Education and Wonder: What calls for learning?

"It is through wonder that men now begin and originally began to philosophize" Aristotle

In our times, education continues to be justified by a myriad of extrinsic aims and purposes. Goals such as economic prosperity, good citizenship, sustainable development, and let us not forget, health and well-being, all vie to resolve the question of what education is good for. I am not going to discuss the desirability or otherwise of these aims here. My interest in this post is not with such extrinsic aims, but with the question of what lies at the other end of the educational endeavour. That is, what lies at the origin of learning? Or, more precisely, what calls for learning?

It is undoubtedly true that much of what we learn in a place or course of education has been purposefully selected, for one reason or antother, from the large corpus of human knowledge, beliefs, sentiments etc. that have been handed down to us. But regardless of this, learning is not in itself some arbitrary human invention. Rather, it appears to me that there is something about learning that is intrinsic to human being.

I wish to show, following the philosopher Jeff Malpas (2006) and his excellent essay 'Beginning in wonder: Placing the origin of thinking', how it is that much learning begins in wonder. I am not saying that all learning begins in wonder, for there is much to be learnt also from other experiences such as sorrow, anger and surprise. But I think Malpas puts forward a good case that wonder, and the kind of thinking produced by it, has a quality that sets it apart from these other experiences. There is something about wonder that returns us to the world of our experience and to the primal fact of our 'being in the world' and illuminates this world for us. Malpas himself is writing specifically about philosophy in this essay, but I believe that much of what he writes can be applied to all genuine learning and thinking that is not mere training or transmission.

We are each of us surrounded by a world of things, or phenomena that seem to call out for a response, that call for our care. This is what Heidegger and many other phenomenologists mean by the expression 'being in the world'. We are inescapably part of the world and any idea that we can think of ourselves as thinking, knowing creatures without recourse to the world of emplaced and embodied experience is quite false. We can follow Malpas and recognise our experience of the world as composed of encounters. Sometimes, these encounters can be quite exceptional, and yet they might to point to something quite ordinary – the very fact of encounter itself.

"The encounter with the extraordinary that often gives rise to wonder – the encounter with the wondrous in its most strikingly immediate forms such as the sublime or the beautiful – brings suddenly to our attention the very fact of encounter. Yet in bringing such encounter to the fore, what is brought forward is not itself something that is extraordinary or unusual, but rather something that is itself 'ordinary' and everyday."

Though it is typically rare and exquisite things, such as rainbows for example, that cause us to wonder, what Malpas is saying is that it is experience of these kinds of encounters which bring the very fact of encounter itself to the fore. That is, such experiences cause us to realise that we are always already emplaced and embodied beings, given over to other things in the world. Imagine for a moment the first time you witnessed a particularly fantastic and picturesque vista. Did it not, in some inexplicable way, transport you back to the world, engage your senses, and compel you to remember that you are in fact a part of that world?

So though it may be the sublime and the beautiful that first cause us to wonder, what this brings forth is actually something very ordinary and everyday indeed - the fact that we are experiencing and corporeal beings who are always already 'in' and related to the world. Malpas goes on to argue that, although the experience of wonder may also involve a certain strangeness, this strangeness lies not in estrangement from the world but precisely in the startling recognition that we belong to that world. This wonder, this strangeness, this sudden and sheer sense of belonging, is what leads directly to questioning. As Malpas writes, "it is just such belonging that makes such questioning and explanation significant, that makes it matter."

I think this is the really significant point for learning - this notion that it is the sudden awareness of our being in the world and our prior belonging that calls us to question and make sense of that world.

Put in such a way, it seems unfortunate that the experience of wonder is usually such a fleeting one, which soon passes as we give way to the pressing concerns that life demands and withdraw back into ourselves. It would seem that one of the roles of a teacher may, therefore, be to nourish and sustain this sense of wonder for as long as possible. This kind of a teacher would point to the world, open up spaces for encounter, evoke wonder and to bring forth that feeling of belonging that leads to genuine learning. We might say that learning begins, first of all, in the very places in which we find ourselves, a point which we can see clearly made in the following quote, if we substitute 'learning' for 'philosophy'.

"[Learning] does not begin in something out of the ordinary, but in the bringing to awareness of the most ordinary; it does not find its limit in something that transcends our everyday experience, but in the very 'being there' of that experience; it does not find its 'end' in a space or time beyond, but only in this place."

A last word on wonder. It seems to me that wonder accompanies us at every step upon the educational odyssey. It is what spurs us on at the beginning and, at the end (if there can be said to be an end) when we come to behold the world as our mutual and accommodating home we cannot help but feel wonder again. Indeed, if we were to look upon this world and feel no sense of wonder, then I would suggest that we cannot be really looking.

Reference
Malpas, J. (2006) 'Beginning in wonder: placing the origin of thinking', in Kompridis, N (Ed), Philosophical Romanticism. London: Routledge.

Photo is by Flickr user magols and is made available under a Creative Commons license