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Our view of what ever is happening!
A chasm divides our view of human knowledge and human nature. According to the logic of the chasm, facts are the province of experimental science, while values are the domain of religion and art! national systems.
From the time of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung and to our present System 1 theory of fast, instinctual cognition, psychology has acknowledged and explored the submerged irrational aspects of mind. But this has had little impact on education. The pre-rational mind is treated as a liability rather than a resource to be cultivated. Philosophy has also had its champions of the irrational or prerational mind, including David Hume, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, William James and more, but analytic philosophy (the dominant Anglo-American approach) and positivist science have treated the mind as a linguistic or propositional meaning-machine, not as an embodied agent or actor in the world.
After years of working on the problem, and countless conversations, it seems to me that what is required is a third path: to enter the chasm itself, or descend deeper into a submerged mythopoetic cognition, and develop an entirely new way of understanding learning that embraces t...
Date: 5/30/2022 2:59:16 AM ( 31 mon ) ... viewed 617 times
A chasm divides our view of human knowledge and human nature. According to the logic of the chasm, facts are the province of experimental science, while values are the domain of religion and art; the body (and brain) is the machinery studied by scientists, while the mind is a quasi-mystical reality to be understood by direct subjective experience; reason is the faculty that produces knowledge, while emotion generates art; STEM is one kind of education, and the liberal arts are wholly other.
These are no longer productive ways to organise knowledge in the 21st century.
Within the logic of the chasm, one way of thinking tends to be viewed as more capable of producing meaning: the scientific mind.
But the literal, logical, scientific mind is the outlier – the weird, exceptional mode of cognition. It is not, I would argue, the dominant paradigm of human sense-making activity and yet it remains the exemplar of cognition itself and finds pride of place in our educational systems.
From the time of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung and to our present System 1 theory of fast, instinctual cognition, psychology has acknowledged and explored the submerged irrational aspects of mind. But this has had little impact on education.
The per-rational mind is treated as a liability rather than a resource to be cultivated. Philosophy has also had its champions of the irrational or prerational mind, including David Hume, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, William James and more, but analytic philosophy (the dominant Anglo-American approach) and positivist science have treated the mind as a linguistic or propositional meaning-machine, not as an embodied agent or actor in the world.
After years of working on the problem, and countless conversations, it seems to me that what is required is a third path: to enter the chasm itself, or descend deeper into a submerged mythopoetic cognition, and develop an entirely new way of understanding learning that embraces the true engine of the mind – imagination.
It is time to initiate Imagination Studies at every level of education, primary school through university. Studying the imagination – its creations, its processes (creativity), and its underlying cognitive structures – is the most exciting and accurate way to heal the terminal divide between the sciences and the humanities.
But, more importantly, Imagination Studies, or imaginology, also promises to reunite the body and the mind, reintegrate emotion and reason, and tesselate facts and values.
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