A primer of my educational philosophy

This will serve as the basis for a good portion of my book on non-belief, belief, and beliefs into action. There is a lot to be fleshed out here. Keep your eyes peeled. Some of this comes across as incomplete because it was initially written for a different audience who knew all of the references.

“... from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved."
- Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species

Humanity occupies an unprecedented niche in the living world. Our ability to adapt to new environments dwarfs all other “higher” taxa animals on planet earth. Though the humpback and bowhead whales sing elegant arias to one another over dozens of miles in a language of which we can only grasp the rudiments, they have no ability to make tools to change their environments. Last year researchers from Iowa State University discovered that female chimpanzees in Africa were making rudimentary hunting spears and teaching younger female chimps how to fashion them. As fascinating as the unknown grammar and syntax of whale languages and chimpanzee tool-making are, the human ability to speak, write, read, use that language instinct to manipulate and adapt to its environment stand as both our greatest asset and our greatest weakness. These several powers combine with the human animals powerful moral and social instincts to make it the most formidable complex organism on the planet and the human animal’s most potent social superorganism is that which incorporates the United States of America. As Peter Parker’s, a.k.a. Spiderman’s, Uncle Ben says, “With great power comes great responsibility.”
From this prologue, my philosophy of education flows easily in three statements:
1. First, do no harm.
2. Having intelligence, we must not act in ignorance.
3. I hope that my students will be the best versions of themselves that they can be.
In the following short statement, I will clearly explain each premise, its foundations, its ramifications, and the means by which the goal can be reached.

First, do no harm.
I begin my philosophy of education with the Hippocratic Oath. A.S. Neill recognized that children were likely to inherit or suffer from their parents’ neuroses or adults’ psychopathologies. His solution was to offer them a home and school free from the doctrinaire rote learning of the so-called “standard education.” Instead, he offered them a place where they could be entirely free from ecclesiastical ignorance and adult intrusion. At Summerhill, children’s wisdom was to respected and admired. Summerhill was a nurturing environment wherein harm was minimized, thereby at least giving the minimal environment in which all children might flourish and might become, as John Dewey might have said, agents of their own personal force, intellectual abilities, and moral character. Note though, that an environment wherein harm is absent meets only a minimal requirement. Nonetheless, it is the basis for any kind of genuine democratic and/or consensus work that can engender good thinking and reciprocity.

Having intelligence, we must not act in ignorance.
The second statement quotes the character Ged from Ursula LeGuin’s novel The Farthest Shore. I assume now that human beings are a species of sapient and sentient mammals who use linguistic, cognitive, and material tools to manipulate the environment. We are intelligent, social, and moral animals. Charles Darwin observed as much in his Descent of Man and it has been reinforced in the writing of E.O. Wilson, Michael Shermer, Frans de Waal, Mark Hauser, Richard Dawkins, Bob Trivers, Peter Singer, and many others. The remainder of my philosophy of education rests upon these facts.
What follows, then, is a chain of means establishing a basic method for educational practice. It is a tetrapartite chain, each, once again, flowing from one to the next though none is necessarily more important than the next. Students benefit from:
1. The liberal education.
2. The ecological education.
3. The skeptical/critical/scientific education.
4. The socio-moral education in democracy.

First, the liberal arts education has received a bad rap not least because of the chauvinism of people like Allen Bloom. We cannot doubt that the inheritance of modern America includes the belief and action of the “great books” authors from Kant and Rousseau to Nietzsche and Camus to Singer and Dennett. But that would be to sell the story short in just the realm of philosophy. Modern Americans would do well to entertain a panoply of philosophical, literary, aesthetic, musical, religious, arithemetic, and scientific subjects.
The modern U.S. student should be exposed to the three R’s – reading, writing, and arithmetic (though I honestly find arithmetic so basic as to need little explanation). But following that a broad understanding should follow that explores the foundations of the U.S. government including the exploration of the framers’ philosophies as they made the Constitution of the United States of America. What of Rousseau? What of Locke? Jefferson? What is the place of art, literature, and music in culture? How can we look to the symphonies of Gustav Mahler to understand the rupture of modernism or, to bring it to the U.S., how did Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man auditorily embody the ideals of much of the nation? How do we explore human nature? We look to some great books like The Lord of the Flies, Othello, or I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. The great religions each dictate their own truths and consequences according to their gods. What do they say? Astronomy. Paleontology. Each contains its facts.
There is no single right answer in what I have proposed except perhaps in the realms of science and arithmetic. Thus far, my proposal merely stands as exposure to the grand expanse of human endeavors and history in broad strokes. The means are rather mundane perhaps – reading textbooks to understand the consensus view on subjects. But from here we begin to explore the ramifications of the past’s actions.

Second, we need to be ecologically literate. As we are an evolved moral, social, and intelligent animal who shouldn’t act out of its ignorance, then it behooves us to understand the place that we occupy in our biosphere. The previous section dealt almost exclusively with human endeavors within human culture. But given the impact that human beings have had on planet earth and the belief, whether from Genesis or Bacon, that we have dominion over the earth or can dominate it, it would behoove us to understand how and why we impact the biosphere and what prices we and it pay for our manipulation by our tools.
Clearly, we change our environment more than any other species. The beaver can build a dam. The termites build their mounds up to twenty feet high in the scrub of Africa. The bower bird makes his nest and the bird of paradise fastidiously cleans a runway for his display. But no animal on earth can irrigate, domesticate, plant, crop, fallow, milk another species, make greenhouses or computers, extract natural resources on an industrial scale, and go to war with the technology as simple as spears or as advanced as the F-17. Those privileges are reserved for human beings. We need to see how all of our habits affect the biosphere.
How to do this? Thankfully we have a plethora of knowledge and practice to work with. David Orr provides us with the basic essentials of a program though Ecological Literacy provides little direct data that would move us forward. Wendell Berry’s experience as farmer and naturalist shows us the value of a man cooperating with his environment. Francis Moore Lappe provides us with the insights of eating lower on the food chain. Barbara Kingsolver offers to us a means by which the family can achieve some semblance of sustainability.
But in the class, how does this translate? As we have seen in the work of Harrison Shaley and Cathrine Sneed via the Garden Project, Alice Waters in the Center for Ecological Literacy (CEL) and her multiple school gardens, the “Miracle at Adobe Creek,” Stone’s article on “The Food Revolution at Berkeley,” or Common Roots video, we have many examples to draw from. We can grow food. We can compost. My favorite ideas come from showing young people how the Vikings or Picts or Seneca prepared food or from coming to understand the range of architecture in Pennsylvania by examining the capitol building, the governor’s mansion, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Water, the average American home, the setter’s cabin, the Iroquois longhouse, or the beaver’s dam. What are the effects of each of these “houses”? How do their occupants use their environments? As a social studies teacher in a public school, I ought to have more leeway than any other subject teachers to engage the huge breadth of ecological possibilities because we can incorporate the sciences of geography, sociology, and anthropology into our students’ studies.

Third in this chain, I come to critical and skeptical literacy. Wendell Berry warned us that we can we can be pawns of “the government’s economy and the economy’s government.” No amount of accepted facts and learned ecology can prevent us from being agents of the state for the state. However, critical and skeptical thinking can. There is no better way to engage this than by understanding the scientific method.
Three examples will have to do for now. The first is a rubric of Carl Sagan’s “Fine Art of Baloney Detection.” In essence we shouldn’t accept arguments that provide no evidence for their statements; we can’t accept arguments from authority simply because they come from authority; the first explanation isn’t always the best one; our own invented explanation isn’t always the true explanation. The list goes on and on into logical fallacies. But if we are to become good consumers of information who can truly be their own principles and agents then “we the people” need to discern the truth values of the claims made to us.
The second example that one could share with students comes from Kingsolver’s “Fist in the Eye of God.” This essay invites the reader to consider the claims and power of companies like Cargill or Monsanto and how they align with the Creationists of modern America. Both are allied to maintain a status quo of ignorance – both feed the pockets of so-called elites some of whom are religious fundamentalists and others are scientismists. All profit at the expense of American ignorance and our underacquaintance with the scientific method.
The third means comes from Wendell Berry. His idea that we should “solve for pattern” is an excellent notion. To return to the ecological literacy for just a moment, we can see how growing a garden can connect us to the environment but also it invites us to examine the claims made in the popular media regarding our food production and consumption. What can we learn by contrasting the evidence of our own gardening and eating, the studying of the nitrogen cycle, composting, maybe even fallowing, with what occurs on the industrial scale. How does the evidence weigh? Who is “in charge” and why are they “in charge”? What different explanations can we try? Which one is the most accurate and the most parsimonious? These questions and explorations would get right to the heart of Francis Moore Lappe’s Diet for a Small Planet, David Orr’s Ecological Literacy, Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation, Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth.
If we could apply just a shred of sunlight, Lucretius’ notion of “a scheme systematic contemplation” or what Justice Louis Brandeis called “the best disinfectant,” to these processes, we might well be in better shape today. That sunlight would come from skepticism and rigorous questioning.

Fourth, to establish the non-harmful environment is to provide a structured direct democracy. Students could directly participate in their own studies, their own governance, their own arbitration, and with whom they should like to study. In this way I identify very much with both Neill and Wiggington regarding schooling. Children have inherent wisdom and, given the opportunity, they can use it well to learn and live happily.
Because the heart of my tripartite proposition entails peaceful coexistence, it should follow that students will reciprocate good action. They will naturally form hierarchies and in- and out-groups of one form or another. However, because the good of the one depends on the good of the many, and everyone’s integrity rests on others’ good wills, students should treat one another well. In such a place, the likelihood of reciprocity increases and, by extension beyond the classroom, engage what Peter Singer has called “the ever-expanding circle” that moves from band, to tribe, to fief, to nation, and maybe even to the global human population or non-human animals.
I understand that not every school, especially a current public school, can allow such a direct approach, I would still keep some of the same though the participation would necessarily be reduced according to the authoritarian hierarchy of the school’s and government’s administrations. However, the notion of the participatory circle could make for a more ideal learning environment where students can be themselves, always knowing that they are safe in my class.
No matter the “school” environment, I would hope that the students in my class would be able to execute the force of their individuality, their intelligence, and their moral agency. Lappe, Prakash, Estevea, and too many others have each sought for the grounded and skeptical youth to come forward. John Dewey hoped for the same – that the school would not separate itself from “life.” School might not be a place to learn about morality (though not necessarily) but it should be a place to learn morality.

I hope that my students will be the best versions of themselves that they can be.
At a school of my own design, I would provide as minimally structured an environment as possible and enable the students to determine the course and scope of their own studies and whether they want to work in groups or alone. Within these groups their agencies could come about. Ideally students could coalesce as they see fit. But in an environment that at least does them no or little harm, cultivates their intelligence and dissuades their ignorance, and elicits their sociability and character, they should be able to get closer to the best versions of themselves that they can be as the social, moral, and intelligent mammals they are. They might then evolve into their “forms most beautiful and most wonderful.”