Question:
I'm a Teacher / Principal with 30 years experience who wrote the manual for setting up Christian Community Schools across Australia. (Also an adult trainer / educator / manager ... with appropriate degrees and certification.)
Or is misc.education.home-school.christian merely a front for Trew Kristyun Witch Hunts, Crusades, Inquisitions, burnings at the stake, crucifixions, etc etc etc ?
Answer:
Critical reflection has been elevated to the major objective of adult education in the work of Mezirow (1990).
"Perhaps even more central to adult learning than elaborating established meaning schemes is the process of reflecting back on prior learning to determine whether what we have learned is justified under present circumstances. This is a crucial learning process egregiously ignored by learning theorists." (Mezirow, 1990:5)
He maintains that such reflection on assumptions and presuppositions (particularly about oneself) leads to "transformative learning"
"Perspective transformation is the process of becoming critically aware of how and why our presuppositions have come to constrain the way we perceive, understand, and feel about our world; of reformulating these assumptions to permit a more inclusive, discriminating, permeable and integrative perspective; and of making decisions or otherwise acting on these new understandings. More inclusive, discriminating permeable and integrative perspectives are superior perspectives that adults choose if they can because they are motivated to better understand the meaning of their experience." (Mezirow, 1990:14 - my emphasis)
In other words, the real significance of adult learning appears when learners begin to re-evaluate their lives and to re-make them. This, for Mezirow, takes precedence over whatever it was they set out to "learn" in the first place.
