Human Knowing - Passion of the Scientist, Precision of the Poet

      “When we honor the hidden aquifer that feeds human knowing, we are more likely to develop a capacity for awe, wonder, & humility that deepens rather than diminishes knowledge. And we are less likely to develop the kind of hubris about our knowledge that haunts the world today. So much of the violence our culture practices at home and exports abroad is rooted in an arrogance that says, ‘We know best, and we are ready to enforce what we know politically, culturally, economically, militarily.’ In contrast, a mode of knowing steeped in awe, wonder, & humility is a mode of knowing that can serve the human cause, which is the whole point of integrative education.
     Human knowing, rightly understood, has paradoxical roots – mind & heart, hard data and soft intuition, individual insight and communal sifting and winnowing – the roots novelist Vladimir Nabokov pointed to when he told his Cornell University students that they must do their work ‘with the passion of the scientist and precision of the poet.’ Integrative education aims to ‘think the world together’ rather than ‘think it apart,’ to know the world in a way that empowers educated people to act on behalf of wholeness rather than fragmentation.”

       Palmer PJ, Zajonc A. The heart of higher education: A call to renewal. Transforming the academy through collegial conversation. Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, 2010.

Koen De Houwer   www.dpreview.com