Awaken meaning!

Education has a role in awakening us from the meaning crisis

Early on in my interest in education I realised that the profound problems in education were systemic in nature.  Systemic problems arise when the boundary between ‘education’ and ‘not education’ is put in the wrong place.  A problem is inside the boundary and the solution is outside, for example, means that the problem has no solution and, if a problem has no solution, it becomes just the way things are.  Alternatively, a problem crosses the boundary and is thus undefinable, no problem.

The first step in a solution is to put the boundary in the right place, which for education is the limits of society itself, meaning, we cannot separate education from society.

This separation was justified in the past as religions provided the development of the deeper types of knowing (perspectival and participatory knowing) which are of existential importance, and schooling could provide propositional knowing.  Procedural knowing, spanned both domains.  Religions are no longer able or willing to provide these transformative ways of knowing and/or have lost their reach.

Without an integration of these four ways of knowing our lives are deprived of meaning, a phenomenon that John Vervaeke describes in depth in his superb 50-part video series: Awakening from the meaning crisis, which can be found here.

We cannot live meaningful lives without all types of knowing so we need to re-integrate what has been lost into education.

This can be done by educators awakening from their own meaning crisis.

In Why We Teach I suggest that about 5% of educators have done this, another 35% are on their way but a majority are still stuck in the old paradigm that education can be separated from society.

It can’t.

John Corrigan is an expert in helping individuals to bring their whole of mind to their daily life and increase their effectiveness and the effectiveness of those around them. This expertise scales from the individual to the team to the organisation. At the core of this work is the practice of encounter.  Earlier blogs can be found here.

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