to Columbia University, where he remained until his retirement in 1922. His most important works on education include: My Pedagogic Creed (1897), School and Society (1899), and Democracy and Education (1916). He was influenced by Hegel, Darwin, and Peirce. The doctrine of interest is the basis of his pedagogy. Teaching should be based on real interests that are not fixed but are constantly changing and updating. The process and purpose of education are interconnected. The educational process has two aspects: one psychological and one social. Education is about providing the child with self-control. The school must become a living and working environment while reproducing the social and economic reality in which students must participate in adult life.
As a teaching method, Dewey applies the general method of research in its five points: The child must acquire their own experiences, delimit and specify them, search for data through observation, rework the original hypotheses, and acquire new knowledge. Dewey’s school motto is “Learning by Doing.”