Yesterday, I mentioned one takeaway from Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death. Here is another, though really it is a nod toward John Dewey:
John Dewey wrote in Experience and Education, “Perhaps the greatest of all pedagogical fallacies is the notion that a person learns only what he is studying at the time. Collateral learning in the way of formation of enduring attitudes…may be and often is more important than the spelling lesson or lesson in geography or history… For these attitudes are fundamentally what count in the future.” In other words, the most important thing one learns is always something about how one learns. As Dewey wrote in another place, we learn what we do. Television educates by teaching children to do what television-viewing requires of them. And that is as precisely remote from what a classroom requires of them as reading a book is from watching a stage show.
I’m excited to look into more about Dewey educational philosophy, because this struck a real chord with me:
Learning how to learn is the essence of education. The content is secondary.
It reminds me of David Maister’s observation that knowledge “depreciates quickly”—you will always need to know how to learn, not just what you learned.
Taylor Coe 