Archive for category Education Generally
The Globalization of Superficiality
Posted by eweislogel in Education Generally, Wholeness, Wisdom on October 10th, 2011
Adolfo Nicolás, S.J., Superior General of the Society of Jesus, on what he calls the “globalization of superficiality”:
When one can access so much information so quickly and so painlessly; when one can express and publish to the world one’s reactions so immediately and so unthinkingly in one’s blogs or micro-blogs; when the latest opinion column from the New York Times or El Pais, or the new- est viral video can be spread so quickly to people half a world away, shaping their perceptions and feelings, then the laborious, painstaking work of serious, critical thinking often gets short-circuited.
One can “cut-and-paste” without the need to think critically or write accurately or come to one’s own careful conclusions. When beautiful images from the merchants of consumer dreams flood one’s computer screens, or when the ugly or unpleasant sounds of the world can be shut out by one’s MP3 music player, then one’s vision, one’s perception of reality, one’s desiring can also remain shallow. When one can become “friends” so quickly and so painlessly with mere acquaintances or total strangers on one’s social networks – and if one can so easily “unfriend” another without the hard work of encounter or, if need be, confrontation and then reconciliation – then relationships can also become superficial.
When one is overwhelmed with such a dizzying pluralism of choices and values and beliefs and visions of life, then one can so easily slip into the lazy superficiality of relativism or mere tolerance of others and their views, rather than engaging in the hard work of forming communities of dialogue in the search of truth and understanding. It is easier to do as one is told than to study, to pray, to risk, or to discern a choice.
Adjunctivitis
Posted by eweislogel in Adjunctivitis, Education Generally, The University, Vocation on June 22nd, 2011
If you are a college student today enrolled in four classes during any given semester, it is likely that only one of your teachers is employed by your school in a permanent position that comes with a middle-class salary, job security, and benefits. The other three are contingent faculty, often called “adjuncts”; they have job titles like “instructor” or “lecturer” rather than “professor” but their roles in the classroom are the same.
link: Adjuncts and the Devalued PhD
I am inaugurating a new category of posts called “Adjunctivitis,” focusing on issues of concern to adjunct/contingent faculty, their spouses and families, their students, their tenured or tenure-track colleagues, college and university administrators, policy makers, and concerned citizens. Watch for tweets of interest as well.
Teaching and Assessing Critical Thinking
Posted by eweislogel in Education Generally, Philosophy, The University on April 11th, 2011
I spent Friday at the Eastern PA Regional College Assessment Consortium’s Third Annual Assessment Summit: “Teaching and Assessing Critical Thinking,” held at the Northampton Community College in Bethlehem, PA. Attendees were treated to two panel discussions, one concerning the struggles in teaching critical thinking, the other on issues surrounding assessing the effectiveness of that teaching. Both are very thorny problems, and both the presenters and my colleagues in the audience were sensitive to ambiguities and nuance, let us say, of the endeavor. In the end, I was left with more questions than answers, but with a couple of observations about ourselves.
First, the observations. We exhibit, I would say, a “genial arrogance” with regard to our students. “Genial,” in the sense that it is obvious – perhaps especially among community college faculty – that there is a deep and genuine concern for the well being of our students and a commitment to do what is necessary to help them learn and succeed. But “arrogance,” in the sense that I only heard us saying what we think their concerns are, what we think their problems are, what we think the sources and causes of their obstacles to learning are. I am not sure I heard anyone report directly what students told them about how they viewed their struggles. We just “know,” uncritically, about their situation and their needs. We just assume we know what education is supposed to be, what teaching is supposed to be, and what our students are supposed to be (and are they supposed to be “what’s” or “who’s” anyway?).
Perhaps students cannot articulate their own situation – but have we tried to find out? Instead, we blame elementary and secondary schools, parents, pedagogical practices (the dreaded rote memorization), etc., as if we knew those were the sources of our students’ inability to think critically. I also happen to teach at an institution that takes Cura Personalis – “care for the entire person” – as the cornerstone for a genuine education. Perhaps we ought to try to practice this more widely as a foundation to our critical thinking about our students and about critical thinking itself.
Further, we tend to talk as if critical thinking was a “skill set.” We view critical thinking as co-extensive with problem solving, which leads to thinking life is a problem (or just a set of problems) to be solved. What about the enigma, paradox, the sweet mystery of life? But, as they say, if all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. If education is only about problem solving, a sense of wonder and awe is relegated to the romantic, and thus, in our pragmatic and utilitarian culture, devalued.
Critical thinking, as it was tacitly presented, exhibits a Cartesian obsession with certainty at the same time it attempts to instill in students a sense that “there are no right answers,” to make them comfortable with difference and diversity of viewpoints. Still, the drive to certainty manifests itself in the sense that it is the lack of certainty that demands (what turns out to be) the insipid tolerance of “whatever.” In effect – despite paying lip service to it – judgment is made radically problematic. But as the very root of the word “critical” – krinein (Gr.): to discern, to judge – implies, thou in fact shalt judge. Judgment is the ignition switch of action. The dismissive “whatever” means the spark plugs of judgment are dead. Even the command, “Thou shalt not judge,” is itself a judgment on those who are being judgmental (which is not the same as judging), those being hypocritical (under-discerning, not discerning enough, especially about themselves). Because, while there is no “one right answer,” there are certainly wrong answers, and being hypocritical and judgmental is a good way to come up with them. To judge is not to be judgmental; to be judgmental is not to judge at all. Our efforts to teach critical thinking aim at getting students to see this. But if those same efforts cut off judgment entirely, we’ve simply come to the opposite side of the same coin, a bad penny indeed. This is our struggle.
Perhaps this means that critical thinking advocates (and who of us is not among them?) need to reflect on whether CT needs to be tied so tightly to the notion of problem solving. Perhaps it is uncritical to think that CT is all and only about problem solving. Perhaps a critical thinker is one who recognizes that not all of human reality and experience submits to instrumental or utilitarian reasoning, important as those are in their relevant spheres.
This all leads to the issue of assessment, which has clearly come down to quantitative analysis. Does thinking in its fullness admit of such measure? We have, I believe, uncritically come to think so…or at least act as if it did. All of us in teaching want to believe that students get something of value as a result of our efforts. We’d like very much to be sure we’ve succeeded in attaining that goal. So our natural tendency is to devise ways to check whether students have learned what we want them to learn (setting aside for the moment the question of whether it is possible that students might learn something of value as a result of our teaching that we do not consciously want them to learn, that we’ve never learned ourselves). Now these ways cannot be of the type, as one person at the conference put it, of “looking for that gleam in their eye.” Why not? Because not only do I need to know whether students “get it,” but others need to know. My colleagues, my chair, my dean, the provost, the president, the state, the funders, the prospective employers all need to know whether the students get it. Not to mention the students themselves (we are, it seems, frequently not mentioning the students themselves…).
But is what I need to know the same as what, for instance, the state needs to know, or the prospective employer needs to know? And is what the math professor needs to know the same as what the philosophy professor needs to know? And is any of this what the student, as a human person, needs to know? And can that which each needs to know be measured in the same way? And is that way always one of quantification?
To put it another way, have we been sufficiently critical – self-critical – about the very meaning of education, specifically higher education? If we have been less than adequately critical, dare I say, hypocritical, about this, then all our progressively intensifying efforts to satisfy our assessment obsession will only result in measuring – if it truly can be measured at all – what we are doing now. It will not ever ask, is what we are doing now what we ought to be doing? In the business world we used to say, “What you measure is what you will get.” If there are multiple intelligences, multiple modes of knowing, but we measure only one, then one is what we will end up with – if in fact we end up with anything at all once we abstract a piece out of human experience and make it the be all and end all.
When our students “just assume,” we judge they are not being good critical thinkers. We judge that they are “just checking their memory banks” for received opinions, accepted without reflection, indeed, held dogmatically. We judge that they are participants in “group think,” and are not themselves thinking autonomously or authentically.
But might we not be guilty of the same charges? Are we not assuming a lot about the nature of education and its aims when we launch into obsessive assessment mode? I think we are. At least I am willing to think about it…critically. And so were my colleagues at the conference on Friday.
Some additional questions:
1. What is more important as an outcome in education, right answers or good questions? In other words, should students leave school with more answers or with more questions than when they started?
2. Are all disciplines the same when it comes to their aims? Do we measure progress and maturity the same way across disciplines? And so can assessment be “one size fits all”?
3. Is everything that goes on in a college or university disciplinary? For what is the purpose of a discipline than to form disciples. Can a disciple be a critical thinker? How?
4. What role does eros or philia have in education? Or is it all about discipline?
5. Regarding learning styles, about which there is ever-increasing awareness: should we “type” all our students? Left-brain/right-brain? Auditory/visual/kinesthetic learners? Mulitple intelligences? Jungian? Myers-Briggs? Enneagram? Astrological sign? Kabbalah? Is this a form of packaging our students? And for whose convenience, theirs or ours?
6. Is teaching a technology? Are we laboring under an illusion of technique when we say we “teach critical thinking”?
7. Is life nothing but solving problems? Is even math really nothing but solving problems?
8. Is all learning ultimately about everything? Are the silos we create, the academic division of labor, the most appropriated structure for higher education? At least, do these silos need to be maximally hardened? Should all learning aim at transdisciplinarity (trans- = through, between, and beyond)? How would that work? For instance, as a teacher of philosophy, how much time should I spend on grammar, economics, and history, all of which are vitally important for a deep understanding of my subject?
9. Are we in danger of getting stuck at the meta-educational level in our drive for (quantitative) assessment? In other words, are we going to spend more time talking about education or are we going to focus on educating? (For instance, focusing more on explaining the rubrics than on the subject matter the teaching of which the rubrics are meant to serve.) Are these separable, though?
10. Is social justice an integral part of all higher education? Or is it one matter among others that can be used as a project theme in a course in an effort to teach critical thinking?
11. Even though surveys show that critical thinking is among the highest priorities – if not the highest – of faculty concerns, have we considered that there may, in fact, be an even more profound concern: the quest for wisdom? Or is critical thinking just what we mean by wisdom?
Philosophy – No or Yes?
Posted by eweislogel in Economy, Education Generally, Philosophy, Res Publica, Wisdom on April 10th, 2011
The following two stories came to me on the same day.
The first begins:
I was in the middle of teaching the difference between knowledge and belief when my cell phone buzzed in my pocket. It was a call from the dean of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas College of Liberal Arts. The dean informed me that he was very sorry but, barring an unlikely immediate solution to the state’s financial crisis, the university had decided to eliminate the Philosophy Department, which I chair. In July, I would be given a one-year terminal contract. After that, the university would fire me, along with all of my departmental colleagues, after twenty years of service.
The author, Todd Edwin Jones, continues:
Puzzlement over why people study philosophy has only grown since Socrates’ era. It is not surprising that in hard economic times, when young people are figuring out how best to prepare themselves for the world, many state college administrators and the taxpayers they serve believe that offering classes in philosophy is a luxury they can’t afford.
Suprising? Maybe not. Unwise? Definitely. The reason, of course, is the subject of my previous post.
The second article, by Stanley Aronowitz, begins with this observation:
The reasons why public education is suddenly an issue despite years of neglect by politicians and the media are straightforward. In this depressed economy credentials seem to have lost their advantage. Many parents and politicians claim schools have failed to deliver what students need.
Notice both the similarity and significant difference from the first article. The first article shows that some people (including, preposterously, college and university administrators) think that in difficult economic times, people don’t have the time or money for “luxuries” like philosophy. The second articles takes note that in difficult economic times, people start to notice that “credentials” may not be worth the money – again, see Matthew Stewart’s essay in the Atlantic called “Management Myth.”
Aronowitz claims our obsession has been with the credentials and not with the appropriate education (and all that means), and we’re finding that some of our academic “emperors” are wearing no clothes.
At the core of our trouble is that we “don’t know much philosophy.” He writes:
In France, high schools have required the study of philosophy, though less so in recent years. High school graduates had knowledge of the main traditions of European philosophy in its classical form: the pre-Socratics, Plato and Aristotle, medieval thinkers, Descartes and Kant, Bergson and some 20th-century philosophy.
Philosophy has been excluded from the U.S. secondary schools, with the exception of elite, mostly private schools. This is a telltale sign that we don’t take critical thinking seriously as an educational goal. If philosophy has pedagogic value, it is to teach students the value of doubt, without which it is impossible to penetrate propaganda and discern the presence of particular interests within knowledge.
If I may paraphrase J.S. Mill in order to gain some clarity on this issue:
It is indisputable that the being whose capacities of *understanding* are low has the greatest chance of having the sense of *being* fully satisfied, *i.e., to believe he knows*; and a highly endowed being will always feel that any understanding which he can look for, as the world is constituted, is imperfect. But he can learn to bear its imperfections, if they are at all bearable; and they will not make him envy the being who is indeed unconscious of the imperfections, but only because he feels not at all the good which those imperfections qualify. It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question. The other party to the comparison knows both sides.
So, is this the time to rid our curricula of philosophy? Is there ever such a time? I suppose that depends on who you ask. If you ask the same swine who blame teachers and union labor for the collapse of our economy (!), I suppose they’ll think the single most important initiative to preserve their vision of the world is the extinguishing of all critical thinking. If you ask foolish administrators, who evidently haven’t a clue about what philosophy is, who mistake it for useless fancy, then the answer will be dictated by this ignorance.
But if you ask one who is neither a swine nor a fool, someone who knows both sides, both philosophy and commerce, then the answer will be “Never!”
If you value a free society, if you value economic innovation, creativity, and genuine prosperity, if you value living a supremely human life, philosophy is a necessity, not a luxury.
The Business of Philosophy
Posted by eweislogel in Economy, Education Generally, Philosophy on April 10th, 2011
Have a look this article by Matthew Stewart in the Atlantic on his observations as a philosopher in the “business world”:
His essay “Management Myth” begins like this:
During the seven years that I worked as a management consultant, I spent a lot of time trying to look older than I was. I became pretty good at furrowing my brow and putting on somber expressions. Those who saw through my disguise assumed I made up for my youth with a fabulous education in management. They were wrong about that. I don’t have an M.B.A. I have a doctoral degree in philosophy—nineteenth-century German philosophy, to be precise. Before I took a job telling managers of large corporations things that they arguably should have known already, my work experience was limited to part-time gigs tutoring surly undergraduates in the ways of Hegel and Nietzsche and to a handful of summer jobs, mostly in the less appetizing ends of the fast-food industry.
The strange thing about my utter lack of education in management was that it didn’t seem to matter. As a principal and founding partner of a consulting firm that eventually grew to 600 employees, I interviewed, hired, and worked alongside hundreds of business-school graduates, and the impression I formed of the M.B.A. experience was that it involved taking two years out of your life and going deeply into debt, all for the sake of learning how to keep a straight face while using phrases like “out-of-the-box thinking,” “win-win situation,” and “core competencies.” When it came to picking teammates, I generally held out higher hopes for those individuals who had used their university years to learn about something other than business administration.
After I left the consulting business, in a reversal of the usual order of things, I decided to check out the management literature. Partly, I wanted to “process” my own experience and find out what I had missed in skipping business school. Partly, I had a lot of time on my hands. As I plowed through tomes on competitive strategy, business process re-engineering, and the like, not once did I catch myself thinking, Damn! If only I had known this sooner! Instead, I found myself thinking things I never thought I’d think, like, I’d rather be reading Heidegger! It was a disturbing experience. It thickened the mystery around the question that had nagged me from the start of my business career: Why does management education exist?
Read the rest here.
Anybody who knows my “philosopher in the closet” story about my time with US Steel knows I see it pretty much the same way. As I have been telling students ever since I “got out,” the very best training for a life in the business world is philosophy. I will let you figure out which type of training might be the very worst. (And you’ll also imagine the analogy with the teaching profession….)
P.S. As the author points out, management types engage in “obfuscatory jargon – otherwise known as bullshit.” But there are other types of bullshit (pardon me…): Stewart’s opinions about Descartes vs. the medievals definitely qualifies.
In Praise of the Useless University
Posted by eweislogel in Education Generally, Feed Your Mind, Life itself, Philosophy, The University, Wholeness, Wisdom on March 5th, 2011
Martha Nussbaum, among many others (including almost everyone who writes college catalog entries for humanities departments) argues that the liberal arts are good for business and democracy. The humanities teach us critical thinking skills and help form in us an “enlarged mind” that is useful for becoming successful in the world of commerce and politics.
But should we proponents of the humanities be making our case in this way?
According to Fencing Bear at Prayer, here’s the case for the humanities: There isn’t one.
Why study the humanities? Not because they will make us better citizens. Not because they will make our lives physically more comfortable or enable us to build better engines or cure cancer. But because one of the things that human beings do is reflect on what it means to be a human being and to wonder at the many forms of expression this reflection has taken. That’s it. Take this reflection away and we might as well be robots. Or beasts. Comfortable, well-built robots or healthy beasts, to be sure, but no longer ourselves. Not human.
Rufus F. at the League of Ordinary Gentleman insists we stop selling the humanities for all of the other things they are “good for” and remember that liberal learning is a good in itself, however “useless.”
The humanities are rooted in the study of texts, which will increasingly put them at odds with a society in which reading is becoming vestigial. People who grow up detached from any cultural/historical context will find academics increasingly alien, if not offensive to their sensibilities. Attacks on the humanities will increase. The way to address them isn’t to trick the public into thinking they’re getting something else for their money, but to repeatedly defend the right of academics to hang back from the passions of the day- to be less-than-useful for whatever desires the society wants satisfied today. That means, by the way, academics in the humanities must drop altogether the pretense of political “activism” and, in their public role, become much more explicitly apoliticaland inactivist; conversely, they need to start expressing quite loudly the worth of this eternal hanging back, instead of flattering and placating a culture that is arguably no culture.
Matthew J. Milliner’s piece, “Useless University,” reminds us that John Henry Newman held that truth has two attributes, beauty and power. The power of truth is expressed in useful knowledge, the knowledge and skills required for business, technology, and government, in short the knowledge useful for getting a job. In the liberal arts, on the other hand, the beauty of truth can be discovered and contemplated for its own sake. Such contemplation is an end in itself, pursued just because we can. Milliner draws the conclusion:
If Newman is right, then to justify the liberal arts, which would now include what we call the humanities, as instrumentally useful, is also to betray them….
Of course, we all have to eat. Which means most of us have to have jobs. But do all of us have to have jobs that preclude our having the leisure for contemplating the beauty of being, of the cosmos, of truth? Here’s an idea (from Toby Ord): live like a graduate student…forever!
In praise of uselessness…
Posted by eweislogel in Education Generally, Life itself, On the soul, Philosophy, The University, Wholeness, Wisdom on February 26th, 2011
A student and I were chatting for a few moments after class on Friday. She told me that she enjoys our class because she gets “to think about and discuss some important things,” things that don’t seem to come up over there in the business school where she pursues her major. She wondered whether she should consider changing her major from something she doesn’t like (business) to something she does (seem to) like (philosophy).
Now, I sharpened up this brief conversation to make a point: this is the moment that any honest and self-aware philosophy professor dreads more than any other. What do I say next?
Do I go on and on about how the humanities are not respected in academia (despite the lip-service paid them), about the miserable job prospects for one who wants to pursue humane learning in a professional capacity, about the viciousness of campus politics (because, as they say, so little is at stake), that academia seems to breed negativity, etc.? Who’d recommend to a young person that way of life? And do I say that the humanities are just something we do for a while, now, while we (at least you) are young, that getting a job is the main thing because so much else in our lives hangs on our economic circumstances, about how the humanities are seemingly useless to living in a consumer society such as ours, about how just because we do not enjoy something does not mean it is not good for us—I teach (about) Aristotelian virtue, after all—etc.?
On the other hand, how do I tamp down the obvious enthusiasm—even love—that I have for philosophy and for what I do with my life? The students can’t miss it. And they want that or something like that. It doesn’t have to be academic philosophy, but they want something that will produce the effusive joy in living and doing in them that they see coming from me. They know I’m not doing it for the money (Lord knows). They know I had a career in business that brought in a very nice income. They know I got to see a little of the world—maybe more than most do. But they see that, after all, here I am.
And they see that how I experience the philosophical life generates a joy in me that is akin to the joy someone else might find in stamp collecting or ice hockey or cooking—but that it’s also more than that. The philosophical life is about life itself, about us, even all about me in a non-superficial, non-egocentric sense. Students in college (and even—maybe especially—the “non-traditional” students, the returning adults) are at a point in their lives where it seems to be “all about me”—again, not just in some superficial, selfish sense. In fact, you might say that the superficial, selfish manifestations of “all about me” arise just because there is no authentic arena for thinking about, wondering about, imagining what “me” means for most of these students. When students find such a space, they gravitate towards it.
And yet, the self-aware, honest philosopher would have to ask: This “joy” you’re referring to—is it genuine? Is it coming from pursuing philosophy itself (if it has an “itself”)? Or does it come from being in charge in the classroom, from being on stage, raptly attended to (if you are any good at performing), from being the know-it-all in the room, from not having to meet payroll anymore, or deal with neurotic funders or board members or troublesome employees, or the bottom line? Is philosophy, for me, “all about me,” in a superficial sense? And am I in any way encouraging the same quest for selfish ego-gratification in others, in perhaps impressionable young people?
Just asking oneself these questions is—inescapably—philosophical, an occupational hazard of the philosophical life, the price to be paid for a joyous pursuit of the good, the true, and the beautiful. It’s all in the game. And the answer is: Sure, it’s selfish. But it is not only selfish. When my students drive away in better cars, I know it is not only selfish. What I do is fun, but it is also serious. It is to me, and it is to the students around me. I should really say fellow-students, because (selfishly, yes!) I am still learning, yearning for learning. I know that I do not know.
Knowing computer programming, accounting, or animal husbandry is useful. Not knowing is useless. Constantly examining one’s life is useless. Philosophy is useless. It gets in the way of the useful, upends efficiency and effectiveness, makes trouble where no one noticed anything troubling.
I think this truth about philosophy infects academic philosophy. I would be willing to bet that most departments might frown upon taking philosophy personally—or at least worry over when it gets “too personal,” as if it is not really about persons, teacher-persons and student-persons. Departments, I would imagine, tend to worry about confusing eros with philia. It is a fair concern. If philosophy is personal—about persons—then some sense of intimacy might develop. And then, call the lawyers! It wouldn’t be useful to make education be so personal—not just for these reasons, but also because we’ve made education all about certification. We have tests and grades and such in order to be able to certify. So a “good” philosophy student is one who knows about philosophy—which one might be even if one is not a philosopher—does well by knowing names and dates, how to define terms, the stock arguments, who influenced whom, etc. Making philosophy to be knowing-about-philosophy is very useful for academic philosophy because you can assess it. If you teach virtue ethics, for instance, you could ask questions about Aristotle and Alasdair MacIntyre. But you could never follow a student around the rest of her life trying to assess how virtuous in living she’s become. That’d be creepy.
Knowing about philosophy might be useful outside the academy…it is hard to see how, though. What would you do…open up your own little philosophy shop? I guess you could engage in interesting cocktail party conversation. You could win big on Jeopardy!, I suppose, being able to ring in fast with, “Who was Descartes?” But it won’t come up on a regular basis in corporate headquarters.
I could try to re-describe philosophy—academic philosophy—in terms that make it appear as if it were useful. In academic philosophy, you learn the art of careful, close reading; argumentation; debate; critical thinking; seeing the “big picture;” etc. All these are eminently useful skills to develop. My students know, for instance, that a big part of the reason I made a buck or two in the business world was simply because I developed these skills. I never had business, information technology, or manufacturing courses, but I ended up having a bunch of people who did have these courses work for me. It would be impossible for me to argue that philosophy—at least academic philosophy—has been useless to me.
But all of that makes up the form of academic philosophy, not the content. You should be learning all of those skills across the liberal arts curriculum. But for me, the content—what philosophy is all about—matters. It would be better if conversations about Aristotle, Kant, and Mill came up on board rooms and shop floors as much as in lecture halls. But they usually don’t. So, for many reasons, philosophy happens intensely only on college and university campuses (if it does at all).
Speaking of Aristotle, he defines happiness as an activity of the soul in accordance with virtue. Happiness is not a feeling or emotion, but an activity, an actualization, a way of being, a state once achieved that is permanent. Aristotle says we do all things for the sake of happiness. What this means is that everything we do we do because it at least seems useful to us for getting what we ultimately want: happiness. But this means that happiness—in the sense Aristotle means it—is useless. It is not for the sake of anything. There is no “in order to” that follows happiness. On the contrary, everything else is “in order to” be happy.
If happiness—again, not to be confused with mere pleasure, although it includes it—is what we want, then what we want is, itself, useless. What students see in me—someone taking joy from the ultimately useless, i.e., someone pursuing genuine happiness, someone working on being happy—is just exactly what they are looking for. I don’t mean me, that it is peculiar or specific to me. There is no cult of personality going on here. I mean they see something in me and what I’m doing that goes way beyond me, that, in fact, makes them forget all about me (in both senses of that—forget about EW and forget about their own superficial “all about me” attitude) and start to be able to grasp who they are and what happiness means to them. And they start to question whether “getting a job”—the most useful thing in the world—will mean happiness for them.
But—again—the problem for me, their teacher and somewhat reluctant advisor—is what to say to them about all this. If I say the most important things are the most useless things (i.e., they are goods in themselves, regardless of whether they are useful for anything else), I don’t want them to think there is nothing useful for getting to the “useless.” Aristotle would be emphatic about this. There are many things that are useful for getting to happiness (even as they should not be confused with being “happiness” itself). But if I emphasize just how important the useful things are (like accounting and computer programming, engineering and law, architecture and culinary arts), I don’t want them to think that we’re just wasting time, then, on this useless philosophy stuff.
So my student friend was wondering, in effect: Should I trade useful for useless?
Now what kind of advisor would I be if I simply were to say: Yes, go for it!? Part of me thinks I ought to be sued for nonsupport were I to do so.
My academic advisor answer is: “You know, philosophy is a great minor. Goes great with business management.”
It’s a useful response. Still, I want to give them something a little more useless because, well, useless is more….
(from the archive: originally appeared October 4, 2009)
Tóibín on teaching
Posted by eweislogel in Education Generally, The University on February 7th, 2011
Irish novelist Colm Tóibín is now teaching at University of Manchester. He says of his new gig:
‘I love the interaction with the students, it’s rejuvenating,’ he said at the time. ‘I teach on Mondays and Tuesdays and it literally changes how I feel about those days. I worry a lot about it before I go in. When I’m there I put a lot of work into it, and when it’s over I feel relieved that maybe it was OK. It’s like acting, in a way.’
Full: Amis out, Tóibín in: why literary tutors are big money – The National:
The End of Philosophy???
Posted by eweislogel in Continuing Crisis, Education Generally, Feed Your Mind, Philosophy, Uncategorized on October 29th, 2009
A student’s lament:
If we are to believe that philosophy is some guy’s opinion, then we have forgotten the essence of philosophy. Philosophy is the touchstone of all progress. We must remember that philosophy is the purest form of dissent. If we do not ask questions, if we do not question authority, if we do not pressure ourselves, then society will never advance. All progress comes from change, and philosophers used to be the backbone of change. Whether we go back thousands of years to Socrates’ “corrupting the youth” or more recently to Bertrand Russell’s condemnation of the Vietnam War, it is obvious that philosophers used to take a stand against a callous system. Now they simply summarize and overanalyze all the irrelevant aspects of life.
This “magnificent” philosophy program I have experienced is a glorified course in writing book reports. Philosophy has been badgered to death by dogmatic opinions and shallow thoughts.
More. I hope my students and my colleagues are listening….
A few words in praise of uselessness…
Posted by eweislogel in Education Generally, Feed Your Mind, On the soul, Philosophy, The University, Wholeness, Wisdom on October 4th, 2009
A student and I were chatting for a few moments after class on Friday. She told me that she enjoys our class because she gets “to think about and discuss some important things,” things that don’t seem to come up over there in the business school where she pursues her major. She wondered whether she should consider changing her major from something she doesn’t like (business) to something she does (seem to) like (philosophy).
Now, I sharpened up this brief conversation to make a point: this is the moment that any honest and self-aware philosophy professor dreads more than any other. What do I say next?
Do I go on and on about how the humanities are not respected in academia (despite the lip-service paid them), about the miserable job prospects for one who wants to pursue humane learning in a professional capacity, about the viciousness of campus politics (because, as they say, so little is at stake), that academia seems to breed negativity, etc.? Who’d recommend to a young person that way of life? And do I say that the humanities are just something we do for a while, now, while we (at least you) are young, that getting a job is the main thing because so much else in our lives hangs on our economic circumstances, about how the humanities are seemingly useless to living in a consumer society such as ours, about how just because we do not enjoy something does not mean it is not good for us—I teach (about) Aristotelian virtue, after all—etc.?
On the other hand, how do I tamp down the obvious enthusiasm—even love—that I have for philosophy and for what I do with my life? The students can’t miss it. And they want that or something like that. It doesn’t have to be academic philosophy, but they want something that will produce the effusive joy in living and doing in them that they see coming from me. They know I’m not doing it for the money (Lord knows). They know I had a career in business that brought in a very nice income. They know I got to see a little of the world—maybe more than most do. But they see that, after all, here I am.
And they see that how I experience the philosophical life generates a joy in me that is akin to the joy someone else might find in stamp collecting or ice hockey or cooking—but that it’s also more than that. The philosophical life is about life itself, about us, even all about me in a non-superficial sense. Students in college (and even—maybe especially—the “non-traditional” students, the returning adults) are at a point in their lives where it seems to be “all about me”—again, not just in some superficial, selfish sense. In fact, you might say that the superficial, selfish manifestations of “all about me” arise just because there is no authentic arena for thinking about, wondering about, imagining what “me” means for most of these students. When students find such a space, they gravitate towards it.
And yet, the self-aware, honest philosopher would have to ask: This “joy” you’re referring to—is it genuine? Is it coming from pursuing philosophy itself (if it has an “itself”)? Or does it come from being in charge in the classroom, from being on stage, raptly attended to (if you are any good at performing), from being the know-it-all in the room, from not having to meet payroll anymore, or deal with neurotic funders or board members or troublesome employees, or the bottom line? Is philosophy, for me, “all about me,” in a superficial sense? And am I in any way encouraging the same quest for selfish ego-gratification in others, in perhaps impressionable young people?
Just asking oneself these questions is—inescapably—philosophical, an occupational hazard of the philosophical life, the price to be paid for a joyous pursuit of the good, the true, and the beautiful. It’s all in the game. And the answer is: Sure, it’s selfish. But it is not only selfish. When my students drive away in better cars, I know it is not only selfish. What I do is fun, but it is also serious. It is to me, and it is to the students around me. I should really say fellow-students, because (selfishly, yes!) I am still learning, yearning for learning. I know that I do not know.
Knowing computer programming, accounting, or animal husbandry is useful. Not knowing is useless. Constantly examining one’s life is useless. Philosophy is useless. It gets in the way of the useful, upends efficiency and effectiveness, makes trouble where no one noticed anything troubling.
I think this truth about philosophy infects academic philosophy. I would be willing to bet that most departments might frown upon taking philosophy personally—or at least worry over when it gets “too personal,” as if it is not really about persons, teacher-persons and student-persons. Departments, I would imagine, tend to worry about confusing eros with philia. It is a fair concern. If philosophy is personal—about persons—then some sense of intimacy might develop. And then, call the lawyers! It wouldn’t be useful to make education be so personal—not just for these reasons, but also because we’ve made education all about certification. We have tests and grades and such in order to be able to certify. So a “good” philosophy student is one who knows about philosophy—which one might be even if one is not a philosopher—does well by knowing names and dates, how to define terms, the stock arguments, who influenced whom, etc. Making philosophy to be knowing-about-philosophy is very useful for academic philosophy because you can assess it. If you teach virtue ethics, for instance, you could ask questions about Aristotle and Alasdair MacIntyre. But you could never follow a student around the rest of her life trying to assess how virtuous in living she’s become.
Knowing about philosophy might be useful outside the academy…it is hard to see how, though. What would you do…open up your own little philosophy shop? I guess you could engage in interesting cocktail party conversation. You could win big on Jeopardy!, I suppose, being able to ring in fast with, “Who was Descartes?” But it won’t come up on a regular basis in corporate headquarters.
I could try to re-describe philosophy—academic philosophy—in terms that make it appear as if it were useful. In academic philosophy, you learn the art of careful, close reading; argumentation; debate; critical thinking; seeing the “big picture;” etc. All these are eminently useful skills to develop. My students know, for instance, that a big part of the reason I made a buck or two in the business world was simply because I developed these skills. I never had business, information technology, or manufacturing courses, but I ended up having a bunch of people who did work for me. It would be impossible for me to argue that philosophy—at least academic philosophy—has been useless to me.
But all of that makes up the form of academic philosophy, not the content. You should be learning all of those skills across the liberal arts curriculum. But for me, the content—what philosophy is all about—matters. It would be better if conversations about Aristotle, Kant, and Mill came up on board rooms and shop floors as much as in lecture halls. But they usually don’t. So, for many reasons, philosophy happens only intensely on college and university campuses (if it does at all).
Speaking of Aristotle, he defines happiness as an activity of the soul in accordance with virtue. Happiness is not a feeling or emotion, but an activity, an actualization, a way of being, a state once achieved that is permanent. Aristotle says we do all things for the sake of happiness. What this means is that everything we do we do because it at least seems useful to us for getting what we ultimately want: happiness. But this means that happiness—in the sense Aristotle means it—is useless. It is not for anything. There is no “in order to” that follows happiness. On the contrary, everything else is “in order to” be happy.
If happiness—again, not to be confused with mere pleasure, although it includes it—is what we want, then what we want is, itself, useless. What students see in me—someone taking joy from the ultimately useless, i.e., someone pursuing genuine happiness, someone working on being happy—is just exactly what they are looking for. I don’t mean me, that it is peculiar or specific to me. There is no cult of personality going on here. I mean they see something in me and what I’m doing that goes way beyond me, that, in fact, makes them forget all about me (in both senses of that—forget about EW and forget about their own superficial “all about me” attitude) and start to be able to grasp who they are and what happiness means to them. And they start to question whether “getting a job”—the most useful thing in the world—will mean happiness for them.
But—again—the problem for me, their teacher and somewhat reluctant advisor—is what to say to them about all this. If I say the most important things are the most useless things (i.e., they are goods in themselves, regardless of whether they are useful for anything else), I don’t want them to think there is nothing useful for getting to the “useless.” Aristotle would be emphatic about this. There are many things that are useful for getting to happiness (even as they should not be confused with being “happiness” itself). But if I emphasize just how important the useful things are (like accounting and computer programming, engineering and law, architecture and culinary arts), I don’t want them to think that we’re just wasting time, then, on this useless philosophy stuff.
So my student friend was wondering, in effect: Should I trade useful for useless?
Now what kind of advisor would I be if I simply were to say: Yes, go for it!? Part of me thinks I ought to be sued for nonsupport were I to do so.
My academic advisor answer is: “You know, philosophy is a great minor. Goes great with business management.”
It’s a useful response. Still, I want to give them something a little more useless because, well, useless is more….