In How We Think, Dewey says that a shift from an attitude-of-play to an attitude-of-work is not a shift in interest in activities for their own sake to an interest in results and products. Instead, it is only a change in the type of activity the child is interested in: she declines those that are moved forward by whim in favor of those that move toward a product. She can be interested in an activity for its own sake and prefer that activity because it leads to a product.
He then says that we jump kids from Kindergarten play activity with no goals to 1st-grade work activity with excessively remote and external goals. Rarely do kids get to work toward goals that align with their immediate interests, which he says is the only way to learn.
I’m still working my way through The Authority of the Bible by C. H. Dodd, but here’s a highlight so far:
Dodd claims that no one has ever honestly believed that all the parts of the Bible are equally as important.
From John Dewey’s How We Think:
Direct immediate discharge or expression of an impulsive tendency is fatal to thinking. Only when the impulse is to some extent checked and thrown back upon itself does reflection ensue. It is, indeed, a stupid error to suppose that arbitrary tasks must be imposed from without in order to furnish the factor of perplexity and difficulty which is the necessary cue to thought. Every vital activity of any depth and range inevitably meets obstacles in the course of its effort to realize itself—a fact that renders the search for artificial or external problems quite superfluous.
A repeated point I’m picking up from Dewey is that “vital activities” (which I think map fairly closely to what we call “authentic tasks” now?) are the only way to learn. You’re either learning by participating with your community in an activity vital to life, or you should just stop.
This is my first post via my little HTML posting web client and a Rails API on Heroku! It has been pleasant developing.