Teaching our children well: pedagogy, religion, and the future of philosophy

Cross Currents, Wntr, 2004 by Claire Elise Katz

There is a multitude of theories that tell us how the self comes to know itself. Yet, in spite of the many different theories philosophy offers for how we come to know ourselves, e.g., through self-reflection, through friends, through the behavior of others, and so forth, academic philosophy has nonetheless moved away from the actual project of knowing oneself. "Knowing oneself" appears to be a luxury not that we are unable to afford, but that we are unwilling to purchase. Academic philosophy has separated the reading of the text from reading ourselves. In turn, our own behavior, and our inattention to itespecially in the classroom--may serve to undermine the very project of teaching philosophy. (6) I argue that it is the teaching of philosophy that will ensure philosophy's future.

We can see most clearly philosophy's fragmentation by examining the increasingly limited role that philosophy of education and religion plays in the wider philosophical discipline. The move from the ancient to the modern period in philosophy is also a move away from texts that demonstrated the interrelatedness of, for example, political philosophy and philosophy of education, or political philosophy and moral education. These treatises either housed the different subtopics within one text (Plato's Republic), or if they were written as separate treatises, they pointed directly from one to the other (Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics and his Politics). But in the modern period these treatises on political philosophy, education, metaphysics, and so forth, were produced separately. As a result, ignoring the treatises on education was made easier until they eventually receded into the dusty rooms of libraries, from where they were rarely retrieved.

The philosophers of the modern period saw the relationship one topic had to the others, and we see this most clearly in Rousseau's treatise on education, Emile, and Locke's "Letter on Tolerance." However, the result of writing them as discrete essays, particularly with separate treatises on education and religious concerns, was for contemporary scholars to think of these topics not simply as an independent discipline, but also as an insignificant or secondary one.

The irony of this effect is that a pedagogical model like the one Rousseau provides might become a model for education, even though those who are drawn to the child-centered aspects might never subscribe to his political philosophy or even his educational philosophy (and many might not even know he produced either). These same people might not even be able to draw the links between what they are doing in the classroom and the larger context in which the school exists, were they ever asked to think about what they are doing in the classroom. Thus, not only does philosophy not ask questions about teaching, teachers (pedagogues) no longer ask philosophical questions. This fragmentation encourages the everyday person, including our students, to believe that philosophy and philosophical concerns have no bearing on one's everyday life. The relationship the philosophy of education has to ethics, politics, religion, metaphysics, epistemology, existentialism, authenticity, and the good life has become less apparent. And the issue of subjectivity as it would arise within the teacher-student relation is an issue that has been lost philosophically, within the academy and to some extent in scholarly philosophical writing. (7)