Creatively Advancing into Novelty
More and more teachers and college professors seem to be worried about the decline of reading habits in young people, and I tend to agree with Dr. Bridgeman (the Dean and VP of Academic Affairs at Methodist Theological Seminary) here about it being a serious problem. Being the father to a tail-end-of-Gen Z middle schooler,…
“At its core, Whitehead’s philosophy of education emphasizes the idea that a good life is most profitably thought of as an educated or civilized life, two terms which Whitehead often uses interchangeably. As we think, we live. Thus it is only as we improve our thoughts that we improve our lives. The result, says Whitehead,…
“Everything we know about the adolescent brain, in particular, would suggest that the school day ought to start much later in the morning, if not after lunch. That’s a simple example of the way that schools can actually work against the optimal development of the brain. There’s also the fact that for a very long…
“Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.” —John Dewey I haven’t really written much about the 2016 U.S. presidential election of Donald Trump because it’s been an overall hugely depressing nightmare for me. I have had a lot of in-person chats, Facebook discussions, and have also read a TON of articles, essays,…
“I’d like to talk about an idea that is often abused. The idea is the following: If we want to have workers [be] better off, well then we should do more in the way of educating them. This is a kind of idea that somehow conveys the dangerous notion that the unemployment suffered by many,…
“According to this view the mind is best understood as a complex and dynamic system, always in process, always changing, growing, and becoming more diverse and differentiated. At the same time they grow in internal complexity, ecosystems also become more integrated and specialized, filling up their niches and fostering symbioses. Ecosystems are composed of a…
“Art is like masturbation. It is selfish and introverted and done for you and you alone. Design is like sex. There is someone else involved, their needs are just as important as your own, and if everything goes right, both parties are happy in the end.” –Colin Wright I had a conversation with a friend…
In my view, the worst thing that has happened in higher education was slicing everything up into academic disciplines…academic disciplines don’t think, scholarship is not an intellectual activity. Our universities have become anti-intellectual, they socialize people to think that the world of thought is not useful…to put it in more proper terms, [in a university]…
The highest activity a human being can attain is learning for understanding, because to understand is to be free. ~Spinoza I can always see the question coming. After recommending to a friend that they read a technical, heavy duty philosophical or theological text, I’m asked “why don’t they just talk like normal people, using normal…
HT to Kester Brewin for turning me on to this little beauty from the RSA. It’s a talk from Sir Ken Robinson on changing educational paradigms but as Kester says “the applications to changing theological ones are there for the taking.” I especially love the part when he talks about divergent thinking vs. convergent thinking….