Philosophy as a prophylaxis against propaganda?
Education is as much about "how to think" as "what to think".
Too many education systems rely heavily on "fact-spouting" and "rote learning" over "debate/discussion/discourse".
Facts are great. Sure. But they're easily dispensed with little incentive to understand from where or why they arise. There is often no room made for contest, speculation or critical thinking. These are skills.
Facts are not skills. Which is why I support philosophy as a fundamental pillar of education. And yet many nations or education systems do not offer philosophy as a primary or secondary level module. If it were up to me it would be mandatory and fostered from an early age.
I think the issue is that many assessments are based on an objective points based system. If "Fact X,Y or Z" is mentioned then assign 1, 2 or 3 points to said exam response.
This is not learning, it's a memory test.
Pray tell, what is your opinion on the state of global education. For me, the critical thinker is resilient to rhetoric and propaganda, the fact learner is however....not.
Too many education systems rely heavily on "fact-spouting" and "rote learning" over "debate/discussion/discourse".
Facts are great. Sure. But they're easily dispensed with little incentive to understand from where or why they arise. There is often no room made for contest, speculation or critical thinking. These are skills.
Facts are not skills. Which is why I support philosophy as a fundamental pillar of education. And yet many nations or education systems do not offer philosophy as a primary or secondary level module. If it were up to me it would be mandatory and fostered from an early age.
I think the issue is that many assessments are based on an objective points based system. If "Fact X,Y or Z" is mentioned then assign 1, 2 or 3 points to said exam response.
This is not learning, it's a memory test.
Pray tell, what is your opinion on the state of global education. For me, the critical thinker is resilient to rhetoric and propaganda, the fact learner is however....not.
Comments (55)
I think youre right about that.
Education is never impartial; it often represents the beliefs and desires of the people and institutions that provide it. Church education, for instance, never forgot to instil a belief in the church and its religion.
As for public education, my opinion is that the state doesnt want philosophers and people who can think for themselves. It wants dutiful tax-payers, soldiers, state employees, and dependents. Thus the system trains the population into a state of serf-mindedness and compliance. It teaches us to glorify the very institution that provides for their training.
One of humanity's biggest strengths is our ability to pass on knowledge, learn from what people who came before us learned and documented. Shutting oneself off from that seems... counter productive, to me.
Like many things, there ought to be a way to find a healthy middle ground - one where you apply proper skepticism to avoid the most egregious propaganda, but you don't apply it so deeply that you have to start your knowledge journey from scratch.
It does happen that way. But it also happens in the opposite direction.
The power of universal literacy and an informed consensus is the engine of democratic life. What people do with their education, however, is widely various. The academy has given birth to the normative as well as the revolutionary. Those who learned through applied skills can be as closed minded or open minded as those from other backgrounds. The Liberal Arts happen where they are alive and kicking.
That's for sure. I could even say that one of the most nuanced philosophical thinkers of the 20th century (Heidegger) seemed to find the Nazi narrative acceptable. But that might be gauche.
Quoting Benj96
Is anyone on earth an expert on global education? Who would even know 1% of what takes place in the realm of education on the planet?
Even the term 'critical thinking' is contextualised through interpretations and iterations and is always subject to a criterion of value which is itself contingent.
Quoting Benj96
Really? Rote learning seems to have been out of favour for decades. There are some
vestigial traces of it left, but education in parts of the West seems to have moved on. Even when I was at school, we did not have to learn dates and facts. They were seen as the product of outmoded Victorian era educational practices.
My daughter's generation (she is 27) were very much given a discussion/debate/discourse model of education. But as I hinted above, different countries do different things.
What we probably need to do is cite specific educational approaches as implemented and then subject them to some evidence based scrutiny rather than just present untheorized opinions on 'education'.
Yeh, but Derrida and Levinas baptized his thoughts, if not his soul. ;)
Keep in mind that the folk hereabouts are not philosophers.
including yourself? Just curious.
While many facts are results of critical thinking, critical thinking without fact-learning is anti-intellectual.
Lots of propaganda masquerades as "critical thinking" where the sole purpose of the "thinking" is to cast suspicion or doubt on the facts, e.g. to undermine the possibility to criticize false or nonsensical claims etc.
I'm borderline, with a couple of degrees and actually having been paid many years ago to teach philosophy at Uni.
There might be a half-dozen folk on the forums who have some idea of how to do philosophy. Most of them only post very occasionally.
Overwhelmingly, the forum is populated by folk who read a book once, and so think they know how to do fil-o-so-fee...
And it shows.
But yes, information presented without a cohesive narrative, or historical contextualization ends up being only potentially useful. Learning how big a frog's genome is, by itself is a big SO WHAT? Learning the names of each gyrus and sulcus in a brain is not very useful unless one learns what they do and how these various parts relate to an animal's actual life.
Juvenile students generally can not supply a narrative or context themselves, at least one that is appropriate. An educated middle-aged adult can receive new information and devise a mental structure which makes sense of it. High school students have long complained about having to study literature. "What is the point of reading this stuff? What is the point of learning history? I don't care what happened 200 years ago or what a poem really means."
I'm not sure to what extent English Lit and History teachers themselves have a solid narrative in the heads which enable them to deliver facts in a meaningful (and interesting) context. College literature and history classes are offered as big chunks which may be studied completely out of sequence. The students are assigned big blocks of material to read (or skim) through; the lecturer will add information about say, Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy (1621). How much understanding about depression, or melancholy, a student will depart with is doubtful -- because in several days the class will move on to another big chunk of text. Who influenced Burton and who did Burton influence? Who claimed to have benefitted from reading the Anatomy of Melancholy, back in 1621?
What is the over-arching story of the American Experience, 1620 to 2024? at 77 I feel like I have some idea, and it isn't what I was taught in high school. It isn't that what was taught was just a pack of lies. Rather, a lot of topics were left out. The Erie Canal opened in 1825. What were the political, social, and economic consequences? What was traveling on early railroads (or even ones in the early 1900s) like? How did the more sparsely settled South become so politically powerful, and stay that way into the mid-20th century?
I doubtless need to get out more.
As opposed to someone who jumped straight to the very last relevant philosopher and thinks he has the answer to all discussions posed on this website. But yet no answer is ever posted, just dumb rhetorical questions that seem to have skipped Plato.
Meh. The stuff I study is fifty years out of date.
There are people here who have actual qualifications in philosophy, I personally know many in real life, none of them say the things you do. So is your attitude a result of your grand knowledge or is it a result of your own personality?
The fact you think philosophy boils down to words suggests you can't summon an apple in your head and spin it around. As to critical thinking, the statement "there are no philosophers here" doesn't show lots of it.
[hide="Reveal"]And before a 3rd-party decides to whine, Banno felt free to pass judgement on the entire userbase of this website, I felt free to pass some too.[/hide]
Quoting Banno
In philosophy, new doesn't equal better, the opposite is true. Back to Plato.
Quoting Benj96
Not good. But many (not close to all) youths don't care about education and only want to skip classes to hang out and do drugs. So education isn't the issue here, otherwise everybody would be getting 10s everywhere environmental or genetic, I think both, but emphasis on the latter.
My "attitude" is entirely down to me. I'm pleased that others are not saying the same stuff I do; I might therefore claim some small originality, although I suspect it has more to do with my being unfashionable. I'm sorry that you don't think this forum is part of your real life, with which it seems you are quite annoyed.
Nice of you to make this thread all about me. Cheers. Keep it up.
I do think the U.S. is too opposed to philosophy, but the problem with your proposal is that "philosophy" is an incredibly elusive term. I would follow Lloyd Gerson in defining it in terms of Plato's wake, but many would disagree with me. So perhaps philosophy is a prophylaxis against propaganda; it's just that we will never be able to agree on what "philosophy" should mean.
Moreover, it's not so clear what "propaganda" is, either. But we would not want to make this a discussion about the use of "words..."
Quoting Benj96
Am I right in thinking of you, Ben, as an Englishman?
Here's some data that might be reassuring. More folk are better educated than ever before.
Critical thinking is more of a middle-class concern, perhaps, on the global scale.
1) yes I was going to make the same point and 2) clever bugger.
Quoting Banno
Thank goodness. Do you think the emerging romantics who want to go back to the Greeks count as philosophy or is this just a romantic nostalgia project?
You might very well think that. I couldn't possibly comment. :wink:
Good. A quick look into political discussions shows how philosophy is likely deleterious. Besides, the term philosophy is basically meaningless anyway.
Be a decent human being and teach basic stuff and kids will be fine.
I was not aware of such a movement. Does that category include those who have read a lot of Greek texts?
Asking for a friend.
I was first conscious of a contra-enlightenment school when sociologist John Carroll wrote a polemical text called Humanism 1993. The argument (and I am simplifying) generally points to the consumerism and toxic relativism of contemporary culture, pins this 'loss of meaning' on enlightenment thinking (death of God) and recommends we return to Aristotle (and, if Christian, Aquinas).
Take a look at these ngrams.
There does appear to be a significant increase in mention.
Some of the actual scholars of the texts do promote such views. Others do not. A concerted engagement with the texts is needed if one is to decide for oneself.
That's just what they want you tho think...
:wink:
Who are these people who want me to think this way?
Or is your comment a rhetorical device?
Understood.
I am interested in your actual response.
Could be. Not being a philosopher, Im mainly interested in behaviour.
I spent a few hours yesterday looking at Classics undergrad courses. They are a bit scarce. ANU did offer pretty much just what I was after a few years back, but it seems to have dropped off. I might contact them next week and check.
This, because I've sometimes regretted not having studied Greek and Latin. It'd help me make sense of the likes of Anscombe and Nussbaum.
But philosophy did not stop at Aristotle, or even Aquinas. They are interesting, even fun, but not necessary.
So back to: Quoting jgill
JGill is right, critical thinking is not tied to philosophy. I used critical thinking most extensively as an undergrad, in studying archeology and anthropology. But whereas other subjects make use of critical thinking, philosophy, perhaps exclusively (but psychology?), makes critical thinking it's topic. If you are thinking about how best to think, you are no longer doing maths or environmental studies, but something else.
It's a mistake, then, to think that because philosophy is not taught explicitly, it's not taught at all.
It's a mistake, also, to think that because critical thinking is not taught explicitly, it's not taught at all.
When I taught technology, I did so using a design, make and appraise model, quite explicitly. I also took that model further, using it in teaching how to write essays, plan meals, or mediating disputes. What is that, if not critical thinking? But I didn't call it that.
So good thinking is not limited to philosophy, but it is the place where may be made explicit. And philosophers have much to say as to what makes thinking good or bad.
But teaching this stuff formally, as part of the curriculum, is unnecessary and probably counterproductive. Only some folk will have the stomach for it. The rest will reject it.
Me too. I wonder if the absence of a middle voice in English completely alters our understanding of the ancient Greek texts. I suppose it does. Would be nice to read them in the original.
Do you think there are philosophers who are more necessary than Plato and Aristotle?
It's interesting to me that you often complain (with Midgley) about the sorry state of philosophy, but I'm not sure you have a remedy to hand. Now, I've no doubt that folks like Hare and Wittgenstein are better at resisting the problems than their contemporaries, but they are at the same time enmeshed in the same sorts of problems that tend to plague 20th century English-speaking philosophy.
Quoting Banno
As an analogy, a society without cabinetmakers will tend to be comparatively lacking in all that relates to quality cabinets. Sure - others can fill in the gaps. General carpenters and those who specialize in other disciplines can manage to throw together a cabinet in a pinch, and these cabinets will be more or less passable. But without the specialization and its outflow into the society a lacuna will form.
Actually in our age of hyper-specialization overarching disciplines like philosophy become especially important. I think you are over-associating philosophy with logic, but even in the case of logic the analogy holds. For example, Scientism is full of scientists who "throw together logic in a pinch," and it's not so much that their logic is incorrect, but rather that it's incomplete, and they end up mistaking logic for scientific logic. When those disciplines which anchor all disciplinessuch as logicbecome unmoored and conflated with sub-disciplines, then all of the sub-disciplines that rely on the anchor suffer.
How should this be understood - "Is there someone such that without them there would be no philosophy in any possible world?" Well, no, there isn't. Philosophy is only incidentally about individuals.
There'd be a difference between acknowledging the need for cabinet makers and insisting that everyone be taught cabinet making in primary school. And yes, urbane life would be much less comfortable without plumbers; but while it is helpful to be able to change a washer, it doesn't follow that we all need to be plumbers.
In so far as logic gives us a way to talk about language, and philosophy has language as its principle tool, Logic must be central to philosophy.
Good post.
Once we would have done Greats, but now it is difficult to even find a teacher. I'm not entirely sure that this is not a change for the better - although I do have trouble with Universities that do not have an Arts or Humanities faculty. Are they really universitas magistrorum et scholarium?
You would be incorrect.
Quoting Banno
Surely critical thinking is best exemplified by those at the elite end of the system for one reason or another. Otherwise how do they trump the rest of us in the power-finance struggle?
Moreover, you say more folk are better educated than ever before. Where does the dunning-kreuger effect play into this? Absorbing misinformation and calling it education does not an educated person make. Flat earthers were a non-issue in the previous century. So it's clear something within the endeavour to become better thinkers has gone awry. And that invariably comes down to the quality of education and the reliability of sources.
Perhaps that us the crux if the issue itself.
Sadly I think arbitrary fact recycling and disconnected informational points are the method of choice for too many educators. That's why I suggested philosophy as a doorway to allowing students to develop their own frameworks, apply them, familiarise themselves with criticism and rebuttal, allow them to defend ideas or acceot new ones and overall to develop a sense of discursive enlightenment, not mere fact learning.
Context is the existence we live in. Association is the way we position individual facts within that context and form practical or insightful relationships between information.
I agree. For if we can assume nothing (ie have no trusted facts) and apply "critical thinking" to every shred of knowledge we are offered, we must go back to first principles again and again in an exhaustive and inefficient cycle.
In an ideal world, facts stand as the ever continuing basis for fresh education upon which we can grow, develop or build a greater level of knowledge.
Unfortunately not all facts remain accepted as such. And some facts are likely erroneous to begin with. Science is in a forever fluctuating paradigm shift.
So without the 100% certainty of fact, one must at least lend some credence to the ability to think rationally. To apply logic. Which is another set of skills beyond mere fact absorption and assimilation.
One would imagine a refined reasoning ought to lead to the same "facts" if such facts are indeed true.
I think the point here was not having a global education oneself. One does not need to know the intricate details of every item on every syllabus across the globe to establish a general comparative study of international education systems. This is somewhat a strawman commentary on a point I never actually made.
Your argument is analagous to saying a "linguist" ought to be fluent in every human language. When in fact they usually study the different frameworks for language and their grammar, and how they compare to one another.
Well I'm also 27 and from the proverbial "west". And my education in school was heavily based on fact and rote learning. With the exception of English - in which we had to develop opinions and comprehensive analysis of a literary work by our own accord.
The opinion may indeed be "untheorized" on a global scale. I can concede to that of course. But in my nation as with my neighbouring one, the concensus is that rote learning is alive and well in many "big players" of the west. And this I based on personal experience having undergone that education system along with many friends from other not too dissimilar western countries.
I am however delighted to hear your daughter benefited from a more nuanced and discursive method of education. I would have loved this format had I had the opportunity myself.
On my view philosophy is twofold: disposition and competence. The philosophical disposition has to do with wonder and inquiry, and this can be inculcated even from a very young age. Philosophical competence has to do with the intellectual virtues and the knowledge that they then make possible. In oneself, it has to do with the ability to learn new knowledge, and both extend and transcend one's philosophical framework(s). In relation to others, it has to do with the ability to engage and bridge different paradigms, and to cooperate, challenge, and act as midwife. This competence requires more maturity and cannot be achieved in any substantial way at a young age.
The disposition precedes the competence, but we find individuals of all different kinds. Some lack both disposition and competence; some have both; some have only one or the other (to various degrees). Critical thinking is but one part of philosophical competence, as is logic.
Philosophical disposition and philosophical competence are vaguely related to Pierre Hadot's ideas of philosophical praxis and philosophical discourse, but disposition is meta-praxis and competence is meta-discourse, in the sense that they are not restricted to a single school of philosophy.
Education and intelligence don't appear to be a good predictor of susceptibility.
The antidote to propaganda is to know oneself better than the propagandist; and "to know oneself" is such a complicated and multi-faceted endeavor that I don't think it can be taught in a school environment.
Ha! No, I'd say it is more a reasonable response to what you asked -
Quoting Benj96
Quoting Benj96
Consensus? Which big players? I wish I had had more rote learning and less discursive lessons. At school, the flaccid discussions bored me, so I paid little attention. Talk is cheap.
I would imagine rote learning has been replaced in many countries - especially those which emphasise conceptual understanding versus facts.
I'd be interested if you had any empirical data on the prevalence of rote learning versus other styles in world education practices.
And France?
That's true. IMO, teaching critical thinking is the priority. It could be taught in a more general philosophy class, but it wouldn't need to be.
So let's take it as an example.
Here's a graph of Singapore's GDP since 1960
The OECD notes three phases in Singapore's eductaion policy.
Edit: Given a lag of a few years while students grow into the workforce, these three phases can be seen in the GDP. Prima facie autonomy had the greatest effect on GDP. It would be interesting to follow through on this.
Critical thinking and philosophy do not figure in this report. Singapore consistently ranks highly in PISA scores. And not just by a little bit:
Here's the US:
And Australia:
Singapore ranks 69th on the Economist Democracy Index. But both Japan (16th) and South Korea (22nd), also on your list, rank above the USA (29th) on that index. Australia is in 14th place.
What to conclude here? Not much. We do know that education leads to democracy. See for example Analysis Of The Relationship Between Democracy And Education Using Selected Statistical Methods
Other factors remain unconsidered on this thread - student agency being the obvious one. Students who learn to take responsibility for their education may well be less disposed to authoritarian demands.
I don't see how it does. Dunning-Kruger may be explicable in terms of regression to the mean, or at least reducible to the better-than-average effect.
Australia consistently outperforms the US, however our results are in decline. We've had the answer before us for decades - our private school system is overfunded, resulting inequity and a burgeoning bottom-end in standardised tests. Gonsky was never implemented*.
We also have a tendency to adopt one-size-fits-all approaches from the UK and the USA, rather than say the autonomous open approaches of Scandinavian countries. Put simply we tell teachers what to do instead of allowing them their professional judgement.
Here's a quick list of the points I would make:
*...because Gillard was beholding to the Catholic education system, and Turnbull to the private elite. A proper political fuckfest.
Quoting Benj96
Totally. To add to your observation, I have found that, not only is it fact based rather than "skill" based; but, the "skills" which are taught are not focused on how to think, but rather, how to grow up gainfully employed, even for kids at elementary levels. Of course, I am not so naive as to deny the value; but, like you, I think teaching how to think must be a priority, beginning in early years.
A somewhat interesting, recent article on the topic: "Who Should Study Philosophy"?