Lilipoh ~ the spirit in life
Spring 2009: Redefining Education - Issue #55, Vol. 14
What Is the Purpose of School?
Douglas Gerwin and David Mitchell
Before we can address the forms of assessment appropriate to each phase of childhood, it is important to identify and set aside three widely held yet misleading assumptions given as reasons for going to school. The first is that one chief purpose of school is to instruct students. On this view, the teachers’ task is to convey what they know to their unknowing students, then confirm the efficacy of this transaction by testing the students’ ability to remember––or at least recognize––what they have received. Often the instruction takes place by textbook or other medium. Students receive their lessons primarily through what they hear and what they see. Other modes of learning are secondary and often neglected, such as working with the hands, demonstrating through gymnastics, and practicing elocution.
But teaching is not just the transfer of knowledge but also drawing out students’ nascent capacities. Herein lies the fundamental difference between in-struction, which in its etymological origins means to pour stones (Latin structus) into an empty vessel, and e-ducation, which in its origins means to lead or draw (Latin ducere) forth or out (Latin e-). When they instruct, teachers insert what they know into the empty vessel of the student who knows not. By contrast, when they educate, teachers draw forth from a student what he or she in some sense already knows, whether implicitly or explicitly. The difference between storing content and developing capacities is simple enough: in the one, you receive something from without; in the other, you generate something from within.
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LILIPOH Editor Walter Alexander Interviews Rollin McCraty, PhD, Research Director of the Institute of HeartMath
The Institute of HeartMath, founded in 1991 by Doc Childre, has conducted groundbreaking research on heart/brain communication and the power of coherence, a highly efficient psychological state where all the systems of the body work together in harmony. Out of that research have come scientifically validated stress relief products and services. After conducting the interview below, I asked for a review sample of one of the HeartMath stress monitoring devices. I was given a choice: either the hand-held emWave Portable Stress Reliever or the emWave Stress Relief System. I opted for the latter because of its PC full-screen readout. Not only does the software provide a real-time display of heart rate monitoring, it produces moving bar graphs of coherence, broken into low, medium and high coherence levels.
At home, I loaded the software and hooked up the USB finger cuff and tried it out. What was initially shocking was that although with relative ease and modest concentration I could get myself calm with a heart rate in the upper 50s (bpm), the bar charts showed my “coherence” levels to be in the basement 100% of the time. Only during listening to some “serious” music did I see the middle coherence bar move up, and then working intensively with some meditative verses I graduated to a few stretches with more than 50% of the time in the middle and high coherence realms. I was still at the lowest challenge level.
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Special Issue
Living with Cancer: Perspectives in the Pursuit of Health
CANCER: A POSSIBLE PATH THROUGH FOUR DOMAINS OF FREEDOM
By Gerald Karnow, M.D.
How dare you talk about something you have not experienced as a reality in your life?
I can well imagine being asked such a question, so will begin by saying that, as a physician, I encounter varied forms of cancer and varied approaches to the disease through my contact with many in whom cancer is a physical reality. I stress the word “physical” because cancer is generally considered a bodily, physical affliction. However, a little deeper look reveals that any physical manifestation of cancer is preceded and accompanied by pre-conditions, pre-cancerous states, which occur not just on a tissue level, but on a physiological level, a psychological level, and even on a spiritual level. Thoughtful physicians come to know cancer not merely as identical with the tumor, but as an illness of the entire human being. With this understanding we can explore how each dimension of the human being – body, life, psyche and spirit – is integral to the arising, the development, and the healing (or non-healing) of the illness. If we address only one dimension of the whole, we will not be facing reality.
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