Reflection on James Baldwin’s Philosophy of Education

• Due Sunday by 11:59pm
• Points 50

Your final assignment for the class is to post a written reflection on your experience of the class, in the light of James Baldwin’s comments on education [posted at the bottom in italics]. I’ve provided some prompts.

I’d like for you to write about 500 words. The assignment is worth a potential 50 points. To get into the A-range, give a thoughtful response to each of the prompts. If you’re content with a score in the B-range, answer only 4 and meet the word-count requirement.

1) Why do you think Baldwin describes education as a paradox?

2) Baldwin says that every society takes “certain things” for granted, and that education in every society seeks “to perpetrate the aims of society”. What did we take for granted in this class that our society also takes for granted? Did the way we studied philosophy in this class perpetrate the aims of our society? If so, how?

3) Do you think the education you’ve received so far in your life has created “the ability to look at the world for [yourself]” and “to make [your] own decisions” and “to ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions”? What about in this class in particular?

4) Baldwin thinks that if a society gets what it “really, ideally, wants” it will actually cause that society to perish. What does a society really want, according to Baldwin? Why would it be destructive for society to get it? How can the right kind of education prevent this destruction?

5) Baldwin says forming our own identity means living with questions, not with answers. Why do you think someone might say this? Do you think it’s true?

From “A Talk to Teachers”

Since I am talking to schoolteachers and I am not a teacher myself, and in some ways am fairly easily intimidated, I beg you to let me leave that and go back to what I think to be the entire purpose of education in the first place. It would seem to me that when a child is born, if I’m the child’s parent, it is my obligation and my high duty to civilize that child. Man is a social animal. He cannot exist without a society. A society, in turn, depends on certain things which everyone within that society takes for granted. Now the crucial paradox which confronts us here is that the whole process of education occurs within a social framework and is designed to perpetuate the aims of society. Thus, for example, the boys and girls who were born during the era of the Third Reich, when educated to the purposes of the Third Reich, became barbarians. The paradox of education is precisely this – that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated. The purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions, to say to himself this is black or this is white, to decide for himself whether there is a God in heaven or not. To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his own identity. But no society is really anxious to have that kind of person around. What societies really, ideally, want is a citizenry which will simply obey the rules of society. If a society succeeds in this, that society is about to perish. The obligation of anyone who thinks of himself as responsible is to examine society and try to change it and to fight it – at no matter what risk. This is the only hope society has. This is the only way societies change.

If you would like to read the rest of the essay, you can find it here (Links to an external site.).

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