This
purpose of this site is to provide a home for conversation, storytelling and networking releated to the topic
of a grassroots transformation of public education. Today, schools are in governed by a systems perspective
that represents and reproduces a modern world view. That is, under the bureaucratic weight of the takeover
of education by the federal government, schools and schooling have never been so completely modern in form, structure, curriculum
and pedagogy. Bureaucratic systems and processes have been strengthened and embedded with increased power to control everything
that happens in schools. The impact of this for students, teachers, and parents is an over-emphases on measurement. For
any bureaucracy to function, the productive output of the school must be measured. The central problem with this approach
to education is that purposes of education are diffecult to define and even harder to measure. As a result, the demand for
measurement has done catastrophic damage to authentic teaching and learning as schools have become quantitative institutions
governed by the need to score increasingly higher on standardized tests. Thus, test scores became the defacto purpose of education
as the teleology of the entire system focused on preparing children for a competitive corporate economic system.
An economic system that is dependent upon ever increasing consumption that nonetheless seems increasingly untenable as
a viable option for the long term, and perhaps even the short term survival of the human race. Still, we continue to raise
our children for the modern world. Norman Wirzba explains:
Our
unprecedented prosperity, rather than being founded in convivial wholeness with the earth and with others, is predicated on
the systematic exhaustion or destruction of life’s sources—soil, water, and air—as evidenced in flights
to virtual words and growing reliance on “life-enhancing” drugs, antidepressants, antacids, and stress-management
techniques—suggest pervasive unwillingness or inability to make this world a home, to find in our places and communities,
our bodies and our work, a joyful resting place. Perhaps even worse, we are training generations of children to see our anxiety-ridden
ways as the norm.
A charateristic
of modenism is the embracing of science as truth. On the other hand, the wisdom of the world’s sacred traditions are
viewed as mythic beliefs. Modernism, and modern institutions of the state, corporations, and public education have dismissed
sacred texts as mere metaphysical musing while at the same time declaring scientific knowledge to be objective and universally
true. The result of this is the common acceptance of secularism as the only worldview appropriate for public
institutions. The problem with modern truth claims and the privileging of modernism through secularism, however, is that these
claims are unsupportable with their own logic. Simply, the history of science has failed to provide a
stable foundation for truth through science; in fact, with increasing levels of discovery in physics, chemistry, biology,
and mathematics, science has actually become more complex and uncertain. The logic of modern truth claims cannot support truth
claims with assumptions independent of their own conclussions. In other words, in order to prove that science represents
objective knowledge, one must a priori assume that the scientific method itself is objective.
This
raises the question of the possibility that philosophers who usually distance themselves from anything theological or sacred
may be missing one of the main currents of contemporary philosophy with profound ethical and teleological possibilities for
educational dialogue and change. In thinking about the oldest and most foundational philosophical questions in education,
why are we educating and what are we doing when we educate, post-secular philosophy offers intriguing new insight for meaning
and purpose in education. Post-secular philosophy simply recognizes the scientific method as a metaphysical belief system
and as a result, science's priveledged status as uniquely secular loses meaning. While the relevance of post-secular
philosophy to education is in the early stages of development, the themes presented for discussion and conversations on this
site actively quest for and believe in the possible impossibility of true and sustained social transformation.
Given
the wisdom tradition context of this discussion, it is important to clarify why post-secular philosophy is both an appropriate
and relevant arena for conversations on public education. We want to
be clear that the purpose is not to advocate any form of publicly-supported religious education that promotes someone or some
group’s religious dogma or metaphysical beleif system as truth. Post-secular philosophy is unabashedly postmodern and
post-secular authors make a clear distinction between religious dogmatism and postmodern post-secular philosophy.
Given this, we hope this
site will provide a space for discussion, conversation and suggestions on:
1. Developing a network of individuals from any background or profession
intersted in fundemental and grassroots changes in how we prepare our children for the world they will live in and be responsible
for taking caring of.
2. Using post-secular thinking as a catalyst for grassroots change in the way we do education and the
teleological purpose of education.
3. Consideration of the relationship between emergent post-secular conversations in other fields and
the provision of education--are changes in education necessary for the development of a society not based on increased
consumption and exploitation of human and natural resources?
4. Encouraging discussion in ways to engage in and meaningfully influence educational politics.
5. A forum for conversations, collaboration, and interdisciplinary scholarship, between post-secular
scholars and postmodern and critical educational scholars.
