My Educational Experience in Light of Dewey's Experience and Education

In examining the teachings of John Dewey with my educational past, I am amazed at how little he really impacted most of my teachers. Throughout high school and college, I have always been plagued with the question, "Why? Why must we learn this? What good will it do me?" I remember having this frustration with one of my advanced math classes in high school. My parents had me ask it of one of my uncles the "why" question because he is an engineer, but he did not provide me with a good answer. So I did the work well and received a good grade, but I still have a tough time seeing the relevance of sine, cosine, and all of the theorems we had to learn. They are safely secured in a "water-tight compartment" in my head, except maybe they have finally drowned.

Unfortunately, the education system in America is still failing to properly educate students. The other week I was at my day job where there were three young city educated men who were approximately fourteen years old. We had a section that was 25% off. One of the items was marked a dollar. The one boy said, "How much is 25% off of a dollar?" His friend replied, "I don't know." The other replied, "Yeah, who cares?" I am always encountering students who cannot even count their change or do simple addition when figuring out how much they can purchase despite being well beyond the grades where that should be taught. If anyone were to work a week in a store that teenagers shop in, they would not fail to see the sorry state of students our school systems are putting out.

Dewey wrote, "It is often well in considering educational problems to get a start by temporarily ignoring the school and thinking of other human situations" (52). It appears that Dewey did not see where this line of thinking would lead. In conversations with educators, they are quick to blame the family life of their students for their student's failures. This easy scapegoat has allowed them to avoid self-examination. It does no good for an educator to blame the outside environmental conditions for a student's failure to learn. For most students who fail we could find a teacher who could make them succeed. It's not their home environment that is failing them; it is the school environment. Examination for failure should always start in the mirror. An elementary or secondary school student spends just as many waking hours at the school with educators as he would awake at home. Maybe the solution would be in having students have the same teachers the whole way through school rather than passing them on from grade to grade. If divorce is unhealthy for a student outside of school, would not separation from a teacher they have grown to love and who has grown to love them be just as unhealthy inside a school. Just when a teacher learns how to connect with a difficult student, that student is whisked away to the next grade. What stops us from having the same teacher take her students all the way from kindergarten to the sixth grade? Then once they are in sixth grade and education becomes slightly more specialized, they would transition to specialized teachers but in a similar vein; they would have the same English teacher, the same Math teacher, the same Art teacher, etc., until they graduate. Not only would they develop a healthy relationship of peers, but they would also have healthy relationships with teachers who would be able to know them and guide them through the learning process in a way that the current system cannot provide.

Having been raised in a small town of 1,400 people with a school class size of sixty students, which decreased to around thirty after students went to vocational school during their junior year, and following that up with graduating from a small college where I had the same History professor, English professor, etc., for most of my classes, I have seen the advantage in the relationships built with my educators throughout the process. Bringing this process of education which is found successful throughout rural America into the inner cities might just give those teachers a hope of impacting children who have difficult situations outside of school, and it might decrease that extremely high dropout rate in the cities. Our educational system is in need of a drastic overhaul. If Dewey is right in that knowledge of the student is essential for the educator, then our current system of passing students along to another teacher year after year prevents the teacher from genuinely knowing the student.

Dewey might not have experienced the problem of social promotion which is prevalent in schools today. If the purpose of education is to ensure that the student can interact with his society constructively, then they should not be passed on to the next grade until they have mastered the skills; however, our system is devised as a grade-tiered system. In order to make school more manageable on a massive scale, we have simplified the system so that all of the students should be at the same point at the same time. The goal of a first grade teacher is to pass the student on to second grade; a second grade teacher is to pass the kid on to third grade; on and on, ad nauseum. The whole system is contrary to Dewey's stance of dealing with the individual student where they are at. This idea of throwing kids in groups of students and having them go through a course together does not meld with Dewey's idea of guiding the student into interacting with their environment.

Our focus needs to shift from getting kids to pass to getting students to excel. In passing, the bar is set low and the student can hobble and stumble over it. In excelling, our goal is to have the student reach their potential. This has come to light more in pursuing my M.A. in History from Union Institute and University. If I hand in a paper and it is not quite up to snuff then the teacher would give it back with suggestions. I am not given a test and given a grade at the end on whether I pass or fail. I am expected to excel. I must learn what I am doing, and I must do it well. If not, I will just keep redoing it. The same is true with my eldest child who we have begun to homeschool. If we give him an assignment and he grasps just enough to get what would pass as a "C", we do not give him a bad grade and move on. We expect him to get every answer right. Not that he has to do that the first time, but he will have to do that. We will work through it together. My kid's grade does not matter; his grasping of the subject matter is what matters. We can do it over and over again until he gets it right. We can take a break if it seems like it is too much. Unfortunately, our society does not treat students the same way as Union treats me and we treat our son. We do not expect them to excel, and when they do not even pass the minimum standard, we quickly blame their home environment rather than examine our methods of education.

In regards to history in particular, I have had some very traditional education. My one professor would give us a list of around 150 terms to study for our test in which 50 of them would be on the test. For each term we would have to write four facts. It was just a matter of regurgitating information rather than actually getting a glimpse of how to live here and now through studying how people lived their lives in the past. Dewey described how to formulate a purpose for education: "It involves (1) observation of surrounding conditions; (2) knowledge of what has happened in similar situations in the past, a knowledge obtained partly be recollection and partly from the information, advice, and warning of those who have had a wider experience and (3) judgment which puts together what is observed and what is recalled to see what they signify" (69) The study of history, if relevant to the learner, fits squarely within the second step in developing purpose. We have thousands of years of people laid out before us of advice, information, and warning. The good historian can extrapolate what is relevant in those stories to the modern learner. For if the history we teach cannot help the individual in the present, then Dewey would, and I would argue rightfully so, declare that history worthless. History must be pulled from the hands of traditional education and released into relevancy in order to change the world. In my experiences, history has been the cornerstone of the traditional education establishment. Maybe it is because of the political and national struggles that characterizes most history textbooks rather than the local stories of the people from the neighborhood who have made a name for themselves or found themselves in the slammer. Dewey opens the door to a tough question that faces historians: What is useful history to the normal everyday experiences of our students?

This is not as to say that we must compromise our principles and make history up; the past is littered with ignored stories that could give advice, information, or warning to our lives; And our realities are littered with even more. The problem might be something more broad in that we have depersonalized history to such a scale that we only focus on the elite and powerful. History, like all of the other subjects, needs to become more localized if the student is to learn from it. Instead of learning to recite all of the Presidents of the United States, maybe my son should learn why our state decided to put the new expressway that will be on the outskirts of our town where they put it, so that he can learn the way our local politics work. Instead of learning the great churches of the past, maybe we should learn what churches have come and gone in our town and the controversies behind their closings so that we can help prevent our churches from reaching such a state; the same would be useful in business. The growing age of the Internet has made memorizing trivia even more mundane than it already was; the information is there for anyone who can google. Understanding how that information is relevant to my life and turning it into advice, information, or warning is where true education, or should I say wisdom, develops. It almost seems as if Dewey is not striving to teach people to be what the world would deem educated, but he explained a system in which the educator and student are trained to be wise.

All quotations from John Dewey's Experience and Education.