The New Significance of Learning

Imagination's Heartwork

Pádraig Hogan author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Taylor & Francis Ltd

Published:2nd Nov '09

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The New Significance of Learning cover

Should education be understood mainly as a practice in its own right, or is it essentially a subordinate affair to be shaped and controlled by a society’s powers-that-be?

What difference does it make if students are chiefly viewed as recipients of a set of skills and knowledge, or as active participants in their own learning?

Does education have a responsibility in cultivating humanity’s maturity, or are its purposes to be effectively matched to the functional requirements of a globalized age?

The New Significance of Learning explores these and other high-stakes questions. It challenges hierarchical and custodial conceptions of education that have been inherited as the ‘natural order’ of things. It discloses a more original and imaginative understanding of educational practice, illustrating this understanding with frequent practical examples.

Among the merits highlighted by this approach are:

  • a recognition that education is first and foremost an invitation to join a renewed experience of quest and disclosure;
  • a realisation that taking up and pursuing such an invitation is a basic right, as distinct from a privilege to be bestowed or withheld;
  • an awareness of the decisive importance of specific kinds relationships in practices of teaching and learning;
  • an emphasis on the human qualities as well as the intellectual achievements nourished by dedicated communities of learning;
  • an acknowledgement of partiality – of incompleteness and bias – in even the best of humankind’s learning efforts;
  • the emergence of a distinctive ethical orientation for education as a practice in its own right.
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'Its (the book) articulation of values and challenges central to imaginative practice makes an original and carefully constructed contribution to a field in urgent need of such deeper explorations.' - Mark Fettes, Studies in Philosophy and Education, 2011

ISBN: 9780415549677

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: 453g

208 pages