CHI TIẾT NGHIÊN CỨU …
Tiêu đề
Wisdom, community, freedom, truth: Moral education and the "schooled heart"
Tác giả
Jeffrey D.L.
Năm xuất bản
2007
Source title
The Schooled Heart: Moral Formation in American Higher Education
Số trích dẫn
2
DOI
Liên kết
Tóm tắt
Suppose it to be true that virtue could not be taught; that no firm principles could be deduced from any exemplar, that all learning was irreparably circumstantial, personalistic, autobiographical. Suppose further that the hard-core relativism of the literary theorists accurately described both an ethical and an epistemological limit, that there is therefore no objective truth to be had from texts, or, for that matter, from other persons. Suppose our ego-centrism really is so thoroughly prophylactic that likewise nothing of the past-no artifact, no record, calculus, or testimony- can achieve for us the status of an authority, or even be received as much more than a mere curiosity. Then in what would acceptable education consist? In improved techniques, apparently, for the heightening of selfconsciousness, for the increase and extension of physical-especially sexual- vigor, and the passive mastery of "useful" mechanical knowledge by sophisticated technical means. None of these technical innovations, we are regularly assured, has been without its value. But the displacement of theoria by praxis, of the logos in learning by the techne in technology, has been more radical in twentieth-century public education than at any previous time in the history of higher education.1 A consequence of this complex is a corresponding diminishment of concern amongst educationists to set as a goal the development of virtue. In so ardently pursuing various and multiform "values" at the expense of common virtues, individual self-expression at the expense of communal wisdom, private gain at the expense of common profit, is it possible that we have made the phrase moral education almost an oxymoron? No one seriously doubts that even a Christian college or university can entirely evade the necessity of technical training and a certain fashionable cachet in the packaging and marketing of educational products. The academic marketplace is more highly competitive than ever, and professional education, with its predisposition to focus on specific technologies and methods, has grown proportionally as part of the work we do. On the other hand, when even a Christian college or university finds that money and market-fashion eclipse the historic rationale for a liberal education, then serious questions about the institutional identity, justifiability, and even viability of these institutions are likely to arise. It is no accident that this kind of conversation is taking place in church-related colleges and universities. But in many cases, our institutions have found it commercially easier to imitate the wisdom of the world, if I may be permitted this phrase, than to do the tougher work of invigorating in our curricula something of that wisdom which Scripture tells us is ultimately "from above." In my title I have identified four educational desiderata, which I take to have been perennially central to moral education in a Christian context. All are elsewhere-to say the least-contestable. In the context of a secular education, I suppose that even to conjoin them in this way would be to risk being thought of as belaboring an archaism. Yet each remains foundational to Christian moral education, and because each has a biblical meaning at variance from normative cultural usage, it seems to me that a situated reflection is appropriate. © 2007 Baylor University Press.
Từ khóa
Tài liệu tham khảo
New Trends in Education in the Eighteenth Century, (1951); Migne J.-P., Patrologia Latina, 91, (1844); Aquinas T., Summa Theologica, (1948); Bunyan J., The Pilgrim's Progress, pp. 90-91, (1993); Descartes R., Rules for the direction of the mind, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, 1, (1985); Watts I., The Improvement of the Mind, pp. 17-18, (1844); Anselm, Monologion, Monologion and Proslogion: with the Replies of Gaunilo and Anselm, (1995); Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, the Library of Liberal Arts, 80, (1958); Augustine, Lectures or Tractates on the Gospel According to St. John, (1888); Augustine, Sermons on Selected Lessons of the New Testament, (1888); Augustine, On Christian Doctrine; Newman J.H., The Idea of a University, (1982); Prickett S., Managerial ethics and the corruption of the future, Education! Education! Education! Managerial Ethics and the Law of Unintended Consequences, (2002); Boyer E.L., The scholarship of engagement, Selected Speeches: 1979-1995, (1997); Seneca L.A., Epistolae Morales Ad Lucilium, (1969); Augustine, The City of God against the Pagans, (1998); Malik C.H., A Christian Critique of the University, (1982); Russell B., Education and the Good Life, (1926); Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, pp. 1103-1115; Augustine, On Christian Doctrine; Hughes T., Tom Brown's Schooldays, pp. 151-152, (1921); Newsome D., Rich Study of Victorian Education, (1961)
Nơi xuất bản
Baylor University Press
Hình thức xuất bản
Book chapter
Open Access
Nguồn
Scopus