The Peripatetic Philosopher shares:

A TEACHER RESPONDS!

 Plagued by an Excess of Intellectual Emptiness

JAMES RAYMOND FISHER, JR., Ph.D.

© January 31, 2017

AUTHOR’S COMMENT:

Of late, I’ve been reading a lot about the so-called “Age of the Enlightenment” to better understand my own times.  The roots to everything that are good or bad about today seem to emanate from that age.  It was during the late 18^th century that we had the “American Revolution” (1776) and the “French Revolution” (1789), largely based on the writings of John Locke, Thomas Paine, Voltaire and Rousseau, among others. 

It was a difficult period in America history, but somehow reason prevailed with the young nation going forward without a counter-revolution. 

This was not the case in France with the “Reign of Terror” with hundreds losing their lives at the guillotine only to be followed by the rise of the Corsican, Napoleon Bonaparte as Emperor creating massive plunder and carnage before being subdued in Belgium at Waterloo.  Yet, to this day Napoleon is a hero in the eyes of many Frenchmen and beyond.

Madness is always just under the surface of every society at the ready to break through to wreak havoc tantamount to an emotional earthquake.  We are now in such a period.

The sad part of the equation is that real issues of social, political and economic as well as ethnic and religious issues are always legitimate contributing factors to the affair.   The problem is that jackals in the other part of the equation are always equally at the ready to exploit the situation to their advantage with the hapless majority caught in the middle. 

The American longshoreman turned philosopher, Eric Hoffer (1898-1983), wrote a series of books including “The True Believer” on the subject, as earlier French polymath Gustave Le Bon (1841 – 1931) did the same on the psychology of the popular mind with such books as “The Crowd” and “The Psychology of Revolution.”

They were explaining philosophers.  They were not planting seeds.  Philosophers in the “Age of the Enlightenment” were planting seeds and using ideas as weapons.  German legal philosopher Hermann Kantorowicz (1877-1940) captures this differentiation succinctly: “There is an important distinction between thoughts and ideas.  Men possess thoughts but ideas possess men.” 

We have possessed unevenly the philosophies of the Enlightenment as we are now in an age bereft of ideas putting all creative energies into the making of things, while congratulating ourselves for our brilliance in this electronic “Age of Information” and ever more appealing contraptions. 

Meanwhile, schools are failing and therefore our students are failing.  The total title to Professor Tom Nichols’ article in The Chronicle of Higher Education was “Our Graduates are Rubes”: We are churning out entitled students with paltry knowledge and inflated egos, easy prey for propagandists.”  Indeed, we are seeing evidence of the crowds across the United States protesting the immigrant ban without fully understanding what it entails or even what it is all about.  We let the media do our thinking for us and where does that usually takes us?  To the streets!

It doesn’t matter if you have a Ph.D. or M.D. or occupy the chair of a prominent university during these times of mass hysteria.  Emotions rule! 

The comments that follow are from a recently retired teacher, a person I know and respect, a person without animus towards anyone but who has the courage to reflect openly and honestly on his career in teaching after reading my referenced missive. 

While on the subject of education and good sense, we here in Florida have found our educators constantly flummoxed with how to lift our students up out of their angst and apathy to realizing education is their ticket out of fear and ignorance and yes, poverty and humiliation.  What has Florida done to address this issue?

Florida has created a school award system on the basis of funding with such designations as “A” and “B” and “C” and “Failing” schools.  The award index is based on school testing, grading, student promotion, and the like. 

As incredible as it may seem, I learn only today in reading columnist Daniel Ruth op ed piece in the The Tampa Bay Times that the Pinellas County School District (across Tampa Bay from Tampa and Hillsborough Country) recently implemented a new grading system no doubt to improve its award ratings.  Students receiving 66 to 100 percent on US History examinations now earn an “A”; tougher courses in the sciences such as biology have to at least score 70 percent on a test to get an “A.” 

For my Great Depression generation 96 to 100 percent was an “A” in any course and a 66 percent score would have been an “F.” 

How can you develop tolerance for others when ignorance rather than knowledge and understanding are not part of the equation? 

We Americans are in a messed up age in terms of priorities.  It was the reason I wrote “Time Out for Sanity!” (2015), and I’m sure the reason why Professor Tom Nichols wrote his article.

A TEACHER SPEAKS

I agree with you 100% (re: my article on “Intellectual Emptiness”).  When I started teaching in 1967, after about a year into the business of education, I felt we were like the Soviet Union in that the state was responsible for rearing the children.  It has never changed. 

When I was teaching at King (high school) doing hall duty during lunch for our section of the campus, a student was standing outside the door among other students waiting to come in when the bell rang.  

As he was waiting he said out loud “We should rush him (meaning me) and kick the shit out of him.”  I went out the door and took him to the office.  On the way to the office I told him he was lucky he was at school because he was the one who needed his ass kicked.  

He was suspended and the next day his parents came in and complained about what I had said to him.  When I was in high school and had I said to a teacher what he said, my parents would have punished me and certainly not gone to the school to complain about anything.     

All this ruckus over Trump’s decision to keep a closer eye on Muslims also bothers me.  Muslims and Non-Muslims are demonstrating in the streets about the Trump decision.  

However, when ISIS broadcasts cutting a non-believers head off or burning them to death and other atrocities such as 9/11, you don’t hear a peep from these same people, and on top of that you don’t hear anything in the media except this one sided reporting.  The only thing Muslims have gone out to protest is cartoons and anything that they see as an insult to Mohammed. This behavior is essentially like the behavior of the student and his parents in the above incident.