ASSE3211: Learning Outcome Assessment 2 Chapter 8 Design Your Life ASSE3211: Learning Outcome Assessment 2 Summer 2012 Rawan Tashkandi- 200800821

Outline Recognizing the dual logic of experience Fate or freedom: which do you choose? Recognizing the dual logic of experience Facing contradictions and Inconsistencies Social forces, the mass media, and our experience Reading backwards Implications for the design of your life

Fate or Freedom: Which Do You Choose? The idea of designing one’s life is a product of two insights: 1- There is a significant difference between life as it is typically lived and life as it might be lived. 2- By deliberately changing our thinking, we can live in a manner closer or our ideal than if we uncritically allow our thinking to be shaped by the forces acting on us.

Recognizing the Dual Logic of Experience For most people, experience is understood as a something that “happens to them” not something they create for themselves. The objective dimension of experience is that part of it that we did not generate. However all the objective factors in our experience must nevertheless be given a meaning, an interpretation.

Facing contradictions and Inconsistencies More important than the sheer number of analyzed experience is their quality and significance. What links the experience as analyzed products of the mind insight. Only when one gains analyzed experience of working and reasoning one’s way out of prejudice can one gain the insight essential to self-honesty.

In analyzing experience we should ask at least 3 questions: What are the facts? What is the most neutral description of the situation? What interests, attitudes, desires, or concerns do I bring to the situation? How am I conceptualizing or interpreting the situation in light of my point of view? How else might it be interpreted?

To be critical thinkers… We must resist the media’s influence on our lives. We must learn how to not be drawn into whatever the media makes up, and to see through it. We must decide for ourselves what we think, feel, and want. We must find other sources that go beyond our national media. We must read widely and think broadly.

Social Forces, the Mass Media, & Our Experience There are powerful social forces that act through the mass media to influence our perception of things. For example: The news media shapes our view of the world. Mass media influence: one-sided, superficial, and misleading.

What happens when the media is uncritically used in learning? Ignorance Prejudice Misconception Half-truth Over-simplification

Reading Backwards Reading books printed in the past is one of the most powerful ways to open our minds and see things from multiple perspectives from different times. It allows us to step out of today’s ideologies and concepts taught and believed today as the truth. We will develop a better sense of what in our social values are essential and what are arbitrary.

Example 1: Socrates, a Greek teacher from 2400 years ago and one of the first thinkers, discovered a method of questioning the leaders of his day that proved that most of their knowledge was very superficial. He concluded that all humans have a superficial understanding of themselves and their surroundings.

Example 2: Francis Bacon, an Englishman, analyzed the mind in it’s normal state of prejudice, ignorance, and self deception and realized that it should not be left to it’s natural tendencies. He called attention to the fact that most people, when left to their own devices, develop bad habits of though (idols).

Bacon’s Idols: Idols of Tribe: the way our mind tends to trick itself. Idols of Cave: our tendency to see things from our own individual , and often distorted perspective. Idols of the Market Place: the ways we misuse concepts in our association with others. Idols of the Theatre: our tendency to become trapped in conventional and unbending systems of thought.

Other Examples Other thinkers like Sir Thomas More, Hobbes, and Locke have defended a common sense analysis and reasoning of everyday life, and thought. They believed that everything should be subject to critique. It was in that spirit of intellectual freedom and critical thought that people such as Sir Isaac Newton and Robert Boyle did their work. They criticized the work of those who preceded them.

To conclude the brief history scan… We have learned the power of critical thinking, and the importance of gathering information with great care and precision. Every society teaches its own view of the world as the truth, and invests a great effort into justifying itself to itself. The only community of critical thinkers ,to date, exists across cultures, disciplines, belief systems, and life styles.

Implications for the Design of Your Life If we commit to designing our own lives we are: resisting social forces, acting outside of our social group’s expected behavioral pattern, learn to keep some of our thinking private. We cannot give others the products of our thinking, they must undergo their own evolution.

Thank You