Thinking about education at the levels discussed in this article is something completely new in my own schema about what it means to be an educator. Since there was a lot of information covered and most of it is new to me, I would like to approach the material on educational philosophies by arguing which elements of each I feel to be most relevant to education today. First of all, however, there is one element of many of the philosophies and theories which I do not agree with at all, and that is the practice of treating the literary “classics” of Western writers as the basis for education and how we should be living our lives. While I see no problem with using these texts as studies in literature and history and discussing how they have affected our society, telling students that they should model how we think and act seems like cultural domination at its most obvious. That being said, I also think that I would probably wind up incorporating elements from several of the philosophies into my view of what educations should accomplish. To begin with Idealist philosophy, I can see that the Socratic method may be helpful in certain situations for scaffolding the ability of students to form ideas about topics and to go through the questioning process themselves. Aside from this single practice, however, I do not think that I currently embrace the more general viewpoint of education as being the medium through which ideas surface from a type of collective subconscious.
I have problems with the realist view, which seems to treat schools as places where academic subjects will be drilled into students and mastery of subject content is the main goal of the academic process. I embrace a view that includes some problem solving or decision-making, not pure memorization, which is more consistent with pragmatism. Learning from experience and changing curriculum and instructional methods with the changing times seems like it would better equip students to deal with a changing world. The focus on interdisciplinary education is another positive aspect that I think comes out of the pragmatist view. However, the scientific method is promoted as the sole problem solving mechanism, which might clash with some students’ cultures.
The parts of these philosophies that it is hardest to wrap my mind around are those that deal with the way philosophies shape values. The abstract nature of the subject, and the knowledge that the values of my students come from such a variety of experiences, makes a discussion of values derived from philosophy hard to apply when thinking about a classroom setting. This is why existentialism is harder for me to understand, since the philosophy in general is based so much on forming one’s own values. After some reflection, it seems to me that the goals of an existentialist classroom environment would certainly create some problems in schools, especially when it comes to that ever-looming threat of school assessment through standardized testing. While the concept of letting students explore topics freely and without any type of curriculum structure at all may be difficult, I think the idea of the teacher “creating an awareness in each student that he or she is ultimately responsible for his or her own education and self-definition” is interesting. When I think about it, students really are, to a certain extent, responsible for their own education in that they decide how to do assignments, what to include in projects, how to participate in discussions, and ultimately how they decide to use new information in their lives. My point to all of this is, basically, I find it hard to embrace the ideas of one philosophy in particular, but it seems like each one results in some practice that I think may be applicable to the classroom.
