I’ve always been concerned about a disconnect between my college teaching and the Deweyan ideals I have in mind. I open every semester by telling the students that I want the course to be a dialogue, but if the students don’t feel like talking on a given day, things veer more toward monologue. (And in weeks like this, where I’m fighting a cold and losing my voice, that’s decidedly not good.) I use various assignments and examples to try to help students make the connections between philosophical texts and the contemporary world, but I’m not sure if it always clicks. I’ve really been thinking about this a lot since I started taking the education courses – in a fairly Deweyan way, they’ve been helpful in getting me to think about ways to implement some of the ideas I’ve absorbed from books like Democracy and Education.
In light of those concerns, I think this essay in the Harvard Crimson is a well-done use of Dewey to criticize the reading/lecture approach that marks so much of higher education. Here’s the closing paragraph, but I’d say the whole thing is worth a read:
It is a telling truism about undergraduate life at Harvard that we learn more from our fellow students than we do in class. It certainly describes my experience, particularly when assessed against the classes I took in the Core. However, it is not simply that peer learning often trumps academic learning, but that the two so frequently exist in entirely separate spheres. A truly revitalized undergraduate education would adopt methods that more strongly involve undergraduates as collaborators in each other’s educations; to this end, the Task Force on General Education’s final report should mark the start of a larger conversation about how Harvard can ensure that its teaching methods are every bit as enlightened as the canon of knowledge it endorses.