The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Child and the Curriculum, by John Dewey

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Title: The Child and the Curriculum

Author: John Dewey

Release Date: June 28, 2009 [eBook #29259]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)

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THE CHILD AND THE CURRICULUM

by

JOHN DEWEY

[Illustration: Publisher's Device]

The University of Chicago Press
Chicago & London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago & London

The University of Toronto Press, Toronto 5, Canada

Copyright 1902 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.
Published 1902. Twenty-eighth Impression 1966 Printed in the United
States of America

_The Child and the Curriculum_

Profound differences in theory are never gratuitous or invented. They
grow out of conflicting elements in a genuine problem--a problem
which is genuine just because the elements, taken as they stand, are
conflicting. Any significant problem involves conditions that for the
moment contradict each other. Solution comes only by getting away from
the meaning of terms that is already fixed upon and coming to see the
conditions from another point of view, and hence in a fresh light. But
this reconstruction means travail of thought. Easier than thinking with
surrender of already formed ideas and detachment from facts already
learned is just to stick by what is already said, looking about for
something with which to buttress it against attack.

Thus sects arise: schools of opinion. Each selects that set of
conditions that appeals to it; and then erects them into a complete and
independent truth, instead of treating them as a factor in a problem,
needing adj