Abstract
This chapter challenges the conventional way of thinking, practicing, and studying ‘education’ as stemming from ‘society’s’ point of view. From this latter perspective, ‘society’ initiates minds in the ways of knowing and living considered to be ‘good’ and ‘worthy’. But were those not minds that created this process in the first place? Would not then all problems for which we blame ‘education’ (justly or unjustly) be problems that come from the mind itself? Pointing to this circularity, the introduction calls for a new way of diagnosing and constructing ‘education’ – one that is not bound by ‘education’ itself. The reader is thus invited into an interdisciplinary journey that will be grounded in his own self-exploration of the mind through mindful attention.
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Notes
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This is a paraphrasis of Neitzsche’s critique of ‘education’ (Nietzsche 2014).
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To a certain extent we are following a diagnosis that’s been made forty years ago by Pinar and Grumet’s in Toward a Poor Curriculum that has recently been republished: “We have gone just about as far as we can go in understanding the nature of education by focusing on the externals. It is not that the public world – curriculum, instruction, objectives – become unimportant; it is that to further comprehend their roles in the educational process we must take our eyes off them for a time, and begin a lengthy, systematic search of our inner experience” (2014, p. 4). Pinar and Grumet proposed a nuanced account of autobiographical inquiry that is integrated in to the ‘curriculum’. The approach proposed here offers a more systematic exploration of the mind.
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Readers who are familiar with Shunryu Suzuki’s (1999) writings will recognize this as the idea of a ‘beginner’s mind’.
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Ergas, O. (2017). Introduction: The Problem of Education Is ‘Education’. Forget ‘Education’.Study the Mind. In: Reconstructing 'Education' through Mindful Attention. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58782-4_1
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