The Importance of Understanding Experience

In The Need of a Theory of Experience, Dewey explains just that. His argument is that it simply is not enough to be anti-banking method, traditional education, and institutional ideology run schools, rather, the opposite, experience, needs to be well-defined for there to be any hope for an effective education in the opposite direction. Basically, he believes that not all experiences are necessarily genuinely or equally educative, so the matter of a revolutionary education cannot be one of complete improvisation. He goes over the negative assumptions that have developed regarding the new education based on experience that detract from its purpose and validity in the eyes of critics. This includes the false idea that this new education is much easier than the traditional, and the mistaking of something for something that is not (rejecting all forms of organization). For this reason he proposes a sound philosophy of education based on a philosophy of experience. Ultimately Dewey’s defense of a new education based on experience is that it strive to inspire students to learn through the ideals of democracy and because of our “preference that we believe that mutual consultation and convictions reached through persuasion, make possible a better quality of experience than can be otherwise provided on any wide scale?” In terms of defining this education it must provide a venue for the student to grow, not only that, but it also must create conditions for future growth, in other words, to continue his education. Another point to note in the gap between traditional and this new type of experience-education is that the former only considers the internal conditions of a person as a factor in learning and completely forgoes the critical role of the external social experience. It is because of the environment that makes the student’s experience, because this is the very environment in which he will have to deliver his education in order to progress and continue it . Dewey rethinks the role of the student and teacher where they are much more engaged in interaction as it is the mode of learning. He addresses the banking method where predigested material is fed to the student to remember in compartmentalized bits, saying that the emphasis on the truths of the material itself is wrong. The emphasis should be, instead, on the process and experience of learning this material which will create adaptable skills that accumulate to make a greater whole than the sum of its parts that can the be applied to future situations in life. This is the failure of traditional education. This is where I started feeling really grateful for my education here at Soka. Sure, it is not perfect, but it is much closer to these goals than anything I have ever experienced before by far.

Through-out my primary and secondary education, I had always been taught through the banking method. The teachers would write notes on the board, and all the students would write them down. Some times they would write questions on the board where the only acceptable answers were word-for-word what she wrote. We would just regurgitate these memorized words onto our books and the teacher would give us a grade based on how perfectly we memorized. The tests were the same, cumulative exams too! I wasted so much time memorizing without understanding, nothing the teacher put in my brain was meant to be connected to anything else but the very topic we were studying. The ultimate goal was to be a class “topper” (score at the top of your class). The test scores reflect how hard it is to do this: the highest grade is usually 80%. That seems absurd for anyone who has not gone to such a school, so many are used to getting A’s, but it is hard to memorized hundreds of pages of material! But of course being human and having a natural tendency to associate our knowledge and experiences, the students learned and many have been successful in life in general. But many failed and were left behind, feeling that they did not belong in the world of inquiry and academics, that they were stupid. Although I did well at school and I enjoyed my social life, I just did not feel my education was doing enough for me. I knew the only reason I was doing it was because it is a prerequisite for respect and a requirement for a successful future, I was just enduring it. This is why I jumped at Dewey’s questioning of this standard: “what avail is it to win prescribed amounts of information about geography and history, to win ability to read and write, if in the process the individual loses his own soul: loses his appreciation for things worth while, of the values to which these things and, above all, loses the ability to extract meaning from his future experiences as they occur?” My experience with this for over 13 years of my life has left me with patterns of behavior that don’t adjust to easily to the newness of education at Soka, it has definitely limited my mind, and so, here, I begin anew.

In the second reading, Ideas in Historical Spaces, Popkewitz outlines an attempt to apply the crucial element of historical context to the writings of Dewey and Vygotsky to extract from their work a better understanding of the formation of their constructivist approach and their continuing influence on current educational reforms. I did not know that their thoughts did not impact education as practical answers to the rotting system, but relegated to the realm of philosophy rather than applicable social science. These people’s lives coincided with the era of the formation of nation-states, large-scale projects of nation-building, and the political movements to constitute new state institutions to administer social and individual life. An idea of the “New man” emerged to realign loyalty from religion and inherited social order to individual responsibilities and discipline under the state. The state and civil society experienced a mutual conflation when “schooling [began to be used] as a mechanism used by the state to conceptualize and organize a massive and ongoing program of pacification, discipline, and training responsible for the political and social capacities of the modern citizen.” This is kind of scary. I was so sold on Dewey that I did not see this coming. Popkewitz so skillfully traps Dewey and his philosophy of education, as well as Vygotsky into a Foucauldian super-structure that makes me doubt the “goodness” of my own authentic experiences.