Sharon Burgmayer, 2000 (modified 2001) | Two Forms of Education: A Table
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"God is playing hide and seek, and made us to play with. |
Spiritual Education | Formal Education | |
conception of the self | comes as a complete package | is incomplete (therefore needing to be educated) and incompletable |
control | unable to and unnecessary to control the world | illusory attempt to attain control over the world |
our "natural" state | joy | suffering/loss/lack |
our relation to the universe | joined, fused | separate, individual, autonomous |
the ontological/epistomological state of the world | is, but is not real (and so is not over-valued) | is created in relationship w/ us; illusion that it is real and valuable |
In the Fall of 2004, Annabelle Wood enrolled in the first-year writing seminar which Anne Dalke was offering @ Bryn Mawr College, "Questions, Intuitions, Revisions: Telling and Re-Telling Stories About Ourselves in the World". In the center portion of the course, which focuses on tacit knowledge ("what we know that we don't know we know") they found themselves in a conversation about two forms of education, one focused on tacit knowing, the other on explicit instruction. They offer here a figure which arose in that conversation, as a contribution to a number of venues--to the course forum on tacit knowing, to the new site on Education and Techology (where web-work is one place where tacit knowing might be expressed), to the Science and Spirit site, which suggests that "exploratory seeking" can be practiced in both the religious and the intellectual realms; and, in particular, to the Writing Descartes forum, where their figure seems to schematize the relationship between "being and thinking," between "treeness and storytelling," between the unconscious and consciousness which that site so insistently works and re-works. Comments are warmly invited here. |