Jane Addams on Play, Education and Ethical Teaching

Abstract

This chapter addresses Addams’s contribution to childhood education. In Democracy and Social Ethics (1902), Addams claims that the cause of many of our problems is a lack of imagination that prevents us from understanding the experience of other people. Although Addams never wrote a treatise on education (with the exception of The Spirit of the Youth and the City Streets, 1909), notes on play, the arts, and education are scattered throughout all her main works. Not only was her development of these concepts was not only inspired by John Dewey’s work in Chicago’s Laboratory School, but she was also acquainted with the advances of play and education theorists such as Friedrich Frobel, Karl Groos, and Maria Montessori. She expanded these ideas in ways that could be useful for today’s educational challenges. Addams’s revolutionary views are presented regarding (a) the social value of children’s experience and its relation to democracy; (b) the conceptual interdependence of play, the arts, and recreation for children and adults; and (c) the criticism of college education and the possibility of “ethical teaching” with a special focus on service-learning.