Enjoyment and the Activity of Mind

This book urges educational institutions to contemplate the harm they have caused to individual and society by their tragic suppression of the energy essential to the flowering of the mind's full potential. No more strident and uncompromising a voice is to be found on this topic than Whitehead's, in The Aims of Education and Other Essays. Walker's interpretation of these essays is set in a story of the lives of several teachers, education students, parents, and a professor. Whitehead's presence is conjured among them as an uncomfortable and challenging gadfly. The philosophic depth is made widely accessible through the conversational language of imaginary journals and dialogues. This strategy also enables Walker to demonstrate the neglected power of dialogic pedagogy, and to suggest its centrality in the realization of Whiteheadian aims. The dialogues show a group of people curiously energized by an inquiry in which their stereotypical foundations are crumbling under the combined impact of focused dialogue and the brilliance of Whitehead's counterpoint. Their creative vitality of mind is shaken out of the narcosis of ingrained routines and secondhand ideas, and they discover the forgotten power of revitalizing outlook and action with an individual discernment of meaning, importance, and truth. They have immediately experienced the very quality of mind and its manner of cultivation Whitehead insists upon. This is intelligence enriching life with its full and interweaving spectrum of intellectual, aesthetic, ethical, and spiritual sensitivities.

Foster N. Walker was born in England in 1941. In 1963 he left industrial chemical research to train as an elementary school teacher, and from 1966 to 1971 he taught in British and Canadian elementary schools. After obtaining his B.A. in English Literature and B.A.Hons. in Philosophy at the University of Winnipeg, Manitoba, he completed doctoral studies in philosophy at The University of Western Ontario. In 1976 he taught in the philosophy depart-ment of The University of Winnipeg and in the same year moved to a permanent position teaching philosophy of education in The Department of Educational Foundations of The University of Alberta. In 1979 he was awarded a doctorate in philosophy for his thesis, Knowing and Education: An Epistemological Perspective on Whitehead’s Educational Theory. He formed and co-facilitated the Edmonton Large Dialogue Group in 1991 and the Calgary Large Dialogue Group in 1994, continuing the experimentation with dialogue in the large group begun by Patrick deMaré and by David Bohm. In 1996 he left university work as Professor Emeritus to focus on writ-ing and on researching dialogue as the unique and most unfamiliar potential of human speech and relationship. Foster N. Walker has given numerous lectures and workshops for school and university teachers. He has made experimental teaching in the university a continuing area of practical research and the basis of articles and conference papers on school and university pedagogy. His unpublished book manuscript on philosophy of education, Education with a Human Face, was for many years used with students of education at the University of Alberta. He has published articles in philosophy of education and delivered papers at con-ferences on philosophy and the philosophy of education in Canada, England, and the United States. Many of these have involved the educational implica-tions of the philosophies of Alfred North Whitehead and Jiddu Krishnamurti, and the significance of dialogue for education. He is a past president of The Northwest Philosophy of Education Society. He is presently facilitating a phi-losophy dialogue group in Calgary, Alberta, and writing a novel that explores the process of large dialogue groups and the effect of dialogue in everyday life.