Dennis Cato:
CLASS OF 1955
St. Patrick's High SchoolClass of 1955
Halifax, NS
Pierrefonds Comprehensive High SchoolClass of 1998
Pierrefonds, QC
American School of BarcelonaClass of 1971
Barcelona,
St. Mary's High SchoolClass of 1954
Halifax, NS
College Street Elementary SchoolClass of 1952
Halifax, NS
Dennis's Story
My wife, Mary Lou McTague, and I have lived in Lachine, Quebec (a southwest suburb of Montreal) for many years, but we have also lived in Halifax where we're from as well as in Rome, Calgary, and Barcelona. I was a high school teacher of History and she was a nurse (a grad of the Halifax Infirmary) and we are both now retired. I listed myself as a grad of St. Mary's University High School on my site but the "University" part never came out. There is no such place as "Saint Mary's High School" in Halifax. It was a private school attached to Saint Mary's University but it no longer exists. That was only for Grades X and XI. Both of us graduated from St. Patrick's High School in Grade XII in 1955 which, I suppose, I should have listed as my high school. (I tried but failed to change it in my Profile.)
In addition to graduating from Saint Mary's University with a B.A. in Philosophy and History, I also graduated from Dalhousie University with a B.Ed., from McGill University with a M.Ed. (the Teaching of History) and an M.A. (Philosophy of Education) and, finally, from the University of Ottawa with a Ph.D. (Philosophy of Education). For my M.Ed. monograph at McGill, "Louisbourg: An Experiment in Confluent Education," I led a team of students down to Louisbourg, Nova Scotia, where we participated in the initial archaeological excavations for Parks Canada. The "confluent education" aspect of the monograph refers to a pedagogical theory of John Dewey in which practice is combined with theory to effect a full pedagogical experience. My M.A. thesis at McGill was entitled "The Conservative Element in the Educational Thought of Aristophanes." The Greek comic playwright, perhaps suprisingly from today's perspective, had the philosopher Socrates as his special target. For Aristophanes, the binding forces of culture always trumped solitary philosophical reflection in the Socratic style which he saw as undermining the foundations of the Greek "polis." My Ph.D. thesis at the University of Ottawa was entitled "Personal Knowledge and Philosophical Analysis in Education" and dealt with a critique of the British analytical school of philosophers from the perspective of Michael Polanyi's theory of "personal knowledge." For Polanyi "personal know...Expand for more
ledge" was not something like "I've got a secret" but rather a "personal co-efficient" which underlies all our knowledge claims. He called it "tacit knowledge." It can perhaps most readily be seen in the "knowledge of physiognomies." You can describe the face of, say, your best friend to me in every particular, down to the micromilimetre, but I will never be able to identify him in a crowd. On the contrary, you will be able to identify him in a second. You have a tacit or personal knowledge of his face which I lack. It is this "tacit coefficient" which necessarily underlies all our knowledge claims.
I know what you're thinking - that this tacit knowledge opens the gates to runaway subjectivism and relativism but Polanyi was a philosophical realist in the sense that he maintained that there exists an independent reality, a real world with which we may, or may not, come into contact. However, there are no purely explicit or objective means in terms of which we can assess our own acts of personal knowledge. All we can do is to assert them with "universal intent," i.e., that we necessarily affirm the truth of our knowledge claims but all the time in the realization that we might be wrong.
Polanyi was a brilliant man and brilliance apparently ran in the family as he was the brother of the renowned economist Karl Polanyi and the father of the Nobel Prize (Chemistry) winner John Polanyi.
I have published over a dozen papers in both national and international scholarly journals in Philosophy of Education and have presented papers in the subject at conferences at the University of London (the Froebel Institute), Oxford University (New College), Cambridge University (St. Edmund's College) and at the University of Leuven (Louvain) in Belgium. I am presently a member of the Philosophy of Education Society (PES) of the United States, the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain (PESGB), and the Polanyi Society.
It was very stimulating being at both the theoretical and practical ends of education as philosophy informed my teaching practice and my teaching practice shaped my philosophical reflections.
My wife and I never had children but we have had whippets over the years. We now have three and they keep us on our toes!
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