Education: A Plea for a Humanistic Approach

Authors: Dr. Hyacinth Pink

Pages: 69-74

Abstract:

The study explains the concept of Humanistic Education and records the various philosophical premises of those who propound the importance of critical reflection in the cultivation of equity and social justice minded educators that should ‘light a fire’ and train the mind to think rather than just filling the mind of the students with mere information and facts. Humanists also believe that it is necessary to study the person as a whole, especially as an individual grows and develops over the lifespan. The study of the self, motivation, and goal-setting are also areas of special interest. The study also focuses on modern western education which is instrumental in ushering a techno-economic, materialistic dog eat dog cultural revolution in the world. Though modern educational culture claims ‘reason’ as its epistemological basis, from a functional point of view it is quite ‘irrational and ‘inhumane.’. So the cultural mission of education in the emerging twentieth first century is to build a postmodern, holistic, just, and humanistic culture. In building up such an alternative ‘world view ‘in our proposed culture design we need first of all to liquidate modernism; and then search for alternatives – a return to ancient Indian Schools of humanist thought which insists on both knowledge and wisdom for a holistic personality.