#3quotes from Dewey

One of the most valued books in my personal library was first published over a hundred years ago, in 1916. It's by John Dewey and is called Democracy and Education. One of the first things I learnt from reading Dewey, is that we don't teach subjects, we teach people. Dewey opposed the mechanistic methods of education that were prevalent in his day, proposing (then) radical solutions. His thoughts about the nature of education extend to what cannot be taught, but is learnt by experience:

"There is the standing danger that the material of formal instruction will be merely the subject matter of the schools, isolated from the subject matter of life-experience. [...] Thus we reach the ordinary notion of education: the notion which ignores its social necessity and its identity with all human association that affects conscious life, and which identifies it with imparting information about remote matters..." (p 9)

Dewey goes on the discuss the false separation between formal and informal learning, knowledge and skills, and warns that technical and academic knowledge, if divorced from real-life experience and personal application, can be fairly vacuous. In the language of the early 20th Century, Dewey is essentially calling for situated learning, where education can be directly applied to everyday experiences. The connection between technical/academic knowledge and every day life are vital, Dewey believed in a balanced and engaging curriculum, because:

"The knowledge that first comes to persons, and that remains most deeply ingrained, is knowledge of how to do; how to walk, talk, read, write... [...] When education, under the influence of a scholastic conception of knowledge which ignores everything but scientifically formed facts and truths, fails to recognise that primary or initial subject matter always exists as a matter of an active doing, involving the use of the bodying the handling of material, the subject matter of instruction is isolated from the needs and proposes of the learner, and so becomes just a something to be memorised and reproduced on demand." (p 103)

Such criticism seems still to resonate today, given the emphasis we see placed on didactic, performative and STEM biased curriculum in mainstream state-funded schools. Dewey also has a lot to say about differentiation and the individuality of students in schools. He is opposed to the emphasis on academic delivery of content to the detriment of arts and vocational based subjects:

"We indiscriminately employ children of different bents on the same exercises; their education destroys the special bent and leaves a dull uniformity. Therefore, after we have wasted our efforts in stunting the true gifts of nature we see the short-lived and illusory brilliance we have substituted die away, while the natural abilities we have crushed do not revive." (p 65)

This is a searing reprimand for mass education. It's clear from the above quotes that Dewey abhorred the pressures placed on children by schools, and was a great advocate of students as individuals, supported active engagement in learning, and favoured a balanced authentic curriculum that could be applied to real life. Even though it is more than one hundred years since the book was published, Dewey's ideas are just as relevant today as the day they were written.

Reference
Dewey, J. (originally published in 1916 - this edition 2011) Democracy and Education. Milton Keynes: Simon and Brown.

Previous posts in the #3quotes series
Paulo Freire
Ivan Illich


#3quotes from Illich by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.