![]() ![]() Different dimensions of mindfulness, the value of contact with, and experience of nature, outdoor activities, and exercise are featured throughout the media and self-help publishing, as solutions to how we might increase physical, mental health and wellbeing. Following the Covid 19 pandemic and indeed even before that crisis, sense based, experiential aspects of living have been regularly advocated as therapeutic experiences for anxious and stressed ways of living and are seen as providing some kind of answer to how we might all lead more flourishing lives. The title of this special edition is especially timely. The necessity to reconfigure education in these terms will initially take us briefly to look at current social trends and inevitably draw us back to ideas concerning flourishing lives and communities, and views on the nature of education. In short, I argue for a humane, embodied and sense-enhanced life that strives for meaning, attachments and affiliations, with the suggestion that this way of seeing life could have profound implications for educational practice. In this paper, I wish to explore and argue for something that stands somewhat against this view. The dominance of a neo-liberal stress on performativity in education is currently powerful and persistent and there are many indications that this general orientation will continue to influence policy. The argument is that this way of seeing life could have implications for educational practice, the role of the teacher and could help to reconfigure how education is experienced by the young. The argument begins with developing the centrality of embodiment to aesthetic sensibility and goes on to suggest how collective understanding of this within a community could constitute a sense of performance and thus contribute to the educational aim of developing a full and flourishing life. Instead, I explore and argue for a conception of what constitutes a flourishing life that is embedded in a more pragmatist analysis of what education may be. The view I set out is in sharp contrast to any narrow assumption that education’s main task is the measurement of high performing individuals who will thus contribute to an economically viable society. In this paper, I set an aspect of what it is to live a flourishing life against the backdrop of neo liberal trends that continue to influence educational policy across the globe.
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