Education and the Ontological Question by Kaustuv Roy

Author:Kaustuv Roy
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030111786
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Science is the ultimate defense of modernity, its self-justification; we hear of the scientific attitude, of scientific standards, and so on, often in a righteous manner in daily public discourse. Even things that are patently not of science are subjected to scientific scrutiny; apparently it is the only credible mode of overview and assessment. This peculiar obsession has obviously found its way into education which is dominated by science learning on one side, and rationalist pedagogy and methods of evaluation on the other. The focus on the cognitive aspect and its corresponding root metaphor “learning” have sacrificed all other ways of knowing and being in the educational world. The control of the symbolic order has singularly triumphed over the possibility of regarding education differently, say, for example, as dialogue, praxis, enchantment, corporeality, emotional maturity, relationality, self-knowledge, spiritual insight, aesthetic sensibility, caring, poeisis, and so on. This is based on a misunderstanding of what science is and what it does. In turn, at the root of this misunderstanding is the missing dimension—ontological consideration. Let us see why that is the case.

The world of science and scientific knowledge is built on direct experience of phenomena. However, in such experience is already pre-supposed something that science takes for granted—we can call this the ground of experience or consciousness for want of a better word. Science is silent on this ground. But the problem is not that science does not explicitly admit this ground. The problem is that science enthusiasts take the scientific perception as all there is, and therefore turn it into dogma. A true assessment of the meaning and scope of science cannot be done from within science, but by returning to the things themselves. In other words, we have to reawaken our primitive ontological sensibilities, to the world that precedes knowledge. We have to penetrate and go beyond the line that Kant drew between ourselves and the world, between subject and object. This is especially vital in education, otherwise we grow up aware of only one side of things, blind to the other side. The biggest problem of the human world is this one-sidedness of perception. We have to pedagogically realize and acknowledge that knowledge in general, and scientific knowledge in particular, speaks about the world, just as a map speaks about the territory, and is not the territory itself. While we must be adept at handling existing sign systems in order to do our thing and go about the world, we must never be deluded about the fact that the world is not the sign system that represents it, and that there is a pre-cognitive universe lying outside the reach of conventional ways of apprehending the world. How and in what manner such a world may be approached, or even who is the entity that might engage in such an endeavor, are questions that cannot be directly answered for the obvious reason that the terms and concepts in use belong to the existing sign systems and are limited by its particular horizon.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.