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CHAPTER 6: Philosophical Roots of Education or examples to illustrate them. For example, an idealist teacher of literature might introduce the general concept of respect for others who are different from us by referring to Henry David Thoreau, who took his own path to civil disobedience at Walden Pond.
6-2b Educational Implications
Socratic method The method
of inquiry named for the ancient Greek philosopher, Socrates, who asked probing questions about truth, goodness, and beauty that caused his students to examine their beliefs and values.
If you were to ask an idealist teacher, “What is knowledge?” she or he would reply that knowledge is about the universal spiritual truths that underlie reality and about the ideas that reflect that truth. Because knowledge is about universal ideas, then education is the intellectual process of bringing these ideas to the learner’s consciousness. If you ask an idealist teacher, “What is the school?” she or he would answer that it is an intellectual institution where teachers and students pursue the questions Socrates and Plato asked: “What is truth? What is beauty? What is the good life?” To answer these questions, we need to think deeply and bring to consciousness the answers that are present in our minds. We need to read the great books and learn to appreciate the great works of art and music in which writers, artists, and composers have captured insights into this truth. Who should attend school? The idealist would say everyone. Although students have varying intellectual abilities, all should have the opportunity to cultivate their minds as far as possible. While gifted students need the greatest intellectual challenges, all students have the right and opportunity to pursue the same intellectual curriculum. How should we teach? The idealist would say that thinking and learning are the processes of bringing ideas to our conscious reflection. The Socratic method, in which the teacher stimulates the learner’s awareness of ideas by asking leading questions, is a very engaging approach to learning.7 Modeling is another part of idealist instruction. Teachers should be intellectual and ethical models that students can emulate. Idealists want schools and teachers to maintain high intellectual standards of academic quality and resist the entry of anything that leads to mediocrity. In Plato’s Republic, for example, intellectual standards were so high that only a gifted minority became philosopher-kings. Today’s idealists would insist that individuals should have an education that will take them as far as their intellectual ability enables them to go. Idealists would endorse standards that require teachers to have high intellectual expectations of students and require students to strive to achieve intellectual excellence. Standards, moreover, would not be geared to the statistical average but should raise expectations as high as possible. Standardization, however, can never be a substitute for individual intellectual and moral excellence.
6-2c Application to Schools and Classrooms Rejecting the materialism, consumerism, and the momentary popularity of sensationalism in the contemporary mass media society, idealism wants schools to be stable places of teaching and learning. It wants teachers to be vital agents in guiding students to realize their fullest intellectual potential; it encourages teachers and their students to encounter and appreciate the finest and most enduring achievements of the culture. Teachers should introduce students to the classics—great and enduring works of art, literature, and music—so that they can experience and share in the time-tested cultural values these works convey. In using technology or any innovation, idealists want educators to keep their attention focused on education’s paramount purpose of searching for the truth in schools that are places of the mind. While they understand that Internet can make the
7 For Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, see C. D. C. Reeve, “The Socratic Movement,” in Randall Curren, ed., A Companion to the Philosophy of Education (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), pp. 7–24. Also, see Paul Ricoeur, Being, Essence and Substance in Plato and Aristotle (Cambridge, UK: Polity Books, 2013).
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