Academics
“To ‘learn from experience’ is to make a backward and forward connection between what we do to things and what we enjoy or suffer from things in consequence. Under such conditions, doing becomes a trying; an experiment with the world to find out what it is like; the undergoing becomes instruction—discovery of the connection of things.”
—John Dewey, from Democracy and Education
A Bennington education—and Bennington College itself—holds several principles in creative tension: freedom and responsibility; individuality and community; independence and collaboration; reflection and action; rigor and expression; excellence, resilience, and an impulse toward meaning and truth. These elements are the constants at an institution that seeks, through ongoing inquiry, to always sustain and exercise its capacity for renewal.
