2020-02-10 Experience and Education Chapters 1 and 2

Experience and Education, Chapter 1 Traditional versus Progressive Education

Think: How do good teachers in general come about? How can knowledge be understood as a tool for dealing with future problems?

Human beings are accustomed to thinking in terms of "either/or" and articulating beliefs.

In the history of education, there are two opposing conceptions, the endogenous and the exogenous, with the former arguing that education is based on natural endowment, and the latter arguing that it is a process of overcoming natural tendencies and acquiring habits by external force.

Nowadays there is the opposition between traditional and progressive education.

Characteristics of traditional education:

1. The system of knowledge and skills already formulated in the past is used as a teaching material, and the task of the school is to impart these systems of knowledge and skills only to the next generation.

2. Moral training is the formation of habits of action that conform to the standards and rules of behavior that have been established in the past.

3. The general pattern of school organization is highly controlled.

The purpose of traditional education is to enable the young generation to acquire an organized body of knowledge and complete skills in the textbooks, a hundred years of preparation for future responsibilities and success in life.

The textbooks and standards of behavior are inherited from the past, the textbooks are the main representatives of the learning and wisdom of the past, the attitude of the students must be gentle, tolerant and supple, and the function of the teacher is to impart knowledge and skills and implement the rules of behavior of the enforcers.

The traditional program essentially comes from above and external indoctrination. It imposes adult standards, materials, and methods on children who are only slowly growing to maturity. The materials, methods of learning and behavior are beyond the young learner's prior experience. Thus, even if some good teachers try to disguise this coercion with skillful techniques in order to moderate the apparent brutality, the result is that the materials and rules of behavior must still be imposed on the children. The student's job is still to perform a task - to learn. What the teacher teaches is still essentially refined, taught as a ready-made product, assumed to be a very imaginary cultural product of the future as well as the past, without any consideration of how knowledge is built or how it will change in the future.

(It is conceivable that many of the teachers who are seen to be good are in fact teachers in the test-based education system, who are able to simplify things and make them easier for students to memorize.)

Characteristics of Progressive Education:

1. Against indoctrination from above, advocating the expression of individuality and the cultivation of personality.

2. Opposition to external discipline in favor of free activity;

3. Opposition to learning from textbooks and teachers in favor of learning from experience;

4. Opposition to the acquisition of isolated skills and techniques through training in favor of skills and techniques as a means of attaining immediate immediate immediate needs;

5. Opposition to more or less preparation for the distant future in favor of Maximizing the opportunities of real life;

6. Opposition to fixed aims and teaching materials, this familiarity with the changing world.

All principles are abstract. Everything is determined by the interpretation given to these principles as they are put into practice in the school and in the home. It is either/or as opposed to the fixity of the old education.

The abstract principles of the new education cannot determine the choice of moral and intellectual education in practice; it must take its inspiration for solving problems from the old education.

What is the place and significance of the material within experience? What is the status and significance of organization? How does the educational material come into play? Is there anything inherent in experience that helps to organize its content incrementally? What are the consequences when the content of an experience is not organized incrementally?

When external control is abandoned, the problem is to discover some control inherent within experience. When we discard external authority, it does not mean that Jill discards all authority, but rather that we need to find a more effective wellspring of authority. Fishing on the basis of personal experience may mean that contact between adults and minors is more frequent and closer than it ever was in traditional schools, and that minors are guided more, not less, by the person they are being guided by.

How do we address the issue of mentoring and management in progressive schools?

Misconceptions: lack of attention to the organization and comprehension of teaching materials, the belief that guidance by adults is an infringement of personal freedom, and that education should be concerned with the present and the future.

The new education emphasizes the freedom of the learner and the promotion of the intellectual and moral development of the child.

Our problem is to identify the actual intra-experiential connections between past achievements and present topics.

Our problem is to discover how to transform the knowledge of the past into a powerful tool for dealing with the future. We can emphasize the importance of knowledge of the past as a tool, against its being an end in education.

When we do this, we are confronted with a new problem in the history of education: how can children become familiar with the past and be able to turn this familiarity into a powerful motivation for evaluating and recognizing the realities of life?

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Experience and Education, Chapter 2 The Need for a Theory of Experience

I. What are the problems facing the new education?

Belief in the new education necessarily opposes the philosophy and practice of traditional education. The fundamental problem facing the new education is the organic link between education and personal experience, and it hopes for some kind of empirical and experimental philosophy. Therefore we must first understand the meaning of an empirical experience that is different from our own explicit conception of empiricism.

Second, experience is not the same as education. What are the manifestations of experience that hinder and distort its growth?

The fact that all education comes from experience does not show that all experience is truly or equally educational. Experience and education cannot be equated. Experiences that hinder or distort the continued growth of experience have a false educational effect. For example, there is an experience which makes a person indifferent, lacking in sensibility and responsiveness, and which will limit the possibilities of acquiring richer experiences in the future (e.g., rote reading of the Scriptures, where a certain nine-year-old goes on to become the life coach of an adult, with a reminder of his father's key words behind him, and is not able to apply his knowledge in a flexible way); and a particular experience which may add to the mechanics of a person's skill in one particular sphere can, in turn, lead him to fall into stereotypes, to narrowing the scope for continued growth of experience. This often occurs with low-level mechanical operations that lack understanding of the skill. Such experiences are a hindrance to the growth of experience.

One experience may be immediately pleasurable, but it leads to sloppiness and inattention; this attitude changes the nature of subsequent experiences, and thus prevents people from getting what they are supposed to give them; some experiences may be disconnected from one another, and although each experience is pleasurable and even exciting in itself, they are not consistently connected with one another. are not consistently coherent with each other, so that unnatural, scattered, fragmented, and centrifugal habits are formed, so that people are incapable of controlling future experiences, and one becomes either pleasant, discontented, or hateful, and becomes rash and impetuous. Both of these experiences may often be reflected in the teacher's ability to teach only what interests the student, to make the difficult easy, with the result that the student develops a sloppy attitude toward knowledge or a habit of discontinuous distraction. Well,, you tell him what topics to cover, what about buying time, ah,

Third, what is the difference between the experience gained in the classroom of traditional education and that advocated by progressive education?

The traditional classroom is also the place where students gain experience. In traditional education, most of the experiences that students and teachers have are wrong. For example, there are many students who respond to ideas with indifference, many students who lose motivation to learn because they are influenced by the methods of learning they have experienced, and many students who have acquired specialized skills through mechanical practice such that their judgment and ability to act reasonably in new situations are instead limited. There are many students who associate the very mention of the learning process with boredom and ennui. Many students find that what they have learned is so different from the context of their lives outside of school that they are unable to control the context of their lives outside of school. There are many students who associate the mention of books with tiresome labor, so that they can be governed by everything else but the flashy reading material.

The old education cannot be denied altogether. In the old education young people had all kinds of experience, but the difficulty lay not in the absence of experience, but in the fact that, from the standpoint of association with future experience, these experiences were incomplete and erroneous. The nature of experience is both direct and indirect. Direct experience is apt and inapt and can affect the future. The influence of indirect experience is not mentioned in appearance and requires the educator to arrange experiences that arouse interest in the student's activity and motivate the student to acquire future experiences outside the classroom. Each experience is not subject to human aspirations and obligations, and each experience acquires vitality in future experiences. The central problem of progressive education is to select from existing experiences the kind of experience that will lead to a full and creative life in later experiences.

Fourth, what is the educational philosophy of progressive education? What are the difficulties of implementation by progressive teachers? What is its solution?

The philosophy of education must be expressed in words and symbols, but it is not only a linguistic expression, it is also a program to guide education. Education is a process of development in (of), due to, and for the sake of experience. Traditional education does not have a consistent philosophy of education, it works according to routine, its plans and procedures are inherited from the past; progressive education has to organize its teaching on the basis of a philosophy of experience. Experience is a plan of action which determines the teaching materials, the methods of teaching and training, and the physical and social organization of the school, and it is irreplaceable.

The need for a philosophy of education is felt only by educational reformers and revolutionaries. The knowledge of those who are stuck in their ways needs a little bit of moving words to justify the existing practice. The actual workshops follow fixed and institutionalized habits. Reformers, on the other hand, base themselves on the new philosophy of education. (As a result, many of our teachers stop short of excellence because they are teachers who are good at summarizing experience, but not teachers who have some advanced philosophy.)

None of the belonging to, due to, or for is self-evident; all prompt one to discover and implement a principle about procedure and organization from an understanding of the meaning of educative experience. Therefore, the elaboration of materials, methods and social relations appropriate to the new education is a more difficult task than that of traditional education. This does not mean, however, that the implementation of the new education is more difficult than that of the old.

The new education is, in principle, simpler than the old. The new education is harmonized with the principles of growth, and there is much to be said for the choice of educational materials and the organization of teaching methods, which often leads to unnecessary complications.

But simplicity is not the same as ease. Discovering what is really simple and acting on that discovery is a very difficult task. Once the perceived and the complex are established, institutionalized, and ingrained in customs and practices, it is easier for people to walk along the path and feel more comfortable doing so than it is to adopt a new viewpoint and find out what is actually going on from that new viewpoint. The old theory of celestial motion with regard to the cycle and the revolving circle was more complicated than the theory of terrestrial motion, i.e., the astronomical theory of Copernicus. In class, until the actual astronomical phenomena are explained according to the geodesic theory, it is easiest to follow the path of the old intellectual closure, and the least resistance is encountered. Thus, the selection of consistent empirical theories to provide positive guidance in the selection and organization of appropriate educational methods and materials is a slow and painstaking process. This process is growth. (People are so accustomed to past experiences and behaviors that they are unable to discard new ideas even when they may actually bring greater benefits. For example, in the era of promoting comprehensive reading, people want to improve their reading power, and the easiest way to improve reading power is to read, but this easy way is less people walk! Like fitness, you can insist on walking or running for twenty minutes every day, but people are counting on the gym or enroll in a class, and the result is unsustainable. The hardest thing is always to change your inertia and habits.)

In organizing progressive education, one must not automatically think of the familiar organization of the old education, but of modern empirical science as the form of organization of knowledge, basing the organization on experience and experiment. (All we can do is to consider how experience is formed and to organize the student to acquire it.)

Summarizing:

Good teachers are often good at summarizing patterns of knowledge and forming systems. They are able to simplify the knowledge and make it difficult for students to remember something. In the system of exam-oriented education, in order to examine the system's inherent knowledge of the situation, such students occupy an advantageous position. However, if these teachers ignore how knowledge is constructed and how it relates to the future, then the students' knowledge is rigid. Such learning experiences are ultimately not applicable to real life, and they produce good students who are stubborn, gullible, and unthinking.

Such teachers can only gain acclaim in schools where the test is the king, and they tend to leave such environments without a sense of fulfillment. They are stuck in a rut, teaching according to fixed and institutionalized habits for more than a decade without thinking about reform. They stop at excellence and fail to move towards it because they do not have an advanced philosophy of education with unlimited possibilities for expansion. In life, the middle-aged teachers in the classroom knowledge seems to be more and more comfortable, the more monotonous life, because they are familiar with that set of programs and knowledge as a matter of pride, and no longer difficult to make a new leap.