scholarly journals Educating far from Equilibrium: Chaos Philosophy and the Quest for Complexity in Education

Author(s):  
Joakim Larsson ◽  
Bo Dahlin

It would be futile, John Dewey argued in 1902, to think that we have to choose between child-centered, progressive education and traditional, subject-matter-oriented approaches. Calling for adaptivity, he stressed that we need the act of balancing the one with the other. The tendency in current educational policy to lean in favor of traditional, disciplinary modes of control appears to lose sight of this need. The aim of this paper is to reconnect to the task of maintaining a balance between educational freedom and structure, using a variety of theoretical resources such as complexity science, and the philosophies of Deleuze and Guattari, Schiller, and Nietzsche. Based on these resources, the authors also discuss Steiner Waldorf education as an example of how educational practice may approach, and integrate the significance of chaos in the form of a “virtual pedagogy”.

2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (9) ◽  
pp. 23
Author(s):  
Dimitris Pavlis ◽  
John Gkiosos

<p>The reason for this publication has been our interest in educational issues on the one hand, and, on the other, in the philosophy of education of J. Dewey. This resulted in further approaching the philosophy of Pragmatism and considering its influence on J. Dewey’s philosophy of education. At the same time, we have sought the influences on his work from Aristotelian thought. In this direction, we show that the American philosopher considered the philosophy of pragmatism as applicable to a democratic education, which is also considered to be moral education.</p>


Author(s):  
Paul Van Geert ◽  
Henderien Steenbeek

The notion of complexity — as in “education is a complex system” — has two different meanings. On the one hand, there is the epistemic connotation, with “Complex” meaning “difficult to understand, hard to control”. On the other hand, complex has a technical meaning, referring to systems composed of many interacting components, the interactions of which lead to self organization and emergence. For agents, participating in a complex system such as education, it is important that they can reduce the epistemic complexity of the system, in order to allow them to understand the system, to accomplish their goals and to evaluate the results of their activities. We argue that understanding, accomplishing and evaluation requires the creation of simplex systems, which are praxis-based forms of representing complexity. Agents participating in the complex system may have different kinds of simplex systems governing their understanding and praxis. In this article, we focus on three communities of agents in education — educators, researchers and policymakers — and discuss characteristic features of their simplex systems. In particular, we focus on the simplex system of educational researchers, and we discuss interactions — including conflicts or incompatibilities — between their simplex systems and those of educators and policymakers. By making some of the underlying features of the educational researchers’ simplex systems more explicit – including the underlying notion of causality and the use of variability as a source of knowledge — we hope to contribute to clarifying some of the hidden conflicts between simplex systems of the communities participating in the complex system of education.


Prospects ◽  
1984 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. 231-254 ◽  
Author(s):  
Suzanne L. Kinser

It came as no surprise to John Sloan when in 1910 the National Academy of Design refused to exhibit his painting 3 a.m. (Fig. 1). Its subject matter must have appeared to the academy jury, as Sloan later said, rather “like a pair of men's drawers slipped into an old maid's laundry.” It is apparent that the critics of the day, who deemed the work “too frank and vulgar,” could hardly have overlooked the fact that the seated woman, sipping a cup of tea, is a prostitute. Indeed, the other woman, who is busily engaged in cooking her a meal, would appear to be one also. During the Progressive Era, it was common for prostitutes to share tenement flats like the one in 3 a.m., as numerous muckraking newspaper articles and tracts on the social evil were beginning to make plain. The reformist zeal for which the period is presently noted may have succeeded in closing down a number of brothels; but the world's “oldest profession” continued to flourish, as journalists were constantly reminding an apprehensive but nevertheless titillated American public. In 1910 prostitutes were more visible than ever. Operating independently out of tenements like the one in 3 a.m., they worked on the streets and out of dance halls, saloons, and cheap restaurants.


1968 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 126-132 ◽  
Author(s):  
David P. Ausubel

In mathematics, as in other scholarly disciplines, pupils acquire subject-matter knowledge largely through meaningful reception learning of presented concepts, principles, and factual information. In this paper, therefore, I first propose to disti nguish briefly between reception and discovery learning, on the one hand, and between meaningful and rote learning, on the other. This will lead to a more extended discussion of the nature of meaningful verbal learning (an advanced form of meaningful reception learning) and the reasons it is predominant in the acquisition of subject matter; of the manipulable variables that influence its efficiency; and of some of the hazards connected with its use in the classroom setting.


2014 ◽  
Vol 77 (4) ◽  
pp. 317-325
Author(s):  
Lars Albinus

The full doctoral thesis, The Beautiful Thinking, by the DanishHistorian of Ideas Dorthe Jørgensen, is an impressive and erudite workthat challenges modern theology to learn from philosophical aestheticsor, more specifically, a ‘metaphysics of experience’. Taking her point ofdeparture in Baumgarten’s concept of sensitive cognition, she sets out todevelop a philosophy which, contrary to the erratic strictures of empiricalscience, on the one hand, and superficial tendencies of the modern entertainment culture, on the other, is able to grasp experiences of ‘immanenttranscendence’ or ‘a surplus of meaning’. In this review article, however, I warn against the romanticizing implications of this endeavor inasmuch as the subject matter of theology is a confessional tradition rather than some form of experiential sensitivity.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 222-235
Author(s):  
Nina Vladimirovna Prakapovich

Russian historiography pays considerable attention to the economic and political modernization of the life of the Philippine archipelago, starting from the time of Spaniards, then, American colonization and ending with the era of independence. However, the educational policy on which, on the one hand, the successes of the political and socio-economic modernization of the Philippines have been based throughout the country’s history, and on the other, which by the beginning of the 21st century has become a serious obstacle to economic independence and the establishment of national self-identity, are undeservedly ignored by domestic researchers. The author of this article in previous works has already made attempts to identify the features of the educational policy of Spaniards and Americans in the Philippines, as well as of the independent Philippine governments in the first decades after the end of World War II. But no less interesting is the era of the authoritarian regime of the President of the Philippines, Ferdinand Marcos (1972-1982). Analyzing a wide range of foreign literature and relying on presidential decrees and testimonies of contemporaries as sources, the author comes to the conclusion that the educational policy of the Marcos era is ambiguous: on the one hand, it has become an effective tool to combat country’s main social - economic problems in the 1970s - the problem of unemployment. On the other hand, in the early 1980s it led to its aggravation and marked the beginning of the mass labor migration of Filipinos, which continues to this day. Political decisions made on issues such as the language of instruction, the introduction of a national entrance exam in colleges and universities, and the publication of new textbooks have become critical levers in the deployment of education in support of the labor export strategy in the Marcos era.


Neofilolog ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 51-73
Author(s):  
Mariola Jaworska

The professionalism of a teacher is their competence, expertise, “knowledge of the craft”, but also the ability to meet high cognitive, operational and ethical standards. On the one hand, this is rooted in social and cultural expectations, related to the educational needs of society, but on the other it has a personality dimension, connected with the teacher’s individuality, which is evidenced in the specific relations they have with students. This article aims to analyse the determinants of the professionalism of the contemporary foreign language teacher found in recent glottodidactic discussion and compare these to the current educational policy and practice. It will present both theoretical approaches and the selected results of studies and reports on this topic.


PEDIATRICS ◽  
1961 ◽  
Vol 28 (6) ◽  
pp. 1019-1019
Author(s):  
Carl C. Fischer

FROM TIME to time Presidents of the American Academy of Pediatrics have used this means of sharing with the fellowship, thoughts which seem to them to be of mutual interest. Last year, President George Wheatley had such a message in every issue, covering a wide variety of interesting and stimulating topics. I will not plan to necessarily continue this policy of having a message for each issue, but will do so whenever the subject matter seems to warrant one. At this, the beginning of a new year for the Academy, it seems appropriate to present to the membership at large a few of the thoughts which I presented in Chicago upon my inauguration as your President. It has recently been my pleasure to reread the two little volumes sent to all Academy Fellows a few years ago, the one containing the Presidential addresses of the first 20 presidents, and the other, Dr. Marshall Pease's stimulating "History of the Academy." I heartily recommend these to any of you who might be interested in the conception, delivery and growth and development of our organization. Of first importance at this time, it seems to me, is the review of the primary objectives of our Academy as originally drawn up by Dr. Grulee and his associates more than 30 years ago. These are: "The object of the Academy shall be to foster and stimulate interest in Pediatrics and correlate all aspects of the word for the welfare of children which properly come within the scope of pediatrics."


Author(s):  
David Randall

Rhetoric as a whole fragmented during the medieval era, as did the conversational constellation in particular, not fully to cohere again until the humanist reintegration of the Renaissance. Yet the humanist recuperation did not restore an unchanged rhetoric. On the one hand, the concepts of friendship, familiarity, and conversatio had reoriented themselves around the universalizing Christian conception of community during rhetoric’s long medieval rupture, while the sermo of dialogue had begun to concern itself with that eminently Christian subject matter, the interiority of the soul. On the other hand, the ars dictaminis had shifted the medieval letter toward the public realm, and thus toward the traditional realm of oratory. Petrarch’s rediscovery of classical conversation retained these medieval innovations. The Renaissance variant of conversation that sprang from him would partly slough the theory and practice of its medieval predecessor—but the influence of Christianity and the ars dictaminis would endure.


Legal Studies ◽  
1992 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-209 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerard McCormark

Reservations of title clauses have enjoyed mixed fortunes in recent times at the hands of the courts in Britain. On the one hand, the House of Lords has upheld the validity and effectiveness of an ‘all-liabilities’ reservation of title clause. On the other hand, claims on the part of a supplier to resale proceeds have been rejected in a string offirst instance decisions. Reservation of title has however been viewed more favourably as a phenomenon in New Zealand. In the leading New Zealand case Len Vidgen Ski and Leisure Ltd u Timam Marine Supplies Ltd. a tracing claim succeeded. Moreover in Coleman u Harvey the New Zealand Court of Appeal gave vent to the view that the title of the supplier is not necessarily lost when mixing of goods, which are the subject matter of a reservation of title clause, has occurred. There are now a series of more recent New Zealand decisions, some of them unreported, dealing with many aspects of reservation of title.


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