Under the influence of Max Weber’s assertion that the Enlightenment, with its laser focus on empiricism and logic, had brought about the “disenchantment” of the world—the loss of magic, mystery, and creative connections that had given rise to the rapacious exploitation of nature for human ends—I read a number of books with “reenchantment” in their titles: The Reenchantment of the World (Morris Ber. [...] To Suzi Gablik, the task of the “reenchantment project” was “to cease to be hypnotized by the rational bias of Western society, through developing a more open model of the psyche, so that as a culture we can recover the ability to ‘dream forward’ and recover the power and importance of vision.”1 The number of books on reenchantment outpaced my literary binge, but I became convinced that we moderns. [...] Yet, even the postmodern cosmologists take us only to the infinitesimal dot, the nucleus of the Big Bang, and hesitate to step into the chasm of First Causes—understandably so, as the notion of an initial creative force can be a slippery slope into dogma and doctrine. [...] Recognition of the necessary ontological and epistemological shifts, and their extraordinary implications for basically everything we think we know about the education of young people, is necessary, I believe, to the project of cultivating our “big history” and effecting a “great transition.” 3 | Big History and Great Transition | GTI FORUM Endnotes 1. [...] She is the former Director of Teacher Education at Goddard College and was the founding Director of the John Dewey Project on Progressive Education at the University of Vermont.
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- 5
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- United States of America
