OBJECTIVIST MODEL OF KNOWING

Abstract

According to Palmer, three fundamental aspects of education are: teaching, learning and knowing. He states that the leading approach of knowing in general education is deep-rooted in fear.  Fear disconnects teachers, students and subjects from one another.  The dominant mode of knowing practised is objectivism which conceives knowing and knowledge as a separation between the knower and the known.  On the contrary, Palmer states that knowing is relational which happens in a community. The origin of Knowledge is Love. Knowledge that originates in compassion and love is the knowledge in which both the knower and the known get to know themselves.  Palmer considers that human knowing is the unity of “mind and heart, hard data and soft intuition, individual insight and communal sifting and winnowing” (The Heart of Higher Education 22). According to Palmer, education needs to recover this kind of community practising knowledge for its vitality.

Keywords: Objectivist model of truth, knowing, reality, conventional pedagogy, community, communal, anti-communal, subjectivity, etc.