The Aim of Education 1
For John Dewey, the purpose of education is the intellectual, social, emotional, and moral development of the individual within a democratic society. Development along these axes both depends upon and contributes to increasingly democratic and democatizing contexts.
Education is thoroughly social, providing individuals with personal investments in “social relationships and control, and the habits of mind which secure social changes without introducing social disorder” (1916/1944, p. 99). Education and experience are cut from the same cloth: “a reconstruction or reorganization of experience which adds to the meaning of experience, and which increases the ability to direct the course of subsequent experience” (1916/1944, p. 74).
Education must thus be experienced-based and not externally imposed because “there is an intimate and necessary relation between the processes of actual experience and education” (1938, p. 20). Dewey’s insistence on experience as the heart and soul of education is founded on principles of interaction and continuity.
Like Piaget, Dewey recognized that experiences build on previous experiences, and he insisted it is the teacher’s responsibility to determine the direction in which an experience is heading. In relation to this point, he believed that experiences (and their facilitation or toleration) can be both educative and miseducative. He defined an educative experience as one that broadens one’s horizons of experience and knowledge and leads in a constructive direction toward intelligent action. Intelligent action involves forward momentum rather than stasis.
It is deliberate rather than impulsive. Above all, it is reflective. In contrast, a miseducative experience is one that “arrests and distorts” development. It cultivates a callous, unreflective, self-absorbed disposition. It inclines the individual toward “routine actions” and “narrows [his or her] field, limiting meaning horizons and eclipsing possible solutions to problematic experiences.”
Miseducative experiences neither suggest nor promote awareness of self, social relationships, and the general sociopolitical ecology in which one lives. They obscure ways in which the actions of individuals can contribute productively to that ecology.