Abstract
This chapter addresses the philosophical commitments driving the reduction of education to curriculum as techne and its ontological consequences. This chapter begins with a brief sketch of the Aristotelian notion of techne, as developed in Book VI of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, and then briefly demonstrates how seminal conceptions of curriculum over the last century instantiate a technical approach to education. The reduction of education to curriculum as techne predetermines what possibilities students will have rather than allowing students to explore their own possibilities. The ontological consequences of losing ownership of our possibilities include an inauthentic disclosure of being and the privileging of actuality over possibility. Curriculum as techne is only interested in producing predetermined copies of the status quo rather than individuated beings who determine for themselves what it means to be. Thus, curriculum as techne narrows the possibilities that most fully characterize the ontological nature of human being as well as education because its predetermined objectives are driven by dominant socioeconomic ideologies.
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Dewar, M.D. (2016). The Reduction of Education to Curriculum as Techne and Its Ontological Consequences. In: Education and Well-Being. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-60276-3_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-60276-3_2
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