I still home-school three of my seven kids, but even if I didn't, I think I would still be interested in education issues. Talk about something affecting our future, and a fundamental type of media, if you define media rather broadly as intermediate layer, or mode of transmission.
This morning I listened to a Philosophy Zone podcast on Martin Buber. I'm not sure why I downloaded that one, considering that Buber has been only a name to me. I think it was because I was curious as to what distinguished "Jewish philosophy" from regular philosophy.
Anyway, the podcast was a treasure trove to me in introducing Buber's concept of the "I/Thou" relationship, which was primary to what he called his "philosophical anthropology". "I/Thou" is something that doesn't translate well into English, but in German it is "du" and in French, "tu". It is the relationship of intimacy. You address your children as "tu" and your dear friends, and Jesus taught us to address the Ineffable in these terms of affectionate intimacy, as in the Notre Pere.
This rang a bell with me because I have been reading about Phenomenology, which seeks to rescue philosophy from the Cartesian/Kantian muddle of subjectivism and doubt, by positing consciousness of objects as our primary mode of experience, and then I read a bit about Personalism, which is the direction in which such thinkers as John Paul II took the phenomenological project. Here's also an article on Thomistic Personalism of Jacques Maritain, which mentions Buber.
Personality shares its own cultivated life with the lives of others. In the process of developing this personal communion with others, dialogue is required. Nevertheless, as Maritain points out, such communication is rarely possible. Indeed, as another personalist thinker, Martin Buber, has remarked, the fact that people "can no longer carry on authentic dialogue with one another is the most acute symptom of the pathology of our time.'' Hence, alienation _ both personal and intellectual _ seems more characteristic of modern man than loving, personal union.
In listening to the podcast, which admits to providing only a taste of the thinking of a given philosopher, I related this "I/Thou" to what I've read about neonatal consciousness, how the neonate seems hardwired to pick out faces more than anything else, at first, and how they seem custom-designed to be held close, literally nourished through intimacy, and optimally developed by means of being held to see and hear in safety.
One fact mentioned in the podcast was that Martin Buber was abandoned by his mother at age three, which undoubtedly made a deep impression on him. A further impression was reportedly made on his thinking by an experience when he talked philosophy with a young man for a short time one evening, only to learn later that the man had taken his own life the next day. This made him think in terms of how we have a duty to try to understand and relate to people not only in terms of words spoken but also in terms of what is not said. A bit about Buber's thought from the link above:
The origin for Buber is always lived experience, which means something personal, affective, corporeal and unique, and embedded in a world, in history and in sociality. The goal is to study the wholeness of man, especially that which has been overlooked or remains hidden. As an anthropologist he wants to observe and investigate human life and experience as it is lived, beginning with one’s own particular experience; as a philosophic anthropologist he wants to make these particular experiences that elude the universality of language understood.
Now you may well wonder what this has to do with education. Later on this evening I was listening to another audio, this time from the Circe media center. It was a talk by Andrew Kern called Assessment that Blesses. I have only listened to the first half, because I got tired of cycling on my stationary bike and sat down to write this.
He defines blessing according to Psalm 1. He goes on to discuss the story of the Fall and pointed out something that I've never noticed before, that the fruit of the tree was good in all the traditional ways: good to eat, lovely to look upon, and leading to wisdom (Goodness--Beauty--Truth). He made the very excellent point that it wasn't the fruit that was bad, but Eve's action in taking and eating of it. He suggested that one way we could read the text was that Eve made a false assessment -- her priorities were off.
Then he related this to the assessment process that has taken over public schools and tends to encroach on private schools and home schools as well. It is not necessarily that the educational process or content itself is wrong, but that assessment by necessity brings in a destructive, distracting element. It takes the eyes off that One Needful Thing, the very thing that Eve forgot when her eyes locked on the fruit.
I am still thinking about the point about assessment being a cause for the mis-education in our school system but the point I was reflecting on was the sense in which quantified evaluation distorts and destroys the relationship that should be in place between the student, the teacher, and the material to be learned.
Martin Buber contrasted "I/Thou" with "I/it". "I/it" is your relationship with things you use, like your washing machine, perhaps (though sacramentalists like Samwise Gamgee have a way of personalizing even their relationships with instruments like ropes, cooking pots, and Bill the Pony -- it's one of the most hilarious and somewhat touching things about his relationship with Gollum, that it is so "I/Thou" in spite of its cantankerousness)
But he was very concerned (Buber went to Palestine in 1938 but of course, witnessed the events of WWII from that vantage point) that people should never relate to other people as "I/it". And perhaps this is one of the problems with quantification-type assessment; the child is considered as the object of a statistical study, a point on a graph, and since children are natural personalists, they sense this and become cynical, rebellious, resigned, or complicit in this dehumanizing project.
Good night!
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