Abstract
Philosophical anthropology is philosophical inquiry into human nature that seeks to answer the fundamental question of what generally characterizes human beings and differentiates them from other creatures and things. Political theories considerably influence educational theories. We call attention to the fact that the three main political theories currently influencing education (liberal, neo-liberal, and neo-conservative) each have a distinct philosophical anthropology. This fact has especially significant implications for pedagogical social constructivism since it influences the kind of individual and society they strive to construct. We will propound a version of social constructivism we call “critical constructivism.”
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Notes
Where liberals advocate rights over the common good, communitarians emphasize the priority of belonging to a community of shared goods as fundamental to the formation of human identity.
See Garrison (1995).
The communitarian emphasis on shared goods can often become exclusionary of cultural pluralism.
For a strident critique of Rawlsian neutrality see Reich (2002, pp. 34–39).
Many traditional historians themselves resisted Hofstadter’s overt challenge to the prevailing “consensus” view of history and dismissed his use of Max Weber’s “status politics” as a methodological framework, which was, according to one more recent reviewer, promoted in the United States at that time by his “radical colleague,” C. Wright Mills (Wiener 2006).
See Leman (2000) for an engaging history of a grand attempt at democratizing access to higher education.
Matters improve when liberals realize it is moral equality and not cognitive or physical equality that matters in pursuit of social justice.
We welcome those who would prefer to think of all of this semiotically to do so, but we would, following Sanders Peirce (1868/1992) like to suggest an embodied interpretation wherein feelings, actions, and habits as dispositions to act function as interpretants of signs and are themselves signs. In this case, signs constitute our very self-identity.
Not only so for history textbooks (Loewen 2007), but every subject matter area is comprised of dominating and competing theoretical discourses. In fact, what for a time becomes a “subject area” is itself a product of the privileging and valuing of certain human quests.
For many years were involved with the history and philosophy of science in science teaching group whose valuable work centers on the journal Science & Education.
In his Logic, Dewey (1938/1986) writes: “What I have said in Art as Experience, in chapter VII, on "The Natural History of Form" can be carried over, mutatis mutandis, to logical forms” (p. 372).
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Fleury, S., Garrison, J. Toward a New Philosophical Anthropology of Education: Fuller Considerations of Social Constructivism. Interchange 45, 19–41 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10780-014-9216-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10780-014-9216-4