When Experience Miseducates: Dewey, Gadamer and the Problem of Openness

Abstract

Experience is often treated as a pedagogical good, associated with activity, authenticity, participation, learning and growth. Yet experience can also miseducate by narrowing horizons, reinforcing unreflective habits and restricting future possibilities for understanding and judgment. Dewey foregrounds the normative distinction between educative and miseducative experience by linking educational value to the consequences of experience for further growth, while Gadamer clarifies how experience transforms the subject by unsettling prior understanding and opening a changed relation to subject matter, self and the world. The article uses this dialogue to understand miseducation in terms of restricted openness : a form of pedagogical harm in which experience narrows students’ future capacity to understand, judge and respond. The concept of restricted openness specifies a form of miseducation that may remain invisible when educational value is assessed primarily through activity, engagement or intended learning outcomes. In doing so, the article reframes educational experience as a formative and normatively charged process in which openness, understanding and judgment may be either cultivated or restricted.