오우크쇼트의 자유교육론에서 ‘자유’의 의미

Abstract

This study is to explore the meaning of freedom in Oakeshott’s theory of liberal education. Freedom is usually regarded as an ‘ideal’ or ‘purpose’ of education. But nowadays there are few people who ask what a freedom means as a principle of education. In this study, the meaning of freedom in Oakeshott’s theory of liberal education is regarded not as results of educational management, but as conditions of educational ‘Practice’. This interpretation depends on the concept of ‘conversation’ in his later works. By Oakeshott, education is an initiation into the skill and partnership of conversation. The classical type of justification of liberal education consists of a number of mutually-related philosophical doctrines concerning the nature of knowledge, the mind, the reality, and the relationship among them. But the freedom of education in view of conversation is related with knowledge as ‘self-understanding’. In conversation, one who seeks knowledge as ‘self-understanding’ always invites another voices’ responses. In conversation, the ‘facts’ appear only to be resolved into the possibilities from which they were made. The modern type of argument for liberal education finds its ground on the nature of knowledge itself. To acquire knowledge is to become aware of experience as structured, organized and made meaningful by means of symbolic systems that have publically shared among human beings. But Oakeshott’s freedom of education comes from the idiom of contemplation which belongs to ‘voice of poetry’. Poetic imagination is not a preliminary to doing something, it is an end in itself. In poetic conversation, students have opportunities to make their own images of human inheritances. Education is a place for ‘play’ which provides the freedom of examining one’s own voice and of enjoying images of human inheritance and of making images of one’s own.