Refining Personal Philosophies Through Education
Refining Personal Philosophies Through Education
It would be sad to think that one can spend any period of time in an educational environment and not adjust their thinking or at least accept different viewpoints on a subject based on what they hear, learn, or discuss. Our nation tends to view education as the accumulation of skills and processes which we will then use in our careers. Education, however, is, or should be, much more than that. Education is a means to expand one’s knowledge and understanding or many different things. We have stopped using the term “Renaissance Education,’ but the understanding that an education is achieved when one learns about many different subjects and how to use his or her mind to approach life, not just when on learns how to put “Part A into Slot B,” should not be forgotten.
All members of each American generation, at some point during their teen years, view themselves as brilliant philosophers. They all, including this writer, believe they understand much more about the world and their place in it, then anyone who came before them. It is not until much later, in college normally, that people learn their experiences have been experienced before and their previous conclusions about life and themselves, perhaps, may have been wrong, limited, or incomplete. A philosophy class is one of the most efficient means through which students can learn that what they may have believed in firmly at one time may not have been complete or, at the least, that other views are equally as compelling and should not be discounted, regardless of the topic under discussion.
It is the questioning that one learns in philosophy that can be seen as the most important element one should take away from the class. Yes, the individual works of the philosophers and their thoughts on life, fairness, reality, equality, and other viewpoints are also important and can form the basis of later learning and accomplishment. The knowledge, however, that any assumption, fact, or belief can be, and perhaps ought to be, questioned and examined, for the sake of what can be learned through the exercise and the value it provides, is what has most affected me. When is something true and, if I determine it to be true, is it true for me or all, is a question that I will take with me from philosophy. My question may not be as profound as that of Descartes’ famous “I think, therefore I am,” conclusion, but it will at least allow me the ability to continue to expand on what I know and not end my education.
In this way philosophy opens the mind and, by opening the mind, allows the mind to grow and continue to develop. Philosophy classes often lend themselves to great parodies or jokes in movies and television, but rarely are they properly understood. The act of questioning is not one that should be ridiculed or thought of as an insult. Every great development we can point to in history, from the discovery of the steam engine to landing on the moon was likely inspired by a question such as “what if ... ,” or “I wonder what would happen if ... .” Therefore, it is through questioning that we learn the most, as Socrates and many Jewish Torah students have discovered. I will walk from this class having learned this fact. I will leave this class with the understanding that knowledge is not something that is memorized or stored in the brain, but something that is gained through questioning, analysis, and by having the mind consider anything from a new perspective.
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