Faculty Scholarly Dissemination Grants
The Necessity of Transformative Education
Department
Philosophy Department
College
College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Date Range
2013-2014
Disciplines
Social and Behavioral Sciences
Abstract
The deepest problem with modernization in the West is that it came so much under the thrall of mechanism that it abandoned any effective concern with cultivation of the human being. Matters of arts, culture, and the humanities became increasingly commodified as decoration or instrumentalized as signals of social status. That most basic understanding of traditional education and culture that the mature human life form requires an intervention into the natural process and a transformative practice was forgotten. The necessity, in the words of the great educational visionary, John Henry Newman, of doing some things as an end in itselfwas abandoned, and as a consequence the West suffered what C. P. Snow called culture lag, the condition Martin Luther King spoke of as one of having guided missiles but misguided men [sic].China could avoid this fate through awareness of the costs of Western modernization and drawing on the rich sources of its tradition for the cultivation of the mature human being.
Conference Name
8th International Forum on Ecological Civilization
Conference Location
Claremont, CA
ScholarWorks Citation
Rowe, Stephen, "The Necessity of Transformative Education" (2014). Faculty Scholarly Dissemination Grants. 775.
https://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/fsdg/775
