Alito "Learn[s] by doing"

After i got done working out today i flipped on CNN and sat down to read a story about Lebron James in ESPN the mag. I was only half-heartedly listening to Sam's opening remarks until he started getting into the part about how he transitioned from being a practicing lawyer to being a sitting federal judge. The difference, said SA, is working to persuade a court/judge to view your client favorably so as to affect an outcome favorable for the client. In being a judge you can have no allegiances, biases or agendas; you have no client. A judge's decision is based on objective interpretations of the law. Learning how to make this switch from being an interested party to an objective interpreter of the law is something that one learns by doing. As a judge you know you cannot be invested in either side, but that can sometimes be easier said than done. You can be told, read about or say over and over that thing which you are supposed to do and know you're supposed to do, but sometimes you have to actively do it, you have to experience it, before you can learn it and know it.

I found it exceptionally interesting to hear Alito say that he learned how to be a judge by being a judge: i "learn[ed] by doing," he said.

I recently finished reading one of John Dewey's later works: Experience and Education. This short book was written approx 20 years after Democracy and Education and is Dewey's attempt to address the some of the criticisms of the theory laid out in that work as well as to address the divide between traditionalists and progressivists - the disconnect between the theory and the practice that he and other progressive educators had laid out. With apologies for not going into a detailed summary, one of the primary points is that, in education, the content of a pupil's schooling must not only have relevance to a future life and life-time activities away from educational institutions but must also be appropriate to the past experiences that a pupil is likely to bring to the situation at that developmental point in her life. Consequently, an optimal way to educate, then, is to have students experience content in relationship with true-to-life experiences. To learn about, say, earth sciences by planting a garden and then discussing the various scientific technicalities in conjunction. Just as a baby learns and forever remembers the lesson associated with touching a hot stove - learning via experience, by doing - so to does a 2nd, 5th, 8th, 12th grader and adult similarly learn and remember through expereincing. Future Supreme cCourt Justice Alito's revealing remarks demonstrate the relevance and importance of exposing learners to memorable lessons through an experiential pedagogy. Or, if you've read the recent issue of CCC, one might refer to such an approach, as do Lunsford et al., as a "pedagogy of performance." (I'll have more to say about this article at a later time.)