Ramifications of Other on Educational Philosophy

As always, putting into words a concise reason for being is separate from the muddy actions and perceptions that make up the bulk of our lives. Philosophical statements are another element of the story we create around ourselves, quite often continuing to deepen our constant human endeavor to be Other. The interaction of these stories between all the individuals in the classroom is the heart of the classroom experience and awareness of this can inform quite different exchanges between the humans involved.

Human knowledge has been categorized and itemized in the past 200 years to an unprecedented level. It allows for specialization and deep understanding in one area. It has also continued deepening alienation from our environment and our actual physical perceptions. We define our experience by what we hear and see on the various media we interact with rather than the environment directly in front of us. The first essential in a holistic approach to learning is first to be immersed, as much as our human consciousness allows, in our perceptions and interpretations of those perceptions in the moment. Observe this, now.

As a whole person, a teacher best offers a model of the adult world by engaging passionately in activities other than education and bringing that to the educational table. Education is not a set of techniques. It is a sharing of passions between individual members of the species. In our hierarchical culture, teachers are a branch of the media, mandated to make learning “fun” (if under the edutainment model) or “getting students ready for a job” (if under the auspices of the industrial/post industrial model) or “warehousing” (if under the police model) and, in most cases, must perform a blend of all three. Letting our passions take on the breadth that true inquiry leads to breaks these boundaries and leads to understanding with depth, and is actually how we learn, prior to the internal categorization of our perceptions into standard cultural definitions. The interplay of personal experience and culturally defined categories, and the individual understanding the difference between these two, can be termed as knowledge.

The relation between individuals equally searching for answers then becomes the arena of shared human knowledge and understanding. The key is for each individual to be enough aware of the story they tell of themselves to be able to offer to the collective the key to their personal search. What question in their life is each individual really trying to answer? If each member of a group understands that this search is what underlies all their interactions, then the interactions between all the individuals in the group can be consciously used for self discovery and deep learning. With that, we each can lend our help to the other members in their search while getting what we need for ours. Maybe, just maybe, then, can we stop yearning for Other and the alienation it entails and be.