The Contribution of Philosophy to Education

Abstract

J DIRECT this discourse mainly to what I consider the center of the subject suggested by the title. I want to propose an analogy: Education is to philosophy as teaching is to the love of wisdom. I want to substitute the second half of the analogy for the first half and discuss the relation between teaching and the love of wisdom. A teacher, if he is worth his salt, needs and loves wisdom. If I had the space, I should like to discuss Plato's Symposium as a discourse on teaching and the pursuit of wisdom. Not the least of my points would be Plato's dramatic presentation of the varieties of teaching. I recommend a re-reading of that dialogue. I should like to suggest my own array of great teachers, with a few comments on each and some generalizations on all of them. My great teachers are Socrates of the Platonic Dialogues, Virgil and Beatrice of the Divine Comedy, and Christ of St. Augustine's De Magistro. I shall save my generalizations until later. I realize that each of us has his own Socrates. Mine is always a teacher, seeking to pass, with his pupil, from opinion and belief to knowledge. His methods were imitated from the torpedo fish and the midwife, the posing of problems and the asking of questions. By shock he forced his victims to deliver themselves of opinions, ideas in embryo, and he invited post-parturitional judgment by the parent. Each delivery was thus a discovery, a reminiscence, a recognition, and a judgment. In these earnings there was always a final phase with two aspects, an insight and a confession of ignorance, a learning vector with direction, sense, and finite magnitude, and consequently the devastating irony of a tragedy, even in small comic matters. Mr. Whitehead has remarked that