“One of Dewey’s basic educational ideas was that kids learn better when they organically assimilate knowledge in an active, personal, imaginative and direct way,” writes GMC prof. Steven Fesmire (philosophy). “A school may train more students with fewer teachers, and an industrial sector may produce more clothes, cars or animal protein to meet market demands with lower overhead costs. These products can then be used, or put to work to produce more things. The industrial imagination stops here, with efficient production. This is arguably useful, but what else has been unintentionally made, to which industrial thinking is oblivious? Have we made narrower lives? Have we at times embittered and disabled ourselves? Have we anesthetized moral and ecological sensitivity? Have we, in Dewey’s words, made life more ‘congested, hurried, confused and extravagant?'”
Read Steven’s thoughts on the subject in this Rutland Herald editorial. Steven is author of Dewey (Routledge, 2015), John Dewey and Moral Imagination (Indiana University Press, 2003), and editor of the Oxford Handbook of Dewey (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2017).
Green Mountain College