JOHN DEWEY

Education and Communication is the necessity of teaching and learning for the continued existence of a society. But justification is found in the fact that such emphasis is a means of getting us away from an unduly scholastic and formal notion of education. Schools are one important method of the transmission. There is more than a verbal tie between the words common, community, and communication. What we must have in common in order to form a community or society are aims, beliefs, aspirations, knowledge -- a common understanding .

As the relations of parent and child, teacher and pupil, employer and employee, remain upon this level, they form no true social group, no matter how closely their respective activities touch one another. Giving and taking of orders modifies action and results, but does not of itself effect a sharing of purposes, a communication of interests.

All communication is educative. To be a recipient of a communication is to have an enlarged and changed experience. The experience has to be formulated in order to be communicated. Formulating requires getting outside of it, seeing it as another would see it. All communication is like art. It may fairly be said, therefore, that any social arrangement that remains vitally social, or vitally shared, is educative to those who participate in it. Only when it becomes cast in a mold and runs in a routine way does it lose its educative power.

There is, accordingly, a difference between the education which everyone gets from living with others, and the deliberate educating of the young. If humanity has made some headway in realizing that the ultimate value of every institution is its distinctively human effect-- its effect upon conscious experience -- we may well believe that this lesson has been learned largely through dealings with the young.

As civilization advances, the gap between the capacities of the young and the concerns of adults widens. Learning by direct sharing in the pursuits of grown-ups becomes increasingly difficult. Ability to share effectively in adult activities, depends upon a prior training given with this end in view. Intentional agencies -- schools -- and explicit material -- studies -- are devised. The task of teaching certain things is delegated to a special group of persons.

One major problem, with which the philosophy of education has to cope, is the method of keeping a proper balance between informal and formal, incidental and intentional, modes of education.

To summarize, the very nature of life is to strive to continue being. Since this continuance can be secured only by constant renewals, life is a self-renewing process. Education is crucial to social life. This education consists in transmission through communication. Communication is a process of sharing experience till it becomes a common possession. As societies become more complex in structure and resources, the need of formal or intentional teaching and learning increases. As formal teaching and training grow in extent, there is the danger of creating an undesirable split between the experience gained in more direct associations and what is acquired in school. This danger was never greater than at the present time, on account of the rapid growth in the last few centuries of knowledge and technical modes of skill.

Prepared by Aaron Sandock