Understanding Humans as it relates to Educational Philosophy and our Views about Education
The following questions were initially answered individually, shared in small groups, responses were compiled from all groups, displayed, and summarized.
Focus questions
- Human life is different than animals - What makes us human?
- Why do we teach and learn?
- How do I know what I know?
- What limits our search for knowledge?
- How does ethics fit with Democracy?
- What do we need to know about educational theory? or What should we know about schooling or educating our children?
1. What makes us human?
Human life is different than animals - see also human animal comparison
Compiled ideas
- Walk upright
- Run for long distances
- Opposable thumbs
- Persistent curiosity, habits of mind
- Collaborate with family, friends, & strangers, across gender, animals, and other tribes or groups.
- Create see a point in the end of a stick, a scraper in a rock, and combine two objects to make one tool ...
- Process food: butcher animals, fillet fish, dry food, cook, smoke, salt, preserve
- Develop tools, technology, domestication of plants and animals
- Foresight - anticipate and see the future
- Fear the future
- Complex brain
- Logic
- Language and communicate across time and long distances, gossip, tell stories, art, music ...
- Social
- Read people's body expressions to anticipate their thinking one, two, three, four, or more steps into the future.
- Able to speculate on what other people are thinking and to speculate that they are capable of thinking about what I am thinking that they are thinking ... and so forth...
- Hate for our enemies
- Create ideas that are not real or have physical properties: art, music, fiction, speculation, lies, stories, myths, explanations, theories, ...
- Consciousness aware that we are curious, social, and have awareness of our selves and individuals.
- Have the capacity to intervene for ourselves and to change the world.
- One form of intervention is learning and teaching.
Summary
The importance of considering what is human, with relation to education, is to step back out of a school environment and consider how we differ from animals, plants, and minerals. And reflect on our history of survival and our important common traits that necessary to continue to survive.
Our ability to learn, make tools, cooperate socially, and communicate our successes and progress together.
2. Why do we teach and learn?
Compiled ideas
- Survive or our survival as a species
- Curiosity that initiates searching for explanations
- Solve problems
- Care about and for others
- Enjoyment pleasure (enjoyment, food, curious, self-development, love to hate enemies, reduce pain…)
- Freedom
- Better lives
- Better way of doing things
- We learn to become more complete.
- Our incompleteness makes it possible to learn
- We search and in the search we intervene which is to teach ourselves
- Searching is never done, which makes us incomplete
- Searching creates the possibility for the creation of knowledge
Summary
Curiosity is the motivation to learn. It stimulates thoughts and questions. It motivates us to wonder, search, discover, analyze, and reflect on ideas and decisions. All which are fundamental results of curiosity so we learn for or to survive and hopefully thrive.
3. How do I know what I know?
Compiled ideas
- Human brain, all human brains are alike in more ways than they are different.
- Human brains have evolved predisposed to eat, move, learn language, and learn new ways to process the many simultaneous inputs the brain receives.
- A genetically encoded brain begins to adapt to the multiple inputs it receives as nerve impulses, neurochemicals, hormones, and other chemicals from the communicative pathways to which it is connected.
- As people interact with the environment they react to and interpret their experiences in novel ways that allow them to adapt and survive or satiate their curiosity.
- Memory of these experiences and adaptations resulting in assimilation and accommodation is learning and collectively is our personal knowledge.
- We learn how to learn. And eventually our knowledge results not just from pure experience, but with a good education, it becomes knowing how to use rigorous logical methods and procedures for productive learning in creative, ingenious, ethical ways to think critically with deep understanding and epistemological curiosity for our survival and enjoyment.
- We are motivated with our ingenious curiosity to move beyond a simple folk representation of common sense, conventional wisdom, and rote learning.
Summary
Critical thinking and logical reasoning based on observational evidence determines our quality of learning and depends on our creative depth of thought.
4. What limits our search for knowledge?
Compiled ideas
Our search for knowledge is restricted by
- Ourselves: genetics, habits of mind, ...
- Those we know - our culture, politics ...
- Authority and freedom
- Freedom can range from doing whatever a person wants at the expense of others which is anarchy. Or Freedom can be restrained by the ethics we choose, but we always have the freedom to transgress.
- Environment …
- Resources …
- Ethics with democracy as the social glue
Summary
Often we think there is no limits to our learning. However, we need to be aware of our self-limitations and how our personal place in our community imposes restrictions and limits so that we might be aware of the forces that drive our choices.
5. How do ethics fit with democracy?
Compiled ideas
- Democracy implies there needs to be a freedom.
- One person's freedom can't interfere with another person's freedom. Anarchy.
- Limit freedom.
- Limits should be ethical.
- Laws are a way to ensure ethical behaviors.
- Laws need to be fair for all.
- No favoritism. Caste system, dictator,
Summary
Democracy requires a large majority of ethical citizens who will take a strong proactive stance to desire, support, and act to protect freedom for everyone, especially those who are different and have minority views different than ours. Citizens who will defend and provide real meaningful inclusion for all citizens with an equitable distribution of wealth and when necessary sacrifice. Where people can make ethical choices with out fear of bias, stereotype, or hate to freely express themselves without censorship and pursue a happy, healthy, and meaningful life.
“The legitimate object of government is to do for a community of people whatever they need to have done, but cannot do at all, or cannot so well do, for themselves — in their separate, and individual capacities. In all that the people can individually do as well for themselves, government ought not to interfere.” July 1, 1854
6. What do we need to know from educational theory?
Education is ideological (The insidious nature of ideology is its ability to make itself invisible.)
To educate we must know:
- Education requires a recognition that our beliefs and ideas are a product of our condition and conditioning.
- Objectivity always contains within it a dimension of subjectivity.
- All ideas and opinions should continuously be considered as subjective: open to investigate the origins, history, and consequences associated with them.
- Without the qualities or virtues such as: a generous loving heart, respect for others, tolerance, humility, a joyful disposition, love of life, openness to what is new, a disposition to welcome change, perseverance in a struggle, a refusal of determinism, a spirit of hope, and an openness to justice a pedagogical practice that provides autonomy for students is not possible.
- Autonomy is not provided in one size fits all standardized instruction.
- Learners must out maneuver the banking system of education (banking information for later use). We must know how to teach (instructional and learning theory) so each learner will approach the learning process in an explorative manner that will make their objects of learning (learning content) knowable.
- How to understand our students well enough (human developmental theories) to help them recognize they are the architects of their own cognition process and provide them the freedom and autonomy to maintain their love of learning while we teach and they learn how to learn, find their talents and develop them to become highly able and successful learners who desire and are capable of taking charge of their education throughout their lives.
Focus questions for exploring teaching goals
What are my beliefs about teaching?
- I teach because I am curious and search for understanding. In doing so I notice things and intervene to provide growth because I care for each learner's personal development.
- Teaching is learning. There is no teaching without learning. When we teach we search to understand, what the learners know and facilitate their learning with a constructivist learning theory. As we assess their understanding we intervene which is to teach ourselves.
- Risk taker. To be open in the world to learn and change we must take risks. To do so we must be confident and believe in our self-efficacy to teach in a manner that empowers learners. We do this with a strong knowledge base communicated with a well developed conceptual framework.
- Authority comes from a self confident teacher interacting with students who are curious and openly question what they know and explore what they don’t know to increase their autonomy through the process of learning and becoming whatever they will become. Their enthusiasm and success gives authority.
- Passion for teaching and learning. Neutrality in education is impossible. You can’t be neutral. Study for the sake of study is impossible. What would you explore? For whom? And why?
- Accepting mistakes. Educability is being unfinished and it is ethical to be so because we must make decisions and we can transgress in the decisions we make.
- Open minded. If the teacher takes only one view, then the teacher can only realize the teacher’s goals or views. And there will be no learner autonomy which results in minimal learning, and no joy of explorative learning.
- I respect autonomy because I know learning requires each person explores information from their point of view to truly learn.
- Research based. There is no such thing as teaching without research (systematic investigation to verify information and new conclusions) and research without teaching. Research and investigation unites theory and practice to result in learning theory, learning cycle methodology, principled procedures for teaching.
- Reflect and encourage peer review. I am secure enough to share my curiosity and
questions about teaching and learning. I am demanding enough to require sufficient research and
reflection to draw conclusions. And through these actions and interactions I educate and educate myself. I do research so as to know what I do not
yet know and to communicate and proclaim what I discover.