A book that’s at once both exciting because of the brilliance of its synthesis and vision, but also depressing because of how it clarifies the mental poverty of so much of current existence.
I’ve dropped almost everything else I’m reading in order to get through this before the 3 week return deadline.
The contrast between the educational philosophy of this book versus what conservative legislators (especially) are doing with education in the US is vast. (You could say this about any number of books or ideas, of course.)
It’s easy as pie to get large inarticulate numbers worked up about fantasy problems like woke and critical race theory and LGBT-themed library books, but it’s impossible to find an equivalent number with the power to push these postformal education ideas ahead.
Conventional, reactionary, conservative and authoritarian educational practices easily reproduce themselves since they’re mostly operating on low-effort duplication of current practice. Rote memorization, acquisition of sterile facts, suppression of dissent, etc., are hallmarks of this educational approach - static social reproduction.
Adopting postformal pedagogies on the other hand is in a paradoxical situation. It would seem to require significant numbers with postformal (or, using an equivalent term, postconventional) psychological and cognitive development to get it going on a mass scale, but this is hugely complicated by the fact that people functioning at postformal levels are generally lacking and might only come into existence if there were significant numbers of them to begin with in teaching positions, but if this were the case then the problem would probably be in some degree of resolution.
Examples of this paradox or dilemma are commonplace in other areas. For example, if you’re at a low or mid level in terms of your critical thinking ability, you will not be able to imagine what it’s like to have a high level ability. Thus, you don’t see your current function as necessarily problematic. Or, if you don’t understand statistics, you won’t grasp whether a given public poll is valid, relevant, significant, or otherwise.