Learning by doing

In 1916 the American philosopher John Dewey published Democracy and Education, and it argued, against the whole tradition of schooling as the pouring of facts into children, that people learn by doing, that a school should be a small working democracy, and that education isn't preparation for life, it's life itself.

Dewey ran a laboratory school at the University of Chicago where children learned chemistry by cooking and history by building things the way people had built them. His claim was that an idea you haven't used isn't an idea you have. Knowledge is a tool, and you learn tools by using them. He also believed, and this is the harder part, that learning is social. You don't learn alone. You learn in a community of people solving a problem together, and the habits of that community, listening, disagreeing well, sharing the work, are the point as much as the subject.

That's the key for this chamber, and it's about where meaning comes from. Dewey would say meaning isn't found. It's made, in the doing, with others. The person who waits to feel that life is meaningful before engaging it has the order backward. Engage, and meaning arrives through the engagement.

He's also the ancestor of the circles that begin later this year. His classroom was a group of people working on something real together. That's what a Vault Human circle is, and it's why the year doesn't stay a solitary practice.

One hundred and five days in, you've been a Dewey student without knowing it: you learned each key by doing it, not by reading about it. Now the question of the chamber is what you'll make with what you've learned, and with whom.