Educating for Life

    I was struck particularly by Dewey's concept of the principal of continuity first mentioned on page 47.  This theory embraces the idea that educative experiences should have future implications for the learner.  However, this is often misconstrued as the accumulation of knowledge (facts, as in the case of traditional education) being a means of preparing students for the future.  The argument is that teaching facts does not prepare students for future situations because they are taught in such a specific manner and environment that there is no connection to real world situations for the learner.  The learner does not recognize opportunities to apply knowledge due to the lack of connection to personal experience.  While the same environment and occasion would probably re-stimulate the knowledge and perhaps bring it to surface, it is unlikely that the situation of sitting at a desk being bombarded with facts would be resurrected in the "real world" outside of the school.  Thus, the knowledge is there, but useless.     

    Dewey then goes on to write of the importance of an educator to instill in the learner the desire to continue learning.  This also lends itself to the challenge of not negatively effecting the student's desire to learn.  He writes that to do so would mean that, "The pupil is actually robbed of native capacities which otherwise would enable him to cope with the circumstances that he meets in the course of life." (p.48)   He infers that for a student to lose interest in the desire to learn is for the student a loss of meaning in future experiences.  Dewey repeatedly writes of the importance of knowing one's students in order to organize meaningful educative experiences that will both create a desire to continue learning, and provide a source from which to draw when faced with similar circumstances in the future.  The teacher is challenged with becoming a sociologists to some extent, to understand the environment a child may have been raised in, and to make educated decisions about choosing proper experiences that will aid students' in making life choices beyond the school experience itself.  So, I suppose the question is how?  How does one create lessons that have equal impact for all students in a given class, especially when the spectrum of students is likely to involve a range of students that are as individual as snowflakes?