Digital Delights

The great educational philosopher Paul Hirst wrote a paper in 1973 entitled "Liberal Education and the Nature of Knowledge" (reprinted in Hirst, P (1974) "Knowledge and the Curriculum"). In this he writes that:

"to acquire knowledge is to become aware of experience as structured, organised and made meaningful in some quite specific way, and the varieties of human knowledge constitute the highly developed forms in which man has found this possible. To acquire knowledge is to learn to see, to experience the world in a way otherwise unknown, and thereby to come to have a mind in a fuller sense"

In rejecting various forms of mentalism and behaviourism, he asserts that

"to have a mind basically involves coming to have experience articulated by means of various conceptual schemata. It is only because man has over millenia objectified and progressively developed these that he has achieved the forms of human knowledge, and the possibility of the development of mind as we know it is open to us today"