Experience and Education

I love my classmate's prompt this week that asks about which passages resonated with us from our reading. As I read I continually mark, highlight, underline and mark up our texts and so often I don’t get to go back and utilize that information, or at least not immediately. 

In this case, one quote which stood out from Dewey’s Experience and Education (1938), and a passage I marked is “Everything depends up the quality of the experience which is had. 

The quality of any experience has two aspects. There is an immediate aspect of agreeableness or disagreeableness, and there is its influence upon later experience” (p 27). 

I like this because of the idea that every experience is just another stepping stone to the next learning event and the next experience. Dewey’s Experiential Learning Cycle promotes this and shows how experience leads to judgment then building upon that to the next. 

As the passage above connotes, even a bad or disagreeable experience acts as a stepping stone and something to build on, it deosn’t have to be a successful or agreeable experience to be worthwhile and something to build on. 

Reference

Dewey, J. (1938).  Experience and Education.  Kappa Delta Pi’