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235 13 Technological Education and the Need for Contemplation How Our Faith in Technology in Education Has Harmed Us Throughout this book, I have argued that contemplation, or theoria, ought to take greater precedence in education than is currently the case; more specifically, I have been careful to emphasize that, most of all, it is important that there be a noetic “taking up” (anairesis) of whatever is seen toward its ground in what is the highest or best (Ariston) of sights. Please remember: it is incorrect to suppose that theoria or the immediate seeing of the intellectus is not currently a component of our educational efforts; rather, anytime that “understanding” (intellectus) is acquired, the capacity of the intellectus for seeing is certainly involved. Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman makes a similar point when he remarks that “contemplative mind” exists in all cultures, and that it can be quite misleading to speak of our own culture as lacking contemplative mind. He explains: “When we make that claim, we are rather lamenting the deplorable contemplative states within which the common mind is absorbed.” Thurman offers television as an example of the sort of “contemplative trance” in which millions of people imbibe “for hours on end, day after day, year in and year out.” Unfortunately, he explains, it is a trance “in which sensory dissatisfaction is constantly reinforced, anger and violence is imprinted, and confusion and the delusion of materialism is constructed and maintained.” Hence, “when we talk about seeking to increase and intensify contemplative mind in our culture, we are actually talking about methods of transferring contemplative energies from one focus to another.”1 I would add that Thurman’s astute observations about television also apply to our modern fascination with computers and the Internet—especially in educational circles where the fulfillment of “ICT outcomes” is mandated and strictly enforced both in curriculum documents and as part of Teacher Professional Growth Plans (TPGPs). Teachers are under constant and ever‑increasing pressure to bring the latest technologies to bear upon their pedagogy, and the fervor of this pressure becomes all the more peculiar when we recognize, for instance, that it is doubtful 236 The Pursuit of Wisdom and Happiness in Education if teachers anywhere have ever experienced similar pressures and threats that they must use television or radio broadcasts (let alone books, paper, pens, and pencils) with their students. Indeed, there seems to be a special kind of seeing that computer technologies are believed to afford, such that their use has taken on a strange power in our understanding (intellectus) of ourselves and of what it means to know. I think that the peculiar allure of computers, of the Internet, and of “information technology” arises on two counts. On the one hand, computer technology offers us the false promise of “knowing everything,” or at the very least, of gaining access to seemingly infinite information about the world‑as‑object; on the other hand, it purports to make available an ersatz transcendence, or a kind of substitute for the joy experienced relationally in a true community of being with others, with the world, and with the divine; put more simply in terms already developed and clarified by Martin Buber, computer technologies promise us a form of “omniscience” in the realm of “I‑It” experience while at the same time offering us assurances about our connectivity to all other users in a communal “I‑Thou” world wide web of being. Computer technologies have, in this regard, become a widely accepted substitute for the genuine spiritual exercise of pursuing wisdom, or “immortalizing.” With a high degree of prescience at the beginning of the age of personal computers, the Venerable Chan Buddhist Master Hsuan Hua referred to computers—like their predecessors in television and radio—as “people eaters” and “man‑eating goblins” inasmuch as their use typically causes human beings to “forget about everything else.”2 Ironically, the promise of computers—literally “electric brains” in Chinese—to increase student engagement and educational accessibility may actually serve most powerfully to undermine our awareness of and attention to what is—the “everything else” of which Hsuan Hua speaks. Also writing at the beginning of the age of computers, the Canadian philosopher George Grant has commented on the falsehood of the statement “The computer does not impose on us the ways it should be used”; he challenges the notion that computers are simply neutral instruments in our hands: The phrase “the computer does not impose” misleads, because it abstracts the computer...

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