Communicating meanings of the expression of life-affirming energy with values in educational relationships and in explanations of educational influences in learning.

Jack Whitehead, University of Bath, Department of Education.

29th October 2007

I have been professionally engaged in education since 1967, first as a science teacher in London Comprehensive Schools and then, since 1973 as a Lecturer in Education at the University of Bath, on an educational research programme into the nature of educational theory and in tutoring and supervising masters and doctoral degrees in education. The passion that has sustained me can be characterised by a flow of life-affirming energy with the values I recognise as giving meaning and purpose to my life.

I find my use of words on a page of text too limited to communicate my expression of meaning of this flow of energy with values. It isn't that I don't value the communicative power of my language in these words on this page of text. I do. But I also need to express my meanings in a visual narrative that can show the embodied nature of the flow of life-affirming energy with values that I experience as am writing and that I express in my educational relationships. Hence I prefer to start by using video-clips from my educational relationships to communicate my meanings and my explanations of educational influences in learning. Yet, I am also aware of the importance of 'framing' a text for a reader so that key ideas can be related to your present understandings. So, in my visual narrative I begin with video-clips that show something of my educational relationships. The narrative includes an explanation of why I attach such significance to the idea of educational influence and to the explanations of educational influences of individuals.

I have spent much of my professional life in education in seeking to bring the embodied knowledge of professional educators into the Academy as legitimate educational knowledge in the form of living educational theories. I have distinguished such living theories from other theories as the explanations that individuals produce for their educational influences in their own learning, in the learning of others and in the learning of social formations. I refer to the explanations as living theories because in my experience the individual's 'I' exists as a living contradiction in enquiries of the kind, 'how do I improve what I am doing?' The other living characteristics of the explanations are that the explanatory principles of educational influence are dynamic flows of energy with the values the individual uses to give meaning and purpose to their lives. The values are clarified in the course of their emergence in practice and formed into the values-laden standards of judgment that the individual uses to account to themselves and others for the life they are living. Here is my illustration of a process of generating a living educational theory from educational relationships. I see these relationships flowing with life-affirming energy with values in the video-clips below in part one of this presentation. I see them in the explanations of educational influences in learning in the visual narrative that includes my living educational theory in part two.

Part One

Communicating meanings of the expression of life-affirming energy with values in educational relationships.

In this first clip I am responding to Jacqueline Delong's Abstract to a draft of her doctorate thesis in the summer of 2001. I am explaining why I believe that it will need modifying in the final submission. My concern is that Jacqueline produces a doctoral thesis that adequately represents her embodied knowledge as a Superintendent of Schools in the Grand Erie District School Board in Canada where she is interested in generating a culture of inquiry to support teacher research for enhancing pupil learning. What I do in my educational relations can be explained with my desire to assist the other to generate their living educational theory of their educational influence in their own learning, in the learning of others and in the learning of social formations. While writing these words I have in mind my relationship with Jacqueline Delong in the two clips below of two supervision sessions in the same week in 2001. One is near the beginning of the week going through the Abstract she has brought. The second is towards the end of the week where she has worked on her Abstract.

In the first clip I am focusing my attention on what it might be for Jacqueline to get closer to representing the embodied knowledge expressed in her thesis in the Abstract.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4R1ilkWB9Dc

In watching the following clip, I experience the flow of life-affirming energy in the expression of humour between us as Jacqueline picks up on one of my responses in a telephone call I took in the supervision session where I complimented another student on his wisdom. Jacqueline is pointing out that I have yet to use 'wisdom' in relation to her own writings and this triggers the flow of life-affirming energy between us through the humour.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2kdOfRKFYs

On December 18^th 2002 Jacqueline graduated from the University of Bath and that evening Peter Mellett led a celebration in the Department of Education. The shared expression of life-affirming energy, through the humour towards the end of the clip, emphasises the significance of experiencing the flow of loving, life affirming energy with others.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxqRF2tVLB4

In recognising the importance of the influences of external relationships in the growth of my educational knowledge I am thinking particularly of cultural and historical influences. For instance, during my working life at the University of Bath I have experienced the disciplinary power of the University in such statements as your activities and writings are a challenge to the present and proper organisation of the University and not consistent with the duties the University wishes you to pursue in your teaching and research. An application in 2006 for promotion from a Lectureship to a Readership was rejected on the grounds that it was necessary for me to focus on producing articles, which can be disseminated via established and renowned international refereed journals. In 2004 the University of Bath changed its regulations to allow the submission of e-media in research degrees. I was on the working party that made this recommendation to Senate. It is my contention that even if the University of Bath as a leading research university had established an international multi-media educational research journal in 2004, it would not have had time to become an established and renowned international refereed journal by the time my application for a Readership was made in 2006.

Following the statement about my activities and writings being brought to the attention of Senate a working party on a matter of academic freedom was established to investigate whether my academic freedom had been breached. The report of the working party to Senate stated that my academic freedom had not been breached and said that this was because of my persistence in the face of pressure that might have constrained a less determined individual. The working party had invited me to comment on an earlier draft of their report for Senate that had concluded that my academic freedom had not been breached. In this draft there was no mention of the pressure I had been subjected to. In the clip below I re-enact my response to the working party. As I watch the clip I feel my legitimate anger against the pressure I had been subjected to. I feel the expression of the power of this injustice in the explanation of why the members of the working party should, as a matter of their responsibility as academics, acknowledge the pressure to which I had been subjected.

The exercise of power in socio-historical and socio-cultural relations in institutions can damage individuals and contribute to pathological responses. I have born witness to such damage when acting as a union friend to colleagues.

On appearing before the senate working party on the matter of academic freedom and hearing their conclusion as if there were no possibility of amending it, I felt defeated. It is a most unpleasant emotion and the sense of defeat was accompanied by a feeling of humiliation. As I was leaving the room, having responded to the working party, I felt this sudden desire to respond to this feeling of defeat and humiliation. I turned and addressed the working party. In watching the video-clip below of me re-enacting the response I feel the flow of my life affirming energy with a passion for academic freedom, justice and responsibility. This clip is important in emphasising that a living theory is very rarely a smooth story of self. An authentic living theory includes responses to pain, suffering, humiliation, fear, loneliness and anxiety.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBTLfyjkFh0

In supervising the generation of living educational theories I recognise that I focus on qualities of relationship that I distinguish as flowing with a loving, life affirming energy. In my supervision I also recognise my desire to fulfil the student's prayer of Maturana:

The Student's Prayer

'Don't impose on me what you know, I want to explore the unknown. And be the source of my own discoveries. Let the known be my liberation, not my slavery.

The world of your truth can be my limitation; Your wisdom my negation. Don't instruct me; let's walk together. Let my richness begin where yours ends.

Show me so that I can stand on your shoulders. Reveal yourself so that I can be something different.

You believe that every human being can love and create. I understand, then, your fear when I ask you to live according to your wisdom.

You will not come to know who I am by listening to yourself. Don't instruct me; let me be. Your failure is that I be identical to you'

(Umberto Maturana 1/07/07 http://www.school-survival.net/poetry/the_students_prayer.php)

I have included the following three clips to share my recognition of the expression of a loving, life affirming energy in educational and other relationships that communicate the expression of embodied values that give meaning and purpose to the individual's existence.

The first is of Moira Laidlaw in China, during her six years on VSO at Guyuan Teachers' College and Ningxia Teachers University. I had turned the camera off after videotaping the lesson. I then saw Moira move towards the door as the students left the room and turned the camera on again. As Moira responds to her students as they flow past her, and as she praises one of the students for her courage in contributing to the less, we both recognise a flow of loving, life-affirming energy being expressed by Moira towards her students.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1jEOhxDGno

This second clip is of Cheryl Black from 2000 when she was a teacher in the Grand Erie District School Board in Ontario. A student brushes some chalk off Cheryl's coat. Cheryl turns and in the moment of recognition there is a flow of life-affirming energy between them that evokes pleasure in me. It evokes the quality of recognition I seek to express in my own educational relationships and explanations of educational influence.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vT0_6UkAlxk

In this next clip Kate Kemp is describing, in the words from a novel she is reading, the quality of relationship to which she holds herself to account:

"He seemed a man who gazed on all he saw with approval and affection who began every interchange with deep and abiding regard for the person in front of him."

Once a week I work for an hour with a group of colleagues in Bath and North East Somerset Authority who are working on inclusion. I had asked the individuals if I could videotape them as they described what really mattered to them in their work. Here is Kate' response:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDcggqIb7J4

In this next clip I am responding to Yaakub Murray's request that I look with him at a text on Progressive Islam. I share with Yaakub a love for knowledge-creation and have supervised his doctoral research programme. What I particularly like about this clip is that it shows to me a communication in which I am seeking to live the values of the above student prayer. It shows us both attending to our understandings of a text. The clip also expresses at the end, through the humour, my life-affirming energy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ud-zPjvae8

I took the following clip in a Monday evening conversation at the University of Bath when Eden Charles is responding to Alan Rayner's anxiety about an interview he is about to give to an American Radio Show on Inclusionality. Eden is just completing his doctoral research programme on How Can I bring Ubuntu As A Living Standard Of Judgment Into The Academy? Moving Beyond Decolonisation Through Societal Reidentification And Guiltless Recognition. (Charles, 2007 see http://people.bath.ac.uk/edsajw/edenphd.shtml) and in this clip I see him expressing his Ubuntu way of being, enquiring and knowing. Through supporting Eden in my supervision of his research programme, and in publicising his ideas on societal reidentification and guiltless recognition as well as showing the flow of loving, life affirming energy in his relationships, I am seeking to contribute to enhancing the flow of values and understandings that carry hope for the future of humanity.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ap06AxMQbkg

Part Two

Communicating meanings of the expression of life-affirming energy with values in explanations of educational influences in learning.

In explaining my educational influence in my own learning I focus on my choice of values and understandings that I attach to the flow of life-affirming energy in my life and my educational relationships. In explaining my educational influence in my own learning I accept a direct responsibility for my choices and there claim to have educated myself. In explaining my educational influences in the learning of others I claim that whatever I do in the relationship is mediated by the creative capacities of other in their educational influence in their own learning. So, I can never claim to have directly educated the other, in the sense of a causally determined relationship. I can however claim to have had an educational influence in the learning of the other. My choice of focus on educational influence has been re-inforced by Said's analysis of Valery's point about their being nothing in the critical field that should be of greater philosophical interest than the notion of 'influence':

"As a poet indebted to and friendly with Mallarme, Valery was compelled to assess originality and derivation in a way that said something about a relationship between two poets that could not be reduced to a simple formula. As the actual circumstances were rich, so too had to be the attitude. Here is an example from the "Letter About Mallarme".

No word comes easier of oftener to the critic's pen than the word influence, and no vaguer notion can be found among all the vague notions that compose the phantom armory of aesthetics. Yet there is nothing in the critical field that should be of greater philosophical interest or prove more rewarding to analysis than the progressive modification of one mind by the work of another." (Said, 1997, p. 15)

In explaining my educational influence in my own learning I acknowledge the significance of a passion to extend my cognitive range and concern (Peters, 1966). In distinguishing the growth of my educational knowledge I look for evidence of this extension of cognitive range and concern, through my understanding and critical evaluation of the ideas of others.

I draw on the language and ideas of Biesta to distinguish what I mean by 'educational'. By this I mean that a living educational theory contains an explanation of one's educational influence in one's own learning. I mean this in the sense that it is an explanation of a unique, singular individual coming into the world as we take up our responsibility for ourselves and towards others:

"In the foregoing chapters I have presented a different way to understand and approach education, one that isn't based on a truth about the human being, one that doesn't claim to know what the humanity of the human being consists of, and one that doesn't think of education as the production of particular identities or subjectivities or the insertion of newcomers into an existing social order. Instead I have argued for an approach that focuses on the multifarious ways in which human beings as unique, singular individuals come into the world. I have argued that we come into the world as unique, singular beings through the ways in which we take up our responsibility for the otherness of the others, because it is in those situations that we speak with our own "voice" and not with the representative voice of the rational community. I have shown that the world in which we come into presence is a world of plurality and difference, because we can only come into the world if others, who are not like us, take up our beginnings in such a way that they can bring their beginnings into the world as well. I have therefore argued that the educational responsibility is not only a responsibility for the coming into the world of unique and singular beings; it is also a responsibility for the world as a world of plurality and difference. The creation of such a world, the creation of a worldly space, is not something that can be done in a straightforward manner. It rather entails a "double duty" for the creation of worldly spaces and for their undoing. Along these lines I have tried to articulate a way to understand education that itself responds to the challenges we are faced with today, including the disappearance of a language of education in the age of learning."   (Biesta 2006, pp. 117-118)

My reason for referring to video-clips of my way of being, enquiring and knowing in my educational relationships is to connect my 'showing' of what I am doing with my 'telling' of what I am doing in my explanation of my educational influence.

In explaining my educational influence in my own learning I include my engage and critical evaluation of the ideas of others. For example, the Appendices below, from a paper in the Ontario Action Researcher (Whitehead, 2006), show this inclusion. In Appendix 1, drawing quotations from the work of Barnett (2000), I show that I first select from a piece of work the ideas that interest me and gather them together. These are ideas that resonate with my own feelings and understandings of my socio-historical and socio-cultural context. They provide me with a language with which to articulate and develop the understandings implicit in my practice. In Appendix II, I show how I integrate the ideas of others into my own educational practice as I recommend the ideas of Winter (1989), Habermas (1976) and Polanyi (1958) in strengthening the social and personal validity of explanations of educational influences in learning, including my own. So, I explain my educational influence in my own learning and evaluate my own practice in relation to my educational influence in the learning of others, with the explanatory principles of life-affirming energy with values and understandings. Using the video-clips above I can be seen to be expressing my life-affirming energy with values and understandings in my educational relationships with others and in responding to what I am seeing as the expression of the life-affirming energy with values and understandings of others. As unique human beings we all have distinct living theories that we use to make sense of and explain our educational influences in the world. We all have our unique constellation of values and understandings that constitute our explanations of educational influence. In justifying to myself the living of a loving and productive life in education I see the generation of living educational theories and their communication to others as carrying hope for the future of humanity. This is my main justification for continuing to support their generation and communication.

Here are the two Appendices from the 2006 multi-media presentation from Ontario Action Researcher that show me gathering together ideas on my socio-cultural and socio-historical context and using ideas from others to strengthen the rigour and validity of explanations of educational influence:

Appendix 1

Ideas from Barnett (2000) on Supercomplexity

" The constellation of fragility

... there are four concepts that are key to understanding the post-modern university: uncertainty, unpredictability, challengeability and contestability. They have distinguishable features but they also have interlinking features. While a number of other concepts are associated with them in the constellation of fragility, it is these four that stand at its center.

Uncertainty is that state of being in the world in which one is aware that one's state of mind is itself open-ended. Uncertainty is that state of being in which one cannot be certain. Uncertainty is partly cognitive, but it is primarily experiential: it is an expression of one's mode of being in the world.

Unpredictability is that state of knowing in which one cannot predict with any security what is likely to happen at some future moment of time. It is a much more bounded concept that uncertainty. It has point in situations where one would wish to form expectations about the world. A state of unpredictability exists where one cannot tell what is going to happen. Science and technology, in their broadest senses, are sites where we seek predictability; but so, too, are our ordinary experiences as actors in the world.

Challengeability is that state of affairs in which our assumptions about the world are subject to counter-intuitive experiences. It is that state of affairs wherever we can be caught out. Suddenly, something takes our breath away; we have the stuffing knocked our of us. The assumptions on which we depended, but of which we were hardly aware, are - in the same moment - both revealed and found to be inadequate.

Contestability is that state of affairs in which a proposition or framework might be subjected to the counter-punch of a rival proposition or framework. It indicates a situation in which competing voices might wish to be heard and can be heard.

While there emphases vary, these four ideas all exhibit five features. Firstly, they contain both cognitive and experiential aspects. Secondly, they indicate the possibility of an undermining from the material world, from the world of human agency or from the world of ideas. Thirdly, they speak to an openness in our capacity to act in the world as well as to understand it. Fourthly, they could come into play in the presence of either collective understandings or those of individuals. And lastly, they have point in relation to understandings which could be highly systematized or which could be tacit assumptions, of which we are hardly aware. (p.65)

"Far from reducing the role of the university, the replacement of the constellation of knowledge by the constellation of fragility opens out to the university a new and more important role. Knowledge and control are not, thankfully, available (That belief partly led to Auschwitz). What is both necessary and possible - just - is an enlightened societal self-monitoring. The university can become a pivotal institution in this process of collective self-enlightenment. The constellation of fragility opens up the prospect of a reflexive reconstitution of society." (p.69)

".... In constructing an ethos for the late-modern university, we have to accept matters as they are: we have to acknowledge that we are faced with multiple uncertainties and that nothing has any solid basis to it. Let us continue to act together and to reason together; but do not pretend that, in the process, we have reached or will reach a position with any security of purity. Let us hold to our values, by all means. But let us not get carried away and attach any absolute quality to them. We all have to be self-ironists now." (p.123)

"In a supercomplex world, the key challenge is not one of knowledge but one of being. Accordingly, the main pedagogical task in a university setting is not that of the transmission of knowledge but of promoting forms of human being appropriate to conditions of supercomplexity. Teaching becomes the discomforting of minds and beings; but it becomes also the comforting of minds and beings. Students are embarked on a never-ending process of self-doubt and self-reflection, but also of determinate action, of living purposively with wry acceptance amid half-sensed precariousness...

Understood in this way, university teaching attains - for the first time - the promise of a higher education. Now, under conditions of supercomplexity, higher education is obliged both to produce a dislocation among its students and to enable them not just to tolerate this dislocation but to live effectively through it. The dislocation has now to embrace the three dimensions of being: knowing, self-identity and action. This is a complete education, in that it extends across the full dimensions of human being. But it is also a genuine higher education, in that it calls for the highest order of self-reflexiveness, a self-reflexiveness that understands that, at best, only a precarious stability is attainable. This is a self-reflexiveness that does not delude itself with the soft option of any grand narrative - of truth, justice, economic competitiveness, virtue, community and the like - but accepts, even if resignedly, that there is no security to be had.

What is on offer, then, and for the first time, is the realization of a fully educated human being in the sense that human being in a supercomplex world has to attain a self-monitoring and self-critical capacity and yet be able to live the resulting fragility of human being. Nothing like this has been needed before; and, as such, nothing like this has seriously been possible. The new conditions of supercomplexity make it possible for and, indeed, require higher education to live up to its rhetoric for the first time. Now, at last, a higher education can be realized. (pp.164-165)

Appendix 11

Enhancing the rigour and validity of our claims to know our educational influences in our own learning, in the learning of others and in the learning of social formations.

In enhancing the rigour of living theories I recommend the use of Richard Winter's (1989) six principles from Chapter Four of his Learning From Experience.

This is how I respond to the six principles in terms of enhancing the rigour of living theories

Reflexive Critique

In asking, researching and answering questions of the kind, 'How do I improve what I am doing?' I hold myself accountable to living my values as fully as I can. This accountability involves a reflexive critique that shows I am aware of normative pressures on my understandings of freedom, democracy, love, justice, respect, compassion, validity, rigour and what counts as knowledge. This is what I understand by engaging in a reflexive critique in action research. I hold myself accountable, in my claim to know my educational influences in learning to the values I hold and which I have related to the normative social order in which I live and work.

Dialectical Critique

I draw my understandings of dialectical critique from the work of Eduard Ilenkov (1978) where contradiction is the nucleus of dialects. Ilyenkov asks 'If an object exists as a living contradiction, what must the thought be that expresses it?' My dialectical critique begins with my experience of existing as a living contradiction when asking the question, 'how do I improve what I am doing?' In enhancing the rigour of my living theory through dialectical critique I express, define and communicate the ontological values I use to give meaning and purpose to my existence in the course of their emergence in my enquiry. The process of clarification and communication transforms the embodied ontological values into communicable epistemological standards of judgment that I use to evaluate the validity of my claims to know my educational influence.

Risk

I draw my understanding of risk from Erich Fromm's work in the Fear of Freedom where he says that if human beings can face the truth without panic they will realise that there is no purpose to life other than the purpose we give to our lives through our relationships and productive work. Fromm believes that we are faced with the choice of uniting with the world in the spontaneity of love and productive work or of seeking a kind of security that destroys our integrity and freedom. I see the rigour of a claim to know my educational influence as working with the risk and fragility of being at the edge of one's competence in projecting oneself into a future that is unpredictable, with the hope that one can look back on one's life with the feeling that it was worthwhile.

Plural Structure

In constructing a living theory of educational influence in learning I am aware of spiritual, aesthetic, ethical, political, economic, psychological, sociological, historical, psychotherapeutic, psychoanalytic and others influences in my learning. Each influence requires a different form of expression for its representation and communication. These different forms of expression help to strengthen the rigour of a living theory in terms of its plural structure.

Multiple Resource

In acknowledging the numerous influences in my own learning I need to draw on multiple resources from the work of others. I acknowledge the influences of these multiple resources in the creation of my living theory by showing how they influence my own learning and practice.

Theory Practice Transformation

In the construction of a living theory there is a necessary connection with practice in the sense that this is required in asking, researching and answering questions of the kind, 'how do I improve what I am doing?' Forming a living theory at a particular time can be seen in relation to a life of enquiry involving a continuous process of transformation. A living theory at any particular time, can be understood as a transition structure in a process of transformation. The rigour of research process in constructing living theories can be enhanced through a demonstration, within the living theory, that both practice and theory are being transformed in the process of enquiry.

To see an explanation of learning whose rigour has been enhanced through the use of these criteria I would recommend:

Peggy (Kok) Leong's M.Ed. Dissertation, Action Research: The Art of an Educational Inquirer Peggy graduated in 1991, University of Bath. Retrieved 12 October 2005 from http://www.bath.ac.uk/~edsajw/peggy.shtml

In enhancing the validity of living theories I recommend the use of Habermas' (1976) four criteria of social validity in reaching a shared understanding and the use of Polanyi's ideas on personal knowledge, affirmation and conviviality in enhancing the quality of the personal validity of our beliefs about the worthwhileness of our productive lives in education.

"I shall develop the thesis that anyone acting communicatively must, in performing any speech action, raise universal validity claims and suppose that they can be vindicated (or redeemed). Insofar as he wants to participate in a process of reaching understanding, he cannot avoid raising the following - and indeed precisely the following - validity claims. He claims to be:

1. Uttering something understandably;

2. Giving (the hearer) something to understand;

3. Making himself thereby understandable. And

4. Coming to an understanding with another person.

The speaker must choose a comprehensible expression so that speaker and hearer can understand one another. The speaker must have the intention of communicating a true proposition (or a propositional content, the existential presuppositions of which are satisfied) so that the hearer can share the knowledge of the speaker. The speaker must want to express his intentions truthfully so that the hearer can believe the utterance of the speaker (can trust him). Finally, the speaker must choose an utterance that is right so that the hearer can accept the utterance and speaker and hearer can agree with on another in the utterance with respect to a recognized normative background. Moreover, communicative action can continue undisturbed only as long as participants suppose that the validity claims they reciprocally raise are justified."(Habermas, 1976, pp.2-3)

Working with the following ideas from Michael Polanyi I strengthen the personal validity of my claims to knowledge by searching for truth, understanding the world from my point of view and stripping away the crippling mutilations of centuries of objectivist thought. My emphases in the quotations below serve to highlight Polanyi's (1958) influence in my personal knowledge.

"From Chapter 10 Commitment

Fundamental Beliefs.

I believe that in spite of the hazards involved, I am called upon to search for the truth and state my findings. This sentence, summarizing my fiduciary programme, conveys an ultimate belief which I find myself holding. Its assertion much therefore prove consistent with its content by practising what it authorizes. This is indeed true. For in uttering this sentence I both say that I must commit myself by thought and speech, and do so at the same time. Any enquiry into our ultimate beliefs can be consistent only if it presupposes its own conclusions. It must be intentionally circular. (p.299)

From Chapter 11 The Logic of Achievement

In the rest of this book I shall outline some views on the nature of living beings, including man, which clearly follow from the acceptance of my commitment to personal knowledge. Having decided that I must understand the world from my point of view, as a person claiming originality and exercising his personal judgement responsibly with universal intent , I must now develop a conceptual framework which both recognises the existence of the other such persons and envisages that fact that they have come into existence by evolution from primordial inanimate beginnings. (p. 327)

From Chapter 13. The Rise of Man

I have arrived at the opening of this last chapter without having suggested any definite theory concerning the nature of things; and I shall finish this chapter without having presented any such theory. This book tries to serve a different and in a sense perhaps more ambitious purpose. Its aim is to re-equip men with the faculties which centuries of critical thought have taught them to distrust. The reader has been invited to use these faculties and contemplate thus a picture of things restored to their fairly obvious nature. This is all the book was meant to do. For once men have been made to realize the crippling mutilations imposed by an objectivist framework - once the veil of ambiguities covering up these mutilations has been definitely dissolved - many fresh minds will turn to the task of reinterpreting the world as it is, and as it then once more will be seen to be. (p. 381)

References

Barnett, R. (2000) Realizing the University: in an age of supercomplexity. Buckingham; Open University Press.

Biesta, G. J. J. (2006) Beyond Learning; Democratic Education for a Human Future. Boulder; Paradigm Publishers.

Habermas, J. (1976) Communication and the evolution of society. London : Heinemann

Ilyenkov, E. (1977) Dialectical Logic. Moscow; Progress Publishers.

Polanyi, M. (1958) Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy . London ; Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Said, E. W. (1997) Beginnings: Intention and Method. p. 15. London ; Granta.

Whitehead, J. (2006) Living Inclusional Values In Educational Standards of Practice and Judgement, Ontario Action Researcher, Vol. 8.2.1. Retrieved 29 October 2007 from http://www.nipissingu.ca/oar/new_issue-V821E.htm

Winter, R. (1989) Learning From Experience. London : Falmer.