Abstract
This chapter justifies the necessity of including the inner curriculum within a reconstructed ‘education’, discusses the ethical stance that such approach requires, and points to embodied perception, me, and I as three domains of the inner curriculum, which are elaborated in the subsequent chapters. The inner curriculum is the missing half of what is conventionally called the ‘curriculum’. It consists of all that we experience in here, which is not directly related to the disciplines and skills studied in educational institutions. This includes thoughts, sensation, and emotions to which we attend wherever we are and throughout our day. We can be ‘educated’ unwittingly by the inner curriculum or engage in it deliberately based on a meta-pedagogical turn in which we attend in here now.
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Notes
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As well as others that are not discussed in this book, such as the timeless.
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This does not mean that teaching practice is necessarily a technical, non-spontaneous endeavor. There are certainly distinctions between the ‘implemented curriculum’ and the ‘planned curriculum’. I am here referring more to the ‘curriculum’ as it appears in our statements about what is done in schools and higher education institutions.
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I owe this idea to Mick Goodrick (1987). This genius guitar Master describes this idea when discussing jazz improvisation – it’s not how many fancy chords one knows but rather how many utilizations one comes up with for one and the same chord.
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See for example Turkle’s (2012) analysis of technology’s role in this.
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This does not exclude the possibility of practices such as visualization that use the imaginative power of our minds to envision a different reality. There are nuances to this that I do not elaborate here.
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Such conceptions follow both East-Asian wisdom traditions such as the Vedantic Atman/Brahman as well as Schopenhauer’s (1966) depiction of this idea.
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Ergas, O. (2017). The Ethics of the Inner Curriculum . In: Reconstructing 'Education' through Mindful Attention. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58782-4_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58782-4_6
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