Sorry all - I left out a very important*not* from my 2nd PP!
I cannot tell you how much I love this:
Vision:The guiding vision and orientation of the Faculty is to develop educational thought and practices which promote education as a humanising influence on each person and on society locally, nationally and internationally.
It resonates with everything that motivates me to teach and to investigate the potential, the parameters and the contradictions in my own practice. What I particularly love is that it articulates the notion that there is that which is human, and in the distinction of that which is humanising, what is human is implied *not* as something static but something evolving and growing - something that is becoming. By implication also, there is that which is inhuman and that which his dehumanizing.
I don't think there is anything more important in the realm of human inquiry than identifying and questioning our assumptions. They are like distorting lenses through which we examine the world; the whole point about them is that we do not see them because we are looking *through* them.
I'd very much like to bring up a really basic assumption in the light of recent dialog. What is 'human'? Suppose that, as we answer that question, instead of referring to all that we have pieced together to make what we 'know' about a human being (or being human), instead we were to say that we do not, entirely know: that an understanding of what is human, is developing exponentially, being reshaped by our modern explorations in the same way that our understanding of the physical universe has been reshaped by quantum physics. When you peer into the material universe deeply enough, you find that there is nothing there but a range of vibrational energy. When you peer deeply enough into the human being, all that really appears to exist is an 'I am' that is being. The potential of that 'I am', the potential of each individual is coming to be understood as vastly greater than we have previously imagined, in line with our developing understanding.
|