Education as Nutrition
Bad analogies in education abound, so we ought to cherish good ones. In writing of the place of education in American democratic life, John Dewey introduces a concept of ‘self-renewal’ that feels urgently needed now. In Democracy and Education (1916), Dewey writes,
“It is the very nature of life to strive to continue in being. Since this continuance can be secured only by constant renewals, life is a self-renewing process. What nutrition and reproduction are to physiological life, education is to social life” (p.9).
Dewey goes onto elaborate that renewal of our life together occurs through a process of communication, a sharing of experience until it becomes a “common possession”. And this common possession of knowledge alters the perspective of all parties who partake in it. It nourishes all.
And that, to borrow Dewey’s framing, is a fundamentally educational task. Dewey puts it this way:
Education is a fostering, a nurturing, a cultivating process. It is a process of continuous reconstruction of experience" (p. 50)
Education, properly understood, isn’t a delivery of knowledge into passive minds. It’s the active, relational work of making experience live—again and again—through dialogue, reflection, and renewal. It’s not enough for facts to be transmitted. They must be taken up, worked over, shared, until new possibilities emerge. Education, in this sense, is never finished. It is an ongoing, messy, profoundly human collaboration to make the world intelligible—and habitable—together.
Society cannot be sustained by humans who merely receive experience; it depends on beings who can reconstruct experience, reimagine it, and share it anew. Without that living work, the body politic decays into repetition, dogma, and division. Without that work, public life starves.
So why do I think we ought to talk of education as nourishment and nutrition in the midst of the present muck and mire of American life? Because it might just lend us a helpful and generous way of seeing so many of us as malnourished. Fed a fast food diet of earnestly believed misinformation and conspiracy theories, deprived of the more nourishing knowledge of fact and reason, how is one to navigate the world. We might see those we disagree with as desperately seeking renewal from sources without nutritional value. Instead of receiving nourishment in real thoughtful reflection from those they looked to for guidance, self-interested power-mongering politicians and megalomaniacal media personalities offered sugar highs of anger and deceit. The riots were animated by false teaching that led to a common possession of a shared delusion.
The present moment, marked by freewheeling, partisan application of the law, pervasive cancel culture, and doublespeak around free speech can feel ugly and terrifying. And many of these markers, we might argue, are the result of a perverse education. But a nutrient rich education remains possible even for those who currently hold views that trouble us, if people with divergent experiences are willing to connect with one another until new insight becomes our common possession.
Here’s the hard truth: if we truly want renewal—not just civility, not just peace, but actual renewal—we will need teachers. Not just teachers in classrooms, but teachers wherever human beings gather to make sense of the world together. If we really want to address the roots of our discord, it will require difficult educative connections. It will require people with deeply held opposing views to meet in communication with one another.We will need people capable of holding spaces where fiercely different views can be expressed, challenged, stretched, and—slowly, sometimes painfully—brought into deeper relation.
We will need teachers who understand that real education isn't the efficient distribution of correct answers. It’s the patient cultivation of shared life.
We will need teachers who know how to nourish.
Are you willing to be that kind of teacher?
REFLECTION
How ‘nutritious’ is the teaching that you see around you? How nourishing is your teaching?
Where do you see opportunities to address deeply held differences in perspective among your students? How might you create space to do so?
REFERENCES
Dewey, J. (1944). Democracy and education: An introduction to the philosophy of education. Free Press. 