Education And Experience (2015)

Picture the following scene: I am sipping fresh squeezed orange juice while looking back at the ground zero site in Hiroshima. I am staring at the ruined, burned out remains of the building where the atom bomb exploded in the atmosphere instantly destroying everything that had been in the immediate environs. Simultaneously, I am thinking about a book review I recently completed for the online journal, Education Review. edited book I reviewed is titled Controversial History Education in Asian Contexts (Baildon et al., 2014) and is a collection of papers presented at a 2011 conference in Singapore that considered the different aspects, problems and possibilities in researching, teaching and communicating controversial histories in Singapore and other Asian countries (Baildon et al, 2014, p. xii-xiii). What I was mulling over was the knowledge that, according to multiple chapters in this book (e.g. Chapters 7 & 8), Japanese students are not taught much about their nation's role in WWII beyond the fact that the United States was never tried for war crimes (crimes against humanity) for dropping the atomic bombs. With this knowledge, my 12 years as an Advanced Placement United States History teacher where I annually taught this event using a chapter titled The Decision to Drop the Bomb (Ch. 12) from James West Davidson and Mark Hamilton Lytle's, After the Fact: Art of Historical Detection (1982), a chapter that uses rational modeling to explain a host of reasons why the United States decided to drop the bomb. I turned to my husband, a political scientist who is very well read and knowledgeable on WWII and said, If I had a son fighting in the Pacific during the War, I think, despite my feelings of guilt at seeing this, that I would have supported the decision (personal journal, July 1, 2014). His answer was, You know, even after the bombs were dropped, there were still a significant number of Japanese generals who did not want to surrender (personal communication, July 1, 2014). At that moment, an older gentleman traveling with his extended family gently placed a hand on my husband's shoulder and said, I, for one, want to thank you from all Australians. We were about to be invaded, the Japanese ships were massed in the harbor and my life would have been very different with much suffering and hardship if the U.S. had not done (personal communication, July 1, 2014). I was in shock: we had just been thanked for dropping the atomic bomb! I was absolutely speechless as the man introduced us to his wife, children and grandchildren. As an aside, after researching this paper, I learned that his statement was factually incorrect, the Japanese government had briefly discussed invading Australia in 1942 and/or blockading the major ports, but by 1945 their army was too weakened for any such plans to go into effect (Oliver, n. d.). However, this knowledge would probably not have changed either his beliefs or lived experience from 70 years ago. issue here for me is how to make sense out of what we know from text, what we experience and the diverse points of view that any historical event encompasses. I have been either teaching or preparing teachers of social studies for 43 years. I have been a student of, or taught curriculum courses, for almost 20 years. I remember reading Dewey's Experience and Education (1938, 1992) for the first time in 1970 and in reconsidering that text, titled this presentation, Education and Experience, in some sense as a play on words, in some sense as an homage and in another sense as a way to figure out the relationship of these two concepts in the curriculum; how do they fit together? knowledge and the experience are so inextricably intertwined. In a way it is a which comes first, the chicken or the egg, problem. Why does this matter? That is always my question when I teach a class, write a paper or prepare a presentation. Well, in terms of social studies/history education, the curriculum creates the understandings that children use as a base for their adult explanations of the world they inhabit. …