What Education Really Means for Me

Education is life itself. - John Dewey

John Dewey (1859-1952) believed that learning was active and schooling unnecessarily long and restrictive. His idea was that children came to school to do things and live in a community which gave them real, guided experiences which fostered their capacity to contribute to society. For example, Dewey believed that students should be involved in real-life tasks and challenges: • maths could be learnt via learning proportions in cooking or figuring out how long it would take to get from one place to another by mule • history could be learnt by experiencing how people lived, geography, what the climate was like, and how plants and animals grew, were important subjects

I believe that not only the purpose of education is in life itself, but also education is all about life. What should teachers consider in teaching their students is to provide them with life skills (read: competence), not materials. The problem is that people in traditional forms of education usually approach it from the standpoint of just preparing a person for a job. But one’s job isn’t the definition of one’s life—it’s only that which enables u to have enough money to meet our needs. Our lives encompass a much broader arena than one’s capacity to earn money. Any educational system that teaches only job skills or offers only intellectual information is neglecting the essential needs of human beings.

We need proper training in “how-to-live” skills such as how to find the right mate, how to raise our children, how to be a good employee, how to get along with our neighbors, and how to concentrate our minds so that we can draw success into all of our endeavors. There are many such skills that are essential to prepare a child for adulthood, and in traditional education many of them are completely ignored. If we train people to drive buses or operate machines, we get skilled workers who can do particular jobs. But if we teach people to think, and provide them with wide horizons, they can do many things; they can train and retrain in different positions, they can be flexible and adaptable in exporting their mental skills from one job to another, and in general they can provide their employers and the country at large with the advantage of being an educated, and not merely a trained, workforce. Thus, education is absolutely not about the eight hours a day we spend at the workplace. In fact, it should be about the whole character and quality of our lives.