The Great Waste in the School

Last week I finished John Dewey’s book, The School and Society and The Child and the Curriculum, so if you bear with me, I’m going to write a few posts on this masterpiece written in 1899.

Dewey strongly believed that teachers should design learning experiences around student’s interests. For as long as schools have been around, there has always been a disconnect between student’s experience outside of school and their experience inside. Students crave for meaning in school work, meaning that extends beyond classroom’s walls. The most important aspect of student’s lives, or the things they most care about, resides outside of the school.

Below is an excerpt from the book:

From the standpoint of the child, the great waste in the school comes from his inability to utilize the experiences he gets outside the school in any complete and free way within the school itself; while, on the other hand, he is unable to apply in daily life what he is learning at school. That is the isolation of the school — its isolation from life. When the child gets into the schoolroom he has to put out of his mind a large part of the ideas, interests, and activities that predominate in his home and neighborhood. So the school, being unable to utilize this everyday experience, sets painfully to work, on another tack and by a variety of means, to arouse in the child an interest in school studies.

This made me pause and think about my practices. Are we even aware what students’ interests and experiences are outside of the classroom? We, teachers, understand the conditions for authentic learning, yet our practices are not aligned with our understanding of it. Will Richardson has been advocating for meaningful learning experiences in schools for a long time. His TEDx talk helps us understand even better what Dewey meant by the great waste in the school.

Learning in focus — Because I understand the type of environment that produces the best learning, I need to make sure I design learning experiences that are aligned with my belief about learning.