1st Global Conference
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Friday 10th September - Sunday 12th September 2004
Mansfield College, Oxford
Conference Programme, Abstracts & Papers
Session
4: Alternative Approaches
Chair: Paul Thomson
A Decade of
European Thought
Goedele De
Swaef
Coördinator European TAXI Project of Socrates
Comenius (and 100-journal),
Filosoferen met kinderen, jongeren en volwassenen,
Pedagogische Begeleidingsdienst Gent, Belgium
It is known that many
educational centres offer experiences in school journalism. Making
public their own ideas, work and projects is always a stimulus for
classes that, converted into research communities, are capable of creating
products – texts, prints, pictures, three-dimensional
objects or Internet programs – that manage to surprise even their
own authors.
As in the best of craft workshops, a certain dynamic of
collective work makes resources more and more sophisticated, to the
extent that revealing the results obtained also forms a part of the
creative process itself.
School newspapers are often the way of expressing
that desire to organise, collect and publicise the work done. The Journal
100, however, is not just, or even fundamentally, a school newspaper
in the classic sense.
It was born plural and multilingual. And it was
born empty. It was born as a possibility of communication, among teachers
who were convinced that the educational relationship that they established
with their students was a social act of general interest.
I am aware
that, put that way, it may seem quite strange or even slightly pedantic.
Perhaps it would be worth the trouble to examine this consideration
for a moment.
The Journal 100 did not respond to a need to publish
finished works, but was conceived as a mechanism to publish the dialogues
in primary school philosophy classes in six different European countries.
In other words the contents of this newspaper were not known beforehand.
What was in fact not just known but profoundly shared by the group
that promoted its creation was the idea of the potential of philosophical
dialogue as an educational instrument.
Giving a voice to primary school
students was something all of them had in common. They had been doing
that for years in their classes, and this daily experience was a more
than sufficient argument for the need for a communications organ that
would make it possible to share those conversations.
The action of
enlarging the research community that every primary school philosophy
class involves was seen as an end in itself. Good dialogues would be
an example of the force that thought acquires as a guide for knowledge
and action. Irrelevant or poorly directed dialogues would be the counter-examples
necessary to reinforce thinking skills that had not been properly employed
in them.
The Journal 100 should be a place where boys and girls can
talk and talk to one another. A space for interchange. A moment for
reading that is interested and curious. A space and a moment as well
to collect those ideas that, though brilliant at the moment, would
have been lost in the clamour of the everyday life of the school without
leaving a trace. That is why 100 was born empty. Free of all outside
restriction, it has continued to make its own way sustained by the
desire of loads of boys and girls who have discovered the pleasure
of thinking in the same way that, as they grow, they broaden their
selection of games and interests.
The communication established with
them by the educators responsible for the newspaper has a genuinely
solid base: on the one hand the philosophy classes in which the students
themselves are both script and text; on the other, the school editorial
boards that oblige them to develop a critical eye with regard to their
own activity as thinkers.
Up to now the Journal 100 has only had to
face budget difficulties. It has never lacked for contributors or readers.
Quite the contrary, it must always select too much. Fortunately, this
highly unconventional concept gained the support of the European Community’s
Socrates Comenius Programme Action 1, designed to support projects
for cooperation between primary and secondary schools of different
European countries.
However, the centres can only receive economic
aid during a limited period of time. That is why, though the newspaper
continues to enjoy a tremendous vitality after six years of activity,
some schools have not been able to continue actively participating
in it.
A sign of this vitality is, nonetheless, the fact that a new
project, a natural result of the newspaper 100 is now underway. It
is going to be called Taxi. As in the case of 100, the identifying
name of this new initiative has to be common not only to the range
of languages present in the group promoting the idea, but, in view
of our experience, should have a point of reference that is universal.
A taxi is a vehicle that permits us to go from one place to another.
A taxi is a public service that we use privately when we need to. The
taxi passenger chooses the destination, can share the taxi, take his
or her own luggage and that of others, can get out the moment he or
she decides and can suggest the route to take. Taking a taxi is an
option when one is in a foreign land where the language is more a cause
of confusion than a source of understanding. A journey in a taxi is
a journey whose comfort resides in a confidence in what the other person
knows. For these reasons among others, Taxi turned out to be a good
logo. At the start of the trip the Freinet school “De Harp” of
Gant, Belgium, which is coordinating the project, the schools “Talentum
Iszkola” and “Jazmin” of Tata, Hungary, the Cooperativa “A
Torre” of Lisbon, Portugal, and “Escoles de l’Ateneu
Igualadi” of Igualada, Spain, are climbing aboard Taxi. All of
them have included the philosophy for children project in their school
curriculum for many years and three of them were in the group that
founded 100. Up to this point, their similarities. Sufficient to hold
common goals and a clear, flexible method of work.
However, Taxi is
going to emphasise their differences. Each school has developed its
own style and centred its interest in particular thematic areas: “Escoles
de l’Ateneu Igualadi” uses
art to provide the youngest students with an access to philosophy,
while the “A Torre” has its strong point in the study of
mythology and music, and “De Harp” has developed as a priority
the Socratic dialogue in a way that is very close to the analysis of
values in education carried on at “Talentum Iszkola” and “Jazmin”.
Thus an initial objective will be to bring together the experience
of each school and, once a consensus is reached, the most useful format,
a virtual library will be started where a list will be made of all
the activities, references and materials that prove to be relevant
to the general interests of the group. This library in website format
will be open to everyone interested in the programme of philosophy
for children. In parallel, each centre will be including the new initiatives
that emerge from this concerted action in their school curriculum.
Taxi is thus taking shape as a new European project that will provide
specific school initiatives with an extremely sensitive and attentive
area of impact. A stimulus and challenge at the same time for a European
school system that has begun to grow beyond the administrative limits
provided for, but filled with that imagination with which primary school
students colour everything they touch.
Escape Education
Sergey
Stepanischev
Ukraine, Russia
No abstract is presently available
The Unenlightened Enlightenment
Hina Anwar Ali
6 H.B.F.C. Bock A Faisal Town, Lahore, Pakistan
Education would be much more effective if its purpose
was to ensure that by the time students leave school every boy and
girl should know how much they do not know, and be imbued with a lifelong
desire to know it.
The paper aims to critically analyze the modern
public education mythic practiced both in the east & the western
learning institutes. What academic institutes desperately need is freedom
of choice on education. If there can be freedom of choice on abortion,
why not freedom of choice on education for those fortunate enough to
have been born?
The answer is that powerful unions & the education
lobby are interested in controlling the minds, hearts & bodies
of children. It is the only way they can be sure of rearing substantial
numbers of liberals to replace themselves.
Because we are three-dimensional
beings, each dimension---body, mind, & soul---must
be fulfilled or we sense we are incomplete. The denial of spiritual
values since the sixties has produced a new yearning & longing
for meaning by many of those at the front lines of that denial
For
example, television producer Norman Lear wrote a column for the Washington
Post that called for a “spiritual renewal”.
Said Lear, “We need to make room in the culture for a public
discussion for our common spiritual life in this desolate modern age.
We need to discover together what is truly sacred.”
The argument
is build around “character building” as
a cross cutting need to harmonize the discrepancies & undue influence
of our past. Above all believing in the intrinsic inner power to enlighten & change
our lives & those closer to us. We can be an influence for evil,
or an influence for good. The philosophical perspectives of good & evil
shall be deliberated & ‘moral values’, their consideration & revolutionizing,
be mediated.