Paradigm Shift in 21st Century Higher Education (original) (raw)
Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2011
Music, dance, sports, painting, architecture and, of course, literature are forms of communication, which on one side allow connecting with the past, and, on the other hand, the past can help us to distinguish contemporary needs and develop future perspectives. The cultural significance of literature lies in its contribution to the system of symbols by means of which larger communities create their own identity. Literature as part of a cultural awareness of a larger group becomes a place where it is decided what will be remembered. Mother tongue and literature is one of the basic subjects in the educational curriculum. With a careful selection of literary works in the curriculum one of the most important goals of the educational process can be accomplished, and that is the creation of educational and aesthetic competencies of students and their involvement in building their own cultural identity, not only in their own country, but also as part of the multiculture of nations.
1992
African schools rarely present instruction in the students' native languages. The language of instruction tends to be of European origin. What results is a civilized elite which is unsuccessful in bringing knowledge to the vast majority of the population. A project in Cameroon proposes to teach through extensive trilingualism. First, children learn reading, writing, and arithmetic via the local language. At the same time the children begin to learn one of the "official" languages, which may become the primary language of instruction. Later, students learn a third language, which may be either the second official language or the local tongue of a neighboring community. Such an effort was conducted from 1981 to 1987. Students expressed themselves better and performed slightly better in arithmetic, and about equally well in French, as did a control group. Teaching in the local language is a necessary part of preserving the local culture. Failing to promote the culture would amount to promoting alienation and harming self-esteem. Discrepancies between theory and practice wculd only be reinforced through setting apart the official language and the vernacular. Despite years of promoting official languages, the local tongue is still the main vehicle of communication. Using local language in education would signal that one can be educated but still retain African culture.
Language, Culture, and Education
A Collection of Papers in Applied Linguistics, Cultural Anthropology, and Educational Studies Milton A. George & Sergio Saleem Scatolini (editors) 2015 - Euro-Khaleeji Research and Publishing House, Oman
The Language and Philosophy of Education
Dejan Dželebdžić, Bianca Schroeder, Elena Zheltova, Duško Prelević, Dušan Popović, Dragana Dimitrijević, Violeta Gerjikova, Dimitar Iliev, Nevena Buđevac, Georgios Chatzelis, Marcela Andoková
Paideia: The Language and Philosophy of Education, 2019
Educations and Their Purposes: A Conversation among Cultures
2007
bringing about increasing economic, social, political, and cultural homogenization as well as fragmentation. Indeed, the complex interdependencies that are arising both within and among societies as a result of the contemporary scales and depths of these globalizing processes set a more useful framework for considering the mutual implications among philosophy, education, and culture than do issues of how the discipline of professional philosophy disciplines itself. The original and perennial constitution of education as a crucial forum for philosophical reflection expresses a general-but by no means, generic-intuition that the pursuit of wisdom involves alloying considerations of the prospects for shaping the self and for shaping society. In other words, philosophical reflection on education constitutes a primary site for envisioning practices and institutions by means of which the personally and socially realized and the ideals aspired to might be interfused and critically tempered. Granted that the shaping of one's person is always the making of person-in-society, it follows that different conceptions or constructions of personhood would be correlated with differing conceptions of education and its cultural import. From this, it follows as well that revising educational aims and practices can be seen as a principal means of changing the existing complexion of culture and society, whether in response to "external" exigencies or "internal" impulses. And, in fact, there is ample historical evidence of education being utilized in precisely this manner as a means to realizing particular theological, nationalist, modernist, or professional ideals. At the same time, however, the interdependence of education and the processes of cultural and social transmission and transformation suggest that periods of cultural or social disruption or disequilibrium will tend to subject educational aims and practices to considerable stresses. The cultural and societal specificity of education implies as well a specific correlation among cultural, social and educational patterns of change and innovation. It is significant, then, that formal education systems worldwide are in crisis. Asking parents, politicians, policy makers, social critics, and educators themselves whether current educational aims and institutions are attuned to and effectively addressing present and emerging educational needs, the answer is almost invariably "No, they are not." This is true whether the question is posed in Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe, or Australia and the Pacific. It would appear that the dynamics of contemporary globalizing processes are bringing about such acutely stressful and accelerating patterns of change in societies that education is now almost universally experienced as both inadequate and errant. Most remarkable perhaps, is the very ubiquity with which education is being perceived as critically afflicted-the degree to which a sense of crisis characterizes the full spectrum of educational systems and scales. To be sure, the specifics of crisis differ greatly from locale to locale, from country to country, and from region to region. But there is a common and deepening recognition 14 RogerT. Ames and Peter D. Hershock standing of the responsiveness of the agent object. Finally, Bruya applies this new understanding of agent-object responsiveness to the case of education, suggesting that effective education presumes at heart a spontaneous responsiveness on the part of the learner that is indeed identical to the responsiveness that Chinese poets assume in their readers. Daniel Raveh, in "Different Encounter between Teacher and Student in Sailkara's Upadesa-Sahasri and in the Teaching of Jiddu Krishnamurti," continues the discussion of the teacher-student relationship. He examines the educational approach of two great Indian thinkers: Sailkara, the famous Advaitin of the eighth century, and Jiddu Krishnamurti, a twentieth-century reluctant "world teacher." While the latter explicitly talks of education, the former discusses the interlacement of teacher and student, as well as the process of teaching leading to ultimate knowledge (bramavidya). The main argument of this essay is that both Sailkara and Krishnamurti, despite being separated by more than a thousand years, espouse pedagogical approaches that reject the conventional model of teaching according to which the teacher knows, the student does not know, and the former conveys knowledge to the latter. Instead, they both maintain that knowledge takes place only within an intimate encounter between teacher and student. Such an encounter brings forth a special kind of knowledge-or rather awareness-that lies in each of them waiting to be 'invited' out. They are equal partners in the enterprise of recovering this interawareness, to the extent that it is often impossible to determine who teaches and who is taught. Neither Sailkara nor Krishnamurti are much concerned with the transmission of information, but rather give first priority to an innertransformation that has consequences for community and world. For both of them, then, this is the purpose of education. Having first rehabilitated affectivity and somaticity for the philosophy of education, in the final part of this collection of essays the discussion turns to the role of aesthetic sensibilities in moral development with the theme of "Education and the Aesthetics of Moral Cultivation." Fred Dallmayr, in "Beautiful Freedom: Schiller on the 'Aesthetic Education' of Humanity," addresses the question of whether or not global education can be entrusted to a global elite relying on the dictates of (Western-style) reason, or alternatively, whether or not global education can draw on the latent impulses and motivations of peoples in local settings. In his three Critiques, Kant had erected a strict dichotomy between universal reason and nonrational sensibility or inclinations. In his "Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Humankind," Friedrich Schiller attempted to overcome this dichotomy by exploring the potential of an aesthetic sensibility (or "Spieltrieb") that would reconcile reason and contingency, moral duty and inclination. Partly continuing the work of Herder, Schiller in these "Letters" intimated at the possibility of a pluralistic learning process among cultures bypassing both bland (rationalist) cosmopolitanism and a cultural parochialism that would engender a clash of civilizations. Dallmayr's essay examines the 157 Index 467