We explain what the worldview is and what is the role of education in this worldview. In addition, examples of worldview.
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What is worldview?
The worldview is the vision of the world in terms of the reality that a society creates 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 to observe or look . It was introduced by the philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey in his book “Introduction to Human Sciences”, between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th.
He argued that the experience of each being had its origin in the set of principles and values that the society where it was formed had. He also affirmed that all the relationships, sensations and emotions that had been experienced in that same environment were going 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 freedom, where the human being 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 made up of different perceptions, conceptualizations and assessments that an individual makes or has about his environment. From the world views, each individual interprets the context in which it is inserted . It is also from it that they will elaborate their own definitions of the daily issues of every human being, on terms such as “help”, ” politics “, ” family “, among others. We can say that the worldview, then, is integral and general.
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The role of education in the worldview
The worldview, at the same time, depends on the social relationships that individual has had , since the human being is a social being and cannot grow up or grow away from such an environment.
The education , for example, 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 had been lost in the jungle for many years appear, do not develop many skills , it is as if they were stunted by lack of practice and learning .
At the same time, those who receive poor or poor education limit their worldview , because they cannot assimilate a large amount of necessary knowledge about their environment or other important issues. For example, ignoring the political or economic situation of their own country means that they cannot see the entire environment in which they live or that they do not directly understand it and that is why they cannot generate a general idea of the environment.
Religious, belief, philosophical, political and other systems can come to count as worldviews because they provide the individual with a framework within which to locate and generate content. Among them is that laws are made and those who feel identified with them join these systems. We could say that, for example, Buddhism or socialism have their own worldview .
Worldviews resist change over time and 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 Islam for those on the western side of the planet. These may contain thoughts that are contradictory to each other, but even that would not invalidate them.
When a worldview is established by force and authoritatively, one speaks of fundamentalism.
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 reality that exist within the linguistic. This is how the Eskimos see and understand different types of snow and ice and someone outside that context cannot understand or perceive it more than as the same thing (a type of ice and a kind of snow).
In literature , the term Weltanschauung is widely used to talk about worldview. Some writers prefer it because they claim that the German language has many more words to refer to the abstract or philosophical than Spanish. Precisely, from the literature of any time and belonging to an author who, of course is inserted in a particular culture, you can know the worldview of that time.
The same happens with a work of art , the context can be judged by the interpretations made of it, as with the Picasso painting called Guernica , which refers to the bombing that occurred during the Spanish Civil War.
