יום חמישי, 25 בספטמבר 2014

Nietzsche and Anthropogogy

Nietzsche’s lifetime concern was education and culture.

He observed that the system had abandoned the humanist outlook in exchange for the scientific. Instead of significant learning, education was consequently vulgarized, its objective having become to form useful and profitable men, not harmoniously matured and developed personalities. Anthropogogy (human learning) is about creating unique identity for the learner.
Alert to everything regarding education, Nietzsche decided to denounce the “unnatural methods of education” and the tendencies that undermined it.
In Nietzsche’s thoughts, education and culture are inseparable. There can be no culture without an educational project, nor education without a culture to support it. 
Culture and education are synonyms of “selective training”, “the formation of the self”; for the existence of a culture, it is necessary that individuals learn determined rules (norms), that they acquire habits and that they begin to educate themselves against themselves, or better, against the education forced upon them. That is the main reason for the creation of the significant learning model.
Anthropogogy, as a significant learning model, was developed by Nir Golan, educational and leadership expert. The Anthropogogy model assumes that the distinction between children and adults is no longer relevant in the digital age and that each student should be treated as a 'whole' person irrespective of their age. This significant learning model provides tools for the teacher to assimilate the Anthropogogy approach in six steps, throughout which the teacher uses dialogue in order to guide the individuals to learn determined rules (norms), that they acquire habits and that they begin to educate themselves against themselves.
Details of the six stages of the Anthropogogy significant learning model:
1.    Action- carrying out an action for the first time in response to an internal or external need. The teacher identifies and reflects the need of the learner: leading him/her to do what they did not do previously.

2.    Behavior- conceptualization of the action: The learner repeats the action using clear quality and quantity measurements. The learner then describes the action, helping him/her to improve the repeated action and transfer it into standard behavior.
3.    Norm- in this step, the behavior is transformed into norm as an expected behavior. It is necessary that individuals learn determined rules (norms), that they acquire habits.   
4.    Value- defining the value in the behavior: The meaning of the behavior is defined to the learner as well as the benefits that may be gained from the norm to the learner and to his/her surroundings. The value then becomes the guiding principle to making future decisions connected to the behavior; helping decide when and how to use this behavior. These principles should guide him while he makes his decisions.

5.    Redefinition of my unique identity- self-identity redefined. The values are acknowledged by the learner and assist in redefining his/her unique identity. The learner knows how to describe their newly unique identity and explain what their unique contribution is to those around them. To make him build determined principles from which he can build on, both internally and externally. The learner formation of the self - that should be the finality of every culture.

6.    Teaching- Using the Anthropogogy model to teach the other. The learner uses his/her personal experience as a role model and teaches the other using his/her own unique identity. He/ She applies the Anthropogogy model to lead a new learner to significant learning.
In his lectures on The Future of our Educational Institutions, Nietzsche examines the entrails of the educational system of his time. He perceives that the State and businesspersons are primarily responsible for the impoverishment of culture. They block the slow maturation of the individual, the patient formation of the self - that should be the finality of every culture - demanding a rapid formation so as to have efficient employees and docile students at their service, youngsters that will learn how to earn money rapidly. But this is not all. When they demand a more profound education, allowing for in-depth specialization, they do so in order to make even more money. But this is not all. This indecorous haste leads students, at an age when they are not mature enough to ask themselves which profession they should pursue, to make bad choices. Instead of an individual learner who can teach the other. 
Education begins with habit and obedience, with discipline. To discipline the youngster linguistically does not mean to overburden him with historical knowledge about the language, but to make him build determined principles from which he can build on, both internally and externally. 
In today's reality, culture is changing rapidly, so education has to be a lifelong process: where the teacher helps the learner discover the unknown without repeating information about the known. It means to turn the student into the master of his identity and to give him the possibility to construct an artistic language, starting from the works that preceded him. This, according to Nietzsche, is the only way to revive education and culture.

Reference: Nietzsche and Education/ Rosa Maria Dias/ Universidade Estadual do Rio de Janeiro - Brazil

אין תגובות:

הוסף רשומת תגובה