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[Music] welcome to this course on philosophy of education my name is stephen hicks i'm a professor of philosophy and one of my very strong areas of academic and professional interest is education in this course in philosophy of education a good place to start is with two natural questions what is education what is philosophy and then a third follow-up question what does philosophy have to do with education now in this course we're not going to presuppose uh extensive background knowledge in
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educational theory and practice nor are we going to presuppose extensive background knowledge in philosophy so we can start uh at the beginning so to speak so with that in mind let's go to the board here where i have the the title of the course uh philosophy of education written down and start with uh those two questions first education what is this if we were to try to define it or come up with an explanatory descriptor sentence in the first place how would we go about doing so well we
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might start by brainstorming the kinds of things that come to mind when we think about education certainly we start to think about knowledge so we can write that down we might think about skills all right that operationalize or put the the knowledge into practice uh we in a social setting know that there is a student usually the student is a younger person uh if it's a social activity the person is not self-taught or uh or an auto-didact there's typically a teacher right an instructor who is
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guiding the person right through the through the process it is a process might be an important concept here typically it's a a longer process starting with younger people typically the teachers are older people who are are more experienced but at a certain point we want the students not to be under the tutelage of a teacher anymore that we're trying to transform the the students into adults who uh once they've finished their formal schooling and their formal education can
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go forth and live their their lives more independently they may be lifelong learners of course but uh that's not primarily what the educational process is is about okay now suppose we then tried to put all of this together in a definition we said all right here is education all right definition it's a process
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of learning
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and teaching
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primarily the young
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the knowledge and skills
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necessary for adult life
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all right good starting point uh points of controversy that are are worth raising questions about here we know that of course older people can be educated as well some people will come back for a second educational career so do we need to expand the definition in that category we know that there are people who are self-taught so is the teaching part necessary here we've mentioned knowledge and skills are there other things that we need to add do we for example talk about
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character uh is that something that we essentially should add so in various ways we could have a discussion and debate about the exact scope and application of this particular definition but i'm going to use this as an initial good starting point for introducing education in its connection to philosophy we have enough to go on to get that on the board we could take this initial definition as serving generically for any species in the development of which the young
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have a process of learning before they are ready to function fully as adults of whatever type of species that they are of course most plants they don't have any learning component other species perhaps like insects and fish and most will have a minimal amount of learning that they engage in in their lives before they're fully functioning adults for more complicated species though it may be a matter of a season cats for example might be born in the spring learn over the course of several months
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as they are growing into adult cats and then by the fall come to sexual maturity and know everything that they need to know to function as adult cats dogs typically are a little bit longer dolphins chimpanzees and elephants complicated species like that their maturity is a longer process a matter of many years but even in the case of those more complicated animals the amount of actual learning and education that they need to uh acquire in order to be able to function as adults in that species is
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is much less than the amount of time that human beings engage in their education so that points up i think one important philosophically charged fact about human education that i want to draw our attention to at the outset and that is the length of time that we as human beings devote to this process of education uh by the time for example even if we take as a baseline puberty say here biologically and hopefully psychologically a young human being is going through the process of becoming an
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adult human being that is 12 to 13 years on average and so the idea is that childhood being a process of a dozen years or more and that the primary thing that the students should be engaged in or that the young person should be engaged in that points is being a student or learning the things that he or she needs to be able to function right as a human being that is an enormous investment in in time the other important thing and i think the distinctive thing about human
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education is that we engage in the process systematically right so i'm going to use an abstract noun systematicity in the other animal species even those other animal species for which there is an extended learning period before the the the young animal becomes an adult the educational process is largely a matter of hit or miss right when an opportunity arises for the say the mother wolf to teach the young cub a lesson in hunting then a hunting lesson will ensue right or any sort of other
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lesson that arises but it's more opportunistic and over the course in a helter skelter kind of fashion that the young animal will be exposed to the kinds of things that he or she needs to know in order to function as an adult when we as human beings do our education education of our young we don't do it health or skelter at least for the most part we shouldn't be doing it and we don't do it that way we think about what we're doing we're thinking systematically in the following sense we
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want the students to know these things these things these things and so forth and we come up with a hopefully thoroughly itemized list of all the things that we want the student to know all of the skills that we want the person to know the character traits if we include character traits uh that we want the students to know we attend to various developmental issues students can't be exposed to these things before they've learned these things they can't learn these things before they learn
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these things and so we're thinking about this long process over the course of many years and we're setting up the process at the beginning to set up for the middle to set up for the the ultimate and pendulum parts of the the processes and so the idea then is that we're developing systems right of education and then we bring the students into that system right so to speak third feature i want to emphasize is the amount of not time that we invest in the process but the amount of wealth
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that we as human beings invest in the process particularly as we culturally become wealthier we start to devote systematically more resources both time resources and monetary resources to the process of education uh typically uh any family that is moving from a state of poverty to a state of not being in poverty they start to acquire uh things that used to be luxuries in their lives almost without exception one of the first luxuries that parents invest in is more
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education for their children more books more schooling more soccer lessons more piano lessons and and so forth and we can also track this across cultures uh the amount of money that we invest in the amount of time that we invest goes up proportionately as our cultures become older for example i can recall in my grandparents generation they were getting their education in the first part of the 20th century the standard for them particularly in my family my last name is hicks so you
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might make a judgment from there an accurate judgment that i come from a long line of farmers but they're the standard education that which was thought to be proficient preparation for adult life was to get up to about eighth grade education and once you got your eighth degree diploma you needed basically everything you needed to know in order to be able to function efficiently and productively as a farmer in that that particular culture now that in historical time is already a
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major investment of both wealth resources and time resources in the early part of the 20th century by the time we get to say my parents generation the expectations has changed the culture was wealthier by the time we got to the middle part of the 20th century when my parents were getting their education and their eighth grade education was no longer considered to be sufficient everybody was expected to give high school a try and there started to be a stigma attached to being a high school
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dropout right so to speak so high school graduation is then the new standard and we're willing to make the wealth commitment and the amount of time commitment and so we're not expecting students to be fully functioning adults by the time they're 13 or 14 instead we're expecting them to be fully functional adults by the time they are 17 or 18. by the time we get to my education getting my education in the latter part of the 20th century again the culture is wealthier
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society is more complicated uh we are going to also afford to have an extended childhood but there the expectations changed and the expectation was that people of my generation everybody should give college a try now my understanding is that by the early part of the 20th century only about 23 to 25 percent of the adult canadian and american population has a college degree but the new aspiration is being set that giving college is a try and now as we're getting into the 21st
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century and the wealthy countries going on for graduate school to get a professional degree or a phd is also something that we are encouraging more systematically and and more broadly now the point then is if you put all of these three together the length of time that we as human beings investigate or invest rather in education the systematic process that we are engaging in and the amount of wealth that we are asking ourselves and other people to spend on this particular
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problem this bears thinking upon so if this is what we're doing and we say for example by the time we're in our generation college graduates a student is 22 years or so for the first 22 years of this person's life we want their primary focus to be on education and of course maybe having a part-time job here and there doing their chores and having lots of time for fun but primarily their project is the educational process of learning to be a fully functional adult
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what are we doing right that warrants that enormous expenditure of wealth what are we doing such that we are investing 22 years of that child's life and what system are we going to put in place that warrants that amount of wealth being spent and that amount of time being put to the time to the extent that we start then thinking about those questions we're necessarily going to bump into philosophical questions we start to think strategically in terms of the big
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picture of education anytime you start to think strategically in big picture about anything you're entering the territory of philosophy and that'll be my next topic what's this got to do with philosophy all right so i've rewritten the initial definition of education up in the right-hand corner in order to make more room here start making connections to this as a statement of the educational uh goal to philosophy i want to develop an analogy to a production line suppose
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we think of a a factory where uh your your job is to make something or other if you're going to do your job well then there are certain things that are absolutely necessary you have to obviously have a clear conception of what it is that you're trying to produce you also have to have a clear conception of what your initial raw materials are what they're capable of and then you have to have a process a central process that takes those raw materials and systematically transforms them in such a
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fashion so you get the desired output right so to speak so i'm going to put uh a production line abstractly right on the on the board here and say this is at the beginning of the process we have an input we have some sort of raw materials right that are coming in and then we have some conception of an output at the end of the process what it is that we want to to come out and then in the middle here we have right production okay so we take the raw materials we do
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various sorts of productive things with them to them uh on their behalf and then at the end of the result we have the desired output and it's off and running now let's draw the analogy crudely to uh to education in the case of education our input is going to be someone who is young a youngster right a child right at some point the person comes into the the formal educational system we then work with the student on the student and so forth whatever verbs are
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appropriate at this point through a long process that we call the process of education right and what we're trying to produce is an educated youngster who at the end of the process is an adult now i want to add just a few more clarifying things obviously at the beginning we're talking in our context about a young human being so the first thing we have to do is understand as anybody in any productive field understand what our raw material is so uh we have young human being
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coming into the process as raw material what am i dealing with in my if i'm a teacher i'm a kindergarten teacher i've got 15 or 20 of them show up in my classroom on day one of the new school year uh what am i dealing with what uh kinds of beings uh have i here what are their capacities what can i expect of them and so forth well so we started saying things like the followings well young human beings we know they have certain needs so might start to brainstorm various kinds
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of needs that they have and certainly they have uh various nutrition needs right they can go for a certain amount of time and then they need to have a a snack right of something like that or perhaps lunch uh and that is a physical need so we can use the symbol phi for things physical in this context here so one need they have is a nutrition need it might be the case that they can go for a certain amount of time and then they need to take a break so they might have
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a point at which they need to have a little nap right or or take a break of some other need in addition to having various straightforward physical needs they're more complicated being they have psychological needs and i'll use the greek symbol psi here for the psychological they have curiosity needs and so they might need certain sorts of stimulus otherwise they get bored and they tune various things out they might have various needs for comfort if they get overwhelmed by
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certain amounts of tier of material and so they might have us an emotional need right for comfort right at a certain point we can also specify their
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right capacities know for example if they are four or five years old right then physically they on average have a certain amount of strength right we can expect them to be able to lift something say i'm just making this number up up to 10 pounds but they do not have the physical capacity to lift things that are 50 pounds or or 100 pounds so we should be attentive in any sort of physical thing that we're asking them to do to whatever their their their strengths are in this case or they might
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have various kinds of dexterity right they might be able to manipulate certain objects with their hands right can they hold a pencil or pen uh in such a way as to be able to to write letters and so forth that would be something we would need to know if we're going to do to educate them and we also know that they have certain psychological capacities that would be important here they do have a capacity for a certain amount of abstract thought all right they have a fairly well
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developed vocabulary by the time they're four or five years old but nonetheless they're not yet ready for abstract algebra let alone calculus so we have to uh figure things out at appropriate capacity level here and we also know that they may have a certain amount of emotional resilience say they are dealing with challenging issues new circumstances a certain amount of failures and disappointments but they can bounce back under certain circumstances emotionally but that
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capacity is not unlimited at the age of five so what we then are doing is developing a kind of chart here what are the needs of the of the young human being both physically and psychologically what capacities does that human being have both again psychologically and physically now at the beginning of the process then having all of this worked out is going to be absolutely important for the teacher another important thing is for a teacher to know is that all of these things are developmental
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all right even uh for students in the at the at the beginning of age five compared to students at the end of age five that's a hugely uh important developmental year a lot can transform itself uh and so we need to be sensitive to the individual's developmental path as well as knowing in general what the averages are what we can expect developmentally from four-year-olds five-year-olds and on up through the process as well so none of this by itself is especially
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philosophical i think part of teacher training or part of being able to do education professionally involves knowing all of this stuff but the more directly relevant fields of inquiry that are uh are important here i think are going to be of course biology human biology human developmental biology and so part of professional teacher training and ongoing teacher professionalism is keeping up with what we are learning and we're learning a lot on a regular basis continuously in
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in developmental biology as it bears on the age-appropriate uh material for the students that we will be dealing with also the same can be said for psychology young human beings are very complicated psychological beings as well and so keeping up with and knowing a great deal about child psychology and developmental psychology is an important part of the teacher's training and ongoing professional practice so biology and psychology so we have a very clear sense of what
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our raw material is at the beginning of the process okay good now we're at the beginning of the process in order to know also what we're going to be doing with the young human beings at that age we should have a clear sense of what our goal is all right so we know at the end of the educational process we will graduate the student we'll put our stamp of approval on we'll give the student a diploma and say you are now ready to go forth uh as an adult uh we have outputted
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our production from from our educational system here what is it that we are trying to produce here well again some qualifiers are are important here we are as human beings we are educating adult human beings
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and we want those adult human beings by the time they're finished the educational process to be capable of functioning
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all right uh all of their capacities that we think need to be developed need to be developed all of the functions that they're going to need to be able to do as adult human beings they need to be in a position to be able to do all of those functions and i'm going to add one more qualifier here right in the real world okay philosophically charged term right there but i'm adding this because partly childhood and particularly childhood in school we say things to students like whether you're
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out in the real world of course they are in the real world uh already school is is part of reality and they're dealing with real human beings in real situations so childhood is part of real life all to speak but nonetheless what i think is captured here by saying that adult life is taking on the real world as opposed to school life is that when children are still children they do to some extent live in a buffered reality or an insulated reality parents and and
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teachers when the children are in school do take some pains to insulate students from having to take on reality full bore because we know that they're not yet fully able to do so so it is a a less of a full contact with the real world but nonetheless the expectation is by the time one is an adult those buffers go come off the insulating comes off and one takes on reality without parents and teachers being the intermediary intermediaries rather between you and the real world
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all right now that said i want to tease out some philosophical implications and i think there are several right at this point here i suppose just in this formulation our goal is to produce adult human beings who are capable of functioning in the real world i'm just going to isolate here two words human beings and now i ask the question what is it to be a human being what is that right what is it to be a fully developed human being what is our conception of that
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what makes me me what makes you you what makes all of us right as human beings human beings what's distinctive about us what's important about us uh what's essential to being the kinds of being that we are now that's a hard question there's been lots of different answers given to it uh it's a hard question partly because we're very complicated kind of being and so a full answer to that question necessarily has to be very complicated but if out of all the complicating
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things that make us us which of them seem to be most distinctively important to our being the kinds of beings that we are let me give you one answer to this question one thing we can say is important to being a human being is that we are very smart right we have a big brain we have a powerful mind we have a capacity of reason of course there's some controversy in animal uh psychology circles over whether other animal species perhaps chimpanzees or dolphins also have a capacity for reason
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uh i'm not going to weigh in on that debate but nonetheless uh true an obvious thing an important thing about human beings is that we have whether those other animal species have reason or not an extraordinarily powerful right rational capacity we can think very abstractly and our ability to think very abstractly very generically and to reason our way in the world is an important part of our functioning as human beings we are for example physically not very hardy right the temperature gets a
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little bit hot we start getting whiny about how hot and humid it is it gets a little bit cooler and again we start whining as well there's a fairly limited temperature range within which we can function as human beings nonetheless because we are smart we are we have the power of reason we can devise clothing we can devise shelters we can devise central air conditioning and central heating systems to to compensate and overcome our lack of physical hardiness we're not particularly strong
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even if you take the most powerful human being weight lifter and he or she is not particularly muscularly strong the average chimpanzee for example my understanding is is at least six or seven times as strong as the most strong at all human being so we don't survive for example by wrestling our prey into the ground and ripping it limb from limb or or or or using powerful jaws to to rip food from it rather we're smart right we can outsmart prey animals we can develop farming and all sorts of
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very complicated uh food production uh techniques uh and as a result we can overcome again our rather frail physiques compared to other animal species again we're not particularly fast right the world record holder in the 100 meters is very fast by human standards but by most other animal species standards he is not very fast at all and so it's not the case again if we just focus on food issues that we're going to survive very effectively if it's a matter of being
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swifter than the kinds of prey that we would like to to be able to eat so we could say for example just at a very basic biological level our being able to survive in the sense of putting food on the table uh our reason is very important to to whom we are but beyond that simply putting food on the table issues our reason is very important nearly explanatory for huge parts of our lives because we are rational beings we think abstractly we can think in terms of abstract cause and
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effect and start to understand the world around us more theoretically we can go on to do scientific enterprises and this gives us a great deal of rational power and existential power over our lives we can think about the world in the past and we have strong historical memory and we can use reason to probe further and further into the past we could use our theoretical understanding of the world uh including our cause and effect understanding to think about the future
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so we are beings for whom the past is important to us uh the future is important to us uh as well of course the present being important to us but we are not species who live only in the present or or only with a very limited time sensibility we're also beings that as a result of our rational capacity enjoy art we'll enjoy painting sculpture and literature and theater and music and so forth we do philosophy we understand jokes and so forth all of these important things about who we are we can
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then say is a result of our being rational beings all right so that's one possible answer we could then say an implication of this for the educational process is this is the right answer or is the the essential answer or the core answer to the question what it is to be a human being then that primarily what we should be doing in the educational process is taking young human beings and doing lots of things with them but primarily developing their rational capacity the
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rational capacity being the most important capacity that they have to have fully developed and functional if they're going to survive as adult human beings all right so that's a philosophical question what is a human being a human being is essentially defined by reason that kind of answer has certain kinds of important educational implications now one of the themes of this course though will be that everything is controversial in philosophy and as a result of that
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everything in educational practice is going to be controversial because different philosophical answers are going to dictate very different educational practices so i want to go back to this question again and suppose we said all right fine we can understand that but what else might we say is a true or an important answer to the question what it is to be a human being another way we can distinguish ourselves is in terms of our emotional capacity right again there's a lively debate in
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animal psychology circles over whether some other animal species have emotions i am tentatively on the side of saying that some animal species do have emotions but i'm not an expert in this area so i'm not going to pronounce definitively here but i think the most gung advocate of animal emotional experience would uh at most say that dogs or dolphins and so forth have say a half a dozen or ten at the most emotions that they are capable of experiencing certain
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kinds of affection certain kinds of fear certain kinds of anger right and so forth we then would be able to count on this on the fingers of one or two hands the number of emotions that are are experienceable by by any other animal species now if we look at human beings in that light an obvious fact about ourselves that we know introspectively and certainly from observing other human beings is that the range of emotions that we are capable of experiencing and
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the intensity of those emotions that we are capable of experiencing seems to vastly outstrip the emotional experience of any other uh type of animal we can experience joy and pride right in humility and schadenfreude and nostalgia and melancholy and so forth you go to any standard emotions chapter in a psychology textbook and just start to count the number of emotions that that the psychologist there will be talking about the the number really is staggering or without having to do that kind of
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research music i think is an important phenomenon here if you were to consider your own musical collection and just to pick out of that say 100 songs and play all of those songs and then make careful note of the number of emotions that you experience in the course of listening to those songs the list of emotions would run to several pages i am i am quite sure so one thing that we can then say is another possible answer to this question is that important to our identity as human beings is
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our emotions right that what we want adult human beings to be able to do to live a full life to live the best possible kind of life is to experience the full range of intense emotional experience that makes human life life life possible and we also want human beings to be able to have the emotional resilience and the emotional strength to be able to live right that sort of a sort of a life so we want to to achieve happiness we want to experience all of the intense emotionality that our family
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relationships can bring to us our business achievements can bring to us our friendships can bring to us our romantic lives can bring to us our accomplishments in sporting activities and so forth uh literature is intentionally emotional and certainly music as i just mentioned is as well so that then if we give that as a key answer to the question what it is that makes them human beings the importantly the kinds of beings that they are that we focus on our emotional capacities that then will have
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implications for what we're doing in education we then would give a different emphasis to our educational system arguing that what we should be doing is preparing human beings to experience the full range of human emotion uh and to have the full emotional resilience to be able to have the right kinds of best emotional experiences that human life can can offer okay so re-reason emotions we might come up with other things that we think are are importantly here but i'm going
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to pause just on on that at this point here and say all right suppose we then say well fine i can understand both of these answers and there are some truth to both of them certainly reason is important to us as human beings our emotions are important to us as human beings there are then some follow-up questions here we might then say all right if we are rational beings and we are emotional beings what's the relationship between these two
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is it the case that our rational life has a life of its own or our emotional side also has a life of its own in that these two proceed on independent tracks or is it the case that we think there's an intimate connection between reason and emotions we say things for example like love is blind right that i think is somewhat metaphorical but what we're saying is that love has a life of its own the reason we fall in love with people is for reasons that are blind to us or that we're not aware of the
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reasons why that we fall in love with people so reason and thinking and facts don't really have anything to do with it and so that's then a position that says our emotional life and our rational life are somewhat separated for various reasons of course there's also the other phenomenon that we might be very infatuated with someone but as a result of coming to know the person we can gather various facts and and the data presents it itself to us we fall out of love with that person we're no longer
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interested in some cases we might be repulsed by the mere thought of that person well what's going on in that case in that case it doesn't seem that our emotional life has a life independent of our reason but rather our emotional transformation is a result of our reason coming up with and processing new facts and new data so is our reason and our emotion integrated do they work together or do they they do work separately now this of course is an important issue in psychology it's an
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important issue in in philosophy but again it's an issue that has important educational implications because if we want to say our job is to train human reason or to train human emotions whether we think that those two are two separate entities two separate animals that we are dealing with or whether we think that they are integrated and should be taught in tandem with each other that's going to dictate very different educational strategies when we're approaching just this one issue here
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we might then say uh suppose there is a connection between the two is it the case that uh that reason really is the legislator here and our emotions follow along or is it the case that we think our emotions are our legislator and our reason right is the is the tag along is it for example that we come to think say certain things about capital punishment right as an example we form certain beliefs and then as a result we have certain emotions uh positive or negative
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when we think about capital punishment or is it the case that we come to have a strong feeling a strong urge right belief or a strong felt experience when we think about capital punishment and on the basis of that we rationalize or construct arguments to uh to justify something that we've already made an emotional commitment to does this one have priority or does that one have priorities so again when we're educators and we're teaching uh things that are are rationally important and
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emotionally significant or should we be approaching them primarily through the educational side or the emotional side of things or through the the rational side of things okay so that's just to focus on two words here a human being and to raise then one question that's a philosophically charged question with important educational implications uh suppose we come back to the question we say all right what is it to be a human being what's important what's distinctive to our identity here and we
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focus on issues other than these two important capacities that we have the reason and the the emotional capacity another thing i think is importantly distinctive about human beings and what we expect of human beings and what in part we are training human beings for is a certain kind of responsibility when we are parents when we are teachers we want children to learn their responsibilities to become self-responsible adult human beings and when we think about responsibility
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in the human context i think we to think about it distinctively compared to any other animal species and this gives an importantly different cast to to human education i use one of my dogs right as an example we have a dog who's fairly tall has very long legs he has some great dane in his background and so he has the capacity to in the kitchen just kind of go along and look over the kitchen counter without really straining his neck very much to see whether there's any food
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of interest to him that he can steal now he's actually he's a good dog we've taught him that if there's food left on a table or food on the counter it's off limits and for the most part he is respectful of that so one thing i can then say about our dog his name is hamlet for for various reasons is that he knows right that he's not supposed to eat food that is on the table right so to speak okay now suppose then i think i have trained hamlet not to eat food that is
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on the table and so i have a sandwich that i've made for my lunch and i put it on the table and i see hamlet eyeing it and i say hamlet don't eat my sandwich that's my sandwich leave that one alone and i leave the room and i come back three minutes later and the sandwich is gone large surprise so i look at hamlet and i say to him bad dog right i use my my stern voice and his ears go back and he slinks off because he knows right that he's done something wrong and he feels guilty all
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right so we hold him responsible and we start then to use moral language right in that case and he seems to be convincing some sort of guilty uh ashamed response in that particular case now that might be true but it would be different if we were to have a human being in the same sort of circumstance suppose my brother was visiting my brother's a few years younger than i but he's an adult human being suppose he were visiting uh and it's lunchtime and i've made a sandwich
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for myself and i put the sandwich on my table or and my brother is there and i see him looking at it hungrily and i say to him that's my sandwich i feel welcome to make one for yourself but please don't eat my sandwich and then i go off if i come back again in a few minutes and the sandwich is gone right and i look at my brother and it's clear that he's the one who's who has eaten it i will say to him bad brother right and then hopefully he will feel some guilt or feel ashamed
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right over what he's done here but in this case i'm going to hold my brother responsible for having eaten the sandwich in a way that's different then i'm going to hold my dog hamlet right responsible for for being a hamlet for for having eaten the sandwich for example we might hold both of them as the responsible party but we're not going to hold the dog morally responsible we're not going to say that he's a bad dog in the sense of being an immoral dog we hold him to a
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lesser standard on the other hand my brother if he were to steal my sandwich in that particular case we would be more likely to use morally charged language right in his particular case but so then here's the question right if we take that phenomenon as a real phenomenon what does it say about our distinctive nature as human beings such that we're going to hold ourselves morally responsible right for the good things that we that we do we should then be to be rewarded in various ways and
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get praise for the bad things that we do we should be held a responsible and receive punishments or at least various condemnatory types of words and so on in a way that we don't hold other animal species responsible and won't praise or blame morally right so to speak well one common answer to that is to say that we as human beings unlike other animal species are beings that have a capacity for making choices right that is not the case that we do things uh because we're pushed around by forces
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beyond our control so we might say for example you can't really hold hamlet the dog responsible for what he did because he's just a dog he might be a smart dog and he might know right that he's not supposed to eat the sandwich but nonetheless a dog is a dog and if the dog is hungry then there are certain biochemical things that are going on he's feeling the hunger pangs if there's a certain kind of stimulus in the environment right the smell of a sandwich right there on the table within
42:42
his visual field and i'm not in the room as a countervailing force to be feared i'm out of the picture altogether all we have then is strong hunger pangs salivation in response to a tasty sandwich sitting there on the table when those urges get strong enough dogs being dogs they necessarily are going to eat the sandwich and that's just the way it is so you can't blame them they're just doing what their biological natures are dictating in the presence of certain
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kinds of environmental stimuli it's not the same story that if we put a human being in the equation we might say my brother is visiting he sees the sandwich he might be a hungry guy and so he's having the same hunger pangs and we put it in the presence of the same environmental stimulus there's a tasty sandwich sitting on the table there he smells that he starts to salivate so he is subject to environmental pressures subject to biochemical pressures but nonetheless there's
43:37
another factor that's operative for him he has the capacity of choice he has the capacity to override those environmental stimuli to override his biological urges and to choose whether or not he's going to act on certain stimuli or not and so what we then say is since human beings have choices they have some sort of volitional control over their thoughts their behaviors we can hold them responsible for how they choose to exercise that control if they give in inappropriately then we blame them if
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they give in but it's an appropriate context and that's fine and if they use their volitional control actively to bring goodness into the world then we will we will praise them so we can then make a claim that this is an important thing about human beings human beings are being such that they have a capacity of choice and as adult human beings an important thing is to responsibly exercise choice over a vast range of things and what this then implies for education is that
44:45
moral education teaching students responsibility in all of the areas of life that they're going to experience as adults that should be front and center in our educational system so moral education of this cast becomes central to to what we're doing as professional educators of course everything in contour is controversial rather in philosophy including this particular claim and i suppose we're all familiar with the idea that uh there are many people who will deny that
45:13
this claim is is even true they will say that this this dichotomy i'm setting up between my dog hamlet and my brother or between other species and human beings is a false dichotomy that human beings are like any other animal species not beings that have ultimately moral responsibility because they don't have volitional control over who they are instead what they are simply more complicated determined beings by forces right beyond their control and so there are various uh philosophical and
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psychological and biological positions that will argue that in fact we do not have any choice instead we have determinism as the truth about the human being but the causal forces that are operating on human beings are more complicated than various other species and they can give rise to this illusion right that we are beings that are making uh morally responsible decisions there are a number of varieties of determinism we might make the argument that we are creatures
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of biology right they're just like a dog or a hawk or a rabbit those species are all borns with a certain genetic package that expresses itself as the species developed but rabbits are going to grow up to be rabbits hawks are going to grow up to be hawks and human beings then are just a more complicated developmental story biologically we also know there's the position that human beings are products of their environment uh there the claim is that human beings
46:40
while they are complicated biological creatures nonetheless uh developmentally we're still uh left with a lot of plasticity in our makeup and depending on the social and environmental forces that we are exposed to that plastic is shaped and molded in various ways until by the time you get an adult human being the adult human being is primarily a product of his or her social environment and there are certainly also theological versions that argue that there are divine forces god or the gods that
47:10
ultimately wield the power and that what goes on here in the human world uh is already scripted for us and we are the puppets of the gods or of god and just simply going through the motions that the the divine playwright or playwrights has already written now if we are then by contrast determinist rights of various sorts that's going to give a very different cast to our educational process we're not then going to be primarily interested in internal motivation in the
47:40
choices we're not primarily going to be interested in moral responsibility we're not going to be using languages of praise and blame because all of that kind of vocabulary presupposes that the student has something to be praised for right or blamed for instead we're going to simply see ourselves as complicated cultivators right of a biological product but that biological product already has an inbuilt biological destiny or we're going to see ourselves as controllers of the environment and
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the student as a more passive being to be manipulated and shaped as we the teachers think should be done or in stronger theological versions we will argue that what god wills will be done and we are simply passively going along in that particular direction okay now notice all of this is taking us into huge territory and this is not the end of it but putting all of these kinds of questions in one box all of them are questions in one important branch of philosophy that
48:46
branch of philosophy being questions of human nature and here we're trying to probe what it is to be a human being right fundamentally essentially right most importantly and that set of philosophical questions right now certainly those philosophical questions do also take us into questions of biology they take us into questions of theology and they do take us into questions of sociology and psychology as well but the philosophical component of them that we as teachers then have to address
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is going to be very important to how we answer the question of what our educational output is and that then is in turn going to determine how we are going to structure this whole educational process and we're not going to be able to do our educational process well unless we have a clear idea about what the output and we're not going to have a clear idea about what the output is until we've addressed systematically these questions about human nature and made up our minds in an informed way
49:42
what we think right human nature fundamentally is all right that's one philosophical question that as it bears on education all right let's go back to this statement of our output goal here an adult human being capable of functioning in the real world we just looked more closely at these two words here what it is to be a human being now i want to pick on three other words and just focus on them and do the same sort of exercise to pull out some philosophical implications we're going
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to pick in this case the last three words we want those human beings to be able to go forth into the real world to leave the relatively sheltered world of their parents home and and the school all right so what's the real world when we say we're going to send students forth into reality uh what is that thing okay lots of answers again possible here but suppose we said the following we say well uh in the real world we know that there is uh there are things like trees and there are rivers and
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um there are rocks which can hurt you if you bang your toe on them there are things like the weather there is looking more broadly a field there are various planets and beyond that there are galaxies so we start from our immediate environment here and and scale out uh we might also notice that in our immediate environment there are other people right besides ourselves that are part of the real world they develop various kinds of technologies so there are refrigerators and automobiles and when
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we go forth in the real world we need to know about those things computers uh there are various kinds of institutions school right being an institution legal institutions business institutions religious institutions sporting institutions right and so forth okay so we might then say as one answer to the question when we're preparing students for the real world we want them to be knowledgeable about all of this and be able to navigate all of this all right so this then is reality
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okay that's a lot of complicated stuff in there of course when i asked is that it is that the whole story right of reality is it the case that everything in here this is uh something we can put in a under a broader heading the natural world people being a part of nature trees and galaxies and so on being part of nature and so what we're then doing as educators is telling a very complicated naturalistic story and preparing students for dealing with the complicated world right of nature but
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end of story right there of course that uh then immediately bumps us into a huge philosophical divide between those who say that is in fact the whole story we can expand to the number of things that we include in this box here because nature is is more expansive than this this minimal list here but one side of the divide is going to say just to focus on this is to miss at least half of the story and perhaps the more important part of the story because the truth of reality is
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that beyond nature or above nature or behind nature is a more important reality that is not anything like this nature here that in fact there is a realm that is superior to nature and so we we'll call that the super natural realm all right and in that realm instead of there being various sorts of complicated physical and material types of things in the supernatural realm what we have are beings that are spirits or a single spirit if we're monotheistic right or souls or minds right
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and so forth and that rather than operating according to various kinds of physical and mechanical laws as this one does this operates according to mental laws or laws of will or the laws of god or the gods depending on the version right that we exist okay now this is of course the traditional question in in philosophy of whether god really exists or the gods really exist and depending on how you answer that question you come down on one systematic side philosophically a naturalistic side
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or you come down on the side uh more religiously and theologically the supernaturalistic side so is it the case really that the important facts about reality are that there is a god for example that god created the natural world and governs the natural world and so if we're properly going to educate students then in addition to or perhaps even more importantly than getting them into a right relationship with the natural world and being able to deal with it is
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getting them into a right relationship with the supernatural world and putting them in a position to be able to deal with it now if we answer the question that way that then is going to take our educational system in one direction by contrast if we answer the question the other way we say look there is the natural world that's reality but the realm of supernature doesn't exist there are no ghosts there are no spirits there are no gods all of that is primitive
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belief that has been outmoded say in the modern world and so we we're doing our students a disservice if we teach them this stuff we're interested in teaching reality and so reality is the natural world and that is what and only what our educational system should be about now this in philosophy is what we call an issue of metaphysics we're asking questions of what it is to be a human being those were questions of human nature this is a question of metaphysics
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and this may be the first new piece of terminology that you're being introduced as you are you're listening in on this course the term metaphysics comes from the greek uh metaphusis and the idea here is the the phusis what we now call physics is to look at reality or the natural world and try to step back from it that's the meta part to try to step back from it and try to discern its general features or what underlying or fundamental truths can be said of all of
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reality whatever it is that we take all of reality to be and so the question then is do we see reality essentially in uh mono terms that there's one reality the natural world with all of its complexities or is it the case that we should see the world metaphysically in dualistic terms that there is a natural world but uh in addition to that beyond that and more importantly there is a supernatural world and we should then study both of those realities so the educational implications of that are
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of course deep uh one of the great battles in philosophical history and certainly an educational philosophy as long as we've been doing philosophy and educating other human beings is this divide between those who take an essentially naturalistic approach to reality and those who take an essentially religious approach to reality and having an informed opinion on that as a professional educator is absolutely a job requirement because that's going to have huge implications
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for almost everything that we do in our educational system all right cutting across this issue of whether we take the world to be naturalistic or supernaturalistic fundamentally is another kind of question metaphysically uh is the world such that we take it to be a world of cause and effect that is to say that whatever happens in the world there is an in principle understandable cause behind it so that uh there are cause and effect laws or cause and effect principles or laws of nature or
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laws of religion that are operative and if we come to understand those those laws or those principles that we can then in principle come to understand why everything that happens in the world happens right everything happens not necessarily for a reason a reason is a mentalistic right kind of cause but there is for any effect a cause that in principle is intelligible that we through our reason can figure out if we come to have the right kind of understanding of the way the world works
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that then means that in the future to the extent that we understand the causal laws we can make reasonable predictions about how things are going to play out and plan our lives accordingly if that is is true now by contrast we could also make the argument or come to the belief that in fact the world is not something that operates according to causal principles instead there's a certain chaos that fundamentally permeates reality there can be naturalistic versions of the chaos
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arguing that ultimately the world is indeterministic or subject to randomness and that our best understandings are always going to be inadequate because of this built-in randomness in the world or the chaos can also be in religious and supernaturalistic form if we believe that god is will uh and god changes his mind uh or that the ordinary uh processes of of reality that might appear to be causal can suddenly be interjected or interrupted rather by by a miracle being interjected into the
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process and so in principle there is no way to understand why things happen they do those reasons are are known by god alone and then correspondingly no way we can predict the the future because miracles and various chaotic interjections are are possible so is it the case that supernaturalistically there's a cause for everything that occurs or naturalistically there's cause for everything that occurs or is the world fundamentally a chaotic enterprise for naturalistic or or supernaturalistic
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reasons now this has educational implications to the extent that we want to urge or not urge students to be able to come to comprehend the world in universalistic terms to always push for an explanation always to have the explanation that they can plan out the future of their lives and maybe take charge of their ultimate destinies all of that is based on a presupposition that fundamentally the universe is causal to the extent that we don't think the universal is causal we're not going
1:00:03
to make those very important educational goals instead we're going to see our lives and the students lives ultimately as being ruled by chaos and unpredictability and so the best we will do is then prepare the student for a fundamentally chaotic and unpredictable kind of life all right coming across these issues as well one more i want to put on the board here one other kind of metaphysical issue when we think about the world as a whole do we think of the world as a place that is hospitable to
1:00:36
our needs our interests our aspirations for the world and this uh position is called the benevolent universe premise is it the case that we can see the world such that if human beings do right develop themselves uh their capacities and so forth they can go forth and find success right in their chosen realms of life or is it the case that by contrast the world and the forces that govern the world are hostile or inhospitable to human aspirations and so students should then
1:01:14
be taught a more defensive posture right with respect to the world let me give you a couple of examples uh historically speaking to drive this point home here when i was in graduate school for a couple of summers i worked in the library and uh in the library department that i was working on there was a collection of old maps i don't remember one month very pleasantly my job was to take some of these old maps that were starting to decay and shift slip them rather between sheets of mylar and seal
1:01:40
them up to slow down the the decay process and so i got to look uh look spend some time looking at a lot of maps and that was kind of fun some of the old maps that were in the in the collections and in the books that the library had were pre-columbian maps that is to say maps that had been drawn by european cartographers before columbus crossed the atlantic ocean to uh to discover the new world and what was interesting about those maps for these purposes and i'm
1:02:06
not sure how many medieval maps fit this characterization but there i know there was a significant sub genre here is that they uh the maps would typically have uh you know various uh parts of europe worked out pretty well north africa was pretty well known uh things uh when you got to the middle east also were fairly well blocked out things got a little less determinate as you got further to the far east into the japans india and china although the europeans at this
1:02:32
time knew of those places existence what was interesting is if you went to the places that were the terra incognita right now the unknown lands right so to speak the the western ocean right what we now call the atlantic ocean uh where uh nobody had gone before uh at least as far as the europeans knew uh in their their state of knowledge and the interesting thing was that on many of these maps there would be illustrations of the cartographers uh that had put there so they would have illustrations
1:03:01
on the terra cognita various features geographically that they knew existed but the interesting thing was that in many of these maps on the in the interior incognita or the unknown sea uh places uh they would have maps or sort of little graphics or little icons depicting horrible things that would happen to ships and sailors if they went in that particular direction so they would have for example a little tiny ship sailing over the edge of a huge waterfall presumably uh to to
1:03:30
everybody's death and the destruction of the ship or in another part of the uh of the ocean at the edge they would have a giant fish with huge teeth right about to uh to to attack and swallow up presumably again a very tiny ship that was sailing along or a huge sea serpenty type of uh monster that dwarfed the ship that was uh encircling the the ship and crushing it into coils again presumably destroying it the interesting thing about these maps is the projection of
1:04:02
the world at large and particularly the part of the world that the cartographers don't know about there's an implicit metaphysical view and i'm going to call it a malevolent right view of the universe in this particular case because what's striking is that the cartographers at the edge of the maps where they didn't actually know what was there if you went off in that direction didn't simply say well we don't know what's here and so we're not going to put anything there uh
1:04:24
or they didn't say for example that we uh we think or we hope that out there there are all these flush paradises and oases and there's lots of beautiful women and maybe there's lots of gold and so they didn't put pictures of beautiful women or pots of gold or or lush tropical a laces that the sailors could then find instead in their estimation what was real about the unknown world is hostile forces that are waiting to destroy you if you venture forth out into the unknown lands now there's
1:04:53
an implication here that if uh if there is a safe the lands that we know and obviously there are lots of dangers and problems there but the point is don't sail off into the unknown because going forth into the world right being the kind of world that it is is a dangerous enterprise chances are very good that you will fail you will be destroyed by various hostile forces of the universe so stay close to home stick with what you know and insulate yourself from the hostile forces of of the
1:05:20
universe i'm using that as an example of a malevolent right approach to the universe the idea being that the dominant forces of the world are negative and inhospitable to human design to human interest to human aspiration i think by contrast another fictional example here of the the television series star trek there's also been a series of movies uh based on this i've only seen a half a dozen or so episodes of star trek but i am struck by the opening sequence which has i might
1:05:53
understand this is the way star trek goes is every episode is an adventure of precisely going forth into unknown parts of reality places that no no man has gone before right so to speak and having all sorts of colorful uh colorful adventures and the idea there is of course there's lots of danger and there are lots of inhospitable forces out there but there's lots of exciting stuff and interesting stuff and neurotic stuff and wealth making stuff and if human beings right are
1:06:23
resourceful and intelligent and courageous they can venture forth right into the unknown world and have all kinds of exciting uh adventures and live and survive and prosper for another day to go forth into further unknown worlds to uh to to have more adventures and so if we think of the the the tagline of the show split infinitive and all to boldly go right where no man has gone before right that idea that you're set toward reality particularly the parts of
1:06:52
the world that you don't know yet about that you can't have that attitude of going forth boldly and expecting to have great fun great adventure great excitement uh that is a very different right metaphysical attitude and i'm going to call that a benevolent right uh universe right approach now the implications here clearly are significant for education if we as teachers come to believe that the universe is largely a malevolent place then the way we teach lots and lots of
1:07:23
things particularly value orientations and the kind of attitude toward the the rest of their lives that we're going to inculcate in students is going to be very different than the kind of attitude that we will be trying to inculcate in our students if we have a more benevolent universe so this raises the question is the universe such that we can and should prepare students to go forth and live their great adventures and dreams and uh and urge success upon them or is the universe such that we
1:07:52
should teach students to lower their aspirations to play it safe and hope to avoid the various dangerous forces that if they stick their necks out are going to damage them is the universe such that it's ruled by chaos and so it's a more a matter of managing unpredictability or is it a matter of the universe being such that it is causal and therefore predictable and so therefore long-range planning and strategy is something we should urge upon our our students and again is the
1:08:21
case that the reality that we're preparing them for the very complicated natural reality or is it the case that as complicated as the natural reality is the more important and more complicated issues alive in terms of one's relation to a supernatural reality and so should our educational content be primarily focused on the natural world or should that be a secondary concern to supernatural focus all right those are some metaphysical issues that become absolutely essential
1:08:48
to our figuring out what we're going to do in this educational production process if we're going to have students prepared as adults to take on the real world wherever we take the real world to all right i'm going to go back to our initial output statement here we want adult human beings capable of functioning in the real world we focused on human beings trying to figure out what it is to be a human being raising lots of philosophical questions about human nature there
1:09:17
focused on the three words the real world uh raising metaphysical questions about what we take the real world to be now i want to focus on the remaining three words these central words here capable of functioning right we want to develop in our students the capacities right to function right in certain ways when they are adults taking on the real world this of course leads to some obvious questions here what capacities do the students have that we want to develop we have lots of
1:09:46
capacities i have a capacity for ax murdering right for example but presumably that's not one of the capacities that we want to develop we have a capacity for doing philosophy when we are young and that is a capacity that i think we should want to develop in our students what kind of functions uh do adult human beings perform what do they do with their lives so we have to have some kind of a conception of what lifestyle or living or or or acts of going through achieving certain goals and doing
1:10:18
certain things in life that we want adult human beings on average to be able to do and that's going to require that certain capacities that they have be developed to a point of proficiency so that they can perform those kinds of functions so we can start then asking what are in adult human life some of the key functions right that we that we we engage in well certainly one of them is we want to have a career maybe a career as a philosophy professor wouldn't that be great or a career in
1:10:50
business right in banking right or career as a teacher or a career as an artist and as we know particularly as we're into the 20th century 21st century rather one of the great beauties of our our civilization is that there are thousands and thousands of career opportunities that will be available to students and if we don't like any of those career opportunities we can go entrepreneurial and make our own career opportunity all right so but career is one important functional part of life
1:11:19
but it's not the whole of life we also know that an important part of life is having friends we also know that people will have love lives and sex lives typically what happens as a result of that is people have family lives we know that they also will engage in leisure activities such as traveling the world and enjoying and learning various things there there's the entire realm of art and literature uh that is an important part of human life as well so we can then start saying okay here are
1:11:53
the things that constitute a life what do we need to teach students so that they are capable of doing all of these things and doing them doing them well we might focus on capacities some of the capacities involve knowledge traits they might need to know what career options are available to them what places in the world are are worth traveling to knowing the various kinds of artistic genres and media that are that are out there and then there are capacities that
1:12:24
have to be developed here they uh there are certain skills that are going to be necessary uh in career or in in literature social skills and friendship love and sex and family and so forth all that had to be developed as well another kinds of capability are going to be various kinds of character traits so we might focus on issues of the necessary virtues that students are then going to have to acquire if they're going to be able to function well in all of these areas
1:12:52
of their lives for example many of these things like career friendships uh romantic relationships family right and so forth are longer term projects and longer term commitments are necessary so we might say that teaching students a certain amount of perseverance is is a necessary character trait if they're going to be able to function capably right as as adult human beings and this then poses an educational challenge for us because we know when we're starting
1:13:19
with young people their attention span is necessarily quite limited but as they develop their attention span and their ability to focus and stay on task and visualize the longer term should be should be increased and our job as teachers uh certainly self-consciously has to be explicitly to build in lessons that build the character trait of perseverance for example we might also say that in careers and friendships and and family relationships and so on a certain kind of honesty
1:13:49
right is important uh and we know there are lots of temptations to lie to fudge the truth to uh to to avoid unpleasantness uh uh can be prevalent at all stages of human life so how do we uh deal with uh and inculcating students the appropriate attitudes to honesty and make that part of their character so that when they are functioning in all of these important areas of their lives they have the requisite character skill right and so forth right all the way down the road
1:14:18
now all of these things are the subject matter of ethics which is another important branch of philosophy here i have called these things functions or things that we do but we do these things because we think they're valuable we think they're important that we think they're a significant part of what it is to live a full human life uh and to the extent that we do all of these things well and we're successful in all of those areas of our lives we have a life that's a
1:14:49
flourishing human life as opposed to a dysfunctional human life a life that's a happy right and self-realize human life as opposed to an unhappy uh uh an unrealized right human life so here we can substitute the concept of uh of uh or rather add the concept of values right and i've left it open-ended here with these ellipses here what are the important values in life such that we as educators are going to single these out obviously we can't teach every value that's possible to
1:15:20
human beings but what are the major categories what things are we going to emphasize are we going to emphasize art as a value social skills as a value career preparation right as a trap as a value right and so forth and how are we going to prioritize those values and how are we going to build them into our curriculum at what particular points certainly there are going to be developmental issues friendship right from the beginning love and sex issues though don't come along until later in
1:15:46
the process after puberty uh and so forth so lots of questions about what the right values are and how to operationalize them and build them into our curriculum if we're going to focus on character education here here we're talking about virtues right what are good traits to the extent that human beings uh uh their personalities and their characters are not uh hardened already by the time they they come to school there's a certain plasticity and developmentalism that's possible there how do we
1:16:19
make real uh and motivate and and operationalize lessons that are going to build the appropriate virtue traits uh and again i have an open ended list here because there are any number of virtues that can be put forth as candidates which ones are going to be the important ones that we will focus on and build into our our lesson plans here all right so far we have in this introductory unit on philosophy of education broken apart the phrase first focusing on the phrase education unpacking a
1:16:49
little bit what is involved in that preliminary definition then when we started to explore in more detail what was built into the educational process the idea of preparing students for adult life for dealing with the real world having certain capacities and functionalities we found ourselves led to big picture complicated philosophical issues and so far we've looked at three such categories of questions questions of human nature are we in control of our destinies or or or not we are rational
1:17:20
beings we're emotional beings what is the relationship between those two and so forth questions of metaphysics are we living in a causal world or a chaotic world is there a god or is the natural world the the entire reality is it a benevolent world or a malevolent world rather questions of ethics and the the meaning of life what are the big values that we want students to pursue as adult human beings what should their career goals be their family goals right and so forth to the
1:17:49
extent that we can help them sort those issues out give them the skills and knowledge that's necessary what kind of character traits are going to be important to our students as adults right and so on and all the questions of ethics that are that are significant here so one other category of question uh that's a philosophical question that's absolutely uh essential for educational practice and i'll first give you the technical name for it here and that is epistemology another
1:18:18
possibly new piece of terminology to you again it's a greek origin we have the ology here part which is to give an account of something in this case what we're giving it is an account of episteme which is the the greek word for for knowledge or one of the greek words for for knowledge right of a certain sort here epistemological questions are fundamental to philosophy and education for philosophical reasons because if you take any question from any of the other
1:18:47
branches of philosophy here i make a claim for example that god exists there's a natural follow-up question which is how do you know right that god exists right or if you don't believe in god you come not to believe in the existence of god what makes that a reasonable position to uh to to adopt right at a certain point here so what we are asking in the case of epistemological questions are questions of knowledge what is it to know right and if education is about
1:19:18
anything it is about knowledge we are a knowledge intensive species we're a highly intelligent species and to a large extent how we function and flourish in the world is a result of of the knowledge that we acquire or the the knowledge that we don't acquire which puts us in a position for for for failure so what is it really to know what is it to know who we are as human beings what is it to come to know the world that we are living in what does it come to know what it is to be a good
1:19:49
person and and how to approach the achievement of various important values in our lives here and so questions of epistemology are important questions in uh in philosophy everything is controversial here from those who argue that we don't really know anything who will adopt a more skeptical skeptical approach uh if as educators we don't think that knowledge is possible then certainly we're going to radically de-emphasize the importance of the transmission of knowledge and knowledge acquisition
1:20:16
skills right as educators but also uh there is an important debate within epistemological circles among those and an applied uh cognitive circles implied knowledge circles between those who believe that knowledge is possible but have radically different approaches to the achievement of knowledge for example if we tie epistemology to metaphysics as it often is we can say one side of the metaphysical divide is between those who are very naturalistic in their view of reality the world is
1:20:46
the natural world and so that's an important thing for us to to come to know but if the world is the natural reality then how do we come to know that it makes sense to say that well we have five sensory organs if we're born normal and healthy and it those are the basis of our knowledge so we come to know the world through sense perception we have a rational capacity that that we can use to classify our sensory perceptual data that can be formed go on to form abstract hypotheses
1:21:14
chains of cause and effect theoretical understandings of the world and so we might then make an argument that knowledge is something that should be based on the senses that should be a matter of reasoning and maybe in the most complicated frontier uh cutting edge parts of of knowledge that we really come to know things as a result of doing science right if something gets through the the scientific method that is something that really can count as knowledge of course
1:21:42
if we have partial sensory data or our our reasoning is inconclusive because we don't we don't have enough data to go upon or if we're in the initial stages and we merely have hypotheses that we're kicking around and trying to sort out we might have uh terms that are that are not as as heavily fraught as saying that we know what's going on we might say that rather than our knowledge being definitive we have only probabilistic knowledge at this stage or we have a number of possibilities right
1:22:10
at this stage and so an important then part of cognitive training will be teaching students how to make those more fine-grained judgments being able to tell when they're dealing with something that's only a hypothesis or something that that is a reasonable certainty or being able in some cases obviously to dismiss certain things is just as ridiculous and not worth spending one's time on so developing our rational capacity in all of these areas then becomes a very important part of
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the project if we are more naturalistic right in our metaphysics now by contrast if we are more religious right in our metaphysics religious traditions typically do not emphasize the senses reasoning and science as the most important or in some cases not important at all in coming to know the important truths about the world if we are strongly religious right in our metaphysics and we say that the the the world of religion the world of god is a world completely other than the natural
1:23:06
physical world around us then more nature-based methods of coming to know god are not going to be appropriate here we might then say that really the best kind of knowledge important kind of knowledge that we need to come to acquire is knowledge that comes through revelation right revelation that is communicated to particular prophets uh through various kinds of mystical experiences that they might have uh or it might be the case that these revelations we think are available to
1:23:35
all human beings if they uh they they use their their cognitive capacities appropriately or it might be the case that we believe that the revelations are no longer ongoing but rather come down to us in the forms of traditions scriptural traditions or institutional traditions and it might be that we believe the important knowledge and beliefs that we as human beings should come to believe are articles of faith and that we do not adopt them because we have scientific or rational evidence for
1:24:02
them we might even adopt them despite right uh rational evidence and scientific data right to the to the contrary so there are long-standing debates in philosophical circles over what counts as knowledge and particularly on what we take to be the most important knowledge that human beings should be striving for what capacities they have or how they should go about forming the beliefs that they have on those most important matters in life now education right clearly the
1:24:30
implications are huge depending on what kind of an epistemological approach uh we adopt here do we think that there is something to faith and this so fundamentally we're giving our students a large body of beliefs that we want them to accept and we're going to urge them when they start asking things like why should i believe this we want to urge them to believe them as a matter of faith do we believe that students have mystical capacities that they can experience
1:24:56
various non-rational insights into the nature of a higher reality and so do we think then that an important thing in our educational process is to develop students mystical capacities or do we think that really that's not the right way to approach epistemology at all instead if we really want to have knowledge knowledge is something that comes as a result of using your senses using observation gathering data reasoning our way through that data and in the most complicated cases doing
1:25:23
science and so epistemologically when we're teaching students not simply what we want them to to know but how they uh they then come become to be uh uh knowledgeable people themselves these are the traits and capacities that we're going to focus on rather than these sets of capacities down here all right all of these kinds of questions right put together are the traditional subject matter of philosophy and on my reading philosophy philosophy has four primary kinds of questions so we can say
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this is a question of what's real
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the epistemological question fundamentally is how do i know
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human nature question who am i and the ethics question so what right what's the point what are the value implications of of all of this well i want to come to have an understanding of the world ourselves particularly our our identity as as knowledgeable beings are our core cognitive capacities and put them in the service of living what we take to be the best kind of life that is the subject matter of philosophy philosophy was first systematically done by greeks i think probably human beings
1:26:50
have been doing and raising philosophical issues as long as there have been human beings uh we being the kinds of beings that we are but nonetheless systematic self-conscious and a self-conscious conception of philosophy as a discipline is something that originated with the classical greeks about 26 or 2700 years ago and it comes then from two greek roots it's a compound word filos right and sophia affilos is someone who is a lover sophia is the goddess of wisdom
1:27:25
so the idea of being a philosopher then is to be someone who is a lover of wisdom that is to say someone who takes seriously and is passionate about the kinds of questions and coming up with the answers the kind of kind of answers a wise person right would come up with on all of the important questions of of the human condition now philosophers are people who do this systematically and do it as a as a matter of professional practice or or if they are our amateurs devote a significant amount
1:27:56
of their life to it uh as human beings whether we are philosophers so conceived or not it's important for us to be nonetheless philosophical because as human beings all of us bump up against these questions and for us to live a fully human life it is necessary for us to have thought these things through and to have some sort of an answer hopefully consistent set of answers and hopefully a thought through set of answers to guide our lives as human beings and certainly as professional educators
1:28:27
it's especially incumbent upon us i think then to be at least philosophical and then hence the importance of a course for professional teachers and of course in philosophy of education we are as teachers telling parents to give us their most prized possessions their children i don't think there's a parent that i know for whom their children are not the most important thing in their lives and we're saying to their parents give us your children for a significant amount of your child's
1:29:00
life and give us lots and lots of your money and we will undertake this incredibly important process of transforming them into adult human beings who are competent and capable of living the best kind of lives possible the only way for us to do that is obviously to take education seriously as a profession and we're all going to be specialists as teachers we might be 7th grade social science teachers or high school coaches or kindergarten teachers or whatever we all have to know our
1:29:34
professional niche and to know it very well but we can't approach our profession with our blinders on we have to know the particular specialized focus that we are our professionals at in the context of what's going on in the rest of the child's education at that point in his or her educational career and we have to know what that stage has to do with the whole rest of the educational process and that necessarily takes us to strategic questions about education and
1:30:00
philosophical questions about education so education is a profession yes there's lots of detailed specialist knowledge that's necessary to be an excellent uh teacher yes but also equally essential is a philosophical perspective on what we are doing as educators and the only way to do that is to spend a certain amount of time doing philosophy and that's what this course is about
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