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

Cross Currents, Wntr, 2004 by Claire Elise Katz

It is therefore difficult for me to think about the future of philosophy without thinking about the role teaching plays in that future. Philosophy is frequently perceived as a solitary and isolating discipline: one takes one's book and goes to his room or to the highest peak of a mountain to read. To the contrary, philosophy is best done as a conversation in a community of those who also wish to learn, an endeavor exemplified in the Talmudic tradition of learning. We often see theories that suggest that reading literature is a vehicle to moral development. And so it might be. But I suggest that this vehicle is useless without a driver--the teacher. The role of the teacher often goes unacknowledged; the teacher is viewed as the disseminator of "academic" information and her role as textual guide is disregarded. Not only does philosophy need to be honest regarding its relationship to religion, but we as teachers need to be honest about the role we play in the classroom, namely, that this role is no more neutral than is the content of the subject matter. We as teachers of undergraduate philosophy students, and certainly of children in pre-college schooling, have an interest (and this is putting it mildly) in the character development of our students. Knowing thyself often implies a hope for the transformation of that self, and the self hoped for is often an ethical self. What then is the relationship between religion, education, and philosophy? Here is where I turn to the question of religion and textual analysis.

Part II: Know Thy Biblical Narratives

If we take seriously my concern that philosophy aims at teaching us to know ourselves while also teaching us to read a text critically, then might we not consider bringing religious texts into the classroom--and here I emphasize the Hebrew Bible. The narratives of the Hebrew Bible lend themselves to engaging with students in a manner that addresses all the concerns I raised previously. First, it allows students to see a "familiar" text in a different light. Let me give an example using the story of Cain and Abel--a familiar story to be sure.

When asked to recite this story, most students have distilled it the point that all they can say about it is that Cain murdered Abel. The issues of jealousy, sibling rivalry, parenting, responsibility, and so forth, have receded from these students minds, if they were ever there in the first place. A closer examination of the text reveals a richness that the students never knew was present. We read the story in class and quite literally examine the story line by line, discovering that there are gaps in the text that require us to refrain from drawing hasty conclusions or snap judgments. The story provides an opportunity for endless discussion, since the interpretations that may emerge from it are inexhaustible.

Second, the gaps that are addressed by the centuries of rabbinic readings, collected under the title midrashim, are especially effective for opening up textual discussion. But more importantly, the biblical narratives have a particular story to tell, even if the conclusions to those stories are left open. And although I cannot prove this claim, I would nonetheless argue that the biblical narratives are unique. There is something about them that pulls us in and requires our attention. There is something in the very narrative itself that demands that we read it carefully. To read the story and not see the gaps is, quite frankly, not to read the story.