Helping my wife tonight on her paper, she came across this quote from Dewey (1916):
From the standpoint of the child, the great waste in school comes from his inability to utilize the experience he gets outside… while on the other hand, he is unable to apply in daily life what he is learning in school. That is the isolation of school – it’s isolation from life.
It seem that we haven’t really come that far in 91 years now… if Dewey was on to this back then, we certainly haven’t moved the stick that far at all. At best we’ve added some window dressing to ensure that it looks like we’ve moved ahead (and we have in some areas, but not as it seems where we should be).
Thinking about this some more, you have to wonder, those of us reading this, how on Earth did we every apply what we learned in school to life before learning became our life (or is that it? – was learning always our life?)? Did we all just enjoy this obscure challenge and have enough “outside” learning to satisfy our outside of classroom world and then enough school to satisfy our day jobs in the classroom? Does this make a case for lots of extra curricular activities for kids (keep them busy so that the don’t see whatever that “real world” may be)?
It looks like I wasn’t the only one to catch this meme/idea over the weekend, Christian over at think:lab and Chris over at Practical Theory also posted about this.
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