Ignition for Education

Often, teachers have little time to think deeply about our work. We rush from lesson plan to lesson, to grading, to meetings, to curriculum plans and standards, to lunch supervisions, to extra-curricular activities, to parent-teacher conferences. When we get to rest, we want to…well, rest, not reconsider. But constant reconsideration, leading to constant improvement, is critical to high performance in any field. For this reason, a teacher must at some point pause and ask not exactly why we do what we do–queue the pat answers about loving children–but how what we do fits into a broader scheme of human wellbeing—to use a word that an English teacher like myself might consider dangerously vague, of goodness.

Because, philosophically, that isn’t a vague word. More about that later.

When we ask, we must resist the obvious, utilitarian answers. Most of the world thinks our profession exists to make young people literate and numerate, equip them with employment-readiness skills, and teach them to behave in a socially acceptable manner. And I am proud that we do those things. Some offer us social cohesion as a motive. We are to teach a body of knowledge and culture that society shares—a literary cannon, for example, or moral standards. Others believe in education as a means of ensuring that children adopt a worldview—a religious worldview, or “patriotism” as a kind of worldview–that their parents and teachers and community hold in common. Still others see us as guardians of our students’ emotional wellbeing and self-esteem. And again, I’m proud of the work we do in the latter direction.

But to truly understand our role, we have to think deeper. We must go back to the historical and conceptual foundation-stone of moral philosophy—Socrates’ question of what constitutes goodness, or, as philosophers call it, “the good.” With an answer to that question—not a final, end-of-the-debate-forever answer; nobody ever has that–we can ask questions about how to further the good of both the individual and society. And about the role of teachers and the roles for which we prepare our students.

And, finally, we can answer objections to what we now know about the good and its implications for education. Because—no exaggeration—some of those objections threaten to rip the soul out of education, liberal democracy, and a great many of the most promising human beings.

Freedom means we don’t criminalize ideas. It doesn’t mean we don’t call them out for intellectual cancers when that is what they are.