Philosophy Of Education Blog Entries

As I sit in the airport in Budapest, awaiting my flight back to Canada, I’m thinking about the real need for philosophy education. My time in Budapest brought this issue into focus for me after attending an international Peace in Education conference that Martha presented at. Another factor was our visit to the Terror Museum at 60 Andressy St in Budapest, once home to the notorious police who iron-fistedly put terror into the hearts of Hungarians in the name of communism after WWII.
In both instances the need for a humane education system was brought up. How can we create communities of caring, humane individuals if we don’t spend time discussing why w we should pursue one course of action or another.
When I was a teacher in Ontario, I often took my students outside of school for a variety of reasons. My teacher friends would often quip, “Where are you heading off to this week Todd?”
The truth is they saw little need for such excursions, regardless of the educational potential. The need to discuss philosophical issues between and with high school students has never been more readily apparent. As the election in the US takes place on Tuesday next week, questions about the nature of democracy are sure to be discussed in classrooms around the country.
But deeper more personal questions and questioning by students is more often stifled by an education system that sees the only valuable time as classroom time.
Philosophy Education in Ontario is a curriculum based course, and outdoor experiences are one of the best ways to create a safe place for students to consider the deeper, more personal issues.

I enjoyed the conversation about our philosophies of ed.-I think the most important idea that came out was our ability to facilitate and let the students pull meaning. I also thought that being able to show them how to navigate the networked world was important. I think the greatest thing we can also give our kids is the purposeful relevance to everything we teach. Again, (coming from Jeff Wilhelm) kids must see that what they are learning has immediate function and application in their lives, that they are socially invested in it. Otherwise, we lose them. We must teach our students to think for themselves, to think critically to take on that accountability for their education. We must also teach kids the skills that they will need for the future. There are still life skills, despite the constant change and outsourcing, that they are still going to need (literacy and their ability to relate and communicate to people being most valuable). I find it exciting that we, as a group, are thinking and doing these things to change education-but it does scare me that there is so much out there that we do not know, things that we aren’t doing, and ideas that we haven’t yet touched on. I can only hope that our kids start to open their eyes with a fresh new look, start thinking about their futures and the world that surrounds them, and see that the future happens whether they want it to or not and they are going to have to live in that world (even though as Karl stated on his powerpoint, that world is changing and becoming outdated every minute). I know it’s a stretch from the world of gaming, MTV, movies, music, and play (so all the fun)-but isn’t it time that we make our kids aware of these issues beyond their everyday existence?

I think getting students to think beyond “next weekend” is going to be key. While some of them do, and many of them do occasionally, I really want them to think about education as we do. Not as time to be served against their will, but as an opportunity to learn and grow as a human being. To get them to really think of it as “their education, not ours” (to quote myself – kinda weird).