In my last post, I discussed how the “knowledge” we attain is often the result of the choices we make or our attitudes about life. I also mentioned how it can be a very dangerous thing as well. If you have a tendency to be so focused on your own opinions that you don’t see the world around you, then you are missing out on a lot of great opportunities.
Emile Durkheim, the great French economist, believed that the key to self-awareness was to learn how to see the world around you. He also said that the most important thing in life is to give yourself the opportunity to learn and grow. So he advocated that people should learn to take advantage of their time, knowledge, and skills, and apply them to their own lives.
Durkheim’s ideas are still relevant today. When you read a book about the history of the human race like “The Origin of Civilization” you know that his ideas were very much alive and well in the 20th century. You can also turn to the book “The Practice of Everyday Life” by Viktor Frankl to learn that Frankl himself worked with Durkheim’s ideas for self-awareness.
While the idea of self-awareness is still very much alive and well in the 21st century, it’s far from being the only one.
I think the idea of self-awareness is one of those ideas that has been around for a very long time, and yet is still very relevant today. We still live in a society that has not yet fully recovered from the destruction that World War II. In this new age we have to relearn what was lost because we can’t live without our values and ideals. We need to relearn that we can still have a society that can be different than that in which we grew up.
I think the world is getting the education it needs. The education that emile Durkheim taught us in the last century, and the education that emile Durkheim’s father, Henri Durkheim, taught us in the last century, both were based on the idea that there was a higher purpose for our lives. In the last century humans had to relearn the concept of what that higher purpose actually was, and this is one of the ways in which we have to relearn.
Durkheim had the idea that education was a means to an end: to get people to a better place. But Durkheim wasn’t just saying that you had to get people to learn how to solve a problem. You had to make them aware that there was a problem, and that they could solve it. The idea that higher education was a tool to an end wasn’t new.
Durkheim’s original idea was to educate people about the world, but he didnt think that the key to that was to make them aware of the world. He wasnt trying to turn people into philosophers. Instead he was trying to teach people to think.
Durkheim was the master of the use of irony in the lecture hall. You could tell that he was trying to educate people in the best way possible. He was a great teacher because he didnt try to convince people to think. In his lecture hall he tried to help a lot of people learn how to think. But he didnt expect them to think in the exact same way as he did.