The Pursuit of Wisdom and Happiness in Education by Steel Sean;

Author:Steel, Sean;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2014-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Philosophy & Contemplative Education: An Infusion of Joy in Education

In my memories of being a high school student, as well as in my current situation as a teacher, the problem of learning seems mostly to gravitate around the experience of learning as drudgery and work, as test upon test and assessment upon assessment, as hoop jumping and curriculum running. Learning in school, it seems to me, is very often devoid of any joy; this is why students so often loath it, and it is why very little of what is taught ever “sticks” with students, for just as Plato has Socrates say in the Republic, “no forced study abides in the soul.”27 Students take delight in seeing, but if the aim of education is, indeed, to divest us of the ignorance of supposing that we see (and therefore that we know) what we do not see, the question then becomes, “How does one go about inspiring, cajoling, or inciting students to take an interest and delight in seeing the highest things, thereby instructing them also about the lower so that they do not suppose the lower to be the higher?” If Aristotle and the other thinkers we have investigated are correct that immortalization is the true aim of education, then the single most important thing we can do to provoke students to want to learn is to confront them with this challenge to immortalize.

However, neither teachers nor students—in accord with the aspirations of their administrative and governmental superiors—take much interest at all in immortalizing. Schall reflects that “the reason we do not reflect on the highest things—the reason why we do not know what we could about our ultimate end or highest good” is that “we allow ourselves to be stupified, to be deflected by what are admittedly many interesting and absorbing things,” and “we do not order our lives so that we are taken beyond what is before us.”28 In other words, lesser sights transfix our attention in the pleasure that they bring, with the result that we take inordinate delight in and lust after things that are not as good as we suppose them to be; likewise, we are moved to fear and pain inordinately at suffering from the loss (or the prospective loss) of these same things through not understanding their nature due to our lack of knowledge about the higher things. As Schall notes, “We are not complete as human beings if we do not have a real taste for learning and take a real delight in it,” and “if we neglect the higher pleasures, we will consequently be prone to mislocate other pleasures.” The task of education, following Plato’s call to leisure in philosophy, is to “take up” our seeing with its associated fears and joys, and to seek out a true measure for what we see in a higher seeing.

Apart from the animosity between the philosopher and his or her surrounding society, yet another difficulty with pursuing wisdom in an education system seems to

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