tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21843852.post6662025622576491427..comments2024-01-04T05:57:26.735-06:00Comments on Education Policy Blog: Hosted by the Forum on the Future of Public Education: Constructivist and Buddhist Visions of EducationCraig A. Cunninghamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18160288758906798678noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21843852.post-411404906214035522007-07-10T22:23:00.000-05:002007-07-10T22:23:00.000-05:00Yes, I agree that Jim is on target about Dewey.His...Yes, I agree that Jim is on target about Dewey.<BR/><BR/>His post made me realize there is another aspect of this argument that I forgot to discuss.<BR/><BR/>Dewey and other progressives were deeply concerned about the cultural "lag" problem. This is the tendency for cultural constructs to stick around (in individuals, in societies) long after they have lost usefulness given the realities of a changing environment.<BR/><BR/>Elsewhere I have argued that the "lag" problem explains why Dewey argued for social practices that seemed unworkable on a large scale. He hoped we'd figure out solutions to the workability issue. If we taught people practices that pointed, however temporarily, in a different direction, then we'd reduce our chance of getting to something resembling the kind of society he wished. <BR/><BR/>Part of what is interesting about the Buddhist approach, and that has always been a bit disconcerting to me, is that they don't really care whether they point you in the "wrong" direction to some extent at the beginning. They are not trying to build an enormous edifice in the same manner. Instead, they expect you to "wear out" simplistic paradigms as you move slowly to more sophisticated ones. So it doesn't matter so much if someone has bad habits in a range of ways. <BR/><BR/>For example, the organization I currently sit with doesn't really care whether you sit correctly at the beginning or not. Their (I think accurate) assumption is that if you sit long enough, you'll eventually just figure it out. You will "wear out" your bad sitting habits. Furthermore, the practice itself (if you are doing it correctly--wearing it out correctly) "rewards" sitting correctly. You can practice better if you sit upright for a complex range of reasons that are only slowly becoming clear to me. <BR/><BR/>Of course, Dewey spoke specifically about posture in Democracy and Education and elsewhere because of his engagement with Alexander and the Alexander Method. Dewey's understanding of how one learns posture is quite different, and fits within his very different vision of integrated learning.<BR/><BR/>[It has taken me about six years to learn how to sit up mostly straight--e.g., to learn in an embodied sense what "authentically" counts as sitting "straight." And I still tend to lean forward a bit too far.)<BR/><BR/>(I'm sure I'm exaggerating more subtle differences between Dewey and Buddhists for effect, here)Aaron Schutzhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10667097977144954236noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21843852.post-19771334431166932852007-07-10T09:43:00.000-05:002007-07-10T09:43:00.000-05:00I forwarded Jim's comment to Jim Garrison, and he ...I forwarded Jim's comment to Jim Garrison, and he stated that Jim Horn is right on! (So is Aaron).A. G. Rudhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14065737458510256119noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21843852.post-41888977177526321922007-07-08T20:36:00.000-05:002007-07-08T20:36:00.000-05:00Thanks for this post, Aaron. If I may also take a...Thanks for this post, Aaron. If I may also take a roll down the hill, I would suggest that if Dewey were alive today, he would be very much in the middle of the new research in neurophenomenology that suggests that the consciousness we give such prominence to is actually something much more tenuous. In fact, natural philosophers/scientists like Francisco Varela, himself a practicing Buddhist while he lived, concluded not long before his death that what we call conscious states are complex, though temporal, neuronal ensembles whose configurations are determined by embodied biological and language structures that are in constant interaction (structurally coupled) within an environment. This kind of permanent embodied temporalism, if you will, seems to be represented in the many paradoxes that are part of the Buddhist tradition. <BR/><BR/>Varela, by the way, was insistent in his search for a "middle way," one based on the complementarity of Western scientific and Eastern religious traditions. He and Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch wrote a ground-breaking book, I think, called The Embodied Mind on the subject. It seems to me that the substance and stance of that book would have been very different had it not been for Dewey's Reflex Arc argument that blew a few hole in the walls that science had built up between the past, the present, and the future.James Hornhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04462754705431590571noreply@blogger.com