A "Doctrine of Mystery" as a Philosophy of Education

• In Event: 25.086 - Sheraton Roundtable Session One - Grand Centre
  In Roundtable Session: 25.086-8 - Mystery, Knowledge, and Education

Abstract

Teacher Education and K-12 Education are generally modeled on technical-rational and social-efficiency models of education. This is questioned by exploring a philosophy of education founded upon a 'doctrine of mystery.' Such a "doctrine", on the one hand, ameliorates the hubris of absolutist and humanist accounts of reality in a way that recognizes the truth in the thesis of 'the human-world', and on the other hand offers up an 'undiscursable, mysterious reality'. The implications for education theory and applications to teaching, learning, curriculum, and milieu are explored. A philosophy of education founded on a 'doctrine of mystery' supports a metaphysics of 'presence' and 'absence,' an epistemology inclusive of a knowledge-mystery dynamic, and an axiology that is provisional and contingent.

Authors

• Douglas David Karrow, Brock University

• Sharon Harvey, Arizona State University