To the Editor:
John Dewey said: "What we want and need is education pure and simple, and we shall make surer and faster progress when we devote ourselves to finding out what education is and what conditions have to be satisfied in order that education may be a reality and not a name or slogan." Moreover, "the constant factors [in education] are the formation of ideas, acting upon ideas, observation of the conditions which result, and organization of facts and ideas for future use." When this cycle of learning is embraced by an entire community, it represents the essence of democracy and the core purpose of a liberal arts college.
The education department is a century-old experiment. If we, as a community, do not observe the conditions which resulted from this experiment, we cannot organize facts and ideas about these conditions for future use. Thus, we as a community are limited in our ability to form new experiments with greater likelihood of success. Simply put, we need to know what went wrong to act more effectively in the future. If this learning process is removed from the community and is restricted to the few, we engage in anti-learning behavior at the community level and create conditions of dependency that are antithetical to the core values of this institution.
The dilemma is, which will do greater injury to Dartmouth: 1) disclosing the truth about the education department or 2) compromising the purpose of community learning that lies at the heart of Dartmouth's mission?
