Autor: Lonergan, Bernard J.F.

Buch: Topics in Education

Titel: Topics in Education

Stichwort: Erziehung; Position: Modernisten - Traditionalisten; Zusammenfassung

Kurzinhalt: f the modernist position. There were five points: first, nothing is to be taken for granted or accepted on blind faith; secondly, there is no fixed reality to be known - knowledge is a component in an ever changing process; thirdly,

Textausschnitt: 13/1 So much for the philosophy of the modernist position. There were five points: first, nothing is to be taken for granted or accepted on blind faith; secondly, there is no fixed reality to be known - knowledge is a component in an ever changing process; thirdly, the methods of empirical science are the only valid methods; fourthly, these are to be applied to the whole of traditional wisdom, which is simply the product of a prescientific, preindustrial, predemocratic age and society, and consequently is notto be expected to be very relevant to our quite different times; and finally, the great appeal is to be to experience. (8f; Fs)

14/1 The traditionalist position is set out at greater length by Adler and Mayer.1 They urge that the traditionalist would say that things exist prior to changing, and change does not eliminate all previous properties; some are permanent. Within the field of science methods differ widely, and there are still greater differences between these scientific methods and the methods proper to mathematics or philosophy or ethics.2 Finally, there are certain truths accessible to a prescientific, preindustrial, and predemocratic age, and these truths hold for any age. (9; Fs)

15/1 You can see that there is a weakness in that answer, at least in the way I have summed it up. An educational philosophy that appeals to the immutable elements in things, to their eternal properties, to the truths that hold in any age, and simply urges that empirical methods are not the only methods, really is defending a negative position. It is not offering a vision, an understanding, a principle of integration and judgment, and the great power that are offered on the modernist side by their close correlation between fundamental philosophic notions and educational theory.3 If one appeals simply to what is immutable, then one appeals to what holds equally for the education of primitives, ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans, medieval and Renaissance men, people at the time of the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, and people today. And that is not meeting the challenge. It grounds an abstract education for abstract human beings.4 (9; Fs)

16/1 It will not do, then, to ascribe a merely negative value to the philosophy of education.5 Let us attempt, then, to grasp the idea of a philosophy of education as something positive, as providing the vision missing in the traditionalist response.6 (9f; Fs)