Education as Growth
John Dewey’s notion of education as growth always resonated with me. In his conception, growth is the goal of education, rather than preparation for a job, or to be a citizen, or to be a productive consumer. But it is not just the goal, growth is education and education is growth. In the context of life, growth can mean a lot of things. Dewey realized that, and didn’t have one specific universal notion of what growth meant. For Dewey, the trajectory of a person’s growth was dependent on myriad factors. Those factors could change as environmental or societal factors changed, as family circumstances shifted, as the learner’s own growth itself altered the course of that growth. And for Dewey, this was a continuous process that happened while a human being was alive. It didn’t end upon high school graduation, college graduation, or upon completion of a post-doc. It only ended when life ended.
At the graduate school of education where I did my masters program, there was a bust of John Dewey up on the third floor. He was venerated as the patron saint of education, oft spoken of as seminal to all things education. Ironically, we never read a word he wrote in my masters program. That never computed to me.
In one of my classes, we had an assignment to write a letter from an educational scholar or philosopher to ourselves about how to incorporate that person’s ideas in our teaching practice. I chose Dewey. Here is the letter Dewey wrote to me (or I wrote to myself, mimicking his ideas):
Dear Aspiring Social Studies Teacher,
While you embark on the all-important task of directing the education of youngsters, keep a strong sense of this educational end: growth. At its core, the goal and outcome of the process of education is just that, growth. You might be wondering what I mean by growth. I mean that the student will increase her sense of understanding of how her various experiences are connected, so that she can engage future experiences in sight of previous experiences — and those experiences would not be limited to her classroom experiences, but all the experiences she has.
As a teacher you need to approach the education of your students with methods that will aid them in growing. Since democratic environments offer an optimal amount of freedom for people to grow individually and as a community, develop situations where students can work collaboratively and democratic participation is modeled. In addition, since the origins of human thinking are problematic situations, lead the students to situations in which authentic problems face them that have some kind of intrinsic value for their particular lives and community situations. In so doing, you may need to enlist the students’ participation in co-creating situations that give them an opportunity to authentically interact with a problem in an environment that is similar to their regular lives (which would also help model democratic ideals). Encourage the students to use their ideas as instruments for dealing with the problematic situations, where they will ultimately test those ideas in action or reconstructed experience. Always try to avoid dualistic thinking, as it tends to artificially construct bifurcations that engender hierarchical thinking and create divisions between theory and practice and between students and curriculum. The goal of inquiry should be to create useful ideas rather than to arrive at “true” propositions, as our criteria for “truth” are inadequate for dealing with the world of uncertainty and change that we inhabit. Absolutes only aim at giving us a sense of permanency and certainty in a world that continually changes.
You may be thinking that there is little above that will help you teach social studies. But I would argue that you are in a much better situation than your colleagues in other subject areas. You may have standards and requirements to meet, but what better subject areas than history and geography could you ask for to implement what I’ve written above? What better than history can help students synthesize useful ideas to use and to help them understand the uncertain and dynamic nature of the world? What better than history to provide students with countless examples of dualisms that fall apart upon basic inquiry (particularly breaking down the dualism of past and present, by seeing the infinite connections between those two disparate notions, and then viewing them as a continuum)? What better than geography to show the variety of environments, organisms, and concepts that abound in our plentiful rather than either/or world? What better than history to offer the students the opportunity to use their ideas to deal with problematic situations and then to test those ideas in the reconstructed actions of their species? What better than history to present students with an infinite number of problematic situations and the ideas of how their species has interacted with those situations? Many of the historical problematic situations persist into our own times and have intrinsic interest to students and their communities. What better than history to offer an exploration of democracy, its role in society, and its alternatives? What better subject than history to provide students with a body of reconstructed human experiences to connect to their own in order that they may view future experiences in sight of all past experiences. What other subject offers room for so much growth?
Think about some of these ideas in the genuine problematic situation that you now face: how to educate young students. You have intrinsic interest in this situation. You have past experience and instrumental ideas to draw on. Best of luck.
What I liked about Dewey’s ideas are that education/growth is fundamental to life. It is expansive and happens in every situation, both in classrooms and outside of them (maybe more in the latter). It is about perspective and understanding rather than memorization and basic skills. And, it is all about meaning and relevance to the students — all things teachers hope they can help their students develop.
But inside the confines of completely contrived classroom experiences, where curriculum guides instruction, where standardized testing rules, how can teachers thread the needle to help their students grow? How can they make prescribed topics and material relevant to students whose lives are dominated by distraction and social and emotional challenges?
When I was a teacher, it often felt to me as though public education was more an effort to standardize children than to help them grow. We had standards of what kids were supposed to know and be able to do in each subject by a certain grade level. It often felt like the standards were setting us and the kids up for failure. I mean, when was the last time you met a standard human?
Variation is the norm. In terms of all sorts of things: culture, neurodevelopment, neurodiversity, background, interest, language, talent, religion, philosophy, socioeconomics, life experience — all the things that make up a person’s unique developmental perspective. And all the things that our school system fails to consider as critical to the process of education. We expect students to excel and to want to excel largely in the absence of an understanding of relevance to their individual growth.
Sure, the system works for some kids who get good grades or who get a lot out of their school experiences. But even a lot of the kids who get good grades don’t really get a lot out of their school experiences. We often conflate those two things. Maybe it is the intellectual bulimia that motivates kids to do well on tests for the sake of doing well on the test and getting a good grade. What gets measured is what gets done. I was one of those kids who managed to do well on tests — I figured out how to play the game, but was immensely underprepared for college when I arrived there.
The question is: are we creating educational systems and experiences that actually help kids grow?
Does it make sense to segregate students into grade levels by approximate age when neuroscience tells us that brains develop at different rates and in accordance with all kinds of social and familial factors? Does it make sense to have a curriculum that all students must learn and demonstrate that they have learned? Is that even possible? Can we reliably measure it? Can batches of students learn the same thing in roughly the same way at the same time and pace? What about the way we confine students to classrooms for most of their school day? Do we subject them to completely contrived situations that are disconnected from what they are “supposed to learn” and that may not seem relevant to their lives? I couldn’t count the number of times that students asked why we had to learn this or that when I was a teacher. A lot of times, the best answer I could give was that it was in the curriculum, because sometimes I didn’t see the value or relevance to the students’ lives at that moment. Sometimes we were rushing to complete lessons and units because it was on the departmental midterm or final exam, and it would reflect poorly upon me if my kids didn’t do as well as other teacher’s kids. What gets measured is what gets done. And, what about the incredible disparity in funding for urban and rural schools compared to suburban schools? And the ethnocentrism baked into systems and curricula that are largely dominated by white European-Americans who run schools, districts, and state legislatures?
How does any of this promote growth? I don't know.