I liked this from Parker Palmer's The Courage to Teach:
Knowing of any sort is relational, animated by a desire to come into deeper community with what we know. Why does a historian study the "dead" past? To reveal how much of it lives in us today. Why does a biologist study the "mute" world of nature? To allow us to hear its voice speaking of how entwined we are in life's ecology. Why does a literary scholar study the world of "fiction"? To show us that the facts can never be understood except in communion with the imagination.
Knowing is how we make community with the unavailable other, with realities that would elude us without the connective tissue of knowledge. Knowing is a human way to seek relationship and, in the process, to have encounters and exchanges that will inevitably alter us. At its deepest reaches, knowing is always communal.
Then there is this critique of "objective" approaches to knowing:
Modern knowledge has allowed us to manipulate the world but not to control its fate (to say nothing of our own), a fact that becomes more clear each day as the ecosystem dies and our human systems fail. Indeed, by disconnecting us from the world, objectivism has led us into actions so inharmonious with reality that catastrophe seems inevitable if we stay the course. Objectivism, far from telling the truth about how we know, is a myth meant to feed our fading fantasy of science, technology, power, and control.
If we dare to move through our fear, to practice knowing as a form of love, we might abandon our illusion of control and enter a partnership with the otherness of the world. By finding our place in the ecosystem of reality, we might see more clearly which actions are life-giving and which are not -- and in the process participate more fully in our own destinies, and the destiny of the world, than we do in our drive for control. This relational way of knowing -- in which love takes away fear and co-creation replaces control -- is a way of knowing that can help us reclaim the capacity for connectedness on which good teaching depends.
Comments