We explain what the worldview is and what is the role of education in this worldview. Also, worldview examples.
What is worldview?
The worldview is the vision of the world in terms of reality that creates a society at a certain time or under a certain culture. We could also say that it is a way of seeing and interpreting the world.
The term worldview comes from the German Weltanschauung, formed by two other terms: Welt, which is world and anschauen, which means observe or look at. It was introduced by the philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey in his book "Introduction to Human Sciences", between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
He argued that the experience of each being had its origin in the set of principles and values that had the society in which it was formed. It also stated that all the relationships, sensations, and emotions that had been experienced in the same environment were to determine in the future the individual worldview of that person.
Dilthey proposes three types of Weltanschauung:
- First naturalism, where the human being can see himself as an object that nature determines.
- On the other hand, there is the idealism of Liberty, where he human being he is aware that he is separated from nature by his free will.
- Finally, there is objective idealism, where the human being becomes aware of his harmony with nature.
This is composed of different perceptions, conceptualizations and evaluations that an individual makes or has about their environment. Based on worldviews, each individual interprets the context in which they are inserted. It is also from this that they will develop their own definitions of the daily issues of every human being, on terms such as "help", "politics”, “family", among other. We can say that the worldview, then, is comprehensive and general.
The role of education in the worldview
The worldview, at the same time, depends on the social relationships that that individual has had, since the human being is a social being and cannot be raised or grow away from such an environment.
The education, for example, it is a social activity, necessary and important in the life of every child. It has been proven that people who live in isolation, such as those famous cases where children who have been lost in the jungle for many years appear, do not develop many abilities, it is as if they are atrophied by lack of practice and learning.
At the same time, those who receive a little or bad education limit their worldview, because they cannot assimilate a large amount of knowledge necessary about your environment or other important topics. For example, not knowing the political or economic situation in their own country it makes them unable to see the totality of the environment in which they live or that they directly do not understand it and therefore cannot generate a general idea of the environment.
Religious systems, of beliefsPhilosophical, political and other can come to count as worldviews because they provide the individual with a framework within which to locate and generate content. Within them is that they are made laws and those who feel identified with them join these systems. We could say that, for example, Buddhism or socialism they have their own worldview.
Worldviews resist change over time. weather and they are complex to understand for those who do not share certain issues because they are totally alien to that culture, as is the case with the Islam for those who are from the western side of the planet. These may contain thoughts They are contradictory to each other, but not even that would invalidate them.
When a worldview is established by force and in an authoritarian way, fundamentalism is spoken of.
The famous linguists and anthropologists E. Sapir and B. Lee Whorf consider that the mother tongue is a symbolic barrier that may or may not allow an individual to perceive various aspects of the language. reality that exist within the linguistic. This is how the Eskimos see and understand about different types of snow and ice and someone outside that context can neither understand nor perceive it other than as the same thing (a type of ice and a type of snow).
In the literature, the term Weltanschauung is widely used to speak of worldview. Some writers prefer it because they claim that the German language has many more words to refer to the abstract or the philosophical than does Spanish. Precisely, from the literature of any one time and belonging to an author who, of course, is inserted in a certain culture, the worldview of that time can be known.
The same thing happens with a artwork, the context can be judged by the interpretations made of it, as with the painting by Picasso called Guernica, which refers to the bombing that occurred during the Spanish Civil War.