The Most Important People in the World Right Now: The Weekly Mentor

By Oliver DeMille

Three quotes really made me think this week. Here they are:

1. John Dewey said: "Perhaps the greatest of all pedagogical fallacies is the notion that a person learns only what he is studying at the time." He goes on to show that how a student learns, the environment where he learns, who he learns from, why he is told to learn, and many other things about his learning--have more impact on his education than the actual topic he studies.

This is deep. Montessori taught this same thing, and suggested that Dewey-style classrooms weren't the best environment for learning.

The second quote builds on this and takes it in a profound direction.

2. As Neil Postman taught, "...we learn what we do. Television educates by teaching children to do what television-viewing requires of them." Which boils down to sitting around and doing nothing except being passively entertained. In other words, Dewey's quote above is right on, and in the electronic age this is having a drastic impact on education.

 Postman continued: "Although one would not know it from consulting various recent proposals on how to mend the educational system, this point--that reading books and watching television differ entirely in what they imply about learning--is the primary educational issue in America today."

Children and youth who read books get a very different education than those who don't--no matter how long they sit in class, how many assignments they complete, or how many projects they finish. Reading books trains leaders. The other methods, however good they may be at training for various careers, don't.

But there is even a deeper point...

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For more ideas on developing your mentoring skills, see The Student Whisperer.

Oliver DeMille is a co-founder of the Center for Social Leadership, and a co-creator of TJEd.

He is the author of A Thomas Jefferson Education: Teaching a Generation of Leaders for the 21st Century, The Coming Aristocracy: Education & the Future of Freedom, and FreedomShift: 3 Choices to Reclaim America's Destiny.

Oliver is dedicated to promoting freedom through leadership education. He and his wife Rachel are raising their eight children in Cedar City, Utah.