Home Late News Justice City budget County budget  Archives Search About Contact
Tobacco files Environment Looper  Restaurants Medical Center Opinion Poll results Bob the GOB Guest book
The Ministry of Information of 
Cookeville and Putnam County, Tennessee
The Putnam Pit
[No bull]

Education

On Socially Responsible Education
By Scott H. Forbes, D.Phil.
Special to The Putnam Pit

[Editor’s Note: Dr. Forbes contributes writings on holistic education from time to time to these pages. He received his doctorate at University of Oxford. Dr. Forbes now serves as executive director and teacher at Holistic Education, Inc., of Portland, Oregon.]

The increasing interest in introducing more social responsibility into education reflects widespread concern with the declining authority of the traditional institutions that dealt with childhood socialization, such as organized religion and the family. In this context, many people turn to education to fill the vacuum. However, it is not clear what a “socially responsible education” might mean.


Dr. Scott H. Forbes

We probably all have some notion of what being “socially responsible” might be (e.g., being a good citizen, or acting for the wellbeing of others, etc.), and we can all come up with examples of “social irresponsibility,” but the relationship between “social responsibility” and education (and therefore the possibilities) is not at all clear. Many committed educators see the need to step into the breach left by these declining traditional sources of childhood socialization. They realize that schools are often the last best hope for many young people to learn many things which family, community and religions used to teach, even though schools were never designed to teach them (e.g., emotional development, conflict resolution, character development, and social responsibility). But how can an educator help a young person learn social responsibility without some clarity as to what this means?  More

Values in Holistic Education
Alternative schools are a whole new ball game
By SCOTT H. FORBES, Putnam Pit contributing education columnist
 

Should the state determine what children learn?
By GEOFF DAVIDIAN Putnam Pit editor
 

Brockwood Park School
Brockwood Park School was founded by Krishnamurti in 1969 for educators and students from around the world to pursue excellence in education and to explore the challenges that confront the world we live in. Students and educators inquire together into themselves and into the nature of humanity. Learning is pursued not only as knowledge in the academic disciplines but as a continuous process of understanding every aspect of living and the world. Such learning leads to a deepening of the human capacity and perhaps to an understanding of what Krishnamurti called right living, and the transformation of man.