I have started to read Democracy and Education, written in 1916 by John Dewey (2009, edition by WLC Books). It is conveniently divided into twenty-six chapters so I will try to read and blog about one chapter each day this month. These entries won't be a summary of the book, but my reactions. I'll try to include what it is Dewey said that caused my reactions, but not to be bound to him in some academic way. Here goes...
In Chapter One, "Education as a necessity of life," Dewey describes education as the way that societies pass on their accumulated knowledge--both functional and social--from one generation to the next. At one time (and in simpler societies), education took place informally by the participation of young people in activities with adults. However, "as civilization advances, the gap between the capacities of the young and the concerns of the adults widens" (p. 10). Learning by direct, informal participation becomes problematical and societies create the dedicated mechanism of formal schooling.
In education today, a lot of attention is paid to making education "relevant." Dewey helps us to remember why relevance is such a challenge. It isn't just that kids don't pay attention like they used to. There is good reason for concern about making the connection between school and society. Digital native youth are often criticized for failing to appreciate the value of knowledge "just-in-case", but in complex societies the future case is increasingly obscure. This distance creates genuine pressure on the separated institution of schools themselves not to be remote, abstract, and irrelevant.
Unfortunately, we often try to make schools relevant rather simplistically by limiting their justification to vocational education--not in the specific sense of a program of training in auto mechanics, but in the sense of justifying every piece of curriculum on the basis of how effectively it prepares students to get a job. I realize there are a variety of factors contributing to this: a shift to two income households, failure of income to keep pace with inflation over the last thirty years, a more materialistic society, unemployment trends, and so on. However, the more we rely on getting a job as the sole justification of education, the more it becomes the standard for what we do. Right now, for example, science and math offer more and better employment prospects and so we focus on those at the expense of social studies which offers more general benefits related to understanding the society we live in.
We demean education when we limit it to technical outcomes and lose sight of its overarching social importance. Dewey points out that education, in its broadest sense, is the means by which societies achieve continuity--the ongoing transmission and renewal of their beliefs and aspirations as well as their knowledge. This is a realization that I think has actually not been lost on today's youth. Most teachers are pretty sure that students like coming to school for the social part, which we tend to characterize as "hanging with their friends." However, Dewey points out that people don't form their community "by living in physical proximity." They form community through communication that helps them to discover what they have in common.
I would argue that this community building through communication is what students' mean by the social side of school. Furthermore, I would argue it's what they are finding in their extreme online activity. It occurs to me, therefore, that what we need to make school relevant is not to simplify it by focusing on academics as acquisition of technical knowledge directly applicable to a vocation, but to complexify it by helping students to see how the technical side of academic subjects fits within a broader social side. This, of course, is the perspective of inquiry-based learning
In his lectures on Pragmatism (1907), William James states that each of us has a philosophy, and that "the most interesting and important thing about you is the way in which [that philosophy] determines the perspectives in your several worlds." When I first read that I wondered, "Who is teaching philosophy in our schools?" This is another way of acknowledging that academic knowledge has value only to the extent that it serves our philosophical objectives. All of which, I recognize, is easier said than done.
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