Lewin's Impact on Education: Instilling Cooperation and Conflict Management Skills in School Children

There are implications of several ideas by Kurt Lewin for addressing the challenges facing today's schools and school children. A Lewinian orientation to educational problems provides a very different view of schools from those that currently prevail. It focuses on social bases of difficulties and takes multiple perspectives. It views classes as dynamic, it examines the social forces surrounding the children as well as the various environments that they experience, and it encourages active involvement of students in their learning. This orientation not only fits current “innovative” thinking in education such as models for making education multicultural, but it has also provided the bases of important applied work on cooperative learning techniques and constructive ways of structuring conflict within educational settings. 1992 The Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues