Intelligence, Education, and the Power of Habits

: In Human Nature and Conduct (1922), Dewey writes that bad habits are ones that have a “command over us” making us “do things we prefer not to do,” because as he puts it, “ we are the habit .” In this chapter, Striano describes how education has a role in our understanding of the command of habit over our lives. The chapter considers how within the process of growth we can start reshaping our habits, making them increasingly intelligent so as to inform “intelligent dispositions.” Intelligent dispositions are central to helping us come to perform new, more reflective, courses of action in the world. The chapter concludes with the ideas that such intelligently reconstructed habits − ones that have been channeled through educative experiences which account for both human plasticity and the changes and “obstacles” in our environment − have the power to determine an effective transformation of our attitudes, behaviors, and understandings and, therefore, of our selves.