Arriving at a philosophy of education will be a continuous arrival.
Educate in it's latin form means led out. Led out of ignorance? To not know? To know? To recognize or identify: to cognize is to perceive or become aware of. Fair enough.
What need one know and why? How should it be obtained most effectively?
What? Sustaining life - self and family and social preservation?
Eating, sleeping, maintaining shelter; producing/obtaining food, obtaining a safe and comfortable environment in which to sleep, obtaining the same in which to eat and live; communicating emotional and physical needs to others in order to obtain them and survive another day.
From observing the results of one’s interaction in the world one learns what behavior results in obtaining food, shelter, care, and comfort. Fair enough, again.
So education can describe one's process of coming to know the world. This includes school but in no way does school or schooling function as the means of obtaining an education. Schooling I believe is merely a means of developing and obtaining new skills and information with which one can filter, assess, parse, translate, and categorize one's experiences inside school but even more so - outside school. I think the most effective tools or skills one can obtain are those that assist, promote, or function as autodidactic practices.
So education perhaps could also be interpreted as being 'led to' survival. And school could be a means in which to socialize while teaching one's self to survive and find a place within the world? Survival is food, shelter, ect, but it is also self preservation and family protection in its primitive sense and also in its present day realm.
ReplyDeleteSo would it be fair to say that you are channeling Dewey? Is content important? It seems like it is only insofar as it benefits one's life and survival within one's society. And does content only have meaning when viewed through the mental lens of the critical thinker? In coming to know the world, it seems that simple facts and the superficial knowledge of linear processes mean next to nothing without a way of creating a holistic web of conceptual understanding and forming critical connections between pieces of content. To follow... is the teacher's prime directive to provide critical thinking skills to allow students to grapple with content that could make it more meaningful?
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