Develop to re-balance!

A gradual shift to deeper forms of knowing is taking place

Have you noticed that propositional knowing, the form of knowing that has been dominant in our schooling systems, is breaking down?

It is hard to know what propositions are true or false in current political, social and scientific discourse.  I wonder if this is a process of putting this form of knowing into its proper place.  For most of human history this was the least important form of knowing: procedural, perspectival and participatory knowing were far more important.  Everything you needed to know to live a good life was in the Bible or the Koran.  You didn’t need to know lots of facts.

If this is a re-balancing taking place, then our schools need to put more emphasis on these other forms of knowing. But these aren’t learned from books but from doing (procedural) and seeing others modelling (perspectival) and from deep engagement with someone who unconditionally accepts [loves] us (participatory).

These all come from a deeper engagement of adults.  We cannot model perspectival knowing unless we are fully engaged, expressing our awareness and emotional intelligence, showing how to respond in the best interests of others when we are challenged.

We certainly cannot deeply engage with others – unconditionally accept them – if we are not fully engaged ourselves.

We know 60% of adults in all walks of life are disengaged.  We can change this if we change it in schools.

And we can.  These are learnable skills - it is just that we are not encouraging their development when we could be.

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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