Perspective and worldview

Posted by admin on May 28, 2012

Following the many wonderful perspectives and dialogues in our cohort regarding the role of nature as or in curriculum, it got me thinking further…

The concept, the question is not a new question in education – and the “answers” or perspectives put forward within our learning community have a range consistent with the diversity of previous writers and theorists. So it struck me – why would a topic such as this drive such polyphony of response and interpretation?

Perspective and worldview.

In order to make sense of something as potentially all-encompassing as ‘nature’, we must draw from our personal understanding of ‘place’ within nature’s spectrum. Does how we view nature depend on how we view ourselves, the world, the universe, and perhaps even the genesis of life? I like what Pascal – arguably one of the earth’s most renowned scientific minds – wrote on this subject:

For after all what is man in nature? A nothing in relation to infinity, all in relation to nothing, a central point between nothing and all and infinitely far from understanding either. The ends of things and their beginnings are impregnably concealed from him in an impenetrable secret. He is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness out of which he was drawn and the infinite in which he is engulfed.

~Blaise Pascal,Pensées #72

So I am left to ponder – do we situate our understanding from a position of human-centered egoism or universal insignificance, or some blend in between those spaces?