Dr. Stein Presents Lectures in London
Learning Dreams Founder and Director Dr. Jerry Stein will be giving two lectures at the Hub Westminster in London, England next week.
The lectures will focus on his research on community-based education through his nonprofit organization, Learning Dreams.
Learning Dreams and the Local Learning System
The first lecture, titled Learning Dreams and the Local Learning System, will focus on the link between parent involvement and the educational success of students. Stein describes how appealing to parents as deeply curious people with their own needs to dream, grow, and learn is necessary support for their children’s education.
“At Learning Dreams, we work with kids and families who are struggling with educational success,” he said. “We ask the parents and the kids: ‘What is your learning dream?’
Many of our families have not been able to think about a personal dream for years and cannot answer this very quickly. But affter they do tell us, we act as connectors, helping them find resources and get going on their dreams,” Stein explained.
We don’t try to fix them. We don’t wait for schools and school reform to solve issues that belong properly with the family and the community. We have a hopeful approach that strategically turns the ideas of a dream into a workable and practical path forward for all families.”
Currently, tickets for this workshop are sold out.
John Dewey’s Thought in the 21st Century
Stein’s second lecture is titled “John Dewey’s Thought in the 21st Century: Sailing on strange seas to far lands” and will be held at the Hub Westminster.
Dr. Stein will be speaking about John Dewey, an American philosopher, psychologist and educational reformer, who had his deepest conclusions about democratic life toward the end of his life.
For those who focus on Dewey’s early period — when he ran his experimental school in Chicago — Dewey was known as the father of progressive education, and was the author of some of our greatest writing on education. But his thoughts later in life had a marked shift.
In his famous early work, Dewey argued that schools should act like true communities, but later in his life, he argued that the role of the school should be diminished and that communities themselves should be educative.
The quote from Dewey in the title of Dr. Stein’s talk, “sailing on strange seas to far lands” comes from Dewey’s book A Common Faith, also from late in his life.
Dewey thought that in traditional society the church and religion attempted to be the home of our most profound spiritual experiences. But in “A Common Faith”, Dewey argued that in modern democratic societies, the possibility of profound life changing experiences are now possible in any ordinary endeavor we undertake. He believed this change, this new openness, this freedom of experience would change society for the better in ways we could not yet predict, and our new situation was akin to sailing on strange seas to far lands.
Dr. Stein will speak to Dewey’s ideas that a democratic society should include a fundamental social commitment to nurture the creative lives of all people.