experience and education

I thoroughly enjoyed today’s excerpt from Experience and Education by John Dewey. I found it to be one of the most interesting, engaging, intellectually stimulating, and insightful pieces that we have read all year.

Dewey’s starting point is the assertion is that the purpose of education is to support students to have positive life experiences in both the present and the future. He states that in order to build a philosophy of education, it must first be based on the foundation of a philosophy of experience. In outlining the latter, he takes a long range perspective into account. The teacher judges the value of an experience in the present moment in relation to its positive or negative impact on quality and quantity of future experiences. He calls this the “continuity of experience”; each experience is influenced by those of the past and lives on in those of the future. Positive experiences are those which cause children to have more positive experiences in the future.

Although it is interesting to evaluate experiences in this way, it would be helpful to have a more universal standard of evaluation that by simply relating experiences of the present to those of the future. Even if we do this, what would define a positive experience of the future? Dewey explores this question by introducing the story of the burglar. He argues that even if the burglar becomes an expert, the value of the situation must be judged in terms of whether development in one path of experience opens up the possibility for development in other paths. Again, this is an interesting idea that nonetheless seems to sidestep the question once more. For example, what if I have a positive experience that opens up the possibility of experience in multiple negative paths? In short, I think Dewey’s analysis would benefit from a more concrete and less relative standard of evaluation of experience.

This piece also provides insight into the elusive question: what is the role of the teacher? According to Dewey, the educator’s job is to watch over students’ development and evaluate the direction in which their experiences are leading them. They must also stimulate interest, which will give them the motivation to continue having positive learning experiences in the future. They must create the most appropriate physical/social atmosphere that will provide the setting for positive experiences. They must help students experience integrate new knowledge/concepts/ideas/experiences into their pre-existing conceptual system. I agree that these criteria define a great teacher.

And finally, Dewey’s critique of the “learn now, use later” philosophy of education at the end of this piece pierces the heart of this flawed ideology. Although students may absorb (an extremely limited amount of) the information that they are expected to absorb now and utilize in their later adult life, this knowledge will be used in a context complexly different than that in which it was acquired. Thus, effective application of this information will be very difficult, if not altogether impossible. In addition, Dewey notes that even if the student does learn some of this knowledge, the most important thing is the implicit curriculum of learned attitudes and beliefs that students develop. If a student is taught history in an uninteresting way, not only do they fail to learn in the present, but their interest and curiosity is stunted and they are prevented from having positive learning experiences in the future. Thus, as Dewey insightfully recognizes, this method of preparing students for the future couldn’t do more to stunt future preparation and learning.