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In most of his major works, John Dewey makes a connection between experience and education, education and social justice. In this paper, I argue that the relationship between experience and education, education and social justice is most profoundly illustrated in the work of Carter G. Woodson. What is Education and what is Educative Experience? Dewey (1916 &1938) argued that in learning, there is some interplay between experience and education. In, Experience and Education, he described succinctly this connection. He argued that the more salient factors contributing to a student’s learning is the interaction between the student’s experience and his or her environment. According to Dewey (1916), education is, “that reconstruction or reorganization of experience which adds to the meaning of experience, and which increases ability to direct the course of subsequent experience” (pp. 82-83). However, “some experiences are mis-educative” (Dewey, 1938/1998, p.13). A mis-educative experience “has the effect of arresting or distorting the growth of further experience” (p.13). Martusewicz (2004, p.4) frames the argument that “transformations [which] reproduce conditions, e.g., ideologies, attitudes, relationships or practices, or social and economic structures that may be harmful to others,” are mis-educative. However, Dewey (1938/1998) defined education as growth and educative experience as continuity through renewal and postulates that “Growth, or growing as developing, not only physically but intellectually and morally, is one exemplification of the principle of continuity” (p. 28). In his conceptual framework, Dewey explained that a man who grows in efficiency as a gangster or as a burglar or as a corrupt politician would not qualify from the “standpoint of growth as education and education as growth” (p.29).Dewey(1938/1998) saw educative experience as a moving force whose “value can be judged only on the ground of what it moves toward and into” (p. 31). Responding to Dewey’s (1938) work, Maxine Greene (1998) commented, For Dewey, the notion of experience referred to all human transactions, all encounters with the physical and human world. If education was to mean anything at all, it had to involve a heightened reflectiveness with respect to lived experience, a more conscious thoughtful way of being in the world. Without such an approach to experience, it was highly unlikely that a pursuit of knowledge could begin. (119-120) Carter G. Woodson (1875-1950), a man who lived at about the same time and during the same era as John Dewey had earlier offered a definition of education in his book, The Mis-Education of the Negro (1933/1993). In the book he pointed out that Blacks were not given the right type of education because their education was not drawn from their own experiences. According to Woodson, the type of education given to Blacks subjected them to the will of others and was not “determined by the make-up of the [people]themselves and by what [their] environment requires of [them]” (p. x). Woodson argued that the type of education given to Black children was mis-educative because it “created a split in the personality of blacks typified by dual identities resulting in a profound identity crises which has made educated African Americans” (Asante, 1990, p. 167), to “decry any such thing as race consciousness”(Woodson, 1933/1993, p.7). He stated, “The chief difficulty with the education of the Negro is that it has been largely imitation resulting in the enslavement of his mind” (p.134). He went on to say that Blacks were never educated but were only informed about the world and about things around them (p.144), because education for Blacks was determined from without. As a corrective to mis-education, Woodson suggested that education for Black children should be determined by the makeup of the people themselves and should be carried out according to the circumstances which their environment requires of them. This is because education which is dictated by one’s environment allows the individual to think for him or herself. Similarly, John Dewey saw educative experience as growth that leads to further growth. ISSN 2375-0782 (Print) 2375-0790 (Online) © Center for Promoting Ideas, USA www.jespnet.com 11 According to him, “Any experience is mis-educative that has the effect of arresting or distorting the growth of further experience”(1938/1998 p. 13).He defined mis-educative experiences to include callousness, insensitivity and lack of responsiveness (p.13). The Importance of Experience in Education As I have noted in the previous paragraphs, Dewey (1916&1938) argued that there is an organic connection between experience and education and in Experience and Education in particular, he talks about students “delving into their roots in the past” (p. 93).To illustrate this point, he stated: Just as the individual has to draw in memory upon his own past to understand the conditions in which he individually finds himself, so the issues and problems of present social life are in such intimate and direct connection with the past that students cannot be prepared to understand either these problems or the best way of dealing with them without delving into their roots in the past. In other words, the sound principle that the objectives of learning are in the future and its immediate materials are in present experience can be carried into effect only in the degree that present experience is stretched, as it were, backward. It can expand into the future only as it is also enlarged to take in the past.(p.93) On his own part, Woodson was consciously deliberate in arguing that Black children were not given the right type of education because their education lacked the interplay between the students and their experiences and because their education subjected them to the will of others. In other words, education given to Black children was not determined by what their environment requires of them(Woodson, 1993, X). Education, Political Consciousness and Social Justice According to Matthew C. Altman, citizenship education should “prepare students to participate in public dialogue about questions of justice and morality” (cited in Waghid 2005, p.323). According to Heybach, (2009), “Dewey called on teachers and schools to become agents of individual transformation”(p. 240). It is instructive to point out that at the time Dewey wrote some of his major works, both the American public, educators and education philosophers “wanted schools to assimilate students into American life, combining the basics of English and arithmetic with emphasis on patriotism, hard work, fair play, and honesty”(Graham, 2005,ff). With the wave of new immigrants into the United States in the twentieth century, John Dewey called for schools to emphasize socialization, development of patriotism and full citizenship. But as Graham (2005) has pointed out, “John Dewey and his high-toned colleagues had much more subtle notions of patriotism in mind, ones that recognized the obligations of both the citizen to the state and of the state to the citizen, including the citizens’ responsibility to serve the state through their enlightened criticism of it” (p.24). Dewey (1916/1966) believed that education is the “construction or reconstruction of experience,” because “every experience both takes up something from those which have gone before and modifies in some way the quality of those which come after” (Dewey, 1938/1998, p. 27). Both Dewey and Woodson believed in education for social justice. They wanted schools to uncover and change permanently institutions that commemorate systemic oppression. In an article entitled, “The School as a Means of Developing A Social Consciousness and Social Ideals in Children,” Dewey (1923) called on schools to do “really fundamental work of improving the health and culture of the community, and in spreading liberty and justice and happiness throughout . . .” (p. 517).Similarly, Woodson (1933/1993) called on schools to expose institutions and organizations which perpetuate systemic oppression and called on educated people “to revolutionize the social order for the good of the community” (p. 145). He went on to say that the “educational system of a country is worthless unless it accomplishes this task,” and concluded, “Men of scholarship and consequently of prophetic insight must show us the right way and lead us into the light which shines brighter and brighter” (p.145). Culturally Responsive Teaching Woodson believed that academic attainment should include student learning, cultural proficiency and political consciousness. He argued that educators should not only use students’ prior experiences and frames of reference to make learning more relevant, but they should develop in their students sociopolitical consciousness that would enable them to critique society not as it is but as it should be (Woodson, 1933/1993, pp.142-146; see also Ladson-Billings, 1995, 2009; Delpit, 1995; Gay, 2010).Lisa Delpit (1995), one of the leading proponents of culturally responsive teaching makes a similar point by suggesting, that [students] must be allowed the resource of the teacher’s expert knowledge, while being helped to acknowledge their own ”expertness” as well; and that even while students are assisted in learning the culture of power, they must also be helped to learn about the arbitrariness of those codes and about the power relationships they represent. (p. 45) Journal of Education & Social Policy Vol. 6, No. 2, June 2019 doi:10.30845/jesp.v6n2p2 12 In as much as Woodson (1933/1993) believed that teachers should cultivate a nurturing and supportive learning environment for their students, he wanted schools to be infused with very robust cultural sensitivities with emphasis on the centrality of experience in what scholars today call culturally responsive teaching. Geneva Gay (2010, p. 31) tells us that culturally responsive teaching “is using the cultur

journal of education and social policy

A Conversation with John Dewey and Carter G. Woodson concerning Experience and Education, Education and Social Justice, and Culturally Responsive Teaching