我的教学信条

My Pedagogic Creed

约翰·杜威

王祖哲  译

第二款：什么是学校

I believe that the school is primarily a social institution. Education being a social process, the school is simply that form of community life in which all those agencies are concentrated that will be most effective in bringing the child to share in the inherited resources of the race, and to use his own powers for social ends.

我相信，学校主要地是一种社会体制。教育既然是一种社会性的过程，学校明白无疑地就是社会生活的形式；在那种形式中，凡能最有效地让孩子们分享群体继承下来的那些资源、并且运用他自己的力量服务于社会目的那些手段都集中了起来。

I believe that education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living.

我相信，教育是一种生活过程，而不是为将来的生活做准备。

I believe that the school must represent present life-life as real and vital to the child as that which he carries on in the home, in the neighborhood, or on the playground.

 我相信，学校必须呈现当前的真实生活——即对儿童来说是真实而生气勃勃的生活，就象他们在家里、在邻居间和运动场上经历的那种生活那样。

I believe that education which does not occur through forms of life, or that are worth living for their own sake, is always a poor substitute for the genuine reality and tends to cramp and to deaden.

我相信，并非通过生活形式而发生的那种教育，或者并非通过本身就值得一过的那种生活形式而发生的教育，总是取代真正的现实的一种可怜的替代品，这种教育就趋向于僵化而死板。

I believe that the school, as an institution, should simplify existing social life; should reduce it, as it were, to an embryonic form. Existing life is so complex that the child cannot be brought into contact with it without either confusion or distraction; he is either overwhelmed by the multiplicity of activities which are going on, so that he loses his own power of orderly reaction, or he is so stimulated by these various activities that his powers are prematurely called into play and he becomes either unduly specialized or else disintegrated.

 我相信，作为一种公共机构，学校应该把现存的社会生活予以简化，应该把它简化为一种雏形。现存生活太复杂，儿童接触之，没有不迷惑或者分心的。他不是被那些进行的五花八门的活动搞昏了头而失去他自己进行恰当反应的能力，就是被各种各样的活动刺激得过分，结果他的能力未经磨练就被派了用处，他不是变得过度地专注一端，就是散漫不堪。

I believe that as such simplified social life, the school life should grow gradually out of the home life; that it should take up and continue the activities with which the child is already familiar in the home.

 我相信，作为经过简化了的社会生活，学校生活应该逐渐地从家庭生活里发展出来；它应该把儿童在家里已经熟悉的那些活动，担负起来，继续下去。

I believe that it should exhibit these activities to the child, and reproduce them in such ways that the child will gradually learn the meaning of them, and be capable of playing his own part in relation to them.

 我相信，学校生活应该向孩子展示这些活动，应该重新制造出那些活动，在方式上要使孩子逐渐了解那些活动的意义，并且能够在和那些活动的关系中，发挥自己的作用。

I believe that this is a psychological necessity, because it is the only way of securing continuity in the child's growth, the only way of giving a back-ground of past experience to the new ideas given in school.

 我相信，这在心理学上是必要的，因为保证儿童成长的连贯性，这是唯一的办法，是为在学校里得到的新观念提供过去的经验的唯一办法。