I Think, Therefore I Think I Can

I’m deep in the land of education philosophy right now. Deep. I feel like I’m writing dispatches from some remote jungle. It’s dense in here. I feel dense in here.

When I first took Philosophy of Ed a few years ago, it was because I was passionate about learning about philosophy…or maybe it was because it was a required course. Regardless, I had misgivings about a) the usefulness of the course to my daily teaching life, b) my ability to understand anything about the course, and c) the usefulness of my abilities in general.

And then I got reacquainted with some people I had clearly met at the wrong time of my life. Plato, Aristotle, Dewey – I knew I’d read them before at some point, but whatever time that was, I apparently wasn’t ready to hear what they were saying. Dewey particularly was one I knew I had read and maybe even incorporated into some kind of undergrad-senior-seminar-philosophy-statement-I-just-want-to-graduate paper thingy. I distinctly remember trying to read him in a car while on a road trip. And that was about as far as I could remember.

Looking back, I realize I just couldn’t “get him” before being a classroom teacher in the way that I “get him” now, And when he talks about the communicative and relational aspects of both education and democracy, the need for people to construct knowledge, and the challenges of dehumanization in the world of machines and mass communication, boy, do I hear him now.

And that was just Dewey. In this class, I met a torpedo fish, I discovered the concept of phronesis, I took a turn with Hannah Arendt (still dizzy from it), and I even BS’d with Harry Frankfurt. My professor introduced me to Maxine Greene, whom everyone should know, and eventually to Doris Santoro and Chris Higgins, who in turn introduced me to others.

But then the thing happened that I didn’t know would happen. I read Gert Biesta. And that was enough to make me realize that machete-ing my way through the jungle of philosophy was rewarding, was worthwhile, was essential.

Education as response instead of education as acquisition? Teaching as transcendence, because students don’t know what they don’t know? “Growing up” as coming into a diverse world and learning to be in that world responsibly with others? Tell me more.

I still don’t get it all, but the struggle is where the learning happens. And I don’t agree with everything I read that I do understand. But now knowing that there are so many ways to know, to deeply see the world around me, I’ve come to realize this – in a time of information overload, mixed messages, and too much stuff, knowing how you think about what you think and why you think it is pretty crucial. Being intentional, critical, and thoughtful about the outlook you craft for yourself, the filters through which you pour information, and the lenses through which you see yourself, your teaching, and your students – that care and wonder is perhaps more important now than it has ever been.

How we see things sits at the heart of how we react, how we decide, and ultimately how we reach our colleagues and students.

And that’s philosophy, or at least, my take on it as a practitioner. We sometimes miss the jungle for the trees; philosophy helps us see not just the trees and the jungle, but also the mountain that jungle is situated on that we didn’t even know was there. And then it helps us see that there’s a neighboring mountain with its own jungle and other trees. It doesn’t always help us find our way through the jungle, but it can help us see that we should be trying to find our way through the jungle and how we can approach the jungle in a new way – in our own way, with some new and some old friends.

In this series of posts, we’ll hit that jungle road with Dewey, Biesta, Santoro, Higgins, and a few others who have some surprising and inspiring things to say to those of us in the classroom. I’m sorry I didn’t hear them before, but I’m glad I can hear them now. More dispatches to follow as we thrash our way through the philosophy jungle. In the meantime, dig out that Philosophy Statement from senior year – it may have some things to say that you didn’t hear before. Thank goodness for required classes!