From: Arlo Bensinger (ajb102@psu.edu)
Date: Fri Nov 12 2004 - 17:26:14 GMT
Hi Rich,
At 08:50 AM 11/12/2004, you wrote:
>Hi Arlo, MSH, others,
>
>I can see where you are both coming from, but isn't putting subjects like
>evolution and Intelligent Design in seperate categories (science,
>metaphysics, religion) part and parcel of the subject/object
>stratification that leads to psichic alienation? I see your arguments
>making sense within a SOM framework, but shouldn't we be discussing the
>MoQ here?
I think what I had in mind was a little different, and I'm sorry I did not
make that clear. One of the biggest problems with the current school
curriculae is that there is no interrelativity among the courses. Each is
seen as a discrete "block". This problem leads children to believe that
history and biology (just to pick two we've been talking about) have
nothing to say about each other. Untrue. And it makes for a boring, if not
misleading, approach to learning. Many charter schools are developing and
using an intergrated curriculum. This is something I have looooong been a
proponent of.
So, yes, in the current setting a discrete "metaphysics" course would be of
course useless, as it would have nothing to apply to, or orient the
students around. What I had in mind when I mentioned this course as an
"orienting framework", is that it would most certainly inform the other
subjects, directly and indirectly, and in some ways could serve as a
"unifying" course as well.
That is, students would learn that their metaphysical understandings
determine their orientations to both history and biology. From here, they
could examine how a "metaphysical shift" could indeed impact understanding
in BOTH courses. This level of critical awareness would allow the students
to "read" biology from a number of metaphysical perspectives (indeed, this
is what they SHOULD be doing).
My concern is that (1) placing it soley with the biology course "bounds" it
to that one field, and reinforces the idea of learning as learning
unrelated chunks of knowledge, and (2) there is hardly amply time or room
in the biology curriculum to cover metaphysics seriously, and this could
either lead to the dominance of one particular metaphysical approach, or
the complete dilution of them all.
In this, I am in full support of abolishing the boundedness of school
subjects, but I would like it done in such a way as to not reinforce that
boundedness, nor give moral dominance (or incomplete consideration) to any
one metaphysical approach.
Arlo
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