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JKL
Justice: “If justice on this earth is ignored, life has no value.” (Kant)
Judge in sentencing Bosnian war criminal Ch. 4 TV 2nd Aug. 2001
“The capacity for justice in humans makes democracy possible. The
inclination toward injustice makes democracy necessary.” Quoted by Tony Benn in a radio broadcast
One of the key passages that underpin the whole dissertation is the Baha’i 2nd Arabic Hidden Word;
‘O Son of Spirit! The best beloved of all things in My sight is Justice; turn not away therefrom if thou desirest Me, and neglect it not that I may confide in thee. By its aid thou shalt see with thine own eyes and not through the eyes of others, and shalt know of thine own knowledge and not through the knowledge of thy neighbour. Ponder this in thy heart; how it behoveth thee to be. Verily justice is My gift to thee and the sign of My loving-kindness. Set it then before thine eyes.’
(Bahá’u'lláh, Tablets of Bahá’u'lláh, p. 36)
Many years ago I asked a Baha’i speaker for his definition of justice and it has served me well for some forty years. He said:
“Justice is the state of being that pertains when due weight is given to every consideration that bears upon a situation.”
“Say; no man can attain his true station except through his justice. No power can exist except through unity. No welfare and no well-being can be attained except through consultation.”
Baha’u'llah, Consultation: A Compilation, p.3 Nightingale Books
Knowing & Knowledge: (see Wisdom)
Knowledge is information made meaningful, subjectively as well as objectively meaningful.
Meaning comes through engagement with caring, creativity, criticality and higher-order values.
Laughlin (1996) says in a web paper entitled Tangent: Belief And Evidence, “Most of the meaning that informs experience is …… made up of tacit knowledge; that is, knowledge that operates below the level of awareness.
Laughlin Charlie (1996) http://www.carleton.ca/~claughli/tutbelef.htm
The philosopher Ryle made the distinction between ‘knowing that’ and ‘knowing how’. Both of these seem to me to be forms of Buber’s I-It and I would therefore seek a third category ‘knowing in’. ‘Knowing in’ would refer to transformative knowing that comes from relatedness taken to the level of the transcendent
Knowledge is defined as “justified, true belief,” a concept first introduced by Plato. Following Williams, Dobson & Walters, (p.35) a belief refers to the information that an individual has about an object. Specifically, a belief links an object to some attribute. Justification is what is offered, a set of arguments, as grounds for believing an assertion.
We believe what we have come to believe through our upbringing and culture – then as we get more mature we believe what we choose to believe. Doing a lot of the latter is hard work and often we avoid that pain. We can and do experience changes of ‘heart’ – a Persian (?) saying states; “The longest distance in the world is from the human head to the heart, and the shortest distance in the world is from the human heart to the head.”
Obviously we may believe something, and it may not be true, with or without apparently good justifying arguments.
We can believe something and it can be true, but we may have insufficient command of justifications with which to persuade someone of the truth.
We might also choose to believe something, or at least assert it, without truly believing it – in which case we are hypocritical or corrupt – in which case we are…. a politician?
Aristotle classified knowledge as being theoretical (e.g. pure maths), productive (tool-making), or practical (e.g. social work training). http://www.infed.org/biblio/knowledge.htm So far as the Aristotelian classifications are concerned we are mainly concerned, without negating the other two, with the practical.
“French and German can distinguish between knowledge that results from recognition (respectively connaitre and kennen), and knowledge that results from understanding ( savoir and wissen). p.4.
“The French cannot distinguish between…. mind and brain…” p. 3
Bryson, Bill, (1990), Mother Tongue – The English Language, London: Penguin Books
“Our whole knowledge of the world is, in one sense, self knowledge. For knowing is a translation of external events into bodily processes, and especially into states of the nervous system and the brain: we know the world in terms of the body, and in accordance with its structure.”
Alan Watts, p.90, “The Book – on the taboo against knowing who you are”
“Knowing, whatever its level, is not the act by which a subject transformed into an object docilely and passively accepts the contents others give or impose on him or her. Knowledge, on the contrary, necessitates the curious present of subjects confronted with the world. It requires their transforming action on reality. It demands a constant searching. It implies invention and reinvention … In the learning process the only person who really learns is s/he who appropriates what is learned, who apprehends and thereby reinvents that learning; s/he who is able to apply the appropriate learning to concrete existential situations. On the other hand, the person who is filled by another with “contents” whose meaning s/he is not aware of, which contradict his or her way of being in the world, cannot learn because s/he is not challenged.” Jacques Chonchol (Preface) p.88 Education: The Practice of Freedom.
“There is, first, what Bohm calls passive, abstract knowledge. “ Sloane, p.141
“… there is active knowledge, or what Polanyi calls tacit knowledge. This is the knowledge contained in our nervous system, muscles, and unconscious.” Sloane, p.141
“Bohm also makes the important observation …. included in our active knowledge are our beliefs that are based on presuppositions, ‘a kind of knowledge of which we are not generally aware’. Our presuppositions are crucially important. They provide the framework and point of departure for all our understanding and dealing with the world, and they pervade and deeply affect our whole life and way of experiencing everything. … Unfortunately, however, because they are seldom brought to consciousness, our presuppositions have the tendency to lock us into patterns of thinking and behaviour that cut us off from the newness and wholeness of reality. Our presuppositions easily become prejudices that often cause great harm…. It is here that Bohm also wants to include in our knowledge both correct and incorrect knowledge.” Sloane, p141
“Bohm, however, argues that our knowledge at any moment is always a mixture of the correct and incorrect, and that ‘until a given item of knowledge is actually found to be incorrect, there is no way to distinguish it from correct knowledge’. And it will, therefore, work in us as individuals and societies in the say way as correct knowledge.” Sloane, p.142
“It is essential, Bohm says, that we realize that the various parts of knowledge are really abstractions from a total living process. ‘In its actual concrete existence’, he writes, ‘knowledge is an undivided whole in flowing movement‘ “. Sloane p.142
“Unfortunately, there is in our knowledge, Bohm says, a tendency for it to acquire the presupposition that at any given time it is absolute truth.” Sloane p.143
How are ‘knowledge’, ‘knowing’ and ‘information’ understood as elements in the educational process?
Q. “When you’re thinking in Philosophy what’s that like?”
A. “Sometimes you learn what you already know.”
(David a six year old on the video Socrates for six year olds)
Central to contemporary problems in education and in the education of teachers is the view taken of knowledge and of information. Personally I consider that differences in how people construe the nature of knowledge is the most thorny problem of our time. In particular it bugs dialogue between politicians and educationalists. Marilyn Butler King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at Cambridge in an article entitled Undermined from above in the Times Educational Supplement on July 2nd 1993 refers to a speech given by John Major to a Tory women’s conference in which he said, “People say there is too much jargon in education. So let me give you some of my own. Knowledge. Discipline. Tables. Sums. Dates. Shakespeare. British history. Standard English. Grammar. Spelling. Marks. Tests.” Butler goes on waggishly to say, ‘Unfortunately it was already clear by the 1890s that it was precisely by having a school education like this that we were falling behind our leading competitors, the Germans.’ Probably one late nineteenth century contribution to the earlier run of this debate that Butler had in mind was the genius of Dickens’ in Hard Times (1970). In this in which the Utilitarian character, the school inspector, says to a recalcitrant girl who made the mistake of mentioning fancy and imagination,
“You are to be in all things regulated and governed, said the gentleman, “by fact. We hope to have, before long, a board of fact, composed of commissioners of fact, who will force the people to be a people of fact, and of nothing but fact.”
As McNiff says, “the way in which people communicate with intent – use their – knowledge reflects views …..about the nature of knowledge.”
McNiff (1992) provides a distinction between ‘objective knowledge’ as ‘know-that’ and procedural knowledge as ‘know-how’. In Polanyi’s (1958) notion of personal knowledge we have a third type. About this Brownhill (1983) says that Polanyi argues that if we are going to gain success in the task of analysing the process of discovery then we must indwell in our research. Only then can we begin to recognise the structure of reality, and begin to build up a commitment to what we see. Brownhill continues,
‘This commitment heightens as we progressively understand the structure. In other words we begin to feel that our understanding of this reality is the truth. Nevertheless in spite of this terminology personal knowledge can be nor more than a belief to which we are very strongly committed and for which we make truth claims.’
Another interesting perspective comes from the Writings of the Baha’i Faith
O SON OF SPIRIT!
The best beloved of all things in My sight is Justice; turn not away therefrom if thou desirest Me, and neglect it not that I made confide in thee. By its aid thou shalt know of thine own knowledge and not through the knowledge of thy neighbour. Ponder this in thy heart; how it behoveth thee to be. Verily justice is My gift to thee and the sign of my loving kindness. Set it then before thine eyes
From The Hidden Words by Baha’u'llah (1932, p5).
This condensed mystical piece of writing seems to me to say a great deal about the nature of authenticity, self actualization, intuition as well as tacit knowledge and the effect of spiritual qualities upon capability in discernment.
Jarvis (1992p. 149) says that some writers clearly distinguish between being and having as modes of knowing and learning. He argues for being ( 1985). Freire (1972 pp 45-46) echoes Dickens in Hard Times when he makes the following disparaging remarks,
Narration (with the teacher as narrator) leads the students to memorize mechanically the narrated content. Worse still, it turns them into ‘containers’, into receptacles to be filled by the teacher. The more completely he fills the receptacles, the better a teacher he is. The more meekly the receptacles permit themselves to be filled, the better the students are.
Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher the depositor. Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiqués and ‘makes deposits’ which the students patiently receive, memorize and repeat.
Clearly there are many issues around knowledge as doing or being or having. Some of those issues are to do with status and power and control – if you have dialogue you might be shown to be wanting. I believe the key is in seeing all learning as dialogic research for the development of the whole person. I believe this is how teacher education should be but it is also what I try to enact in teaching 9 to 13 year olds. McNiff , a member of the action research network based on the University of Bath (1993), presents this notion of dialogic learning and sums up well her adoption of the personal knowledge concept, within the rigour of an action research group, as a kind of creed;
I claim to know something;
I am committed to that knowledge -that is, I believed it is true;
I take this knowledge into my values system;
I show my commitment in my actions;
My claim to knowledge is apparent through my actions;
My ‘values in action’ result in a particular way of living;
My knowledge is manifested in my way of life;
My claim to knowledge is justified by my way of life.
“Knowledge is of two kinds: we know a subject ourselves or we know where we can find information upon it.” Samuel Johnson
KNOWING, MORALITY AND VALUES SINGLENESS OF MIND
Throughout we have avoided dealing with the question of morality and values separate from the question of knowing. The main problem with most of the current demands that greater attention be given in our families and schools and other social institutions to values is that these calls frequently serve only to widen the prevailing split between what is taken to be on the one hand, moral idealism and, or the other, cognitive realism. . In such a separation that which is considered cognitive will eventually triumph….The gap is itself, however, the result of an error in cognition. There is no knowing that does not embody value choices and implications; there are no value commitments and capacities for valuing that do not enter into our ways of knowing and with the forms our knowledge takes. The inner moral development of the individual, the moral qualities of being in the knower, shape the imagination. And the depth and quality of our imaginative knowing-participation determine the realities we perceive, understand, and are capable of entertaining. (my italics II p186
Tacit Knowledge: see knowledge & knowing, intuition
“Sometimes you learn what you already know!” Boy on video of Socrates for Six-year olds – extract from BBC 2 programme, available from EPIC at the University of Glasgow.
Language:
Our language then, shows us how we or our predecessors have labeled our categorized reality, the divisions we have made, the relationships we have inferred or assumed, the classifications which it has been convenient to make. p50
Emmet, E.R., (1968), Learning to Philosophize, Penguin Books, London
If you would be pungent be brief for it is with words as with sunbeams the more condensed they are the deeper they burn. Uncle Charles
Learning:
In SunWALK learning =
development in abilities, admixtures of the 3Ccs,
Examples: ability to look after a pet will include a disciplined sense of responsibility (Caring), telling or writing about the story of the trials of keeping the pet and/or devising ways to keep pet happy & occupied (Creativity) & making decisions about too much/too little food (Criticality)
developed individually and in community,
structured via the 8 ‘E’s,
Those who argue that learning is
Social, affective and dependent on circumstances are themselves making a kind of generalization. But even they, it could be argued, might be missing something easily missed in the scientific temper of our times, namely the possibility that there is an element that is utterly mysterious about our ability to learn, something that is hinted at in our everyday understanding of the power of love to transform both the lover and the object that is loved. If we fail to grasp this, it might be argued, we fail to understand how leaning is also concerned with the pursuit of excellence or perfection. One needs to go back t o Plato for such an insight ( p. 134)
Winch, Christopher and Gingell, John (1999), Key Concepts in The Philosophy of Education, London & New York: Routledge
Training is usually employed as a contrastive concept to education. It is … used… in the sense of conditioning where a repetitive process is applied to someone (or an animal) in order to achieve a desired behavioural result ….. rats and humans ….can be trained…(but) it does not make sense to say that animals can be educated. ( p. 236)
If training is associated with conditioning then it is hard to see what its educational value might be or even whether it is ethically desirable when applied to humans, given the lack of autonomy that it implies. ( p. 236)
Winch, Christopher and Gingell, John (1999), Key Concepts in The Philosophy of Education, London & New York: Routledge
Learning that actualizes development requires a confrontation and resolution of the dialectic conflicts inherent in experiential learning. This process Paulo Freire describes as praxis i.e. using dialogue to stimulate reflection and action on the world in order to transform it:
Paulo Freire’s central message is that one can only know to the extent that one “problematizes” the natural, cultural and historical reality in which s/he is immersed….to “problematize” in this sense is to associate an entire populaceto the task of codifying total reality into symbols which can generate critical consciousness and empower them to alter their relations with nature and social forces. This reflective group exercise… thrusts all participants into dialogue with others whose historical “vocation is to become transforming agents of their social reality. Only thus do people become subjects, instead of objects, of their own history.
Denis Goulet in his introduction to Freire’s Education for Critical Consciousness
Lecture/Lecturing:
‘The lecture is one, the discussion is one thousand’. (Arabian proverb). This educational maxim along with, ‘ How shall a man learn except from one who is his friend?’ were what Albert Mansbridge, in 1913, introduced his book University Tutorial Classes.
Life:
When honoring the widow of Sans-Briz the Israeli ambassador said, “He who saves a single life saves the entire universe.”
Angel Sans-Briz (a diplomat) and Giorgio Perlasca (a cattle-trader wheeler-dealer), like Oskar Schindler, saved more than one thousand Jewish people from the Nazis. When eventually honoured by the Israelis Perlasca said, “I’m no hero. All I did was tell a bunch of fibs.” The Independent 2.5.94
Life-energy – spirit/chi/inochi
Literature:
See Poetry and Story
Logic:
“Owen Barfield ……. Logic demands, in other words, that meaning be fixed and unchanging, and the logical use of language can, therefore ‘never add any meaning to it’. “ Sloane p.149
..for Bohm, formal logic must be seen as an abstraction from a larger movement of rationality. It is in his view, “the intellectual counterpart of the imaginative rearrangement of known images that takes place in imaginative fancy.” Formal logic is necessary and essential in providing categories and methods for introducing order and control into life. Formal logic he points out, is always based on the complete fixing of our categories, assumptions, hypotheses, axioms and so forth, that are usually regarded as the solid ground for discourse. This universe of discourse is necessary, but it too is an abstraction, which, if made absolute along with its logical connections, serves to veil the universe of reality (and so would RP say the universe of personal or group knowledge creation). Formal logic is secondary to insight and is never the source of new knowledge. Formal logic and discursive reason not in the service (see Einstein quote) simply lock us all the tighter into our given presuppositions and rigid mental compartments, and stand as obstacles to further perception. Sloan p146
Love: see Caring except for this:
At a conference of sociologists in America on 1977, love was defined as ‘the cognitive-affective state characterized by intrusive and obsessive fantasizing concerning reciprocity of amorant feelings by the object of the amorance. That is jargon – the practice of never calling a spade a spade when you might instead call it a manual earth-reconstructing implement…
Bryson, Bill, (1990), Mother Tongue – The English Language, London: Penguin Books p. 9
Loving school A:
A LOVING SCHOOL: We all want the best for our child but what is the “best” school. The one thing that we do know is that schools vary tremendously. Some are interested only in the talented, leaving the ordinary to get by as best they can. The swans receive excellent teaching and encouragement, but the geese are treated as such from the start.
In other words, all the geese are swans. The school seems inordinately proud of what to us is mediocre achievement. Yet in some respects such a school may be the best, even for a talented pupil. For encouragement, appreciation, even, if I dare use the word, love, of all the pupils at a school is, in my view, the ultimate standard of excellence. Only in such an atmosphere can children begin to have confidence in themselves and explore their own talents.
These are schools where, courtesy, openness and friendliness seem to exist as a matter of course. The children smile at visitors and talk to them; they laugh with their teachers, not behind their backs; they treat younger children with kindness and respect.
Baroness Mary Warnock, Mistress of Girton College.
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