The New Significance of Learning Imagination's Heartwork [Hardcover]

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 societys 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 humanitys maturity, or are its purposes to be effectively matched to the functional requirements of a globalized age?

The New Significance of Learningexplores 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 humankinds learning efforts;
• the emergence of a distinctive ethical orientation for education as a practice in its own right.

PART ONE: EXPLORING EDUCATION AS A PRACTICE  1. The Harnessing of Learning  older and newer reins  2. A Postmodern Debility  3. The Integrity of EducatilÓ=