Dewey states,
"I believe that much of present education fails because it neglects this fundamental principle of the school as a form of community life. It conceives the school as a place where certain information is to be given, where certain lessons are to be learned, or where certain habits are to be formed. The value of these is conceived as lying largely in the remote future; the child must do these things for the sake of something else he is to do; they are mere preparation. As a result they do not become a part of the life experience of the child and so are not truly educative."
Even in today's high-school populations, the opinion is rampant that learning is an accumulation of tools for use after graduation. In classrooms that don't directly connect content to application, this question is heard too often: "What do I need to learn this for? I'm not going to be calculating molecular masses in Real Life". If we didn't say it ourselves, we had classmates who did. Just last week I saw in my Facebook feed that someone had posted a graphic saying something to the effect of "Today another day went by where I didn't have to solve for x."
I believe (and I think Dewey did too) that effective education anticipates this sentiment and makes it irrelevant by erasing the idea that school is merely training for adulthood. Students should be taught that learning, as an experience, is the beginning of adulthood and has the power to make adulthood meaningful and worthwhile. By placing a boundary between education and adulthood, we sell ourselves short of the realization that both exist in the same space.
Another important dichotomy (and its effacement) marks Dewey's statements. He begins his creed by asserting that "all education proceeds by the participation of the individual in the social consciousness of the race". I realized metacognitively that I was initially pushing back against Dewey's emphasis on the importance of the social sphere as it informs the individual. I came to his Creed with a fight for the importance of deep introspection and the understanding of the infinite universe of the subjective self. It took me a few moments to realize that his assertions do not preclude this. Rather, they postulate what I understand to be a truth: that the "self" cannot exist without the community to define it, and that the community cannot exist without individuals to compose it. He states,
"I believe that the psychological and social sides are organically related and that education cannot be regarded as a compromise between the two, or a superimposition of one upon the other. We are told that the psychological definition of education is barren and formal - that it gives us only the idea of a development of all the mental powers without giving us any idea of the use to which these powers are put. On the other hand, it is urged that the social definition of education, as getting adjusted to civilization, makes of it a forced and external process, and results in subordinating the freedom of the individual to a preconceived social and political status."
We rob ourselves of the truth when we insist that individuals can live fully agent, self-realized lives without finding themselves within a community of others. Through others, we learn about our selves and internalize experiences that come through existing in a community. The intersection of the self and community is not a setting-beside-each-other, a "compromise" or a "superimposition". It is a simultaneous existence that can't be parsed (See Portals > Ubuntu (philosophy) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia).
Today in our Research and Educational Practice class, our instructor made a statement that I believe extends far beyond the realm of statistical analysis and is in fact a fundamental truth of the human condition: When we categorize, we lose meaning. She was speaking about the act of splitting a continuous number line into discrete categories of cut scores, but I heard a bell at the extrapolation of this; when we take the whole, limitless objective component of reality and place it in boxes, we cheat ourselves of its shades of existence. We have oaks, maples, elms, and ashes; we have tigers, sloths, capybaras, and lemurs; and we have street lights, taxi cabs, pianos, and welcome mats. But what we lose is the hum of it all, the realization that everything came from dust and then time and then stars and then supernovae. We have these things, which by definition means they are not those things, which means they are certainly not us. But they are us, and we lose that, and all through simple words.
As a lover of poems and stories and, yes, those simple words, I feel deeply, sometimes mortally, conflicted. Every word I speak or write or hear or read simultaneously gives meaning to the universe, both objective and subjective, and also destroys its full meaning. It is impossible to separate one from the other, the act of verbal creation and destruction. But this is the point, I think, because that separation is just another set of two categories that must exist at once.
The Beatles had it right: Let it be.
So did Vonnegut: So it goes.
I say: it is what it is. And I hope a smile and a question are enough for this.
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