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Dassein
Heidegger’s German term for “Being-there,” the kind of existence that self-conscious human beings uniquely possess. http://www.philosophypages.com/dy/d.htm#dasein
German compound from da (‘there, here’) and sein (‘to be’), thus literally ‘to be there’ and, as a substantival infinitive, ‘being there’. In Kant, Hegel, etc. it is ‘determinate being’, especially in space and time, but also the ‘existence’ of God. It often amounts to a person’s ‘life’. For Nicolai Hartmann it is the Dass-sein of something (‘the fact that it is, its existence’), in contrast to its Sosein (‘essence, being thus’). Heidegger uses it for ‘the entity which each of us himself is’ and ‘the being of man’. He does so for several reasons. Dasein is a neutral term: it does not commit us to viewing man as a biological entity, as consciousness (Bewusstsein, a formation parallel to Dasein), or as essentially rational. Dasein has no determinate essence; its being consists in its possibilities, in what it can make itself be: for Dasein, ‘To be or not to be, that is the question’. It is ‘there’ in the world. But it is not confined to a particular place (or time); it ‘transcends’ and is ‘there’ alongside others or past events. It is the ‘there’ or locus of ‘being’: without Dasein there would be beings, but no being as such.
OCP http://www.xrefer.com/entry/551744
Deconstruction:
A philosophical movement and theory of literary criticism that questions traditional assumptions about certainty, identity, and truth, asserts that words can only refer to other words, and attempts to demonstrate how statements about any text subvert their own meanings: “In deconstruction, the critic claims there is no meaning to be found in the actual text, but only in the various, often mutually irreconcilable, ‘virtual texts’ constructed by readers in their search for meaning” (Rebecca Goldstein)
The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language
Deconstruction - the exposure and undermining of the metaphysical assumptions involved in systematic attempts to ground knowledge, as in STRUCTURALISM. Deconstructionists tend to focus on close readings of texts and how the texts refer to other texts, to uncover what is left out, ignored, or silenced by the text, and reveal the illogical and paradoxical in what appears logical and stable. They also seek to disrupt hierarchical oppositions (speech and writing, truth and lie, being and nonbeing) in which one term is valued and the other denigrated and upon which texts depend. Because deconstruction is an attack on the very existence of theories and conceptual systems, deconstructionists shun logical definitions and explanations for such approaches as nonlinear presentations based on word play and puns. The term deconstruction was coined in the 1960s by Jacques DERRIDA, who extended the philosophical excursions of NIETZSCHE and HEIDEGGER to criticize the entire tradition of Western philosophy. In the U.S. deconstruction has been particularly influential in literary theory. Concise Columbia Encyclopedia
Democracy/Democratic:
“The capacity for justice in humans makes democracy possible. The inclination toward injustice makes democracy necessary.”
Quoted by Tony Benn in a radio broadcast
In SunWALK the classroom and the school are seen as the place in which to learn democracy. This is not to make the process of education fully democratic, because legal and moral responsibilities are attached to being a teacher that are not devolvable. Nor is it to make the process child-centred, in the generally understood sense. We prefer person-centred to child-centred. Being caring, creative and critical, in community, applies just as much to the child as to the adult, but the child should not have to carry the real, or pseudo, rights and responsibilities of the adult. S/he is entitled to be a child, and a person – as opposed to an incomplete or pseudo adult.
“I was convinced that the Brazilian people could learn social and political responsibility only by experiencing that responsibility, through intervention in the destiny of their children’s schools, in the destinies of their trade unions and places of employment through associations, clubs, and councils, and in the life of their neighbourhoods, churches, and rural communities by actively participating in associations, clubs, and charitable societies.
They could be helped to learn democracy through the exercise of democracy; for that knowledge, above all others, can only be assimilated experientially. More often than not, we have attempted to transfer that knowledge to the people verbally, as if we could give lessons in democracy while regarding popular participation in the exercise of power as ‘absurd and immoral’.”
Paulo Freire, p.36 Education: The Practice of Freedom
Detachment:
SEE http://www.digiserve.com/mystic/
Development:
Dialectical The:
Dialectical process in SunWALK is seen as consisting of two, linked, forms of process. The first, after Freire ( ), is problematization in which learners are encouraged to participate in the process of drawing up the agenda for learning through teasing out relevant issues. The second is multi-level dialogue (see below).
Freire, Paulo
Dialogue: see Dialectical:
Dialogue is seen, in various forms, as the key process in education, the chief means by which the potential in each person is made manifest. It is the second element in the dialectical, the first being the process of problematization.
“We wanted to off the people the means by which they could supersede their magic or naive perception of reality by one that was predominantly critical, so that they could assume positions appropriate to the dynamic climate of the transition. This meant that we must take the people at the point of emergence and, by helping them move from naive to critical transitivity, facilitate their intervention in the historical process.”
But how could this be done?
The answer seemed to lie:
a) in an active, dialogical, critical and criticism-stimulating method;
b) in changing the program content of education;
c) in the use of techniques like thematic “breakdown” and “codification”.
Our method, then, was to be based on dialogue, which is a horizontal relationship between persons.
DIALOGUE
A with B = Communication and Intercommunication
Relation of “empathy” between two “poles” who are engaged in a joint search.
MATRIX: Loving, humble, hopeful, trusting, critical.
Born of a critical matrix, dialogue creates a critical attitude (Jaspers). It is nourished by love, humility, hope, faith, and trust. When the two “poles” of the dialogue are thus linked by love, hope, and mutual trust, they can join in a critical search for something. Only dialogue truly communicates.
Dialogue is the only way, not only in the vital questions of the political order, but in all the expressions of our being. Only by virtue of faith, however, does dialogue have power and meaning: by faith in man and his possibilities, by the faith that I can only become truly myself when other men also become themselves.
And so we set dialogue in opposition with the anti-dialogue which was so much a part of our historical-cultural formation, and so present in the climate of transition.
ANTI-DIALOGUE
A
over
B = communiqué
Relation of “empathy” is broken.
MATRIX: Loveless, arrogant, hopeless, mistrustful, acritical.
It involves vertical relationships between persons. It lacks love, is therefore acritical, and cannot create a critical attitude. It is self-sufficient and hopelessly arrogant. In anti-dialogue the relation of empathy between the “poles” is broken. Thus, anti-dialogue does not communicate, but rather issues communiqués.” Paulo Friere p.45, Education: The Practice of Freedom
Dialogue group:
Zohar and Marshall, (2000),
Class as a community of inquiry
Consultation
Zohar, Danah and Marshall, Ian (2000), SQ Spiritual Intelligence The Ultimate Intelligence. London: Bloomsbury Publishing
Discussion:
‘The lecture is one, the discussion is one thousand’. (Arabian proverb).
Apart from being virtually a complete model of education the following Baha’i passage emphasizes the primacy of discussion and dialogue;
Among these children many blessed souls will arise, if they be trained according to the Baha’i Teachings. If a plant is carefully nurtured by a gardener, it will become good, and produce better fruit. These children must be given a good training from their earliest childhood. They must be given a systematic training which will further their development from day to day, in order that they may receive greater insight, so that their spiritual receptivity be broadened. Beginning in childhood they must receive instruction. They cannot be taught through books. Many elementary sciences must be made clear to them in the nursery; they must learn them in play, in amusement. Most ideas must be taught them through speech, not by book learning. One child must question the other concerning these things, and the other child must give the answer. In this way, they will make great progress. For example, mathematical problems must also be taught in the form of questions and answers. One of the children asks a question and the other must give the answer. Later on, the children will of their own accord speak with each other concerning these same subjects. The children who are at the head of the class must receive premiums. They must be encouraged and when any one of them shows good advancement, for the further development they must be praised and encouraged therein. Even so in Godlike affairs. Oral questions must be asked and the answers must be given orally. They must discuss with each other in this manner.
(`Abdu’l-Baha: Education, Page: 310)
Almost a complete model of education?
passage by Abdu’l-Baha –
(Baha’i Education compilation p. 79. No additions or excisions – just sub-headings added)
1 GOAL = HUMAN DEVELOPMENT – Among these children many blessed souls will arise, if they be trained according to the Baha’i Teachings.
2 DEFINING METAPHOR – If a plant is carefully nurtured by a gardener, it will become good, and produce better fruit.
3 AIMS = GREATER INSIGHT, AND SPIRITUAL RECEPTIVITY These children must be given a good training from their earliest childhood. They must be given a systematic training which will further their development from day to day, in order that they may receive greater insight, so that their spiritual receptivity be broadened. Beginning in childhood they must receive instruction.
4 METHOD 1 = PLAY NOT BOOK LEARNING – They cannot be taught through books. Many elementary sciences must be made clear to them in the nursery; they must learn them in play, in amusement.
5 METHOD 2 = THE PRIMACY OF THE ORAL – Most ideas must be taught them through speech, not by book learning. One child must question the other concerning these things, and the other child must give the answer. In this way, they will make great progress. For example, mathematical problems must also be taught in the form of questions and answers. One of the children asks a question and the other must give the answer.
6 ONE MEASURE OF SUCCESS = Later on, the children will of their own accord speak with each other concerning these same subjects.
7 REWARD PROGRESS AT ALL LEVELS – The children who are at the head of the class must receive premiums. They must be encouraged and when any one of them shows good advancement, for the further development they must be praised and encouraged therein.
8 SAME PRINCIPLES FOR RELIGIOUS EDUCATION AS FOR ‘MAINSTREAM’ EDUCATION – Even so in Godlike affairs.
9 QUESTIONING EACH OTHER = DISCUSSION NOT PRE-DIGESTED DE-CONTEXTUALIZED INFORMATION – Oral questions must be asked and the answers must be given orally. They must discuss with each other in this manner.
SEE Philosophy for Children and Dialogue
Education:
*Education:
“… the role Paulo Freire attributes to education understood in its true perspective: that of humanizing man through his conscious action to transform the world.”
Jacques Chonchol p.87 Education: The Practice of Freedom
“Education is raising questions that are worth arguing about.”
(The late Jerrold Zaccharias of MIT)
Authentic education:
The eight characteristics that Abbs sees as making education authentic are:
1) commitment to understanding;
2) seeing education as inherently valuable;
3) experiencing education as existential in the sense of the individual taking responsibility for something which cannot be bought or transferred but which can be released by the right agent including a teacher;
4) being engaged (utterly absorbed) – not just the mind but the whole personality;
5) the recognising that education is open-ended and that of necessity we live with uncertainties with scientific theories only being provisional explanations;
6) (dialogic in )collaboration both as language, the creation of an immense activity down the ages, and as the trust and relations within the group or class or seminar;
7) recognising diversity including plurality in modes of understanding, ways of knowing;
acknowledging transcendence – moments in which one can sense abiding value and a sense of the ordinary self surpassing itself , seeming to be fully alive but in another realm.
Abbs, Peter, “On the Need for the Socratic”, p.1, and “On Intellectual Research as Socratic Activity” p.66 in Aspects of Education, Socratic Ed. No.49, Inst. of Ed. University of Hull 1993
Education and teacher democracy:
Whitehead’s foreword to McNiff (1993), in discussing how education is fundamental to social regeneration, fears that it will not play its part because of the traditional view of educational research that is dominant in educational institutions, (and, one might add, in the minds of politicians and members of the general public). The view is that educational knowledge is created by all the ‘ologists’ and subject specialists in institutes of higher education. The alternative ought be, McNiff and Whitehead suggest, that educational knowledge is created by those at work who are prepared to research answers to questions like, ‘How do I live more fully my values in my teaching?
Whitehead sees McNiff’s view of ‘teaching as learning’ as fulfilling the aim of encouraging practitioners to have faith in their own creative powers to understand education from the point of view of making sense of their own practice while exercising their critical powers in evaluating the contributions of other thinkers to this understanding.
* Education – purpose
The purpose of education according to William Tyndale, who was strangled and burned at the stake in 1536, is to develop everything in a child that distinguishes them from animals on the one hand and from machines on the other hand.
Tyndale, William or Tindal, William (c. 1492-1536), English biblical translator
Empathy:
empathise – To diagnose, that is to recognize and identity the feelings, emotions, passions, sufferings, torments through their symptoms is to realize intellectually, to understand them, in a remote way to identify oneself with the patient, without ever personally having experienced those feelings, – to empathise, as it is known in psychiatry.
On the other hand, to place oneself in the position of the patient, to get into his skin so to speak, to be able to duplicate, live through, experience those feelings in a vicarious way, is closely to identify oneself with another, to share his feelings with him, to sympathise, from the Greek syn, together with, and pathos, suffering, passion.
empathy - …. Empathy is thus a form of identification; it may be called intellectual identification in contrast to affective identification.
Hinsie & Campbell Psychiatric Dictionary quoted in Christian, J.L., (1994), Philosophy: an introduction to the art of wondering, Harcourt Brace, USA
Encouragement and Courage;
“Few people say no to an idea in the beginning because it may not get off the ground – and why waste a good negative? So instead most wait until it is hovering in mid-air looking for a landing space and then they attack!” Uncle Fred
Energy/spirit:
Engagement:
More than just concentration engagement is depth and breadth of the person with depth and breadth of the material.
Environment/ecology/:
Ethics:
“The degree to which I can create relationships which
facilitate the growth of others is a measure of the
growth I have achieved myself.”
Carl Rogers in his book On Becoming a Person:
Ethics: see values, morals, other-centredness
In general, ethics refers to values in the context of human behaviour or conduct. An ethical act is one that has reference to good or desirable behaviour. The term moral is often used synonymously with ethical, but there are a number of distinctions between them. One difference, discussed by Aristotle, is that while ethics refers to the theory of behaviour, moral refers to the practice. In another sense, the term moral refers to any judgment of good or bad arising from a social matrix.
Taylor & Taylor, The human Course p 583. After John Burroughs, Accepting the Universe Houghton 1920 p 314
If the simplest moral rule is not to do another what you would not wish to have done to you, the ethical rule of adulthood is to do to others what will help them, even as it helps you, to grow.
Erikson quoted in Jarrett James L (1991) The Teaching of Values: caring and Appreciation, Routledge, London & NY
Evaluation:
What was educationally significant and hard to measure has been replaced by what is insignificant and easy to measure. So, now we measure how well we have taught was is not worth learning!
Arthur Costa, (1988, June) The School as home for the mind address delivered at education Summit Conference, Fairfax, VA – quoted by Jeffrey Kane in Holistic Education Review Vol 5, No 4 Winter 1992
Evil & badness:
Following the Baha’i view, evil and badness is seen as the absence of good. This is not to fail to recognize the wrong, or fail to punish wrong deeds, but it is the principle with which to stay focussed on real remedy – the only solution to the problems in, and from, darkness is light. The dark side of human nature consists of those qualities that are the negatives of all of the virtues; hate for love; hard-heartedness for compassion, cruelty for kindness etc.
Zohar and Marshall, (2000), view evil as archetypal energy which is out of control. Interestingly the Baha’i educationalist Dan Jordan (1993) says something similar in relation to anxiety. He says that anxiety is energy without a goal. He also emphasizes the need for nurturing a strong healthy sense of identity and purpose. Of course activities that strengthen identity and purpose are likely to lessen such negatives as anxiety – a good thing providing the cultural context is good one (the German Nazis had a strong sense of identity and purpose).
Evil, Zohar (2000 p.180) says, is a human potential of the fragmented, de-centred, spiritually stunted, self.
“The vital integrating force at the centre of the human is present in every human being, and particularly in human beings due to the nature of our consciousness. Many of us are ignorant of our relation to the centre. Ignorant that they whole of universal reality wells up within us. Many of us are estranged from it……. Each of us is a cacophony of sub-selves relating like the members of a dysfunctional family. We have a dominant ‘I’ that we identify as ‘me’, but the repressed presence of the others haunts us and sometimes overwhelms us. In the Hebrew language the word for Devil is Shitan. Literally it means no response, ‘he who cannot respond’….The psychotic sadist feels no response to his victim’s pleas or suffering; he does not identify with the victim as a fellow being……Evil only becomes possible when it is perpetrates against ‘the other’, against those to whom we feel no response.”
In her final sentence Zohar is of course following the Buber I-it versus I-Thou distinction. This view articulates Holistic Education’s concern for integration or inner harmony, but only in the light of challenging and demanding moral principles.
The devil then is a heart so unable to respond to the call of goodness (or Godness) that it remains impervious, or as the Baha’i teachings say the only enemy is the enemy of self, and more mystically in Baha’u’llah’s writings;
O SON OF DUST! All that is in heaven and earth I have ordained for thee, except the human heart, which I have made the habitation of My beauty and glory; yet thou didst give My home and dwelling to another than Me; and whenever the manifestation of My holiness sought His own abode, a stranger found He there, and, homeless, hastened unto the sanctuary of the Beloved. Notwithstanding I have concealed thy secret and desired not thy shame.
(Baha’u'llah: Persian Hidden Words, Page: 27)
This ‘Hidden Word’ can apply both to the hard-heartedness, or the heart possessed by materialism, whenever a new Messenger of God appears, but it can also apply to the individual’s day-to-day state of being – open-hearted or hardhearted, possessed by the ‘stranger’ (or Devil) of materialism or able to make the right decision and allow goodness to flow.
Buber, Martin, (1958), I and Thou, trans. Ronald Gregor Smith, New York: Scribner’s
Jordan Daniel C., (1993), Becoming Your True Self: how the Baha’i Faith releases human potential, London: Baha’i Publishing Trust
Zohar, Danah and Marshall, Ian (2000), SQ Spiritual Intelligence The Ultimate Intelligence. London: Bloomsbury Publishing
Experience:
“There is always more to experience, and more in what we experience than we can predict (and control), but it is also the means where that more to and more in can be revealed.”
Warnock Imagination p 149
Experience, for Csikszentmilhalyi is information plus interpretation as in;
“The content of consciousness is experience, that is, the sum of the information that enters it, and its interpretation by awareness.”
(see Consciousness)
Faith:
By faith is meant, first, conscious knowledge, and second, the practice of good deeds.
(`Abdu’l-Baha: Baha’i World Faith*, Page: 383)
The awareness of transcendent MEANING comes with the sense of the ineffable. The imperative of AWE is its certificate of evidence, a universal response which we experience not because we desire to, but because we are stunned and cannot brave the impact of the sublime. It is a MEANING wrapped in MYSTERY.” A.J. Heschel, p.77, Who Is Man?
AWE is more than an emotion; it is a way of understanding, insight into a MEANING greater than ourselves. The beginning of AWE is wonder, and the beginning of wisdom is AWE.
AWE is an intuition for the dignity of all things, a realization that things not only are what they are but also stand, however remotely, for something supreme. AWE is a sense for the transcendence, for the reference everywhere to MYSTERY beyond all things.”
A.J. Heschel, p.89, Who Is Man?
“Faith is not belief, an assent to a proposition; faith is attachment to transcendence, to the MEANING beyond the MYSTERY.
Knowledge is fostered by curiosity; wisdom is fostered by AWE. AWE precedes faith; it is the root of faith. We must be guided by AWE to be worthy of faith.”
A.J. Heschel, p.89, Who Is Man?
Friendship:
The natural relationship for pupils to explore, for example via stories poetry and other art forms, as a means of developing the Core Ethic, which is seen as living in friendship with another so as to support her/him in the process of Self-Actualization.
SEE also Caring
