Educational Practise and the ingerity of learning
Educational Practise and the ingerity of learning

Summary/Abstract: This four-part enquiry explores the integrity of learning, not in the sense of integrity as ‘honesty’. Its chief concern, rather, is with reclaiming the integrity, or ‘wholeness’ of education as a practice in its own right. The first section examines how this integrity, with its classical roots in the work of Socrates, became lost, or colonised, by the dominant powers in the history of Western civilisation. The second section investigates how some landmark investigations of Enlightenment, including the ‘modern’ efforts of Kant and the ‘postmodern’ efforts of Foucault, have sought to emancipate human understanding, and human learning, from different forms of such colonisation. The ongoing difficulties attending such efforts lead the enquiry to follow a different path in the third section. This reviews some central insights of recent philosophical research (e.g. hermeneutic philosophy) that are relevant to understanding the experience of human understanding itself; insights that yield conceptions of educational practice that are more revelatory than ideological, more conversational than partisan. The final section attempts to sketch key features of educational environments that are informed by such insights. Particularly significant in this connection are some virtues that actually constitute the integrity of learning, as they become embodied in educational practice as a form of critical dialogue.

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