یکشنبه ۲۵ شهریور ۰۳ | ۱۸:۳۹ ۶ بازديد
of connections between one’s actions and their results, all learning has a practical element.
But at the same time, making those connections, and making further connections between
one’s present experience and what one has previously learned, leads to more abstract and
general knowledge that constitutes theory. By basing education on experience, theory
emerges from and finds application in practice. Purely practical education would be simply
acquiring habits by rote—e.g., learning a trade but without fully grasping that industry’s
broader effects. Purely theoretical education would be devoid of any connection to experience
outside the classroom—e.g., learning to solve an equation without understanding the uses of
that mathematical activity. The ideal of education, on Dewey’s account, would always have
theory and practice mixed.
A concept of a university that rejects the theory and practice divide would be aligned
with this experiential approach to education, instead of the inconsistent mix described by
Kerr. The division of theory and practice makes the separation of vocational studies from
liberal studies seem to track an important distinction, as Brewer expresses in his criticism of
practically-minded reforms at liberal arts colleges. But it is exactly this idea, ‘that a truly
cultural or liberal education cannot have anything in common, directly at least, with industrial
affairs’,38 that Dewey’s account of education enables us to resist. Subjects that are primarily
concerned with practical applications would become opportunities for learning scientific and
humanistic studies that are traditionally treated as worthy of study intrinsically. They would
not be relegated to ‘breadth’ requirements disconnected from students’ interests, but
integrated into their subjects of study. Going the other way, the practical justification of
subjects traditionally presented as purely theoretical studies would no longer be a ‘trap’ that
38 Ibid., 266.
draws us away from the true value of these subjects and towards mere economic value, as
Collini fears. A Deweyan approach to teaching these subjects would encourage students to
find connections between their own interests and activities and the more abstract and general
subjects, deepening their appreciation for theoretical study and finding practical value of a
broader sort than job skills. We can thereby also resist the notion that ‘the education which is
fit for the masses must be a useful or practical education in a sense which opposes useful and
practical to nurture of appreciation and liberation of thought’,39 as expressed in Rubio’s
remarks about vocational education. The aim is not more welders and fewer philosophers, but
more welders with appreciation for and interest in philosophy, and vice versa.
4.2. University Teachers and Researchers
The role of the teacher, on Dewey’s account, is to facilitate the student’s having of educative
experiences. Lessons are designed with the student’s background experience in mind, so as to
draw upon but also to challenge the connections and habits the student has already learnt. The
teacher sets up conditions so that the desired ways of acting and undergoing occur to the
student, and by ‘making the individual a sharer or partner in the associated activity so that he
feels its success as his success, its failure as his failure’.40 The school, of which the university
is one kind, is a special place set up to effect these experiences. The student’s experiences in
and out of school form a closed loop: her prior experience and interests form the basis for her
experience in the classroom, which she then connects to further experiences outside the
classroom, which form the basis for her next classroom experience.
Of course, university teachers do more than just education. One element that makes
universities distinct from other educational institutions, consistent across the entire history of
39 Ibid.
40 Ibid., 18.
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