… there is almost no line between social criticism and philosophy of education. There is almost no line between describing our fallen human condition and proposals for what we should do, almost no line between the satirizing of human folly and the search for true wisdom. The philosophy of culture describes the human predicament, for which the answer is ultimately theological. … this means that education in a postmodern world has to revert to story-telling, even telling stories that might be meta-narratives, in order to find our way out of the reduction of education that has resulted from the modern rationalism represented by Descartes. The human mind needs stories, even a big redemptive story, in order to be truly interested in or to find meaning in the information learned by rational or empirical means. Wow! What an alternative to the dehumanizing of education that easily makes school boring! And what an alternative to both modernity and postmodernity! Let me suggest we need a new adjective to describe the either very new or very old philosophy of life and education represented here.
… Humanity, under the perceptions instigated by Descartes, is merely a thinking entity that exists because it thinks, reducing our perceptions of our own humanity. With specific irony, Cartesian modernity and postmodernity did not free us from immaturity or from the clutches of tradition and authority. They cost us a dimension of our humanity, the ability to perceive both our own fallenness and our dignity. The new adjective I think we need for a better philosophy of life and education after modernity and after postmodernity is post-naïve.
Thomas K. Johnson, in: Jan Hábl, Teaching and Learning Through Story. VKW: Bonn, 2014.
