The New Significance of Learning: Imagination's Heartwork

ISBN-13: 9780415549677 / Angielski / Twarda / 2009 / 198 str.

Padraig Hogan

Opis

Should education be understood mainly as a practice in its own right, or is it essentially a subordinate affair to be shaped and controlled by a society's powers-that-be? What difference does it make if students are chiefly viewed as recipients of a set of skills and knowledge, or as active participants in their own learning?　 Does education have a responsibility in cultivating humanity's maturity, or are its purposes to be effectively matched to the functional requirements of a globalized age?　　 The New Significance of Learning explores these and other high-stakes questions. It challenges hierarchical and custodial conceptions of education that have been inherited as the 'natural order' of things. It discloses a more original and imaginative understanding of educational practice, illustrating this understanding with frequent practical examples. 　 Among the merits highlighted by this approach are:

• a recognition that education is first and foremost an invitation to join a renewed experience of quest and disclosure;
• a realisation that taking up and pursuing such an invitation is a basic right, as distinct from a privilege to be bestowed or withheld;　
• an awareness of the decisive importance of specific kinds relationships in practices of teaching and learning;
• an emphasis on the human qualities as well as the intellectual achievements nourished by dedicated communities of learning;
• an acknowledgement of partiality - of incompleteness and bias - in even the best of humankind's learning efforts;
• the emergence of a distinctive ethical orientation for education as a practice in its own right.

This book arises from a bold suggestion: that education is to be understood mainly as a practice in its own right, as distinct from a subordinate activity to be controlled by the powers-that-be in a particular society. Yet the long history of the practice has abundant examples that reveal just the latter. Many centuries of ecclesiastical control cast practitioners, including teachers as well as pupils, in an acquiescent role, and proclaimed a paternalistic order of things to be the natural one in the world of learning. In a secular age a more mercantile credo gains ascendancy, but the hierarchical order of things in education essentially remains in place. Indeed the intense educational reforms internationally in recent decades have done much to secure a major renewal of this order for the 21^st century.

In an accessible style Hogan draws on a wide range of insights from history, philosophy, literature, social sciences to reveal a vacuity that lies at the heart of this renewed educational order, for all its conspicuous concern with excellence and its measurement. More constructively, the book seeks to uncover the eclipsed classical origins of education as a characteristic human undertaking with its own inherent purposes. The seminal power of these origins is revealed by joining them with major insights of more recent times, to elucidate a distinctly educational understanding of human understanding itself. The merits of such an understanding are explored in some detail, not least by reviewing some objections that might be brought against it.

The promise of a more original understanding of education as a practice is then pursued by investigating it, with illustrative examples, as a form of imaginative heartwork. This heartwork recognises the plurality of the human condition, but also the necessity to cultivate and sustain environments of learning embodying practices that are robust candidates for universal defensibility. A central ethical orientation for educational practice thus emerges as one that combines a commitment to progressive fluency with an educated sense of one's own ignorance, and of humankind’s relative ignorance. Such an orientation identifies an overlooked significance for learning in an era where fundamentalisms have made headway internationally, not only in religion, but also in politics and in commerce.

Recenzje

'Its (the book) articulation of values and challenges central to imaginative practice makes an original and carefully constructed contribution to a field in urgent need of such deeper explorations.' - Mark Fettes, Studies in Philosophy and Education, 2011

Spis treści

PART ONE: EXPLORING EDUCATION AS A PRACTICE  1. The Harnessing of Learning – older and newer reins  2. A Postmodern Debility  3. The Integrity of Educational Practice  4. Disclosing Educational Practice from the Inside  5. Opening Delphi  6. Eros, Inclusion and Care in Teaching and Learning  PART TWO: EXPLORING UNDERSTANDING IN EDUCATIONAL EXPERIENCE  7. Understanding in Human Experience  8. Cultural Tradition and Educational Experience  9. Giving Voice to the Text 10. The New Significance of Learning  11. Neither Born nor Made: The Education of Teachers  12. Imagination’s Heartwork

O autorze

Pádraig Hogan is Senior Lecturer in Education at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth and Assistant Editor of the Journal of Philosophy of Education.