Abstract
This chapter draws from my own lived world experience and examines how the unfolding of curriculum hinges on a long-standing Aristotelian conception of time as a linear and infinite succession of atomistic “now” moments that occludes what it means to be, because it occludes the human being’s unique sense of temporality. When we live in time as if it were a “thing,” we lose the more primordial sense that the nature of human being is to live as time. When we reduce time to a thing, to a timeline we live our lives on, we turn death into a thing, to a future event whose ontological significance can be brushed off in the present. But without an authentic consideration of what it means for us to know that we will not live forever, we are unable to prioritize and meaningfully give shape to our possibilities for being. Therefore, when curriculum, and consequently education, is dominated by clock time, it occludes the most meaningful possibilities of human being, which is to become a “well” being.
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Dewar, M.D. (2016). Curriculum and the Reduction of Temporality to Time and Its Ontological Consequences. In: Education and Well-Being. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-60276-3_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-60276-3_4
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