Educational Alchemy

'Alchemy an Introduction'

Today, the term "alchemy" is often used metaphorically to describe the transformation or refinement of something, whether it be physical, mental, or spiritual. Word's themselves carry no meaning, its is that in which we perceive them that delivers their message. Perhaps Alchemy is a word that has always represented two distinct paths'. The search for spiritual enlightenment or the juxtapositioned search for wealth from extraction.

Achemic processes involved techniques, such as distillation, sublimation, and purification in an attempt to turn common metals into gold or Even discovering the elixir of immortality.

In the west the ancient arts of alchemy have transformed into modern chemistry, as early alchemical practices contributed to the development of experimental methods, laboratory equipment, and the understanding of chemical processes.

Perhaps This word Alchemy can be used in an attempt to explore our way's of knowing through modern education. Thus we shall explore the metaphorical concept of Educational Alchemy in the following paragraph's.

Understanding and Knowing Thing's

The traditional western Educational habitus is centered on knowledge as concepts that can be acquired through consumption and storage. We seek to know the world not be recognising our emersed being within it. Rather we act in ways that suggest to know something is to first understand it in isolation and thus we begin to distil and purify the world into its smallest perceivable parts. 

Much as in modern chemical production we distil earthly compounds into their purest seperate form. We search for understanding through understanding the world as separate subjects, schemes, and fragments and often, separate to ourselves. 

Its not that i Intend to present this way of knowing things as inherently wrong, rather that i wish to explore this concept fully so that new ideas' about ways of knowing may emerge. 

'Just in Case Knowledge'

The way of knowing we are exposed to in schooling belongs to the realm of 'Just incase' (Read more on how knowledge relates to time here: New Knowledge). Just Incase Knowledge relies on a system of banking, whereby learners passively consume information from a person or source of perceived expertise. So that they may recall that information if required in the future.

Just Incase Knowledge becomes frozen in time, Sublimated from the context which gave it is original form. This process allows for the efficient delivery of many forms of information, across multiple domains, without the need of an additional stage. The intrinsic curiosity for search ching for a meaningful form to take. 

We outsources our determination of what is of value and meaningful to others and divided out a universal bank of knowledge into faculties, subjects and schemes. Much like the chemical understanding of the earth the curriculum of knowledge in schools become like a form of periodic table.

Everything of dictated importance. retained and organised into categories. Packaged, printed and ready to be re-presented and re-modeled for other's to memorise and then experts to test for the ability to recall that information at a later date. 

The periodic table of learning

  

 View this image, much like you would have done during your times sat at a high dest behind a row of gas taps and sink's. Perhaps this image has its place above the front desk or on the wall nearest the door, its presence constant, but its understanding often absent from presence. 

So what does it mean? This Abstracted organisation of early compounds? 

When we remove information from the context which brings it into being, it inherently losses its meaning. For those seeking to understand knowledge in this abstract form one can not fully appreciate the richness of its entanglement with everything which brings it into meaningful life. 

Why is it that metal's such as iron, Copper and steel, born out of the nature of earth, forged by Mans work in extracting and distilling them down into their purest forms. Can be found littering the planets surface, eroding their now toxic material back into the ground it originated from, yet now is unrecognisable to. Despite being born from the world itself, through the actions of Man's extraction it is no longer part of its earthly origin. It is almost as if the earth can not recognise what it once only knew as one whole.

'Knowing this way...separates us from meaning' 

When we seek to know by extracting, distilling and categorizing. It becomes harder to recognize what it is that we are at one with.  

Our innate curiosity is slowly replaced with systems that teach us that value can only be attributed to that which can be extracted or what can be gained from another being for our own means. What can We extract for our egoic self.

This way of knowing distances us from the naturally occurring opportunities to explore thing's in their contextual home. It then relies on external pressures from others in the system for one to continue to try and acquire more information about any subject. 

We can no longer be guided by the answer's we search for from within, instead we must join in this mass alchemy, a widespread individualistic race to extracting as much knowledge and resource as possible.....for a time, which me may never arrive... after all no man ever achieved immortality through alchemy. 

So I leave you with a quote:

 'To make whole, be whole'  - John Butler, Somewhere on a hill In Bakewell, England.