Jay
Challening the world is not a place in a curriculum, it is a curriculum. If Dewey is right we have to create our entire school system towards this particular goal if we are to have any chance of success. That means creating people who are comfortable being challenged and even - gasp - outmoded. Hell we can't even create this type of safe space in higher academics.
Michael
________________________________
From: Jay Lemke [mailto:jaylemke@umich.edu]
Sent: Wed 10/13/2004 5:46 PM
To: XMCA LISTGROUP
Subject: science, religion, education
Just a note on the issue of science and religion blurring into one another
... I think it is a key question to ask just where in the curriculum we do
create a space for students to discuss the moral issues surrounding science
and other belief systems, or technological practices? Where in fact do we
create a space for them to critically challenge ANYTHING about the world
they are inheriting, and which it will be their right to change?
Are we just preparing them to operate the technologies on which prior
generations have made us so dependent, without ever offering them the
opportunity, and the intellectual means, to question whether they indeed
want the kind of world being made with these technologies? technological
dependence is not irreversible, especially dependence on high technologies
which have evolved largely in the last century to support ever larger-scale
capital accumulations (e.g. genetically modified crops, hi-tech healthcare,
large-scale environmental management, energy-intensive economies, etc.).
To be quite candid, and I have been a science educator for more than 30
years, I do not envision the time EVER when we will have a global
population of people who think according to the dominant patterns of
recent, Western science. So perhaps we had better start to imagine
desirable human futures that do not depend on this neo-colonialist fantasy.
JAY.
Jay Lemke
Professor
Educational Studies
University of Michigan
610 East University
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1259
Ph: 734-763-9276
Fax: 734-936-1606
http://www.umich.edu/~jaylemke
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