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CHAPTER 6: Philosophical Roots of Education believe that our personal understanding about the human condition and the personal choices we make are crucial. Education’s purpose is to awaken our consciousness about our freedom to choose and to create our own sense of self-awareness that contributes to our authenticity. At school, existentialists say, teachers and students should engage in discussion about their own lives and choices. Because we are all in the same existential predicament, we all should have opportunities for meaningful, not routinized, schooling. Teachers and students should have the opportunity to ask questions, engage in dialogue, and consider alternatives in all areas of life. An existentialist teacher would encourage students to philosophize, question, and participate in dialogues about the meaning of their hopes and fears; their desires; and living, loving, and dying. There are no correct or incorrect answers to these questions. They are personal and subjective, not measurable by standardized tests, nor reached by group consensus or by using the scientific method to solve problems. An existentialist curriculum consists of whatever leads to open-ended personal philosophizing. Particularly valuable are literature, biography, drama, and film that vividly portray individuals in the act of making choices in life, especially emotional and aesthetic ones. Students should read books, often autobiographies and novels, and discuss plays, movies, and television programs that vividly portray the human condition and the choice making it requires. Students should be free to create their own authentic modes of self-expression.23 They should be free to experiment creatively with music, art, poetry, drama, dance, film, and literature to dramatize their emotions, feelings, and insights. Educational technology that portrays personal choice and freedom has a role in an existentialist education. For example, students can design multimedia productions to express themselves. However, technologies that generate conformity in thinking and subject a person to group-controlled expression, such as when social media is misused, should be viewed as another kind of oppression that limits freedom. The question is— does social media lead to greater freedom of expression or more conformity?
6-5b Applications to Schools and Classrooms Teaching from an existentialist perspective is always difficult because curricula and standards are in place in schools before teachers and students walk through the doors on the first day of class. They are often imposed on teachers by external agencies. Further, existentialists warn that teachers cannot specify goals and objectives in advance because students should be free to choose their own educational purposes. They would oppose the standards movement, especially its emphasis on a common core curriculum for all students and standardized testing to measure academic success, as an impediment to personal choice and freedom. Rather than imposing external standards on students, the existentialist teacher seeks to stimulate an intense awareness in students of their ultimate responsibility for their own education and self-definition. To do this, the teacher encourages students to examine the institutions, forces, and conditions that limit freedom of choice. Further, existentialist teachers seek to create open classrooms to maximize freedom of choice. Within these open learning environments, instruction is self-directed rather than standardized.
6-5c An Existentialist School: Summerhill Although Summerhill defies neat philosophical classification, the philosophy of its founder Alexander Sutherland Neill (1883–1973) illustrates some aspects of existentialism. A British educator, Neill founded Summerhill School, where he encouraged For narrative and education, see Mike Haylor, Autoethnography, Self-Narrative, and Teacher Education (Boston: Sense Publishers, 2011).
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