ERIC Number: ED496515
Record Type: Non-Journal
Publication Date: 1998-Jun-11
Pages: 21
Abstractor: Author
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Culture of "Fear": Toxification of Landscape-Mindscape as Meta-Context for Education in the 21st Century
Fisher, R. Michael
Online Submission, Paper presented at the Comparative and International Education Society, W. Regional Conference (Vancouver, BC, Canada, June 11-13, 1998)
The paper presents the view that opening up learning beyond school walls and age barriers, although a positive extension of human potential, has left the learners of this open learning to be exposed to the toxic meta-context of a "culture of 'fear'" with its attending violence/hurting that pervades the cultural landscape. Evidence is presented that challenges the current dominating W. psychological conception that "fear" is a "feeling/emotion" and therefore is located only within the individual mindscape (psyche). This apolitically theorized "fear" within mainstream psychology has led to a preoccupation with the hundreds of individuals' "fears" ("phobias") and virtually no research on the phenomenon of "fear" itself in a sociopolitical context. "Fear" is recently being articulated in academic and popular literature as a social and political context. The author calls for a deconstructruction and reconstruction of "education," "Love" and "fear" as core aspects to understanding a new ethical base for education and its practitioners in the future. (Contains 2 figures and 2 footnotes.)
Publication Type: Information Analyses; Reports - Evaluative; Speeches/Meeting Papers
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Language: English
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