Chapter 6: Education as Conservative and Progressive

In Chapter 6, Dewey provides what might be a rationale for inquiry-based learning as well as a thematic rather than a chronological approach to history, literature, etc. Furthermore, he provides some real perspective (rather than just complaint) on digital natives' penchant for just-in-time as opposed to just-in-case information.

Dewey states that "education may be conceived either retrospectively or prospectively" (p. 68)--terms roughly equivalent to conservative or progressive. He opposes study of the the past as something isolated from the present, and he advocates for study of the past only insofar as it contributes to understanding what he calls "the moving present"--that is, as a "resource for the imagination...seen as the past of the present, and not as another and disconnected world" (p. 65).

I don't believe it is the intention of most teachers to sever the past they teach from the present that their students inhabit. But, I do think that teachers, from their mature vantage point, forget that the connection is not natural or self-evident. James Loewen (Lies My Teacher Told Me, 1995), makes this point with regard to the teaching of events through which one has lived. For someone born in 1950, for example, the Vietnam War is an experience that is a natural and self-evident influence on the rest of that teacher's life. For our students, it's just history, with no more connection to the present than the Civil War, or the Revolution. To become evident, the connection (if indeed there is one) has to be constructed, starting in the present and looking to the future.

1. This argues in favor of thematic study rather than chronological study. A chronological approach asks the learner to hold too much in suspension against a vague promise of some future value.
2. Similarly, it argues in favor of an inquiry-based approach. A well-crafted inquiry question begins in the present and looks to the past in service of a recognized need. 

The present, in short, generates the problems which lead us to search for suggestion, and which supplies meaning to what we find when we search (p. 65).

Finally, this approach helps us to consider how students may have it right when they expect just-in-time information rather than just-in-need information....an individual can only live in the present...Instead of being just a cause of complaint over students' impatience and narrow perspective--instead of being seen as just one more thing that students don't have--their immaturity (as Dewey has explained) is their capacity for growth which can only be met by whatever is next in time.

We thus reach a technical definition of education: It is the reconstruction or reorganization of experience which adds to the meaning of experience and which increases the ability to direct the course of subsequent experience (pp. 65-66).