Philosophical Issues In Education
In John Willinsky's Learning to Divide the World, he asks us to analyze how
"five centuries of studying, classifying, and ordering humanity within an imperial context gave rise to peculiar and powerful ideas of race, culture, and nation that were, in effect, conceptual instruments that the West used both to divide up and to educate the world" (pp. 2-3).
Willinsky chooses to make sense of our divided world "beset by struggles of ethnic nationalism, hardening of racial lines, and staggering divides between wealth and poverty" (p. 1) and then to reiterate this idea on difference to young students. He shows us, that in order to progress self-consciously, a person must begin with the notion of freedom.
The first three chapters of the book examine the adventure in learning in regards to European imperialism, along with some of its effects both in Europe and other countries abroad. However, it is possible for us to say, for instance, that "the expansion of experience and conquest educate[d] the conqueror" (p. 55): the observant imperial self-display through the media of museums and expositions, public gardens and zoos, encyclopedias and travels which "educated the eye to divide the world according to the patterns of empire" and meanwhile informed and civilized the populations of the imperialist countries (p. 57). Willinsky has made it clear that, schools have not offered much help to students—even parents—in explaining why consequences are so dominant because of differences. He shows us that it is vitally important that schools and teachers teach their students to be aware of differences and to learn to appreciate their effects (p. 5). Still, in the process of developing this argument and claiming that "educators owe those they teach some account of what we have taught them about the world" (p. 16), Willinsky shows how difficult it is to avoid inappropriate references to an idealistic, even a historical, interpretation of education. ...
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