Education and Experience Chapter 3

I struggled putting into words what I felt the significance of this chapter was on the future of education.  Although it is interesting that this book still holds relevance to education 78 years after it was first published.  That in and of itself probably says something about our education system...

Chapter 3

Criteria of Experience

As we construct the new learning ecosystem (based on principles of Mass Customized Learning), the role of experience becomes a concept that we must address.  The new learning ecosystem (with the learner at the center) is really an “experience generator” for students.  The challenge is to assure that the experiences that are built have what Dewey calls “continuity”.  Continuity is simply the recognition that one experience builds toward another experience and that we cannot construct educational experiences that exists in “water tight” (Dewey’s term) compartments that are unrelated to each other.  The goal of multiple experiences is growth for the student.  The role of the teacher is to encourage experiences (and create experiences) for students that encourage growth in all areas of their development.  The new learning ecosystem will avoid the narrow definition of growth that is now dominating education; namely growth equated to better scores on standardized tests.  Growth will be equated with how experiences will lead to further growth for students in all areas of development.

Learning facilitators will be charged with creating learning experiences that encourage growth and this will be a change in role for them.  Learning facilitators will create experiences that recognize the physical and social importance of a learning experience (Dewey calls these objective factors).  Our history (and training) in education has been to concentrate on a very narrow sliver of the physical aspects of creating a learning experience.  Things like textbooks and classroom layout have dominated our thinking while social aspects have been largely ignored (especially how they relate to creating a continuity of learning experiences).

My last reaction to this chapter as it relates to what we are building within the MCL framework is that our traditional education system creates (or demands) learning experiences that are unrelated to each other.  We may tell students that they have to learn something (or take a class and “learn”) because “it is good for you” or that it will teach you “discipline” or that you will “use it later in life”.  This is intellectual dishonesty toward our learners and toward ourselves. Without anchoring the learning experience in the life of the student, the learning experience becomes an abstract concept with little or no meaning for the learner. Our new learning ecosystem will not have a learning experiences whose stated objective for learning is that “it is good for you”.