Page 142 - TWO OF A KIND • Erik Renkema

CHAPTER 6
perspectives in the social context of a safe classroom, students practice democratic values (Sutinen, Kallioniemi and Pihlström 2015; Webster 2009; Knight 1998).
The second aspect of Dewey’s democratic education is psychological. Dewey emphasizes the psychological side as the basis of education (1897), pointing out that communal and societal aims cannot be reached without paying attention to the student’s evolution of experience. In multiple publications, Dewey underlines the importance of concentrating on children’s life experience (1899, 1902, 1938a, 1897): “That we learn from experience, and from books or the sayings of others only as they are related to experience, are not mere phrases” (1899, 14-15). Education must concentrate on this learning from and thinking about experiences. In democratic practices of education, “one shares in what another has thought and felt” (1980, 8). At the heart of this process is the response of children’s minds and the creation of a new experience towards a “culmination of themselves” (1902, 123). We recognize this concept when Dewey, in his Common Faith, elaborates on experiences in (religious) education as religious experiences, or the “actual religious quality in the experience” (1934, 14), stressing a focus on general and natural experiences of all students. These experiences can be interpreted as religious when they are conceived as “the sense of awe and wonder, dependence, peace and joy that come with a mystical appreciation of oneself and one's community as integrated within the whole that constitutes the universe” (Knight 1998, 71). They should be the content of religious education instead of religions, institutionalized systems of faiths (Knight 1998).
In this focus on experiences, the educator has the task to create new experiences for the students by introducing stimuli (Dewey 1902; Knight 1998). It is not his task to transfer knowledge and ideas to the students or to shape their habits. The educator is a member of the school community who is responsible for choosing this stimuli in the educational process and guiding the student in response to these stimuli (Dewey 1897; Sutinen, Kallioniemi and Pihlström 2015). Sutinen, Kallioniemi and Pihlström describe this process as “an interpretative transformational process” (2015, 341). The student thus also communicates with these educational stimuli that represent previous experiences, “the intellectual and moral resources which humanity has succeeded in getting together” (Dewey 1897, 1). These experiences from outside the students, which the teachers present in words and symbols (Dewey 1980; Sutinen, Kallioniemi and Pihlström 2015), serve “as a guide to future experience” (Dewey 1902, 20).
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