Between present and future : on the temporality of educational goals
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Contemporary educational practice and policy are dominated by certain assumptions about how time, children's learning and their good are connected. These assumptions are rarely questioned, and it seems that we often lose any sense of how practice and policy could be grounded in different and better ones. Specifically, learning time is unreflectively assumed to be a limited resource, usually a scarce one, to be used as effectively and efficiently as possible by teachers in order to promote particular educational goals, and the realization of these goals - e.g., skills, knowledge, mental dispositions, moral attitudes - is assumed to take place only in the more or less remote future. Following these assumptions, children's present experience, their here-and-now, is treated as meaningful only in so far as it serves a future achievement. In other words, educational time tends to become almost exclusively a "time on-task" and the child is commonly viewed as a deficient version of the educated adult he is supposed to become. Ultimately, teaching and learning on these assumptions is liable to turn into a form of training, losing what is uniquely "educational" about them. Further, children and youth cease to be respected as persons in their own right: they become mere means to the pursuit of rigidly predetermined future-ends. My dissertation asks how can education be conducted so that the present of the child, his here-and-now, is given attention, thought meaningfully about, and ultimately respected while his future is not neglected or predetermined but viewed with genuine and open-ended hope. The dissertation is composed of four papers. The main concern of the first two papers is the possibility and challenge of educationally appreciating the present and in a way it is a critique or at least a call for a reexamination of goal setting in schools and elsewhere. I show that a focus on children's interests and on the ephemeral characteristic of education have the potential to free learning and teaching from reductive instrumentalism. The next two papers add to this critique, but from another perspective, that of hope for a favorable future. The main questions asked in these papers are -- how can we teach without letting our hope harm or disrespect the child? And how can we educate in a way that inspires hope without determining in advance the hoped-for future? Here, I draw on Gabriel Marcel's and Jonathan Lear's analysis of the phenomenon of hope. Ultimately, I hope to show that appreciation for the present is compatible with a hopeful future-orientation as long as the educator views this future as truly open. Then, education can become a genuine alternative to an exclusive instrumental training and socializing.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2018; ©2018 |
| Publication date | 2018; 2018 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Zipory, Oded |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Callan, Eamonn |
| Thesis advisor | Callan, Eamonn |
| Thesis advisor | Labaree, David F, 1947- |
| Thesis advisor | McDermott, Ray (Raymond Patrick), 1946- |
| Degree committee member | Labaree, David F, 1947- |
| Degree committee member | McDermott, Ray (Raymond Patrick), 1946- |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Graduate School of Education. |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Oded Zipory. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Graduate School of Education. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2018. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2018 by Oded Zipory
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license (CC BY).
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