Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. Shuki Taylor is right to trace the current vogue for experiential Jewish education back to John Dewey. And indeed we can trace the recognition that learners learn through experience to even earlier moments in education history too. As such, experiential Jewish education is nothing new, but rather the integration of a long-tested way of thinking about learning into Jewish educational practice. Dewey’s Progressive educational methodologies prioritized the individual development of the learner. As Jewish education has fallen into lockstep with Dewey’s philosophy, so Jewish educators have understood that learners are individuals on their own particular journeys, and must be engaged as co-creators of their learning experiences. Jon Woocher’s paradigmatic 2012 essay on Reinventing Jewish Education Century is, in many ways, a reassertion of Dewey for the 21st century.
Assessments of Dewey often draw crude dichotomies between his learner centered models of Jewish learning, with a prior era pilloried as little more than dictated memorization. The challenge for experiential Jewish educators, as Taylor alludes to, is to resist such a binary. The choice cannot be for learner centered exploration, or content knowledge. It must be both. Jewish education is not therapy. The answers were not inside all along (despite that lovely gemara about pre-natal Torah scholarship). And yet also, learners are individuals, and must be engaged with and through experiences in which they are able to engage in ways that shape them as individuals. The challenge is to create educational experiences that are so saturated in Jewish content and flavor that learners are engaged organically and individually.
