The Research On John Dewey’s Citizen Curriculum Idea

Citizens are neither subjects nor private people. They have rights to participate in social public affairs and play a role. In the modern society, citizenships are a series of relations between the individual and government, and these relations contain both rights and obligatory relations. Citizen education means to cultivate qualified citizens.It is the root to maintain the development and stabilization of modern countries.With the advancement of China’s modernization process, the status of citizen education becomes prominent in our country. Unlike the west, citizen education in our country did not “grow” from our own cultural tradition, but rather, was grafted with the national in internal and external troubles. Based on the premise that using for reference must be after understanding and agreement, there is a certain degree of understanding deviation in the western citizen education because of the complexity and diversity of the concept of citizen and the citizen education practice in the west, and in a certain extent, this deviation affected our civil education practice. These understanding and practice problems included: the social public’s cognition to the western citizen education discourse system, the idea to cultivate what kind of socialist citizens,establishment and implementation of citizen curriculums. Dewey, as a master of pragmatism, had carried on exploring and thinking of the modern citizen education. His pragmatism citizen education discourse system had an important referential significance for us to overcome the citizen education problems.Complete understanding of Dewey’s citizen curriculum ideas is a key factor to use it for reference. Since Dewey’s thoughts were spread in China, there have been many different ways to explain it, such as experiment interpretation, effect interpretation,experience interpretation, children center interpretation, interpretation of education without purpose, interpretation of bourgeois position and truth interpretation. These understandings contained reasonable explanations for the Dewey’s education thoughts,and also a certain degree of deviation. Two reasons led to different interpretations. On the one hand, due to the depth, integrity and richness of Dewey’s thoughts system, some researchers maybe only focus on part of Dewey’s education thoughts system, and not be able to go deep into its internal. On the other hand, complex and abstract theoretical system could be understood by us after constant interpretations and operationalizations.But in the process, the operators often injected their subjective understandings due to subjective and objective conditions of reality. However, this kind of understandings often deviated from Dewey’s intent.In order to completely understand Dewey, we need investigate Dewey’s experience concepts firstly. Based on the understanding of existence, Dewey reconstructed the concept of experience, and gave rational, moral, political, artistic, metaphysical connotation to it. The concept of experience to Dewey’s citizen curriculum idea was through the influence of political philosophy. The innovation of Dewey’s political philosophy was that he thought that the social politics were established on the basis of experience, and that democracy was a way of life first, rather than the political form.From the perspective of Dewey’s experience thought, the social and political life imaged by Dewey was unified by individual and group, secular and belief, knowledge and action, reason and moral. The integrity of the social and political life was a great innovation to the traditional social binary opposition political life. This integrity put forward new demands on school curriculums, so the school curriculums must make new answers for questions about cultivating what kind of citizens and how to cultivate citizens.Dewey’s citizen curriculum ideas systematically answered the following questions.The first question was what kind of personality traits the citizens should have in a democratic society. Different from "civic virtue" and "freedom rights of citizens" in the history of western education, starting from the methodology of experience, Dewey believed that "democracy as a way of life" was an experience of exploration process,and under this background the citizens should be “intelligent person in virtue of experience”. “intelligent person in virtue of experience” os citizen of a new era with intelligence, virtue and faith. Looking from the qualities of intelligence, he had reflection thinking abilities, and with these abilities he could participate in social and political life. Looking from the qualities of virtue, his excellent moral characters embodied in promoting the growth of experience. Looking from the qualities of faith, he had a sense of religion and artistic temperament.The second question was what kind of arrangements school curriculums should make to cultivate the citizens’ personality. Unlike traditional schools, Dewey attempted to overcome a series of binary opposition of the traditional school to implement curriculums innovation. From the curriculum contents, curriculums could be divided into family and social activities curriculums, social background curriculums and utilityclass curriculums. From the organization of the curriculums, they could be summarized as the integration of spiral curriculums. From the status of teaching materials in curriculums, teaching materials was the gather of "activity" and "knowledge", and the function of knowledge teaching materials was used as a tool to provide resources and projects for teaching activities. On the implementation of the curriculum, the curriculums exploration of experimental school in Chicago was characterized by:experimental principle which namely paid more attention to the rational spirit of the curriculums; continuum specierum which namely paid attention to the growth of the curriculums value; social principle which namely paid attention to the social function of curriculums; interest principle which namely paid attention to the main body status of students; artistic principle which namely paid attention to the aesthetic function of curriculums.Dewey’s citizen curriculum ideas have an important reference value for us to implement our citizen education. Through Dewey and his ideas, we can glimpse the basic idea, method and basic trend of modern education.Dewey’s important contribution to the curriculum idea is as follows.First of all, He describles the ideal citizen image of modern society; secondly, he explore and form the basis of modern civic education.For Chinese civic education,his pragmatic methodology and Marxist epistimology theory is consistent, his new individualist ideology and Chinese traditional collectivism is consistent, his understanding about democracy for us to develop the socialist democratic politics has important reference significance, the ideal citizen personality he describles and our educational purpose is similar.The civic education in our country can draw lessons from Dewey’s citizenship curriculum idea.To realize this, we must try to create some cultural conditions,such as getting rid of the vulgar understanding of Dewey and his education thought, returning to the life essence of school curriculum, creating a good citizen and social action environment.