The New Significance of Learning: Imagination's Heartwork - Hardcover

Hogan, Pádraig

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0415549671 ISBN 13: 9780415549677

Publisher: Routledge, 2009

Synopsis

Should education be understood mainly as a practice in its own right, or is it essentially a subordinate affair to be shaped and controlled by a society’s powers-that-be?

What difference does it make if students are chiefly viewed as recipients of a set of skills and knowledge, or as active participants in their own learning?

Does education have a responsibility in cultivating humanity’s maturity, or are its purposes to be effectively matched to the functional requirements of a globalized age?

The New Significance of Learning explores these and other high-stakes questions. It challenges hierarchical and custodial conceptions of education that have been inherited as the ‘natural order’ of things. It discloses a more original and imaginative understanding of educational practice, illustrating this understanding with frequent practical examples.

Among the merits highlighted by this approach are:

• a recognition that education is first and foremost an invitation to join a renewed experience of quest and disclosure;
• a realisation that taking up and pursuing such an invitation is a basic right, as distinct from a privilege to be bestowed or withheld;
• an awareness of the decisive importance of specific kinds relationships in practices of teaching and learning;
• an emphasis on the human qualities as well as the intellectual achievements nourished by dedicated communities of learning;
• an acknowledgement of partiality – of incompleteness and bias – in even the best of humankind’s learning efforts;
• the emergence of a distinctive ethical orientation for education as a practice in its own right.

About this title

About the Author

Pádraig Hogan is Senior Lecturer in Education at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth and Assistant Editor of the Journal of Philosophy of Education.

Edition details

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0415549671
• ISBN 13: 9780415549677
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208