This initially serves as a comment to Julia's post, but I now think it may provok more thinking if I post it here.
Actually, I very much agree Dewey’s opinion that education should open doors or enable our students to develop connections. Then the problem is open doors to where? be connected to what? The answer differs individually. A burglar may think that his education should open a door for him to become a more skillful burglar; A young child who is interested in mathematics would believe that his education should connect him to a world full of mathematics; and a person who pursues monetary wealth believe that his education should connect him to a more wealthy status.
Although Dewey insisted that to ask “growth towards what?” is inconsistent with the concept of growth, actually, from my perspective and most of you may also agree, Dewey believed that growth should towards an ideal democratic society. So if an experience couldn’t lead a person towards a good citizen of a democratic society, then this experience is not educative.
Thus we see that Dewey’s growth actually has a direction. If we do not agree with Dewey’s direction, then we should face the questions: what is the right direction of education? Just as I mentioned, the answer may differ from person to person. Then this may lead to a concept of education that students should be taught individually, according individual interests and characters. This concept is at best impracticable and biased. The reason why we are leading to this situation is that we neglect that each individual might have more than one aims and expectation of their education. If everyone is connected only to one place, we would not have a community or a society. There are multiple connections. So there may not be an ultimate aim of education, rather there might be multiple aims of education. Thus we could explore the possibility of defining the aim of education from both the angle of individual and the angle of the whole society, and they try to find the connections between the two types of aims.
Showing posts with label Dewey growth. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dewey growth. Show all posts
Wednesday, September 8, 2010
Friday, September 3, 2010
About Dewey's "Growth" and Epistemology
As I mentioned in my last post, some other questions running in my head when I was writing that post. Also, the topic of my last post seems too big, and somehow empty, so I am trying to talk some smaller things by using specific examples here.
Dewey hold the opinion that becoming more skillful as a burglar does not represent growth, because such activities close off connections and prevent further growth. Then Noddings put another two examples of mathematics and monetary accumulation to argue against Dewey’s opinion. From my perspective, both of their opinions haven’t well developed (maybe it’s because the length of the passages in this book is limited, and I have never read other of their articles in which their argument processes maybe full presented).
In my opinion, the process when the burglar is learning should be regarded as a kind of growth. Then if the burglar went on to do very serious wrong deeds, more and more serious, even developed into a murderer, and got arrested and was given an all life sentence. Only at this time, his growth stopped, because he had lost all the connections to further growth. Exceptional cases exist where prisoner with a life-long sentence could get out of the prison and go on towards new growth like Andy Dufresne in the movie “The Shawshank Redemption”. However, I am not intended to talk about so extreme cases here, so let’s go back to the burglar, if he didn’t do that much serious wrong deed, and someday he somehow realized it’s a bad thing to steal, and stopped such behavior and became a very skillful worker or so. The skills he had learnt when being a burglar may contribute to his new job. This is definitely a growth which opens the door of a new kind of life to him. Even if the skills won’t contribute to his new work, his thought during this transition of his life, and his idea that “being a burglar is wrong” should definitely account for his growth. Dewey may see things from the angle of a democratic society, but I see them from the angle of the individual burglar. We have talked about Dewey’s democratic idealism in our group’s discussion in class, the critiques of Dewey’s theory is actually based on his ideal democratic society.
Dewey's "aim of education is growth" led me to think one question I have been wondering: what is the aim of engineering education? To make students become engineers? What if many of them end up not being engineers (this is obviously true)? Does the engineering education fail? Many of my former classmates in Electrical Engineering are not engineers now. Is this a waste of engineering educational recourses? Should I blame this to the EE education that we have received? Now, Dewey’s idea of growth kind of inspires me that as long as the engineering education gives certain connections to the students which connected them with certain directions that they want to go, the education is at least not a failure, such as my EE education has connected me to Purdue ENE now. I am not an electrical engineer now, but at least I am not failure production of that EE education. It seems earlier to talk about “engineering education” when we are still reading about education, but my mind doesn’t wait until the “what is engineering education?” essay due date. This is another contradictory topic running in my mind, and I shouldn’t say it here. Maybe I could further develop this idea in my “what is engineering education?” essay.
I have a last piece of opinion to say. When I wrote about the burglar case, I said the idea “being a burglar is wrong” could contribute to the burglar’s growth, and this reminded me a defect in Dewey’s epistemology: "p" should be true to be regarded as knowledge, when "p" turns to be wrong, it no longer guides inquiry, so it couldn’t be regarded as knowledge and should be abandoned. There should be more to say, even though "p" is no longer right, “p is wrong” should be knowledge, because it could guide inquiry. For example, we may get a hypothesis that “s is wrong” because it is similar to "p", and then we could utilize other method to verify whether this hypothesis is right or wrong. Actually, the knowledge that “something is wrong” is often more useful than a right proposition, because we tend to be more aware of the experience and lessons we gain from a former wrong idea.
That's all, please excuse my badly-organized logic.
Dewey hold the opinion that becoming more skillful as a burglar does not represent growth, because such activities close off connections and prevent further growth. Then Noddings put another two examples of mathematics and monetary accumulation to argue against Dewey’s opinion. From my perspective, both of their opinions haven’t well developed (maybe it’s because the length of the passages in this book is limited, and I have never read other of their articles in which their argument processes maybe full presented).
In my opinion, the process when the burglar is learning should be regarded as a kind of growth. Then if the burglar went on to do very serious wrong deeds, more and more serious, even developed into a murderer, and got arrested and was given an all life sentence. Only at this time, his growth stopped, because he had lost all the connections to further growth. Exceptional cases exist where prisoner with a life-long sentence could get out of the prison and go on towards new growth like Andy Dufresne in the movie “The Shawshank Redemption”. However, I am not intended to talk about so extreme cases here, so let’s go back to the burglar, if he didn’t do that much serious wrong deed, and someday he somehow realized it’s a bad thing to steal, and stopped such behavior and became a very skillful worker or so. The skills he had learnt when being a burglar may contribute to his new job. This is definitely a growth which opens the door of a new kind of life to him. Even if the skills won’t contribute to his new work, his thought during this transition of his life, and his idea that “being a burglar is wrong” should definitely account for his growth. Dewey may see things from the angle of a democratic society, but I see them from the angle of the individual burglar. We have talked about Dewey’s democratic idealism in our group’s discussion in class, the critiques of Dewey’s theory is actually based on his ideal democratic society.
Dewey's "aim of education is growth" led me to think one question I have been wondering: what is the aim of engineering education? To make students become engineers? What if many of them end up not being engineers (this is obviously true)? Does the engineering education fail? Many of my former classmates in Electrical Engineering are not engineers now. Is this a waste of engineering educational recourses? Should I blame this to the EE education that we have received? Now, Dewey’s idea of growth kind of inspires me that as long as the engineering education gives certain connections to the students which connected them with certain directions that they want to go, the education is at least not a failure, such as my EE education has connected me to Purdue ENE now. I am not an electrical engineer now, but at least I am not failure production of that EE education. It seems earlier to talk about “engineering education” when we are still reading about education, but my mind doesn’t wait until the “what is engineering education?” essay due date. This is another contradictory topic running in my mind, and I shouldn’t say it here. Maybe I could further develop this idea in my “what is engineering education?” essay.
I have a last piece of opinion to say. When I wrote about the burglar case, I said the idea “being a burglar is wrong” could contribute to the burglar’s growth, and this reminded me a defect in Dewey’s epistemology: "p" should be true to be regarded as knowledge, when "p" turns to be wrong, it no longer guides inquiry, so it couldn’t be regarded as knowledge and should be abandoned. There should be more to say, even though "p" is no longer right, “p is wrong” should be knowledge, because it could guide inquiry. For example, we may get a hypothesis that “s is wrong” because it is similar to "p", and then we could utilize other method to verify whether this hypothesis is right or wrong. Actually, the knowledge that “something is wrong” is often more useful than a right proposition, because we tend to be more aware of the experience and lessons we gain from a former wrong idea.
That's all, please excuse my badly-organized logic.
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