A SOCRATIC INTERLUDE

I have in the last two postings made a case:  those concerned with local schools should know something about educational philosophies.  This includes those parents who take an active role in their children’s education.  And while I believe that local business people and other citizens should be likewise engaged, they too would benefit in their interactions with schools by knowing this material.  The call is not for such people to be experts, but to have a conversational familiarity with the subject.  The main reasons for this is to apply that knowledge toward, one, evaluating the schools in question – each philosophy sets a normative direction for what a particular school’s efforts should be – and, two, determining where the school people they interact with are “coming from.”  The lay person can be armed with an albeit limited language so that interactions can be more meaningful and better directed. 

This posting is dedicated to reviewing the first of four philosophical traditions and two “near” philosophical traditions.  The first addressed philosophy is considered the most conservative of the four and is one of two philosophies that are classified as teacher centered approaches to education; I’ll explain shortly.

Perennialism, at its core, is based on an assumption.  That is, in life, throughout the course of history, there is a list of principles and concerns that is timeless, universal, and deserving of our continued interest.  This list includes liberty, happiness, equality, trust, and the like.  This focus is preferred over educational efforts to convey facts, structures, or processes, for example.  As these listed concerns indicate, topics of interest are aimed at human issues as opposed to technical, mechanical, or vocational topics.  A main difference between perennialism and essentialism, the other conservative philosophy, is that essentialism tends to be centered on what is considered essential knowledge and skills for the given economy in a school’s location.  So, present day conditions, for example, would be aimed, in part, at teaching computer skills.  Perennialism would consider such a focus short-sighted and a bit superfluous.  Those who subscribe to perennialism would instead state that the aim of education is to prepare students to live more meaningful lives and that calls for them to be engaged in dialogues over the time honored principles and values, such as those just listed, as they pertain to contemporary realities. In terms of initiating such discussions, students should be exposed to the great thinkers of Western Civilization. 

This approach has been popularly related to the Great Books program that originated at Columbia University through the efforts of John Erskine back in the 1920s and later popularized chiefly through the public efforts of Mortimer Adler.  Encyclopedia Britannica publishes the set known as the Great Books series and provides in-service teacher training programs on the use of the Great Books for classroom use.  Their training is based on perennialist principles and teaching instructional strategies.  Adler provides the following three standards by which to include a particular work in the Great Books collection:

·        The book has contemporary significance; that is, it has relevance to the problems and issues of our time;

·        The book is inexhaustible; it can be read again and again with benefit; “This is an exacting criterion, an ideal that is fully attained by only a small number of the 511 works that [were] selected.  It is approximated in varying degrees by the rest.”

·        The book is relevant to a large number of the great ideas and great issues that have occupied the minds of thinking individuals for the last 25 centuries.[1]

Along with the assumption regarding timeless principles and values, perennialism also assumes that mental capacity can be likened to a muscle and that appropriate educational efforts should be about exercising that “muscle” by engaging in active discussions that challenge accepted beliefs and values.  If this sounds familiar, it is highly reliant on the Socratic method.  Based on, in my opinion, a not so accurate view of Socrates’ “gadfly” role in ancient Athens, teachers skillfully using focused questions challenge students to reflect and reconsider opinions, beliefs, values, and attitudes associated with an issue.  The questions would probably reflect some position proffered by a great thinker.  Who are these thinkers?  The list includes, randomly, Plato, Livy, Cicero, Plutarch, Francis Bacon, Rene Descartes, Jane Austin, Charles Darwin; you get the idea.

What can be said about perennialism in relation to federation theory?  In effect, federation theory is a perennialist approach in that it banks on Enlightenment ideals – its strong reliance on reason, for example – as those ideals influenced the philosophical basis of our nation’s constitutional principles.  But it does not solely depend on this tradition (I will further develop this theme when in a future posting I review progressivism).  Pure perennialism has an absolutist view of values; they are valuable in and of themselves and do not rely on consequential factors.  That is what gives these values and principles their timeless character.  As with essentialism, this philosophy has an objective view of reality – it shies away from relativistic and constructed views of knowledge.  The teacher is expected to control the teaching/learning process, although he or she is counted on to pose the challenging questions mentioned above.  In this, perennialist ideals call on teachers to open instruction so that students can engage in the give and take of dialectic discussion.  This process will find corresponding strategies in the more liberal philosophies of progressivism and reconstructionism.  As such, it also mirrors what I have indicated my favored instructional approach would be in implementing federation theory content – a modified values clarification approach.

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[1] Wikipedia, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_books .

A FUNCTIONAL PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION

With the last posting, I began a series of entries in which I will review the four prominent philosophies that dominate the literature of curricular studies.  In addition, I will add another posting that will report on two off-shoot philosophies or “sort of” philosophies.  But before I begin, I will comment on the function that educational philosophies should provide, but under the structural realities of our public school systems, they do not.  As I review the ideas that constitute the separate philosophies, ask yourself:  in a given school, how important is it for the teaching staff at that school to share in a unifying philosophy?  Much of the debate among educators over philosophy is about which one is best.  While important, a much more important concern is how unified the teaching staff of a school is in supporting that school’s prevailing philosophy.  Private schools are in a better position to insure that the teachers they hire will fall within the philosophical tradition of that school.  They are in a better position to insist on such compliance since these teachers do not enjoy employment protection that their counterparts have in the public schools.  But why is this an issue of any standing?

Consider your typical public school.  If you were to ask an average teacher what philosophy of education he or she subscribes to, you would get either a blank stare or some extended version of “I teach because I believe in education” or “I believe in the future” or “I love children” or a similar response.  If you instead ask if the teacher is a Perennialist, an Essentialist, a Progressive, or a Reconstructionist, then you would more than likely see a bewildered face.  They might have heard these terms some time ago in college, but chances are that that was some time ago and the concern has not been revisited in all the ensuing years.  But the problem is that such negligence can be the source of many problems a school is facing. 

The problem has to do with the lack of coordination in how different philosophies are implemented.  Even though most teachers in public schools, whether they know it or not, tend to be Essentialists, there are those who are not.  I would say that sprinkled among a given faculty of any size, you will find several Progressives and a few Perennialists.  To further complicate matters, you might have an administrator, even a principal, who is not an Essentialist, but a follower of one of the other philosophies.  Why are they this, that, or the other?  Because, in their teacher training programs, they were trained to be that “kind of teacher” and they took the lessons to heart.  It is their way of trying to be a good teacher.  The secret they don’t share in is that for any of these philosophies to be successful, it has to be practiced in a supportive environment.  Let me illustrate.

Consider expectations.  I have, in this blog, described education as a discipline, not a consumer service.  Education demands effort and, for many, one form of sacrifice or another.  Usually, students upon entering school do not have an appreciation for what education is going to afford them.  Parents and teachers strive to put a positive spin on the demands of education; they might put a great deal of effort in heightening the intellectual pleasures that education can provide.  Or they might offer rewards for diligent work and the like.  But the bottom line is that the student is asked to exert effort and that effort is not going to be entertaining all or even most of the time.  Under such a discipline, it is useful for those involved – both for teachers and students – to have expectations met.  This simple requirement is fundamentally disrupted when a student proceeds from classroom to classroom with various views about what the whole enterprise concerns.  This is further detrimental when the majority is of one philosophy with limited numbers being the other philosophies.  This situation makes the efforts of those in the minority subject to feelings that what they are about, what they are asking and demanding of students, is somehow illegitimate.  And since, as a group, teachers are ill-informed about what it means to be an Essentialist, for example, what results is an approach that lacks consistency.  Teaching becomes a hodge-podge of activities or a singular instructional strategy in which students are victimized not by variety, but by boring repetition as those teachers lecture all the time or pass out one worksheet after another.   None of these philosophies promote or justify such approaches.

To get back to the notion of a supportive environment, I wish that public school principals were, first, knowledgeable and appreciative of the function of philosophies and, second, in a position to hire and evaluate teachers according to the philosophy the principal espouses.  This choice should be a public one; all stakeholders should know, even before being hired, what the philosophical leanings of a principal or potential principal are.  In turn, that principal should be allowed to hire those educators who share in his or her philosophy.  

I hold the philosophy I subscribe to because I believe it leads to the best educational results.  That means, if implemented by a sufficiently talented teacher, using that philosophy will arrive at the best possible result for the student and the community in which the student resides.  But that opinion does not preclude me from believing that any of the philosophies can lead to positive results.  The advocates of each can cite supportive empirical evidence as to the viability of their preferred philosophy.  As I indicated above, what is more important than the philosophy a school utilizes is the consistency in which the philosophy is used.  So what is a functional philosophy?  It is a philosophy a faculty can implement wholeheartedly and skillfully.