Did Einstein have a better idea of what's good for our kids than fundamentalist scientists, or the wretched Brown government?

Title and source: Muybridge race-horse - WikiPedia

-0-

Science and scientific method (as part of the SunWALK model)

OUT THERE:

The sciences, and their corresponding 'scientific method', is one of the three great groupings of culture and academia; the three being the Humanities, the Arts and the Sciences.

Each of the three has its own methods.  

Each is valid - within its sphere.

Each presents a different form of knowing and truth-telling and of engaging with reality.

IN HERE:

Our consciousness and ways of expressing ourselves, and of engaging with reality, develops in response to these three.   The shaping is called socialization and starts in babyhood.

Science and its methods is concerned with objective truth-telling

We learn to identify, count and group and classify.   These roots of the scientific process are then nurtured at school into command of Biology, Physics etc. - if we are lucky.

In order to provide a basis for developing education I developed the SunWALK model in which science and its methods is termed Criticality the IT voice of objective engagement, so termed by Ken Wilber.  Science isn't the only activity in Criticality.  There are others including philosophy, and critical studies.  They all objectify.

The IT voice necessarily makes of things 'objects'.  At the good end of objectification there is the genome project, and at the bad end is the Nazi de-humanization of Jews, Gypsies and the handicapped.

The other two voices are Creativity, the subjective 'I' voice of the Arts, and Caring, the moral 'WE' voice of the Humanities.

These three Cs are the only ways in which we express ourselves.  Physical expression is the servant of, and dependent on, all three Cs.  The 3Cs and the physical self together = the human spirit, the life-force.

GETTING OUR Cs IN A TWIST

The truth-telling of Science is demonstrable by repeatable experiment.

Art and the Humanities (including religion) on the other hand isn't.  When it appears to be what's being studied isn't from art or the moral realm, it's something else.  Criticism of art isn't art it's Criticality

Art is necessarily subjective - though judgements about it might be agreed by many.

But judgements are not art they belong to Criticality, based on beliefs and values in the Humanities.

And science can be perverted by it's inappropriate application - this we call scientism.

Science can be deified, when its deemed to be the only worthy, legitimate way of engaging with reality.  

Science can have its own funamentalists - those who deny the reality of the arts and Humanities, including heart-knowing and mystical and artistic experience.

SOME SCIENTISTS ARE NOT BLINKERED OR FUNDAMENTALIST

Why did Einstein place imagination above scientific method and mystery above both?  

My answer is that he saw that humans were much more than glorified bean-counters and that reality was much more than the truth-telling that science can provide - vital and enormously beneficial though it is.

IS THERE ANY HOPE FOR THE EDUCATION WE PROVIDE FOR OUR CHILDREN?

We, and the education we provide our children, need to be a balance of Caring, Creativity and Criticality - all experienced of course in the Community/ies that hold the repositories of the Humanities, the Arts and the Sciences - and their methods.

This simply means base developing education on being human.  It's risky - peace might break out, the few might lose their right to screw the many, famine might disappear.

To read more about the SunWALK model go HERE

Version as at 1st July 2009

-----0-----

Posted via web from sunwalking's posterous