Sharon Burgmayer, 2000 (modified 2001)

Two Forms of Education: A Table
November 1, 2004

"This world is an agreement we have all made." (Byron Katie)

"God is playing hide and seek, and made us to play with.
Who is doing the game right? The one that remembers or the one that forgets that she is God?" (Alan Watts)

 

Spiritual Education

Formal Education

conception of the self comes as a complete package is incomplete (therefore needing to be educated) and incompletable
control unable to and unnecessary to control the world illusory attempt to attain control over the world
our "natural" state joy suffering/loss/lack
our relation to the universe joined, fused separate, individual, autonomous
the ontological/epistomological state of the world is, but is not real (and so is not over-valued) is created in relationship w/ us;
illusion that it is real and valuable

In the Fall of 2004, Annabelle Wood enrolled in the first-year writing seminar which Anne Dalke was offering @ Bryn Mawr College, "Questions, Intuitions, Revisions: Telling and Re-Telling Stories About Ourselves in the World". In the center portion of the course, which focuses on tacit knowledge ("what we know that we don't know we know") they found themselves in a conversation about two forms of education, one focused on tacit knowing, the other on explicit instruction. They offer here a figure which arose in that conversation, as a contribution to a number of venues--to the course forum on tacit knowing, to the new site on Education and Techology (where web-work is one place where tacit knowing might be expressed), to the Science and Spirit site, which suggests that "exploratory seeking" can be practiced in both the religious and the intellectual realms; and, in particular, to the Writing Descartes forum, where their figure seems to schematize the relationship between "being and thinking," between "treeness and storytelling," between the unconscious and consciousness which that site so insistently works and re-works. Comments are warmly invited here.