I was challenged to write (actually, assigned to write) an essay on why I would want to be a teacher. I suppose what was intended as the assignment was why I wanted to be an educator in the American education system. What I did write was an explication of why I want to be a teacher and the education system where I want this teaching to take place. This is not as full and exhaustive as I would have liked, but there are only 24 hours in a day. No more excuses:
Why I Want to Teach
Before responding to the assigned question, I would like to begin with why I do not want to be a teacher. I have found the modern educational process to be fairly boring and tedious. While I recognize that this is most likely the result of being educated (in my high school years) at a very small school, it remains the case that I did not feel fulfilled. I did not get the option to participate in high school debate, take any A.P. courses, take the stage with any drama club, or discuss God (or even epistemology) with any of the folks responsible for nurturing my young mind. Fulfillment would mean, generally, the ability to actively participate in the direction of my education. This need not be a fork-in-the-curriculum so much as a participation in the center of the instruction, the base of my understanding of the world once I completed the “general education” degree. This desire for fulfillment is the reason for both my desire to become an educator and the change I wish to bring about inside the system.
The center of an education should be the necessary connections between the different foci of study; however, all too often, I believe, these separate courses are treated as they are, 12th grade History as 12th grade History, Biology as Biology. In other words, the courses themselves almost become separate and disparate fields. Neil Postman, in Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, points out that from the disintegration of the culture comes a disintegration in education. He says,
Modern secular education is failing not because it doesn’t teach who Ginger Rogers, Norman Mailer and a thousand other people are but because it has no moral, social, or intellectual center. There is no set of ideas or attitudes that permeates all parts of the curriculum. The curriculum is not, in fact, a ‘course of study’ at all but a meaningless hodgepodge of subjects. It does not even put forward a clear vision of what constitutes an educated person, unless it is a person who possesses ‘skills.’ In other words, a technocrat’s ideal—a person with no commitment and no point of view but with plenty of marketable skills (186).
This treatment leads to the kind of specialization found in the marketplace, to be sure. But this treatment also reinforces the notion that specialization is what “education” is, an assumption which should be pondered upon before the education system projects this.
The position I shall take against this notion of “education through specialization,” will be the return to the liberal arts qua liberal arts. Quickly enough, I realize that the modern educators will be looking to debunk this as it reflects the “uncivilized” classical views, as seen in the area of English (replacing what was, appropriately, called “Grammar.”) Even the area of Rhetoric, which had at its core ethics and dialectic, has been reduced to “Speech.” Richard M. Weaver, in Ideas Have Consequences, stated that what “idealists propose is not a voyage backward through time but a return to center, which must be conceived metaphysically or theologically” (52). This section identifies with this “center” or “base” of education a connection to the “progress” typically cited as the counter-statement to classical education. Progress, in the sense of a timeline, does not ever cease, and so we need only be concerned with the “direction” our timeline follows.
It is not a coincidence that I have obtained a minor in Philosophy and have seen the grossest misunderstandings of the study within our culture. I do not presume that this feeling is unique to me, as a molecular biologist must often get tired of people confusing viruses and parasites. However, I have noticed that some of the most general concepts in the area of Philosophy have been overlooked and under-taught. Even when Philosophy is taught, the modern day Philosophy class is usually a “history of thinkers,” and not a practice in critical thinking, or even an intense, critical approach to the ideas of those thinkers. If one were to look at the results of this type of treatment to the area of Philosophy, it is no great shock why an administrator would cut this out of the curriculum. Under this treatment, Philosophy – the King of the Liberal Arts – has been disarmed, and what is left of him could be and should be sufficiently covered in a History or Western/Eastern Civics course.
Indeed, this disarmament is a larger cultural trend. Postman, again in Technopoly, describes a world where people have sacrificed Philosophy at the alter of convenience and efficiency:
To every Old World belief habit, or tradition, there was and still is a technological alternative. To prayer, the alternative is penicillin; to family roots, the alternative is mobility; to ready, the alternative is television; to restraint, the alternative is immediate gratification; to sin, the alternative is psychotherapy; to political ideology, the alternative is popular appeal established through scientific polling. (54)
Naturally, then, a modern day administrator, facing down budgets, others higher up the food chain, and standardized test results, would feel the need to cut a modern day “philosophy.” This administrator would argue, “Given a Philosophy course about Philosophers, the alternative is the History of Western Civilization.” I argue that what he is really saying is, “Given a teacher who does not understand Philosophy, cannot teach critical thinking, will not impart the understanding of the most basic assumptions about what it means to be human, the alternative is memorizing a series of facts, and history does that better.”
However, the determination of our theoretical administrator is of course made on pragmatic grounds. And here lies a perpetual cycle which we must identify should we continue to entertain the notion of change in education. As was stated above, the administrator should cut a modern day Philosophy course which offers to its pupils no philosophy. (And he, unfortunately, might never have been offered any himself.) Philosophy, indeed all of the liberal arts, has never had any chance in defending itself against a pragmatic lens, especially after it has had its proper substance stripped. This is like a Viking preparing for battle, only to discover he does not have a sword or longship.[1] Though, it is also true that in “classical” education, the liberal arts never had to justify itself under the pragmatic lens. The reason for this lies in its etymology.[2]
The Greeks had a distinction between two educational styles: the liberal arts and the servile arts. While the servile arts found as their goal the technical training required for living, the liberal arts found as their goal the cultivation of knowledge itself. Put another way, the liberal arts gave its student an education in understanding himself in the world. The liberation of a man from ignorance was the freedom the liberal arts intended to impart. Yet, the focus of the liberal arts is gone. All that even remains of the liberal arts is all that remains of Philosophy. “The facts” of a subject now mean “what is written in the textbook” and “truth,” if one can be found to claim it exists, now means “the most commonly held view.”
Philosophy, to exercise etymology one last time, comes from two Greek words: philia and sophos, meaning love and wisdom. The most common suffix for our studies is “–logy,” meaning science or study. Looking at the meanings of the roots of those two words, I implore those serious about the progression of modern education to tell me, Philosophy or Biology? Given the opportunity for only 1 course, I argue for Philosophy; students must understand their relationship to the natural world before they can endeavor to dissect and to categorize the natural world. If I do not give them Philosophy, I am not teaching them; rather, I continue in the disarmament of the King of the Humanities. Of course, given an education system with the capability of offering multiple courses, Philosophy could be implemented alongside any other subject.
[1] I once had an Algebra class period that, as a result of student questioning, was entirely devoted to why Algebra was necessary for x, y, and z in a, b, and c situations. The students scoffed at these proposed situations, as they rightly should have. Algebra is useful to some, yes, in those situations, but educating folks of Algebraic principles cannot have the same justification as cooking. An algebra test is not the same kind of assessment as the driver’s test.
[2] Of course, this is yet another lost art. Classical education used to include what we now call the “Classics,” which included Greek and Latin. This lead to the very obvious connections between the languages; the study of those connections are now reserved for Linguists and Etymologists.
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