Chapter+4+Reflection

I think this chapter on Philosophy was very interesting. I attended public school so to see how the curriculum goes about being constructed leaves me at nothing short of interested. The book provided us as readers with definitions, visuals and examples making this difficult yet interesting topic easier to digest. This chapter in the book focused more on the educators’ use of philosophy and often referred to them as “natural philosophers.”

I do agree that teachers and educators either have a philosophical perspective or they do not. From what I have found from personal experience with different educators is that the ones who are in touch with a philosophical outlook tend to teach more effectively than those who are not. To me, a teacher does more than just teach, they recreate. Some teachers have the ability to make events from hundreds of years ago come alive, texts from old dirty school department shelves jump off the page and connect to each student in their class on a different, yet common level. That is how I view a good teacher. When planning their lessons I assume teachers rely on many factors, one the curriculum, to the events from before the topic, the philosophical idea behind it and what can be interpreted from the ambiguous information. For example, I know many of my high school English teachers researched prior events that the book was based on, had to make sense of the ambiguous information and also looked to many great philosophers like Plato and Socrates because in many cases Plato’s writing and Shakespeare’s writing can be paralleled almost infinitely. So yes, teachers can be natural philosophers in many ways.

Another part of the text that caught my eye was idealism. The concept is not very abstract but how it intertwines with teaching is very interesting. Idealism holds that ideas or concepts are the essence of all that is worth knowing. So, once you apply this to a classroom, the teacher is the ideal role model and the teachers utilize three ways of teaching; lecture, discussion and imitation. This sounds like many classrooms I and many have you may been in before. However, what ties back into how teachers teach and why they teach what they do is brought back to curriculum of schools today. In idealism it states that teachers don’t teach to the subject, or the students they teach to the idea. Think about it, without the idea what would they teach? Because the idea is the basis of everything.