The educational ideas of Walter Lippmann

Master of EducationWalter Lippmann was primarily not an educationalist but a political commentator and a writer of books on questions of political philosophy raised by the processes of American and international politics. His thought on education emerged from his deliberations and must be seen in their context. His writing career of over fifty years may be seen in terms of an evolving response to what he called "the acids of modernity". By this he meant the dissolution of the old traditional order, the rejection of the ideas of social and political hierarchy, the sacred authority of institutions, and out of this the development of more democratic, secular and human institutions and relationships. Prior to World War I he enthusiastically endorsed this process, but the experience of the War deeply affected his assumptions about the nature of man and ease with which society could be reshaped for the better. At first he attributed the malaise he saw to the inability of the people to gain access to the facts necessary for effective government. He moved on from this, in A Preface to Morals, to examine the basis for a morality which would enable the orderly functioning of a democratic society. During the 1930s he was mainly concerned with the economic issues of the New Deal, but in The Good Society he articulated what he saw to be the foundation stone of a democratic order - the rule of law based upon an appreciation of the essential dignity and inviolability of man. It seems clear from his writings that the fundamental issues which he raised were ontological in nature. However, because Lippmann was primarily concerned with sustaining the conditions of civility and freedom without returning to the belief systems which inspired them, he did not face the issue squarely. He developed a "civic theology" in The Public Philosophy having the show of truth necessary to sustain a political order rather than answers to the questions of the nature of truth and reality. The same evolution from optimistic progressivism to apprehensive conservatism is evident in Lippmann' s educational thought. Initially he argued that there were no fixed bodies of knowledge which should be passed on. Instead the curriculum should be shaped by the child's own needs and interests. But as he became pessimistic concerning the essential goodness of man and saw that the traditions of freedom and civility were being threatened, he trenchantly criticised the progressive movement for its failure to pass on the essential western culture through the assumptions, ideas, values and methods of the academic disciplines. Lippmann' s chief contribution was that he raised the central issues, but the value of his answers was weakened by his failure to face squarely the questions of the nature of reality and truth and how a free society could be based on that truth

The Pendulum Continuum

The Pendulum Continuum saw the return of rave to CarriageWorks, and to a time when the site was neglected and abandoned by the forces of post-industrial progress. This was a site-specific installation comprised largely of documentary film footage of a rave party, recorded on location in 1996 when the group Meat Beat Manifesto performed as part of the underground rave Carnival of the Mind. The rave dancers returned to CarriageWorks in their states of ecstatic reverie for one night, but this time around they danced not to the charged beats of MBM but to a composition by late Romantic composer ‪Jean Sibelius. The piece played with the mournful nature of Sibelius’ late Romantic composition as a driving rhythm (and force) for late twentieth century dance music culture, connecting different expressions of musical reverie as part of a continuum of progress and modernisation and with it, loss. This presented a playful meditation on the continued dialectical exchange between order and chaos in the city – between Dionysian pleasure and Apollonian order – where the ever-present searching for liminal, indeterminant spaces of pleasure and escape in turn carve out new sites for play and abandonment, adding ever more value to the gentrified spaces of post-industrial Sydney today. The team here were Sarah Barns (concept and creative direction, with archival footage sourced through her residency with ABC Pool), Micheal Killalea (creative direction) and Ian Plowman (sound and technical direction)

Whither religion in a world of compounding crises?

Though a significant minority across the world enjoy the gross material benefits of a prodigiously productive global economy, our planet is at the same time beset by escalating system-level crises. Deep economic inequality is intensifying both between and within national polities. Ecological degradation is calling into question the future of the earth as we know it, with disruptive climate change only the most prominent issue. Global (dis)order is stoking increased militarisation, including the possession of planet-destroy ing arsenals of nuclear weapons by a growing number of nation states and potentially by non-state actors. Democratic institutions and practices are being hollowed out from within, including from with - in supposedly mature liberal democracies. And there are crosscutting crises of existential meaning. In all of this, religion has an ambiguous place. Entrenched civil conflicts, fuelled by modern cleavages, are, for example, being fought in the name of deep ethnic and religious animosities. Religion, or to be more precise, one religious creed — Islam — is being used to name the reason for the militarisation of public security and border control. And in a world of fractured communities, interpersonal conflicts, ‘culture wars’ and crises of meaning, religion is treated as everything from part of the problem to the source of our salvation

Religion in a Secular Age?: The Struggle for Meaning in an Abstracted World

The world is in a mess. Democratic institutions and practices are being hollowed out from within, including from within supposedly mature liberal democracies. A series of cross-cutting crises challenge the bases of existential meaning. In all of this, religion has an ambiguous place. Entrenched civil conflicts, fuelled by modern cleavages, are, for example, being fought in the name of deep ethnic and religious animosities. Religion, or to be more precise, one religious creed — Islam — is being used to name the reason for the militarization of public security and border control. And in a world of fractured communities, inter-personal conflicts, culture wars, and crises of meaning, religion is treated as everything from part of the problem to the source of our salvation. Different people across the world — religious, spiritual, agnostic, secular, atheist, and otherwise — find themselves vacillating between hope and despair. In this context, Religion in a Secular Age? seeks to answer a series of pressing questions. What does it mean for the place of religion? Can the revival of religion be a positive and constructive force in relation to overcoming the morbid symptoms of late modernity? To these questions, the different writers of this volume have very different answers, even as they struggle in common with a world in crisis