This post was written by Matt Bazemore on November 15, 2006
An additional component that is included in the structure of the person is the deontologic component. This component refers to the fact that good, bad, right or wrong are assigned to at least some of the experiences that are continually incorporated into the structure of the person. I say “some� for the reason that I am not ready to claim that all experiences, beliefs, or desires have a moral quality assigned. If a moral quality has been assigned to at least some beliefs or experiences, then there is some integration of the moral faculty with the other faculties of the person.
For instance, let us say that a student hears an idea, B. Upon hearing it, the content of B is then incorporated into the Belief-Desire set. B may give rise to a positive, negative, or an indiscernible affect given the relations of B to the individual’s Belief-Desire structure at that time. Moral qualities are also assigned in this acquisition which could be expressed in the proposition, “This idea is good/bad.� I take this to be a plausible picture of the educational process in which a moral quality is assigned to an acquired idea. This occurs because every individual soul is an integrated whole (see part 1).
My larger point of why the Academic-Professional Model is deficient is hopefully made clear from this discussion. The A-P Model does not view the student as an integrated person. If lectures, assignments, and curricula are structured for the sole purpose of acquiring propositional knowledge, then that approach does not address the whole person. Class time becomes more of indoctrination than actual learning. Students passively take in what the teacher says with no reflection on how that information shapes them as a human being. In other words, there are larger things occurring in the individual in the educational process. This has implications for what kind of people universities are producing.
This also has implications for the task of integrating a Christian world view with one’s field. If the spiritual faculty is a faculty of the soul, and it is integrated with the mind along with the rest of the soul, then intellectual beliefs and religious beliefs can be integrated. This assumes that religious beliefs address the spiritual faculty of the person, and intellectual beliefs (those dealing with one’s academic field) address the mind of the person.
|
