Word: dennison
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Dates: during 1970-1970
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...Dennison tells us that the proper concern of the school is not instruction, but the lives of children. He shows how, in his own words, when the conventional routines of a school are abolished (the military discipline, the schedules and rewards, the standardization), what arises is neither a vacuum nor a chaos, but rather a new order, based first on relationships between adults and children, and children and their peers, but based ultimately on such truths of the human condition as these: that the mind does not function separately from the emotions, but thought partakes of feeling and feeling...
That says it all succinctly and elegantly-although Dennison is equally eloquent in his demonstrations and elaborations. If the summary doesn't convince you, all the better-read the book...
...Dennison is acutely aware of the differences between philosophical though and "mere intellection," and he includes as evidence a bristling but rather insubstantial critique of Bruner. Some of his points, however, are well worth noting: that educational experts like Bruner (and now Jones) are concerned not so much with the education of the young as with the improvement of the schools, not so much with instructing children as with manipulating them. Much more intriguing in this vein are Dennison's accounts of how "freed" children develop organic and highly structured codes of order and morality; how they come to respect...
...First Street School eventually closed down, because Dennison and his colleagues could not sustain their interest in it. He takes his lesson from that too. The Appendix of the book includes extensive advice on how to establish and run a school like First Street. Dennison prefaces this advice with the following statement in the last chapter...
...other experts assume the right to make decisions about everybody's children, and then concoct theories and materials which can't fix even the superficial problems of the public schools. Meanwhile those schools, already the most totalitarian institutions in our society, are systematically destroying the souls of children. Dennison tells us that education must focus not on systems and materials but on the lives of individual children, and that it must be located in the communities that care for these children...