Socratic Seminar Preparation

From Dewey:
"Again, in school each of these subjects is classified. Facts are torn away from their original place in experience and rearranged with reference to some general principle. Classification is not a matter of child experience; things do not come to the individual pigeonholed. The vital ties of affection, the connecting bonds of activity, hold together the variety of his personal experiences. The adult mind is so familiar with the notion of logically ordered facts that it does not recognize--it cannot realize--the amount of separating and reformulating which the facts of direct experience have to undergo before they can appear as a "study" of branch of learning" (184).
Significance: In all of the educational theory we have been reading, the philosophies presented can be applied beyond the classroom. Dewey's analysis of pedagogy is grounded in an understanding of our society: everything is classified, therefore thinking is classified, and teachers--in their strict subject-matter divisions--teach categorized thinking. This brings to mind how significant teachers are to students. They do not simply transfer information, they teach children how to think in the normative way society operates.
Question: Is this role appropriate for teachers? Should we, as new teachers, question it?

From Freire:
"Education as the exercise of domination stimulates the credulity of students, with the ideological intent (often not perceived by educators) of indocrinating them to adapt to the world of oppression" (59).
Significance: Similar to my thinking about Dewey, I can see how revolutionary Freire's ideas are about pedagogy, because his philosophy applies societally. Teaching passively, what he calls "the banking concept of education," teaches students to be civically passive. How students participate in school is training for how they will function as adults in society. As acting as the oppressed in the classroom, they become familiar with a world in which the system of oppression is widely accepted and tolerated.
Question: How can we create experiential learning that challenges the intolerable ways in which society now functions?

From Gardner:
"The pre-modern or nonscientific mind has available all the same thought processes as has the scientific mind, but the system within which the former works is essentially closed: all premises have already been stated in advance, all inferences must follow from them, and the explanatory system is not altered in the light of the new information that has been procured. Rather, in the manner described in my discussion of traditional religious eduation, one's rhetorical powers are simply mobilized to provide ever more artful justifications of the conclusions, the worldviews, that were already known in advance and for all time" (362).
Significance: In Gardner's relaying of learning throughout history and across cultures, the Renaissance/the Enlightenment that changed the way we think about learning was revolutionary.
Question: Is the focus on new innovation still as important today? How can we encourage our students to formulate their own questions instead of just mimicking others?

From Elbow:
"For me, the conference ended up with an important subtheme--ended by sticking up for a side of the profession that often gets lost in high school and college English departments: play, storytelling, the personal, amateur, imaginative, affective, and informal. I'm not saying that the profession suffers from too much of what is professional, cognitive, analytic, and pragmatic; there can't be too much of those good things--only too little of the other side. Nothing need be lost, but something need be gained" (205).
Significance: This is an older book, and I can see how Elbow's thinking, perhaps echoed by others, led recent teachers to incorporate art and media and creative personal exercises to bring back the play into the classroom.
Question: How important is the personal to the study of English?