Discuss-2

Now we come to the portion of our online class that invites you to consider some ideas that will be discussed when we meet. Please be aware that there are no "right" or "wrong" answers here. Once you feel you have a fairly good start on the material on the "Week 2" page, please give some thought to these "higher order" questions. After our presenters have discussed their author and philsopher, it is hoped that everyone will bring their ideas into the discussions.

Most of these questions will ask you to compare and contrast ideas that emerged from the authors' time periods and consider what impact their works have had on education today. We will bring in some contemporary thinkers who have written about these ideas and expressed their concerns about the belief systems set in motion from antiquity to the present. Please hold these ideas in comparison to your own.

Introduction to Contemporary Educational Theory

What do we mean in education when we talk about "theory"? It is hard to define but may best be explained by saying that it includes writings from outside the field of education but directly concern it. Particular, large ideas may resonate with concepts in education, and because other thinkers have done analyses of culture, language, philosophy, psychology, sociology, gender, history, or politics, their works add new perspectives on educational matters. "Theory" does not imply a set of methods, but a looser collection of works that are tied to arguments in the fields. Works that have become "educational theory" may suggest implications for pedagogy, the aims of education, epistemology, curriculum, meaning, nature and culture, public vs. private experience, the larger historical influences on individual experience and so on.

Questions for Discussion:

1. One thing we must keep in mind when we talk about educational theory is that it tends to project a "utopia". For example, Plato's Republic describes the ideal society and educational system. Other educational theories focus on an ideal world where "normal" students come to class prepared to learn; where there are ideal conditions in the schools; curriculum is relevant with texts, knowledge forms and so on that are all optimal. With this in mind, do you think educational theory is worth considering as we look at education? Or is this the real "fiction" and not helpful because we need to look at the "facts"?

2. In view of this utopia, what do we see in Plato? In Homer?

3. Richard Rorty has written of the failure of philosophy and religion to provide any indisputable "truths" (redemptive truth) and claims that literature is the only field that can teach us anything new. He says,

(There) ...is what Heidegger called the hope for authenticity—the hope to be one’s own person rather than merely the creation of one’s education or one’s environment. As Heidegger emphasized, to achieve authenticity in this sense is not necessarily to reject one’s past. It may instead be a matter of reinterpreting that past so as to make it more suitable for one’s own purposes. What matters is to have seen one or more alternatives to the purposes that most people take for granted, and to have chosen among these alternatives--thereby, in some measure, creating yourself. As Harold Bloom has recently reminded us, the point of reading a great many books is to become aware of a great number of alternative purposes, and the point of that is to become an autonomous self. Autonomy, in this un-Kantian and distinctively Bloomian sense, is pretty much the same thing as Heideggerian authenticity.

For members of the literary culture, redemption is to be achieved by getting in touch with the present limits of the human imagination. That is why a literary culture is always in search of novelty, always hoping to spot what Shelley called “the shadows that futurity casts upon the present”, rather than trying to escape from the temporal to the eternal. It is a premise of this culture that though the imagination has present limits, these limits are capable of being extended forever. The imagination endlessly consumes its own artifacts. It is an ever-living, ever-expanding, fire. It is as subject to time and chance as are the flies and the worms, but while it endures and preserves the memory of its past, it will continue to transcend its previous limits. Though the fear of belatedness is ever present within the literary culture, this very fear makes for an intenser blaze.

And,

... the literary intellectual substitutes the Bloomian thought that the more books you read, the more ways of being human you have considered, the more human you become—the less tempted by dreams of an escape from time and chance, the more convinced that we humans have nothing to rely on save one another.

I hope that what I have said so far has given some plausibility to my thesis that the last five centuries of Western intellectual life may usefully be thought of first as progress from religion to philosophy, and then from philosophy to literature. I call it progress because I see philosophy as a transitional stage in a process of gradually increasing self-reliance. The great virtue of our new-found literary culture is that it tells young intellectuals that the only source of redemption is the human imagination, and that this fact should occasion pride rather than despair. (excerpted from "The Decline of Redemptive Truth and the Rise of a Literary Culture" 2000) http://www.stanford.edu/~rrorty/decline.htm

Please jot down a few of your ideas on this subject.

4. R.G. Collingwood (in The Principles of Art) claims that the myth about Plato's banishing the poet from the idea city is due to a misreading of the Republic. (49). The problem for Plato is the decadence of Greek society and symptomatic of this was the substitution of magical, religious-based art with a new, trivial amusement art. (52). Plato put all his efforts into counteracting the corruption he foresaw spinning out of control. Collingwood says, "Once a class had been created whose only interest lay in amusement, it acted as an abcess which by degrees drew away all emotional energies from the affairs of real life. Nothing could arrest the spread of amusement; no one...could regenerate it by infusing into it a new spirit of religious purpose or artistic austerity." (99). The Greeks eventually fell to the new consciousness that had gathered strength, one for whom practical life was so interesting it had no need of amusement: the Romans. But the cycle was repeated, and Rome fell to the Christians, and so on through the rise and fall of kings and queens and eras. Today we watch the success of television, the film industry, football, etc. "There is no certainty that our civilization is tracing a path like that of the later Roman Empire. But the parallel, so far as it has yet developed, is alarmingly close. The disaster may be preventible, but the danger is real. Is there anything we can do?" (102-103). What do you think?

Please go to the game for Week 2. (Click on top left "Game-2") Have fun!