Statement of
Curriculum, Teaching, and Learning Philosophy

Who is the educator, George North?

I agree strongly with John Dewey. Learning takes place in a social context.

Truth and knowledge are not constants waiting for discovery by educators and/or

learners. Information only becomes knowledge when stressed. It may very well be

that there is no absolute truth, but stressed, I will hedge on this point. If there is no

absolute truth, then the statement that there is none may not be true either.

Educators and learners bond to make an environment where teaching can

take place. Both educators and learners are teachers. The goal is to place a body of

information under stress and to apply a methodology that will test knowledge

theories. This methodology is an educator's pedagogy. The educator/learner and

learner/learner bond is my teaching method. I am not the teacher, the bond is the

teacher.

The best educators learn more from their students than any one student

learns from them. The best educator builds learning environments where students

learn more from each other than from the educator. The best educators are equally

adept at teaching and learning. The goal is to individually give students their best

chance to become learners and educators.

The best learners, in the Plato/Dewey sense, play a game of Socratic solitaire,

questioning, probing, and making mistakes. Education's only constant is this

Socratic solitaire. The goal is truth and knowledge, but the quest is unending.

An education system watches over and cares for -- fosters the culture of the

society it servers. A direct implication of this goal is inclusion. An indirect measure,

then,of the success of equation systems is a measure of its inclusiveness. All-