The Importance Of Indirect Education

We are inherently inquisitive beings. We are always questioning and exploring the world around us. Starting out as babies, we pick things up only to drop them back down and in doing so, we inadvertently learn about gravity. When we are a little bit older, our natural curiosity may take the form of questions like, “Why don’t we do more to help homeless people”? “Indirect education” relates to this kind of personal “growth that comes with contact with the realities of the physical and social world" (Dewey, 1904, p. 240). Indirect education promotes the kind of learning that takes place when we are not actually conscious of our learning. It also relates to the kind of personal growth that occurs when we are "feeling" and “doing and inquiring for its own sake" (p. 240). Learning for the sake of learning.

Conversely, "direct education" refers to the conscious learning that takes place within

To answer this question, we first need to agree that “the individual has to be known and judged in terms of his own unique self, unrepeatable in any other self...just because he is his own self” (Dewey, 1904, p. 243). Freire also recognized the importance of treating each child as a living, growing, emotional individual with a critical mind. Accordingly, Freire (2000) believed teachers "must be partners of the students in their relations with them" (p. 75). That is, they should take a step back from their role as an authority figure and see their students more as equals; teachers and students are then "critical co-investigators in dialogue" (p. 81). Similarly, William E. Doll, Jr. (1993) thought teachers should assume the role "of the prima interpares," meaning " 'first among equals '" (p. 167). Clearly, what these authors have in common is the belief that education should be more student-centered. Therein lies the heart of the matter; creating a student-centered educational experience does not start with the teacher, nor the