Essay - World View
Education begins from birth with how and what we learn first determined by our parents and their beliefs and values. What aspects we will accept and what we will discard is shaped through our community and also collectively by our gender and age. I will show you how my position in a religious country town has formed how I approach education and why I constantly seek to learn. I will also show how being a female and more importantly a young female mother has and will continue to affect my attitudes towards education and higher learning. Our world view though ultimately based on our upbringing, our community, age and gender is critiqued and analysed, added to and discarded till it forms our own individual world view, seen through our approach to education and learning. To be able to fully understand this, the foundational concepts must first be fully understood. The term 'world view' is accepted by most people in its definition though strongly argued in how it is applied and how it influences all aspects of life. My culture has accepted that it is in everything we do, but it is often unacknowledged and overlooked. Julia Hobson defined world view as "a set of beliefs that we hold through which we organise our understanding of ourselves and understanding of others" (1996, 30). Dana interprets its importance to "enable survival and adaption" (1993, 9), similar to our primal instincts and Darwin’s theory of the survival of the fittest. In order to write about my world view, you must first be able to understand how my world view was shaped. I was born into a large family that was strictly catholic and in the country. Emphasis was always on faith and to live life in a sinless way and in the way the Bible told. It taught me a strong family ethic and loyalty to those I held close. My upbringing was reflected through my approach to learning where we were taught to apply ourselves to the best of our abilities, though at times pushed to better this. In early schooling