13 June 2007

Practical Philosophy: An illusion of contradiction

My passion is to create a practical philosophy of education.

Of course, the phrase “practical philosophy” is usually considered a contradiction, but that is like saying that the phrase "house design" is a contradiction because a house is a real object but a design is merely an idea.

The connection between a design idea for a house and a real house is the blueprints that were used to guide the work of construction.

A blueprint is just a map of what will be instead of what is, kind of a map to a desired future.

Most people think about education as if it's just the delivery of knowledge, skills and information without any thought to how all that data relates to anything else.

That’s like thinking of a house as a pile of boards, nails and other building materials.

Education is really a process of cognitive cartography, a process of developing internal maps of all the knowledge, skills and information that we acquire as we live.

The problem in education is the fact that we have a huge on-going building project without an effective blueprint to help us put it all together the way we really want it to be.

My philosophy of education helps students learn to create maps of reality and then join in the project of building a world that works for all.

Follow-up Posts:
Mapping Reality

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