Experiences

When reading Dewey’s thoughts on how experience and education relate, I of course started to think about my own educational experience. I remember throughout the years of middle and high school when we were learning something that we found to be of little interest we would ask the teacher, “When are we ever going to use this?”. Unlike the elementary school teachers who had said that one day we would use all of the things we were learning, the teachers of middle and high school were now being honest. They told us that maybe we would never use a certain type of math equation in real life, but the experience that we are going through to learn it right now was what was important. Of course we hardly remember anything from twelve years of school, but if we had not had those years of education we would be totally different people. In Social Construction of Reality” Berger and Luckman say, “Human being is impossible in a closed sphere of quiescent interiority. Human being must ongoingly externalize itself in activity”. Even if the experiences were not perfect it is important that they are at least experienced.
Now realizing that teachers were not simply just providing information, but also providing experiences I can reflect on which of my teachers did a good job at it. Not every class experience was equal; it depends on the quality of the experience provided. In the reading, Dewey says, “Every experience is a moving force. Its value can be judged only on the ground of what it moves toward and into”( 38). If I am going to judge the experience I have had I must look to see if it moved me towards something valuable. I think that a liberal arts college is also particularly interested in creating high quality experiences that will help its students to move forward in their experiences even after they have left the school.