Causal layered pedagogy: Rethinking curricula practice (original) (raw)
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Alfred North Whitehead’s (1861–1947) “Philosophy of Organism” offers an important, indeed fundamental, metaphysical system. There are many publications, including monographs, devoted to Whitehead’s metaphysics, to his approach to education and learning, and to Whiteheadian interpretations of his (systematic) approach. Why would yet another book on that topic be expedient, timely or even urgent? It is expedient because education is arguably, more than ever, the most important cultural factor. It is timely because of the need to investigate the efficacy of the process philosophical (mainly Whiteheadian) approach in the context of the contemporary situation in the field of education and learning, where artificial intelligence becomes more and more powerful. Such an investigation has never been made. Yet, it is of theoretical, as well as practical, interest for philosophers, specialists in education and learning, and scientists (especially computer scientists, engineers, natural scientists and human scientists). It is urgent because artificial intelligence gains traction in the context of the global systemic crisis announced in 1972 by Meadows.
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This paper problematizes current thinking about education by arguing that the question of educational purpose is not simply a socio-political question concerned with what the ends should be and why, but can also be understood as a structural question, concerned with the way we understand education's directional impetus. We suggest that it is possible to understand education as something other than a curricular instrument designed to facilitate a purpose external to itself. We challenge such an instrumental view by arguing that education is an emergent phenomenon with its own unique aesthetic qualities (like art or music); a phenomenon, moreover, that does not simply serve a purpose, but generates the purpose it serves. In this paper we lay down the groundwork for such a non-instrumental understanding of education by combining the notion of emergence with ideas from Cassirer's Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Aristotle's teleological notion of the 'ideal' as self-generated and the Greek notion of 'paideia.' This provides an opportunity to theorise education's directional impetus as the ongoing and open-ended coordination of three realms of human life: the symbolic, the individual and the political. Given the acute political and social dilemmas that instrumental understandings of education bring forth in multicultural, and so called 'democratic' and 'inclusive' societies, we hope that by opening the possibility to theorise education as a noninstrumental phenomenon, it may become possible to have more fruitful discussion regarding education than endless political debate about what the curricular ends of education should be.