With Regard to Rebecca Goldstein and Other Things about the Philosophy of Education

It was refreshing to hear Goldstein talk; I often have worries that philosophy is at a standstill and can gain nothing from looking over the same texts from the ancient world but Goldstein strengthened my faith in philosophy and in curiosity to learn and know more about philosophy.

This ties in partly with what I'm thinking about for my paper which is the idea of curiosity as a pedagogical principle. I think it is arguably the most important principle of learning. If there were a way for a teacher to get all the students curious about learning things, even if irrelevant to the class, then I think learning would be a lot easier and actually fun. Curiosity for me has always made doing anything fun. The plight of students is that they feel they're being told information they already know or information that is difficult for them to understand. With the difficult-to-understand information, it is crucial for the students to be curious about how it works and intersects with itself and various other disciplines.

Struggle as a Principle in Education

There's frequent talk of war in The Republic but I'd like to consider it as an element in education. Arab scholars, especially Quranic scholars, refer to a word that means something like "knowledge-struggle" and involves the word jihad but in a much different sense than FOX News uses it. The struggle ties into our discussion of active vs. passive learning. I think there should be a struggle with the teacher, conflicting beliefs (I've learned the most when arguing with a teacher), but also with fellow students. The struggle between students just doesn't seem to happen. It's a kind of attitude like: "We just need to get through this, y'all, and pass and learn what we can and it'll be all good." It's not anyone's fault but somewhere a struggle mixed with a desire of wonder to learn was lost. The rewards with learning aren't immediate and for a lot of us, it's an acquired disposition, but once acquired learning begins to feel like recreation.

Introduction

Hello. I'm Christopher Johnson, an English/Philosophy double major. My interests are literature, films, and languages, and maybe philosophy. Feel free to ask me any questions. Or email me if you want to discuss stuff from class or other philosophical subjects.

:D