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Reclaiming Wisdom As The Goal of Education

This document discusses several issues with mainstream education models: 1) Mass education systems that transplant models from one culture to another can amount to cultural genocide by imposing foreign standards of knowledge. 2) Western children have been increasingly exposed to violent images through television, video games, and computers, poisoning their imaginations. 3) Mainstream education in the West and World Bank models have been criticized for disempowering youth and failing to address complex global problems. Alternative holistic and wisdom-based models are recommended. 4) Education needs to move beyond the limited industrial school model and embrace life-long learning integrated into communities.

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43 views2 pages

Reclaiming Wisdom As The Goal of Education

This document discusses several issues with mainstream education models: 1) Mass education systems that transplant models from one culture to another can amount to cultural genocide by imposing foreign standards of knowledge. 2) Western children have been increasingly exposed to violent images through television, video games, and computers, poisoning their imaginations. 3) Mainstream education in the West and World Bank models have been criticized for disempowering youth and failing to address complex global problems. Alternative holistic and wisdom-based models are recommended. 4) Education needs to move beyond the limited industrial school model and embrace life-long learning integrated into communities.

Uploaded by

sum1oru
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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It is well known that education is the most powerful method of enculturating (even

'brainwashing') a people. Mass education which transplants an educational


model from one cultural system (such as Euro-American) into another very
different culture while retaining the original standards and categories of
knowledge, is tantamount to cultural genocide.
Over roughly the same period of time, the education of the imaginations of
children and youth has changed from the nourishment of oral folk and fairy tales
to the poisoning of interactive electronic nightmares. Since the advent of TV, and
Video game parlours, followed by the use of computer games (originally
designed to train and desensitise soldiers before sending them off to the killing
fields), western children and youth have been consistently and exponentially
exposed to violent images. Globalization has led to the ubiquitous ness of these
processes and their subsequent colonization of youth culture and imagination,
globally.
RECLAIMING WISDOM AS THE GOAL OF EDUCATION
The industrial model of education which underpins mainstream education in the
West, and thereby the processes instituted by the World Bank in its EFA agenda
has not only been critiqued by educationists in the developing world. Much of the
youth futures research over the past decade has demonstrated that many young
people in the industrialized world have become fearful of the future,
disempowered and disenchanted by the education system. (Slaughter 1989;
Eckersley 1995; Gidley and Wildman 1996; Hutchinson 1996) These futures
researchers recommend more holistic, integrated teaching methods using
imagination (to be elaborated later), pro-active social skills (such as conflict
resolution, cooperative learning methods) and specific futures methodologies
(such as creating scenarios, visualizing preferred futures, action plans).
It has been strongly argued by some educational futurists that the limitations of
the instrumental rationality of western scientific positivism, has rendered it as
being well past its 'use-by date' 1[1] as a viable dominant epistemology for the
future. The 'global problematique' 2[2] has become so complex that the rational
paradigm with its fragmented disciplines and specialisations is completely unable
to cope with finding solutions. What is needed is integrated education systems at
both the school and tertiary levels which are underpinned by higher order
knowledge systems and inclusive cosmologies. (Inayatullah and Gidley 2000)
These include the traditional, indigenous knowledge systems of many cultures as
well as such spiritually based cosmologies as are found in the West, (for
example, the underpinning philosophy of Steiner education, discussed below).
Such systems reclaim wisdom as the goal of learning and transformation as the
goal of a learning society.
1
2

While it is becoming increasingly vital that school and university education are
underpinned by such higher order knowledge systems and inclusive
cosmologies, this is by no means to suggest that education (and learning) are
confined to schools, colleges and universities. The industrial, factory model of
education as schooling being confined to factory-like buildings for persons
between the ages of four and twenty-something, must urgently be regenerated
by spatial and temporal expansion into life-long learning in physical, architectural
and social spaces that breathe with the community. The creative imagination
required to foster such transformations has been for too long impeded by the
limitations of the reductionist school education model as we know it.

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