Abstract
Margaret Mead was not a theorist. She was an applied social thinker. She had a healthy respect for certain established systems as being both a function of and functional in society, but recognised that without taking such established ideas and applying them to new situations then what had been functional would be dysfunctional and the positive function of society would be seriously challenged. Central to her view of education was positioning, in a wider realm of lived experience and knowledge, accepted ideas, assumptions and practices that could then be open to scrutiny, questioning, development and repositioning in order for them to be appropriate in the context of necessary adaptations to environments impacted by social, political and technological changes. Conceptualisation of issues, in addition to her previously mentioned often acerbic, no nonsense language, was the key to her skill in communication to which the young of her time were highly responsive.
…the idea of the future being different from the present is so repugnant to our conventional modes of thought and behaviour that we, most of us, offer a great resistance to acting on it in practice.
(Keynes 1937, p. 13)
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Notes
- 1.
I have used these terms for convenience: reality1 is the concrete world of living, reality2 is the virtual but no less real world of living.
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Maguire, K. (2015). Reconfiguring Relationships with the Young Supermodernity. In: Margaret Mead. SpringerBriefs in Education(). Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9309-4_3
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