Opinion | John Dewey’s Vision of Learning as Freedom

Education
should aim to enhance our capacities, Dewey argued, so that we are not
reduced to mere tools. “The kind of vocational education in which I am
interested is not one which will ‘adapt’ workers to the existing
industrial regime; I am not sufficiently in love with the regime for
that.” Are we?

Who
wants to attend school to learn to be “human capital”? Who aspires for
their children to become economic or military resources? Dewey had a
different vision. Given the pace of change, it is impossible (he noted
in 1897) to know what the world will be like in a couple of decades, so
schools first and foremost should teach us habits of learning.