Experience: the true face of education

Education is a wide space in which experiences are used and translated in the best way in order to acquire various skills and achieve educational goals. Experience is the shining star in this space, and its brightness can only be achieved through its continuity and effectiveness. It becomes useless and sterile if its growth stops. It is not pleasant to talk about experience and its association with experience without referring to the philosophy of John Dewey, who considered experience to be the basis of education and considered experience to be the essence.

Education was associated with John Dewey with experience, as experience is the basis on which all education is built and through which experience is formed and renewed, and thanks to this renewal, the ability of education to direct subsequent experiences increases. He said that all true education comes through experience.
John Dewey Pioneer of Experience and Expertise:

Dewey places great importance on experience as a basis for education, and believes that the best way to raise a child is to allow him to learn from reality, benefiting not only from his daily experiences resulting from his interactions with his environment, but that he should benefit from the good of others. It is true that benefiting from the experiences of others expands the scope of knowledge, but in Dewey's view, it should not be relied on permanently and directly, so that the result is not negative, and the learner becomes unable to benefit from his experiences and interact with his environment, as he believes that the experience gained because of interest leads to Knowledge that is assimilable and leads to intentional versus incidental learning.

Dewey emphasizes the close link between experience and experimentation. In his view, learning is nothing but the fruit of continuous experimentation that enables the child to deal positively with practical situations that modify his behavior and ideas. He also points out that experience has two aspects: one is the experience itself, and the second is the effect resulting from this experience.

Philosophy of expertise and experience:
John Dewey considers experience par excellence, and experience is an essential point in his philosophy, as it occupies an important and essential place in the process of life, so wherever there is life, there is behavior and activity, and in order for life to continue, this activity must remain connected, continuous, and compatible with the environment, and this adaptation is an adaptation Neighborhood with its environment, it is not negative in any way, but an adaptation that aims to shape the organism through the environment in which it lives.

The philosophy of experience is one of the topics that occupied an important space in Dewey's philosophical and educational ideas. He defines experience as the process of interaction between the individual and his environment, which enables him to acquire the correct methods of thinking. And he considered it a source of logical thinking and categorically rejects the existence of the logical image outside the scope of reality and experience. Dewey has linked inference to experience in order to get rid of traditional philosophical perceptions.

For him, education is from cradle to grave. It is not a dose given once and for all, but rather it is a natural phenomenon in the human race, which takes place in an unconscious way since birth by virtue of the individual’s existence in society, and it is a continuous and evolving process, just as it is not just a preparation for a future life, but rather life itself and a process of its operations, that is, it must be School life, from his point of view, is a real life in which experience is obtained directly, and it resembles in its realism the life of a child at home or the environment in which he lives. And it needs to continue because science always has something new to provide us with, as the school is a laboratory, not a lecture hall.

In order for the experience to be useful and of educational significance, it should lead to more experiences, which ensures the continuity of the learning process, and this requires that the learner feel the existence of a new problem in every educational situation, so he takes the initiative to identify the problem and know its dimensions, which generates an initial sense of the solution, so he brings up previous experiences and information that enables him Whoever formulates the hypothesis again accepts what has been proven by experience and rejects what else.

Dewey is the author of the method of experience approach which states that human experience is not a disjointed series of intermittent episodes, but an evolving circle of activities. Learning deserves to be framed in this way as a cumulative and evolutionary process, as researchers move from a stage of unsatisfactory skepticism to another stage characterized by satisfactory problem solving. One of the foundations of the education process is finding the student himself in a real experience centered around a problem that serves as a stimulus for thinking, and it is required that this problem be of natural origin, not artificial, and pertains to the student himself, so that learning is discovery and innovation, and not just accumulation of information, as he believes that traditional education has neglected the element of nature. Humanity, restricted individual freedom and neglected the role of the learner in the educational process, and that traditional education produces harmful experiences in education and these experiences impede growth, hence it leads to dullness and dispersion of thought, while he believes that the purpose of education is to achieve growth and increase it and find ways to reach this The goal here appears the basis adopted by Dewey, which is the concept of experience as a guide in the educational process, because the theory of education is summed up in the formation of experience in a new and steady formation, and it is a distinct idea from education in terms of preparation for a distant future, or it is a discovery, external formation, or a return to the past.

Conclusion:
Dewey says: “The belief that correct education is achieved through experience does not mean that all experiences have real educational value, or that they are equal in this regard. Because some experience is harmful from an educational point of view, and any experience that leads to hindering the growth of experience in the future or deviating from the correct path is considered harmful from an educational point of view.

Accordingly, Dewey believes that experience is nothing but a moving force towards growth. It is the duty of the educator to work on bringing the student’s experience to full maturity.

John Dewey has brought about a fundamental revolution in the field of education. He is the one who stirred the slumber of the educational scene, and provided educational systems with a philosophical and educational framework that enables them to escape from compulsive education. It restored the individual mind and free will its place, and paved the way for creativity, innovation and creative thinking, so the West benefited from it and made a quantum leap in the educational, scientific and technological field, and we in the Arab world are still stuck between educating the oppressed and liberating the oppressed. We are not innovators. We are limited by intellectual closure on the one hand and fear of change on the other.