Experience and Education

Sorry...these are rough notes.

“Experience and experiment are not self-explanatory ideas.”

-“belief that all genuine education comes about through experience does not mean that all experiences are genuinely or equally educative.”

-Miseducative-produces lack of sensitivity…narrows field of future experience

-Everything depends on quality of experience

“Wholly dependent of desire or intent, every experience lives on in further experiences”-habit

“A philosophy of education, like any theory, has to be stated in words, in symbols.”

We think we understand what words like “culture” and “discipline” mean, but when asked to define them, we have difficulty doing so because we have learned them through signs. We know how to recognize and imitate them and will pass on what we know. (Vygotsky)
“It is easier to walk in the paths that have been beaten” (institutionalization and habit-Berger and Luckman) and “”The principle of continuity of experience means that every experience both takes up something from those which have gone before and modifies in some way the quality of those which come after.”
Growing=continuity (in whatever direction)

Whenever a person learns, they open up a new environment. Yet…does he not also limit himself by making decisions? Learning how to read unarguably opens up new environments, but other things, like learning how to dance, might take the place of learning how to sail because a lifespan is olnly so long. “…relatively immune to those things about him that would have been stimuli if he had made another choice.”

Experience is NOT exclusively internal.