Standards of Judgement.

Reflecting on my  understanding of What are standards of judgement? Has 
been a core process of my PhD enquiry. I arrived in Japan with overt 
standards of judgement which bore the authority of my western educational 
and nursing profession. They were proven , they worked , they had 
repeatability and 2000 years of  history behind them.

However I also had covert standards of judgement in play ones which I was 
not consciously aware of. This being the judgements I used as a white 
male. These judgements and values had been socialised in me by my culture. 
To many the mere fact of being white is seen as being “privileged”. I with 
a traumatic childhood and early adulthood had never considered myself  
privilege in any way. I found it disconcerting that my colour could be 
seen as privilege. A thought that made me feel extremely uneasy as a 
communicator and educator.

Being a white male nurse educator in Japan is problematic especially when 
the very education system you are working in is a western colonised system 
whose educational values  appear to conflict with the deeper values of the 
culture. My standards of judgement that arrived with were woefully 
inadequate and inappropriate for the cultural context in which I found 
myself.

My living standards of judgement  in Jacks understanding emerged through 
the heuristic reflective process of researching and writing my thesis. 
Such emergence was not anticipated as I thought that any values would be 
educational ones related to my development, management and teaching of a 
new curriculum in nursing.. However in reality of the events in actual 
practice I faced challenges which I struggled with and engaged with in a 
mindful state of open enquiry. This enquiry soon painfully pointed out to 
me the filters I carried concerning the rightness of my whiteness. I never 
questioned the authority of my pedagogy and such questioning as it emerged 
was deeply painful for in a sense I realised that much of my western forms 
of knowing grounded in cognitive logic and rational facts could easily be 
seen to “emperors cloths syndrome” . This revelation showed me that I 
needed to look closely at “Judgements and values”.

The  need to reflect my own epistemological and ontological values was 
guided by my Buddhist beliefs and teachings which had deepened in Japan. 
New insights emerged as to the inappropriateness of certain values, ideas 
and concepts I held resulting in a dramatic ontological shift. So what is 
a living educational standard of judgement?

With my present understandings that have directly emerged from my research 
I hold the following living standards of judgement;

1.	I would never consciously do harm to another salient being by 
thought, word or deed.
2.	I would live my life as inclusionally as possible seeking to 
communicate my values to others while respecting our differences.
3.	Never to conform to the ideology and methodology of a “ Banking 
Educator”
4.	to serve people to the best of my ability in Buddhist service.
5.	To hold in loving enquiry the claimed knowledge and knowing of my 
self and others certain in the fact that I do not know and the boundaries 
to my knowledge is my ignorance.

I find the idea  of knowing that I do not know very empowering for I am 
freed from buying in to the passion for knowledge claims. If my judgements 
can remain flexible and fluid then they will empower me to be inclusional 
in my life and my work. If they become solid and concrete they solidify my 
boundaries and become dogma. Such a process is insidious and the road to 
dogma is deceptively easy. . I choose now to be immersed in the process of 
knowing with the eyes  and wonder of a child. Yet I still struggle with 
the word judgement, for Buddhist teachings tell us not to judge others as 
they are but mirrors of ourselves and our teachers. Perhaps discernment is 
a better word ? what do you think??

Love and respect to all
Je Kan