Education Support Services Thought of the Week Archives x x In his book The Stories We Live By, Dan McAdams explores the importance of personal myth (a personal narrative or story) in our lives. This personal narrative, I believe, is what gives us a sense of self. Our myth must remain transparent, permeable, and open […]
And teenagers who play violent video games employing virtual reality experience physiologically arousal (faster heartbeat, perspirtation, etc.) and more aggressive thoughts than control subjects not playing the games or observers simply watching the players.
Education Support Services Thought of the Week Archives December 1998 Rituals belong to what the ancient Greeks would have called techne, the root of our words technical, technique, and technology. Ritual is a sort of technology because it is a method (a time-honored one) for accomplishing something in the real world….The techne of ritual, however, […]
Jerome Bruner Acts of Meaning Comment: Applied to the classroom, we cannot interpret a student’s act as meaning something until we know the whole context of the action, and that context transcends our classroom. (R. Harris) July 8
Education Support Services Thought of the Week Archives January 2000 In his essay [“The Perennial Philosophy,” Aldous] Huxley describes four central claims of the perennial philosophy: the world and all its creatures are expressions of an underlying divine reality; by appropriate training humans can come to known this reality; and they can recognize their unity […]
Normal human consciousness always depends on contrasts…and tends to ignore what is constant even though it provides the necessary background for the perception of change. … If a pleasureable state is to be conscious, it cannot be constant, for there will be no contrasting ground against which to feel it. … Pleasure is thus…the configuration […]
Education Support Services Thought of the Week Archives April 1998 This is why modern civilization is in almost every respect a vicious circle. It is insatiably hungry because its way of life condemns it to perpetual frustration. … the root of this frustration is that we live for the future, and the future is an […]
Education Support Services Thought of the Week Archives May 1998 The hero’s journey is a pattern of completely-lived experience. It is a map that offers orientation in times of change. During crises or illness, this map can prepare us for the necessary descent into an inner world. It can help to recognize one’s own call, […]
…Both God and the devil are at an infinite and dissociated remove from human experience, and this reflects the structure of civilization. Conversely, among primitive peoples, all antinomies [Contradiction or opposition, especially between two laws or rules; a paradox] are bound into the ritual cycle. The sacred is an immediate aspect of man’s experience. […]
Education Support Services Thought of the Week Archives February 2002 I have tried to make the case that the function of literature as art is to open us to dilemmas, to the hypothetical, to the range of possible worlds that a text can refer to. I have used the term “to subjunctivize,” to render the […]
Harris Communications Thought of the Week Archives April 2000 One of the principal features of postmardenism is the lack of transcendent purpose of meaning. Goallessness and the postmodern deconstruction of authority go hand in hand: not only has postmodernism come about because a lot of people have lost faith in progress and are therefore running […]
Writing bridges the inner and outer worlds and connects the paths of action and reflection. We sit down, face the receptive blankness of a piece of paper or a computer screen, pull our thoughts together, and begin to write. Writing is sorting. Writing down the stream of consciousness gives us a way to respect the […]
Education Support Services Thought of the Week Archives June 2000 Teaching has two fundamental challenges now. It has to provide a based for knowledge, but it also has to provide connections. T. S. Eliot, in commenting on Dante’s Inferno, describes hell as someplace “where nothing connects with nothing.” The teaching profession has to provide connections […]
The Hero's Journey: A resource for educators, teachers, and students
(See quote of June 26) If one alienates certain facets of oneself, one will render the self-image fraudulent. The alienated facets (i.e., the now ‘unconscious’ shadow) will nevertheless remain but will be projected so as to appear to exist ‘outside’, in the environment or in others. Therapy consists in contacting the shadow and eventually re-owning […]