Heidegger argues that modern technology is quantifiably different from all earlier periods because of a shift in ethos from in situ craftwork to globalised production and storage at the behest of consumerism. He argues that this shift in technology has fundamentally shaped our epistemology, and it is almost impossible to comprehend anything…

Since early times, human beings have searched for spiritual experiences that provide connections to their hearts and souls. People sometimes find these connections through experiencing music--perhaps the last remaining ubiquitous spiritual experience in Western culture. And yet, material values rule our world, even in music education. Is music in…

In probing the interrelationship of myth, meaning, and education, the author offers a case in point, notably, Peter Jackson's film adaptations and Howard Shore's musical scores for J. R. R. Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings trilogy"--"The Fellowship of the Ring," "The Two Towers," and "The Return of the King." Intersecting literature, film, and…

In the fall of 2010 the faculty of Baker Demonstration School began a yearlong exploration of the question "How do we know what children know?" At that time, three teacher colleagues already had entered upon a collaborative project integrating music and drama with a unit of study in the second and third grades. They decided to carefully…

In a country as diverse as Canada, spread over an incomprehensibly large land mass, the connections between citizens may require more imagination. One way that these connections have been traditionally imagined in Canada is through national myths, including the myth of the wilderness. This myth draws the Canadian identity out of an…

The Theatre Company Blah Blah Blah (the Blahs) have been working in youth centres since 1985 and over that time the Blahs have experimented with ways to make theatre for young people in this environment. A youth centre can be a hostile place to take a piece of theatre. Many of the youth centres the Blahs have visited have been in areas of social…

For an enterprise dedicated to truth, American higher education harbors a lot of myths. Frequently advanced as unexamined propositions about "the way things work," these deeply held articles of faith within the academy unwittingly mark its core values and priorities and shape public perceptions about what is important in higher education.…

The author started in the Ph.D. program in comparative literature at Princeton in 1992, a year after she graduated from college. She fell in love with mythology and the classical traditions and find herself teaching literature. In the remainder of her time at Princeton, she precepted for four or five more classes, got the chance to join the…

In this article, the author discusses the resilient myth that it was Columbus' journey to the New World that proved that the world was round. It is widely known that it was Columbus' journey to the New World that proved that the world was round. However, Thomas Kuhn in "The Copernican Revolution" showed clearly in 1957 that the idea of a flat…

All real classrooms are saturated in the fictional narratives about education from TV and movies that swirl about thickly and persistently in western culture, yet the influence that these fictions exert on real teachers and real students is seldom examined. This article argues that since these fictional narratives nearly always deal in recycled…

This author speculates about who benefits from school failure. The article is grounded in the author's personal reflections over 50 years of involvement with urban schools, teachers, students, and administrators. He provides an in-depth critique of identifying the causes of school failure in the personal shortcomings of children and their families…

One of the best-studied, least-discussed texts of Native American oral literature is a long Mojave "epic" taken down from a man named Inyo-kutavere by Alfred Kroeber in 1902 and published in 1951. The text was published in twenty-nine pages along with forty-eight pages of commentary and twenty-five pages of notes. In 1999, Arthur Hatto, an…

Verses written by Vietnam veterans from "Winning Hearts and Minds" are discussed in terms of two thematic categories: that which smashes the hypocrisy and myths of America and its patriotism, and that which documents and records the veteran's experience. This accessible, immediate poetic documentation of the Vietnam experience merits…

Dispels five misconceptions surrounding the suicide of children: that children under the age of six do not commit suicide; that suicide in latency years is extremely rare; that psychodynamically and developmentally true depression is not possible in childhood; that child cannot understand finality of death; and that children are cognitively and…

In this article, the author focuses on the development of a young poet from Bulgaria, Indiana Pehlivanova, who experienced an explosive growth as a poet. Activating memory, myth, and reality, Pehlivanova's imagination wove together what the author terms as "the finest lines I have ever witnessed in youth poetry."