What is Educative?

We were asked to read Experience and Education by John Dewey

We were asked to think about

1. How does Dewey compare traditional vs. progressive education?

2. What consitutes a genuine "experience?"

3. What is "freedom" according to Dewey?

4. How do children learn "social control?"

Then...Write about: Do you think ALL experiences that a person has are educative, or just those that lead to growth? Feel free to agree or disagree with Dewey in this regard. 

Dewey said “…Education comes about through experience does not mean that all experiences are genuinely or equally educative. Experience and education cannot be directly equated to each other. For some experiences are miseducative”. I understand that Dewey meant not all education is the education we want people to learn or maybe the information is not accurate. However, learning from mistakes can sometimes outweighs formal education.

Dewey goes on to say, “No experience is educative that does not tend both to knowledge of more fact and entertaining of more ideas and to a better, a more orderly, arrangement of them.” As I mentioned before, if someone is given false facts and makes a decision based on that, they usually have a consequence (natural or given). Because of the consequence the person endures, since they followed false knowledge of facts they will learn from this mistake. Although it usually is not the course most educators want students to travel in order to learn, it happens quite often.

Lastly, Dewey says, “But what has been said is organically connected with the requirement that experiences in order to be educative must lead out into an expanding world of subject-matter, 1 subject-matter of facts or information and of ideas.” Again, I disagree that experiences have to be based off of subject-matter of facts or information. Sometimes the best qualities within people are because of a mistake they learned from.

Being educated in the educator world, typically means the knowledge one learns through some form of formal education (this definition is also slightly different than it once was). However, being educated to most people means acquiring knowledge, and whether a person learns something from a blog they read, a Facebook message someone posted about Miley Cyrus, a erratic driver on the interstate, or from the history text book in school, knowledge was transmitted, thus the experiences are educative. Whether that educational experience was positive or not, it is all about how the learner perceives information.