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

Cross Currents, Wntr, 2004 by Claire Elise Katz

The discipline of philosophy transforms lives; although how and in what ways is not always apparent to us. Philosophy teachers do not simply teach a body of information. Teaching philosophy is not about having students memorize facts or formulas. And although experiences clearly can be life changing, it is more often the reflection on those experiences that does the work of transformation. With its emphasis on reading texts and reflecting on them, philosophy aids one in thinking about his or her life. One need only look at the underlying assumptions in existentialist philosophy and even ancient Greek philosophy to see this point. But more significantly, one would have to ask what we are doing in the university and teaching in the liberal arts if we did not believe that reflecting on texts changes our lives. This transformation occurs both through the content of what we teach and how we teach that content--the two are related.

The famous dictum, "know thyself," commands us to examine our lives, to know who or what we are, and to live our lives accordingly. The expanded phrase "know thyself, mortal," uttered when one enters the temple at Delphi, reminds us that we are to know that we are mortal; that we are not gods or goddesses, not in the technical sense anyway. We are exalted to know our boundaries and our limitations, and we would be engaged in hubris to cross such boundaries.

I suggest here that our experiences are enhanced by our reflection on them. Clearly, we have initial responses to our experiences; but do they not offer us greater meaning, are our lives not better enhanced, when we have reflected on those experiences? And vice versa, are books not more meaningful when we have been somewhere, or we are going somewhere mentioned in a book, when we have actually experienced love, or when our relations with others reflect those described by an author. Is it not the case that books transport us to places we might not otherwise go; do they not ask us to think about the horrors of love, rather than merely its romantic elements; do they not ask us to think about what justice, sexual equality, freedom, beauty, and about good and evil? Do they not ask us to consider human relationships, questions about religion, and the significance, if not the existence, of god? Is it not the role of the university to free the mind so that one can think about these ideas, an activity that was once considered a luxury? And is philosophy not the best discipline to help us perform this task--by its very definition, to engage in this kind of endeavor, even if we are using a piece of literature as the vehicle is to engage with that literature philosophically?

The books that challenge us to think, to wonder, and to reflect also offer an opportunity for us to engage in imaginative variation, and our minds are expanded in ways that we might not otherwise have foreseen. But most of all, it is the life of the mind that is intended to direct us toward that age old Delphic dictum to know thyself taken up by Socrates. For Socrates, the unexamined life was not worth living. Although Socrates might not be the likely friend of Dewey (one can only guess that after his trial Socrates might not have been a big fan of democracy), is it, nonetheless, not the case, that the unexamined life is anathema to a democracy?