Analyze a Paradigm Shift
Your journal writing assignment for this week is to analyze a paradigm shift. You can either analyze one you choose or simply use higher education over the Internet as a current paradigm shift and analyze.
Paradigms are model or standard ways of doing things. Archetypes, like paradigms, are standard ways of seeing the world. If you look at a clock, chances are you will either see a sweep hand or a digital read out. The sweep hand is an analog archetype representing a world in continuous movement and change. The digital read out is a digital archetype representing a world of discrete units, either/ors, and on/offs. Thermostats are analogue; light switches are digital.
T. S. Eliot said, "The pre-logical mentality [paradigms, archetypes] persists in civilized man, but becomes available only to or through the poet [the creative thinker]." How does the world around you access your pre-logical mentality? When a poet (or advertiser) uses an image that frequently occurs in myth, religion, and folklore with the intent of awakening strong primitive emotions in the reader or viewer, is she trying to get at that pre-logical mentality.
Modern advertisers and large corporations (mass education) sell products through archetypes. Remember how angry the public was when Coca Cola (the Coca Cola and the bottle symbolizing the first, the best, and, when it falls out of the sky, " the drink" of the gods) produced another "classic" version of coke. The pre-logical emotions we formed between the ages of 8 and 16 were not to be trifled with. There is only one true coke, one true first date (with coke) one first kiss (and coke).
It is probably true that if any recognizable sensory experience occurs frequently enough to a pre-logical mentality, that sensory experience (whether Christ on the Cross, Lilacs in spring, thunderclaps, or watermelon) will engender a strong emotion. Poets, lyricists, and advertisers use these archetypal experiences to arouse your emotions.
Now, where is all this going. You are currently learning within an educational paradigm which is now shifting. The archetypal four-walled classroom is sharing educational space with the virtual classroom.
Spend some time in your journal and write about how you think Internet instruction is shifting the education paradigm. Note how the paradigm is shifting. Mass education that once took place in a classroom with four walls can now be done electronically, at a distance, within the comfort of your home or personal space. What are the costs and the benefits? I hope through this exercise you will better understand your learning paradigm.
Other current paradigm shifts:
Access to information (whether
fact or fiction).
Climate as Global.
Virtual reality.
Artificial Intelligence.
Why cultures collapse.
Learning (knowledge poured in (rote learning) or brought out (Plato's soul
movement/experience).
(5/6/05)
Rob C.