This is http://www.essayz.com/a9302261.htm Previous-Essay <== This-Essay ==> Following-Essay Click HERE on this line to find essays via Your-Key-Words. {Most frequent wordstarts of each essay will be put here.} ========================================================== %CRISIS DILEMMA TECHNOCRAT TRANSCEND ESCAPE HONEST 930226 Because all effective education involves people in relationships whose purpose is the promotion of personal change, all effective education is essentially a reflexive process. Students cannot be objective about their success or failure in education, because it is changes in themselves which are the purpose of the process. The teachers/professors cannot be objective about their success or failure in promoting changes in students, because it is their professional accomplishment and respectability which is at stake. The promotion of effective change in students is not possible if the students are being defensive within insecure contexts generated by teachers and professors who are insecure, defensive, and attempting to be in full control of the process. Thus effective education takes place only when teachers and professors are involved in personal relationships which make them vulnerable. Teachers and professors who are seeking to be invulnerable in the educational process cannot be effective in their work. All of the above is true regardless of the subject matter of the education, the skills to be learned, the attitudes and beliefs which need to change. All the above is most obviously true when the focus of education is overtly upon personal relationships and personal expressions of intimate reflexive perceptions. All of the above is less obviously true when the focus of education is apparently only upon objective relationships, processes and abstractions: but all of the above is still true even then. A failure to acknowledge this truth is central to the decades old "crisis" in science education. The decades old "crisis" in science education is an oxymoron. It is not a crisis because it is decades old. It is a rather dilemma rooted in the failure of leading scientists to recognize and honestly deal with the essentially reflexive aspects of all education. Scientists in their narrow specialization have been trained to exclude from consideration reflexive realities---because such realities are not objective, and do not fall within the range of the objective paradigm of scientists who are narrowly specialized. The "crisis in science education" cannot be transcended until many scientists become willing to deal openly and honestly with the essentially reflexive aspects of all education, and acknowledge that no collection of techniques, technologies and systematic procedures can resolve the "crisis in science education". The "crisis in science education" is not a technical problem, and there is no technical solution to the "crisis". The "crisis in science education" is a dilemma waiting for many scientists who are willing to participate in a process of paradigm transcendence which they are likely to find will be confusing, disorienting, threatening, frustrating, and even painful. The process of paradigm transcendence cannot be carried out in keeping with their familiar objective/quantitative paradigm. Yet, a continuing failure to go through the valley of the shadow of the death of the old paradigm will lead them and their followers into the terrible pits of both personal and communal disintegration. (c) 2005 by Paul A. Smith in (On Being Yourself, Whole and Healthy) ==========================================================