Description
Viva Books The Future Of Post Human Education by Peter Baofu
Is education really so valuable that, in this information age of ours, there are many who believe that, as Derek Book, Ex-President of Harvard University, once put it, "if you think education is expensive, try ignorance" This overvaluation of education in our information age can be contrasted with an opposing idea in the anti-establishment circle that, as Maya Angelou, author of the popular novel I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, once caught the attention when she wrote "that some people, unable to go to school, were more educated and more intelligent than college professors." (BQ 2010) Contrary to the two opposing sides of this debate on the nature of education (and other views as will be discussed in the book), the value of formal education (on one side of the controversy) and the importance of informal education (on the other side of the controversy) are neither possible nor desirable to the extent that their respective ideologues would like us to believe. But one should not erroneously treat this challenge to the contrastive versions of the conventional wisdom on the future of education (and other views as will be clear later) as a suggestion that education is an useless endeavor, or that some fields of study (related to education) like philosophy, psychology, sociology, or even culture studies are to be dismissed. Surely, neither of these extreme views is reasonable either. Instead, this book provides an alternative (better) way to understand the future of education, especially in the dialectic context of teaching and learning—while learning from different approaches in the literature but without favoring any one of them (nor integrating them, since they are not necessarily compatible with each other). Thus, this book offers a new theory to go beyond the existing approaches in the literature on education in a new original way. If successful, this seminal project is to fundamentally change the way that we think about education, from the combined perspectives of the mind, nature, society, and culture, with enormous implications for the human future and what I originally called its "post-human" fate. In this book Introduction—The Value of Education Teaching and Its Duplicity Learning and Its Ambivalence Conclusion—The Future of Education