Part of the point of a college education is to make intellectual
demands of students. This is required particularly by the
subject
I teach, philosophy.
In teaching philosophy courses at Maryland I attempt to provide
the sort of atmosphere that students often miss in courses on more cut-and-dried technical
material. It's not particularly a competitive atmosphere, but
one
stressing coordinated group conversation. Though my classes
typically don't
involve a very heavy burden of reading or written assignments, I
expect
close analysis of our readings and a back-and-forth
("dialectical")
style of summary/discussion during small-group classes and on exams and
papers.
Where class size permits, I give students important
responsibility
for leading the discussion; and where time
permits, I provide students with line-by-line analytical comments
on exams and papers. In larger courses where discussion is led by TA's this job has to be delegated to others, and the schedule of topics and readings has to be set out formally in advance. However, in the smaller courses that I teach on my own, I often allow some flexibility as to the
pace
and subjects of the readings.
In another sense, however, my approach is uncompromising: it stresses self-criticism and
self-discipline, as required both by the enterprise of philosophy and
by
intellectual (and personal) growth at the college stage.
My aim is quite simply to make serious students into serious
thinkers. I don't
maintain a particular philosophic viewpoint in class (though I
don't
mind saying what mine is) but rather attempt to
give the strongest argument for whatever position students seem
not to appreciate fully.
I also place important emphasis on the ability to think clearly
in
writing. I often am struck by the number of students who
can
express themselves rather well orally but whose ideas become
seriously disordered in writing. It's a frustrating problem to
work on, since it can't be corrected adequately in the space of a
single course; nor are students pleased to have to confront it at
the college stage. The best I can do is to insist on taking the
problem seriously.
Though I sometimes add recommended side-readings from other
traditions
to the main material for my courses, my own training
is in Western (specifically, Anglo-American) philosophy, and my courses focus on works
from
that tradition. They typically concentrate on a few selected authors or readings,
in
the hopes of setting students a task they can handle without
relying on secondary sources, despite the difficulty of much philosophic writing.
I don't attempt to deny the limitations and even prejudices of some
of
the historical figures in the Western tradition; my approach to
them
is not at all reverential, but rather critical. But criticism of the best sort depends on first understanding the view in question in its own terms. Sometimes, for that matter, these
authors can themselves be viewed as representing other cultures,
in
the sense of forerunners of our current global culture. But it's
important to my educational aims that such differences be
confronted and studied.
Bertrand Russell once commented that the most important thing to
be
learned from philosophy is the ability to deal with
uncertainty. What students gain from philosophy courses is not
necessarily an enlightening body of knowledge but rather the ability to work on intellectually demanding
material on their own.
A typical small-group,
discussion-oriented
philosophy class involves puzzling over complex texts and issues,
not necessarily to reach a final conclusion, but more
importantly,
to sort out relevant positions and arguments and to explore
different responses to them. The process can be difficult in the
short run, but it's essential to the ultimate purpose of education.