How a philosopher completely changed the way I think about learning

In a previous article, I wrote about how students behave as consumers, an attitude that hinders the learning process. This provoked many responses, but I never intended to dismiss active students as mere consumers. I am also very aware of the difficult position students find themselves in today, and how high the expectations are.

However, I do believe that actively approaching the material is a crucial attitude to enable learning, which is why I would like to clarify the philosophy behind “the active producer”. This approach to knowledge is based on a philosophical tradition that has completely changed my thinking about learning.

The illusion of knowledge transfer
Current university education is mostly passive in nature. Teachers sometimes give lectures lasting up to three hours. What is in the lecturer's head must be transferred to the student's head via PowerPoint slides, knowledge sheets and accompanying models. At the end of the term, there is a test to determine how much of that knowledge has stuck.

This way of learning is primarily a cognitive activity; thinking is a mental process, and ideas are transferred from mind to mind. The spoken words, the slides or the letters on the page must be communicated as clearly as possible. The personal experiences of both the lecturer and the student are irrelevant, as knowledge is considered universal and separate from what is happening in the classroom at that moment.

This belief is rooted in the so-called Cartesian revolution. The French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes argued that the body and the mind were separate and that the mind contained the true source of knowledge. He distrusted the outside world and the senses. After all, he could doubt everything, but there was one thing he could not question: thinking. I think, therefore I am (cogito ergo sum).

René Descartes is regarded as the founder of “modern science”, but he is also responsible for the loss of experiences and emotions in science. In his view, these belonged to the body and therefore had to be excluded from what we value as knowledge. The transfer of knowledge also became a head-driven process: sit down, close your eyes, and I will tell you how reality works.

Breaking away from passive education
One of the thinkers and philosophers who broke with this tradition was the 19th-century educational reformer John Dewey, according to whom we cannot separate the mind from the world in which we live. There is no ultimate, unchanging reality that can only be known through thought. Reality evolves with the knowledge we produce about it.

Take the Golden Age, for example. It used to be presented as a world of wealth, prosperity and knowledge development. Today, we no longer come to the same unambiguous conclusion. It was also a time of exploitation and inequality. The facts have not changed, but the meaning we attach to them and our interpretation of them have. This shift in our thinking is not a threat to science; rather, it shows that knowledge changes with our experiences and the social context.

So what is the role of education, according to Dewey? At its core, learning becomes student-centred rather than knowledge-centred. By bringing the mind and body together, there is first and foremost room again for the different ways in which we can acquire knowledge. This means there is room to play with the material both literally and figuratively, physically and in the world around us. How such playing unfolds differs from person to person: while one person learns to understand the material through dialogue, another finds it helpful to make drawings about it.

Furthermore, because there is no ultimate knowledge that is always valid, there is also no end goal to learning. Learning is a process of continuous development. The only goal is for the student to ultimately be able to continue learning on their own. It is therefore about learning to learn autonomously.

Finally, Dewey breaks with the classical idea that consciousness is the place where ideas are located and from where they are transmitted. In this way, he creates space to consider the interaction between teacher and student in a new way. When a student has a question and raises their hand, a locally situated interaction arises in which meaning is created jointly.

If a student asks, “Why are there so many plant species in the world?”, there is no single “correct” answer. Instead, the teacher and student search together for a shared interpretation, bringing literature, personal experiences and the teacher's professional knowledge into dialogue with each other.

Dewey's lessons for our education
So, what does Dewey's thinking mean in concrete terms for our education and the position of the teacher and the student? First of all, the teacher is not the owner of the knowledge that must end up in the student's head. A good teacher should facilitate the act of playing around with information. As a student, you should not expect a ready-made answer, as this would be misleading and extremely ineffective for your own learning process.

Secondly, it is important for both the teacher and the student to realise that the person opposite you has gone through their own process involving experiences, interests, and misunderstandings. A teacher should therefore ask themselves where a student's question comes from. The student should show interest in the personal experience that a teacher can bring to a dialogue. According to Dewey, this contribution of personal experiences and worlds is not a distraction from joint knowledge construction, but rather a prerequisite for it; knowledge grows from shared experiences.

Finally, I would like to advise students and teachers to ensure that learning does not remain solely an intellectual activity, but instead finds a place in the world around you. In line with Dewey, this means that knowledge only becomes meaningful when you actively engage with it, experiment with it and put it into practice. Therefore, when you study, try to come up with physical examples for abstract information. Or, more broadly, explore what knowledge means to you. For example, make drawings or sketches to accompany the information. Try to explain the knowledge to someone else. Make it your own, literally. For example, I once wrote a PhD chapter about plants in the middle of a nature reserve, where I regularly continued to think about the results while walking. I also knew someone who always took beautiful photos and made drawings of her fieldwork.

These examples make it clear that important questions in education, for both teachers and students, are: who are you, how do you learn, and what experiences have shaped your interests? I believe that universities and teachers still offer too little room for this, and that education should focus more on these questions. When students gain insight into the processes that develop their thinking, it generates freedom and autonomy. This also helps them outside of university.

After all, Dewey writes about thinking: ‘No thought, no idea can really be transferred as an “idea” from one person to another (...) only by working through the circumstances of the problem themselves, first-hand, and seeking and finding their own way to a solution, can someone truly arrive at real thinking.’

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