scholarly journals Giftedness in the Finnish educational culture

2021 ◽  
pp. 026142942110542
Author(s):  
Kirsi Tirri

Giftedness in the Finnish educational culture is seen as taboo, and it is easier to talk about talent development. We need to widen the concept in the ways that would address both excellence and ethics. The definition of transformational giftedness includes a beyond-the-self orientation and implies that the purpose of giftedness is to help to make the world a better place. This kind of definition might be the key in using the term “giftedness” in egalitarian and inclusive cultures like Finland.

2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (5) ◽  
pp. 135-150

The springboard for this essay is the author’s encounter with the feeling of horror and her attempts to understand what place horror has in philosophy. The inquiry relies upon Leonid Lipavsky’s “Investigation of Horror” and on various textual plunges into the fanged and clawed (and possibly noumenal) abyss of Nick Land’s work. Various experiences of horror are examined in order to build something of a typology, while also distilling the elements characteristic of the experience of horror in general. The essay’s overall hypothesis is that horror arises from a disruption of the usual ways of determining the boundaries between external things and the self, and this leads to a distinction between three subtypes of horror. In the first subtype, horror begins with the indeterminacy at the boundaries of things, a confrontation with something that defeats attempts to define it and thereby calls into question the definition of the self. In the second subtype, horror springs from the inability to determine one’s own boundaries, a process opposed by the crushing determinacy of the world. In the third subtype, horror unfolds by means of a substitution of one determinacy by another which is unexpected and ungrounded. In all three subtypes of horror, the disturbance of determinacy deprives the subject, the thinking entity, of its customary foundation for thought, and even of an explanation of how that foundation was lost; at times this can lead to impairment of the perception of time and space. Understood this way, horror comes within a hair’s breadth of madness - and may well cross over into it.


Author(s):  
Ingvar Johansson

Some kinds of utterances which have an indicative grammatical form seem, for different reasons, to be unable to say something true of the world. Logical contradictions are only the prime example of something the author baptizes impossible descriptions. So-called performative contradictions (e.g., "I do not exist") make up another kind, but there are at least two more such kinds: negating affirmations and performatives which cannot be explained within the philosophy of language. Only philosophical anthropology can explain their feature of "impossibleness," and a distinction between unreflective and reflective consciousness is central to the explanation. Particularly important here is G. H. Mead's distinction between two aspects of the self: the "I" and the "me." Each of the four kinds of impossible descriptions distinguished has its own contrary opposite. These are, in turn, logical tautologies, performative tautologies, affirming negations, and omissive performatives. The last three types as types have not received the philosophical recognition that they deserve. All four fit a general characterization which is given as a definition of the concept of superfluous description.


Author(s):  
Candy Gunther Brown

This chapter canvasses the various meanings of modernity and secularization, and develops a partial typology of Protestant reactions to these key themes of the twentieth century. Through the author’s expertise in global charismatic and divine healing movements, and shifting interpretations of sacred texts and religious practice, the chapter notes six categories of Protestant responses, which are to: (1) reinterpret the Bible in light of modern scholarship; (2) reaffirm the Bible’s authoritative status; (3) recontextualize the Bible in light of modern society and culture; (4) reinterpret medical materialism through the prism of biblical supernaturalism; (5) reassess the Bible’s compatibility with a plurality of spiritual healing resources; and (6) reappropriate modern technologies for traditional biblical ends. The chapter notes the challenges to the standard secularization theory, and to the self-definition of Protestant dissenting movements, as they move around the world. It illustrates these points with particular reference to the rise of African indigenous charismatic dissenting practice, starting with key figures such as William Wadé Harris.


PEDIATRICS ◽  
1989 ◽  
Vol 84 (1) ◽  
pp. 164-164
Author(s):  
Student

AIDS quickly became a global event—discussed not only in New York, Paris, Rio, Kinshasa but also in Helsinki, Buenos Aires, Beijing, and Singapore—when it was far from the leading cause of death in Africa, much less in the world. There are famous diseases, as there are famous countries, and these are not necessarily the ones with the biggest populations. AIDS did not become so famous just because it afflicts whites too, as some Africans bitterly assert. But it is certainly true that were AIDS only an African disease, however many millions were dying, few outside of Africa would be concerned with it. It would be one of those "natural" events, like famines, which periodically ravage poor, overpopulated countries and about which people in rich countries feel quite helpless. Because it is a world event—that is, because it affects the West—it is regarded as not just a natural disaster. It is filled with historical meaning. (Part of the self-definition of Europe and the neo-European countries is that it, the First World, is where major calamities are history-making, transformative, while in poor, African or Asian countries they are part of a cycle, and therefore something like an aspect of nature.)


Author(s):  
Eugene Matusov ◽  
Ana Marjanovic-Shane

We define genuine education as students’ active leisurely pursuit of critical examination of the self, life, society and the world. It is driven by the person’s interests, inquiries, needs, tensions, and puzzlements. Thus, it is based on the students’ ownership of their own education, rather than on the society’s needs and impositions on the students. Hence, genuine education cannot be forced on the students, but rather the students need to be supported and guided to find and pursue their own education as their existential need. We view genuine education as students’ authorship based on the students’ learning activism. In our opinion, the primary condition for the students’ ownership of their education is the students’ freedom to participate in making decisions about their education. In our paper, we discuss pedagogical experimentation aimed at promoting learning activism and ownership of their own education through critical dialogue and democratic self-governance.However, to our surprise, we found out that merely engaging students in decision making about their own education does not work for many students. After several years of practicing the Open Syllabus pedagogical regime in our undergraduate and graduate classes, we have experienced and abstracted two major mutually related problems: a problem of “culture” and a problem of “self-failure.” The issue of “culture” involved a tension between building a new democratic educational culture while practicing it. We also found that our undergraduate and graduate education students do not follow their own freely chosen educational commitments, and thus they feel betrayed by themselves. Analyzing students’ reflections on the self-failures, we found that they felt pressured by life and institutional survival and necessities. Because of that, they did not have the luxury of prioritizing their own educational self-commitments. In response to this and other concerns, we developed a hybrid pedagogical regime, called Opening Syllabus. We focus on tensions within this new, hybrid pedagogical regime, by analyzing students’ reflections and contributions in class.


Sains Insani ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 10-14
Author(s):  
Ira Meilita Ibrahim ◽  
Taufik A. Latif ◽  
Afi Roshezry Abu Bakar ◽  
Muthualagan Thangavelu

The advancement of European dress to the rest of the world was linked to the definition of civilization as “a stage of social development considered to be more advanced” and “polite and good-mannered”. The widespread of their fashion style in the 19th and 20th centuries influenced the way the rest of the world attire. The fashion trend and dressing style thus change the purpose of dressing through time. The dressing style in campuses especially in private institutions of higher learning is under particular scrutiny, as it is often said to be inappropriate for a learning environment. This study looked at the importance of moral education, and its role in implementing the dress code for students among university students especially between two types of university i.e. public university and private university. It looked on the dressing style of students, both male and female, and the factors that lead to their dressing pattern which is common among students. This study also advocated the students’ understanding of the content of dress codes in their learning institution and the role played by moral education in regard to dress code. The overall study highlighted students’ perception towards the implementation of the dress code and punishment in their learning institution. The methodologies used to carry out this study are questionnaires and interviews. This study will therefore ascertain the important of dress code among students at higher learning institution and the role of moral education in cultivating values in order to dress properly or decently. Key Words: moral education, dress code, higher learning institution, civilization.


2008 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 200-212
Author(s):  
ELIZABETH BULLEN

This paper investigates the high-earning children's series, A Series of Unfortunate Events, in relation to the skills young people require to survive and thrive in what Ulrich Beck calls risk society. Children's textual culture has been traditionally informed by assumptions about childhood happiness and the need to reassure young readers that the world is safe. The genre is consequently vexed by adult anxiety about children's exposure to certain kinds of knowledge. This paper discusses the implications of the representation of adversity in the Lemony Snicket series via its subversions of the conventions of children's fiction and metafictional strategies. Its central claim is that the self-consciousness or self-reflexivity of A Series of Unfortunate Events} models one of the forms of reflexivity children need to be resilient in the face of adversity and to empower them to undertake the biographical project risk society requires of them.


2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-66
Author(s):  
Monika Szuba

The essay discusses selected poems from Thomas Hardy's vast body of poetry, focusing on representations of the self and the world. Employing Maurice Merleau-Ponty's concepts such as the body-subject, wild being, flesh, and reversibility, the essay offers an analysis of Hardy's poems in the light of phenomenological philosophy. It argues that far from demonstrating ‘cosmic indifference’, Hardy's poetry offers a sympathetic vision of interrelations governing the universe. The attunement with voices of the Earth foregrounded in the poems enables the self's entanglement in the flesh of the world, a chiasmatic intertwining of beings inserted between the leaves of the world. The relation of the self with the world is established through the act of perception, mainly visual and aural, when the body becomes intertwined with the world, thus resulting in a powerful welding. Such moments of vision are brief and elusive, which enhances a sense of transitoriness, and, yet, they are also timeless as the self becomes immersed in the experience. As time is a recurrent theme in Hardy's poetry, this essay discusses it in the context of dwelling, the provisionality of which is demonstrated in the prevalent sense of temporality, marked by seasons and birdsong, which underline the rhythms of the world.


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