A Simple Philosophy of Education

I used to tell students in one of my classes that parents, teachers, and doctors have in common a painful measure of their own success: parents succeed when their children don’t need them anymore; teachers succeed when their students don’t need them anymore; and doctors succeed when their patients don’t need them anymore. What is painful about this measure is that, in order to be successful, we must proceed consciously and actively knowing that we are presiding over our own declining purposes. I believe this imperative for us in education is non-negotiable.

I believe we must strive to prepare learners through academic readiness to make themselves more complete human beings. I believe that we have a responsibility to ensure for learners the most favorable environment we can for their integration of knowledge and scholarship and for the acquisition of necessary comprehension and synthesis skills. To accomplish this task we must provide for them ample and purposeful opportunities to develop and to test developing hypotheses and to encourage an advocacy of the notion that a part has coherent meaning only in the context of "the whole." If what we desire for learners is a sustained and productive response to order in flux, then we must stress the plurality of the foundations of knowledge and the diverse angles of refraction on ways of knowing. Becoming a more complete human being means being prepared sufficiently to respond with sensitivity and creativity and to resist the lure of the rigidly familiar. It means allowing dimensions of difference to emerge as components essential to formulations of new orders.

I believe, too, that we must come to understand service as an essential element in one's lifelong learning—that it is not just giving back to society--though it is that, too; rather because it is fitting…and because it is right…but more importantly because the lived through experience of service bestows to our persons the full currency of the human phenomenon.

I believe we must encourage in learners a willingness to engage simultaneity rather than to insist primarily on quantifying discrete bits of isolated information as the "way of knowing;" we must prepare learners to take the risks required by creative acts of the imagination--to guess what is yet unspoken, unseen; we must urge their discovery of secrets still obscured in complexity as much as to remind them to place into coherent sequence that which everybody already knows.

I believe we must exhort learners to remain flexible and adaptable, and to trust in the fundamental connectedness of things, so that they may acquire (learn) whatever they need in order to arrange bewildering fragments of thought and experience into at least a more plausible, if not a more intelligible design. This approach to or philosophy of education promotes a commitment to a capacity for lifelong learning and establishes the essential context of a presiding sensibility, without which the whole seems too much of a random miscellany. Learning is active; it is transitive; it can be reflexive and reciprocal; it illumines.

As an educator, I believe we should encourage in learners a belief that the role of learning in their lives will be central to the creation of coherence, to the negotiation of meaning. Through learning, I believe, learners should fortify their courage to dream--not merely to plan; through learning, I believe, learners must ensure that their aspirations and ideals will continue to hold their shape in the dissolving images of yesterday's news. I believe we must urge learners to attend to their physical, psychological, philosophical, intuitive, spiritual, intellectual, and emotional selves because attention to this totality of themselves clarifies purpose and the connectedness of life