Tag: philosophy

“What Does a Liberal Arts Education Mean?”

by Alan C. Jones

      Thomas Wolfe’s I am Charlotte Simmons contains, in just a few short pages, one of the best answers I’ve encountered to the question: What does a liberal arts education mean? Wolfe takes us back to ancient Rome to explain the content and the underlying rationale of a liberal arts education.

      The Romans had slaves from all over the world, and some of the slaves were very bright, like the Greeks. The Romans would let these slaves be educated in all sorts of practical skills, like math, engineering, so they could build things, and in music, so they could be entertainers.

      But only Roman citizens, the FREE people studied subjects like rhetoric, literature, history, theology, and philosophy because they were the arts of persuasion. They did not want slaves to learn how to present arguments that might inspire them to unite and rise against the empire.

      Although in today’s educational vocabularies the arts of persuasion have been shortened to critical thinking, the original meaning of rhetoric is the ability to understand who you are and the number of perspectives you can bring to a problematic situation. No problem today can be understood using a grand theory, nor the mining of data points. Problems are solved in conversations between theories and facts on the ground that are played out in highly fluid environments that resist the status quo. The liberal arts, at a minimum, equip politicians and policymakers with the tools needed to move between grand theories and facts on the ground, and to use that conversation to address difficult societal problems. The knowledge and skills to participate in a conversation between grand theories and facts on the ground allow societies to solve their most difficult societal problems.

“Philosophy at Work”

by Alan C. Jones

“…Real knowledge arises through confrontations with real things. Work, then, offers a broadly available premonition of philosophy. Its value, however, does not lie solely in pointing to some more rarefied experience. Rather, in the best cases, work may itself approach the good sought in philosophy, understood as a way of life: a community of those who desire to know.”

(M.Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft)

     For a number of years, I taught a Philosophy of Education course to teachers seeking certification in school administration. For the first couple of years I used a traditional philosophy of education textbook, which, was a compendium of philosophical writings in education from Socrates to Dewey. While I personally enjoyed rereading these philosophers, it was clear to me that the students in front of me found little relevance in the vocabularies and stances of these philosophers.

      What did spark some interest in the class was when I related a particular philosophical stance to school policy or a personal experience in the classroom or main office. I responded to these sparks of interest by redesigning my instructional approach into three parts: case study—>concepts/theories—>philosophy. On the one hand I was pleased with the class discussions that were generated by this redesigned pedagogical approach. On the other hand, I felt somewhat guilty that my students were leaving my class unschooled in the particular philosophies covered in my colleagues’ classes.

      As I was struggling with how to reconcile both pedagogical approaches to teaching philosophy of education, I came across the quote that begins this blog from M. Crawford’s book, Shop Class as Soul Craft. My epiphany in reading Crawford’s book, was treating philosophy, in his words, as “some more rarefied experience,” rather than as a “confrontations with real things.” My experiences in the classroom and main office, the “work” of schooling, offers, in Crawford’s words, “a broadly available premonition of philosophy.”

      The point Crawford in making is all work experiences involve the what and how of getting stuff done. Lurking in the background of all work experiences is a “why.” The why may be reduced to an instrumental outcome—a paycheck—but, also may pose a variety of moral, ethical, intellectual questions that philosophers have grappled with and, which, guide the what and how of enactment.

      The error I had made when assigned the course, the same one my colleagues were making, is creating a firewall between philosophy as an academic discipline, and philosophy as a living, breathing, discipline that serve as a means of making collective sense out of the problems that arise in all work experiences. This divide between academic ideals and workplace realities is made worse when a discipline, like philosophy, is presented as embodying eternal truths that, if interpreted correctly, will offer up truthful answers to human and worldly problems.

      The pragmatists philosophers, John Dewey being the most notable, countered this academic view with the position that truth is not discovered, but, rather developed based on experience. For pragmatists philosophy is not a discipline so much, as just one more tool, among many academic tools, that come in handy when solving real world problems. Again, returning to Dewey, in his words, it is not what you study, but, rather, habits of thought and methods of inquiry that become the all-important tools in making sense of the day-to-day home and work problems.