I’m just beginning to gear up to teach the educational philosophy course during J-term. It’s a course I enjoy teaching and one I think of critical importance in the training of “real educators” for the church. There is some frustration in holding the conviction that philosophy is critical to one’s effectiveness as an educator, and living into the pragmatic limitation of being able to teach only one educational philosophy course during a three week J-term. But sometimes one does the best one can with what one has (how’s that for a philosophy?).
Writer Jonathan Mahler writes in The New York Times Magazine (Sep. 19, 2008) an interesting piece on philosophy Prof. Kelley Jolley of Auburn University titled, “The Thinker.”
Here are some excerpts:
This is not to say that Jolley isn’t, above all, a philosopher. It’s just that he sees philosophy less as a profession than as a way of looking at, of being in, the world. “I am convinced that philosophy is not just about theory,” he told me. “It’s about a life well lived and thoughts truly thought.”
As to the question “Can philosophy be taught?”:
Being a philosopher requires you to engage in the practice of relentless inquiry about everything, so it’s not surprising that Jolley has spent untold hours puzzling over how to best teach the discipline itself. What he has decided is that philosophy can’t be taught — or learned — like other academic subjects. To begin with, it takes longer. “Plato said that you become a philosopher by spending ‘much time’ in sympathy with other philosophers,” he told me. “Much time. I take that very seriously.” We were sitting in his office, which was dark with academic books and journals; a large paperweight reading “Think” sat amid the clutter on his desk. “Plato,” he went on, “talked about it as a process of ‘sparking forth,’ that as you spend more time with other philosophers, you eventually catch the flame. That’s how I think about teaching philosophy.”
And as to the question about how to teach philosophy:
Jolley says he thinks of his relationships with his students less as teacher-student than as master-apprentice. His goal, as he sees it, isn’t to teach students about philosophy; it is to show them what it means to think philosophically, to actually be a philosopher.
I found the article rewarding and inspiring. I hope you’ll read it.
