Philosophy of Teaching

Randall Smith

Associate Professor, University of St. Thomas, Houston

 

Background: From Plato to Christ

 

            My inspiration for teaching comes from my own college experience.  At Cornell College, there was a small cadre of extremely gifted individuals who mentored students into a life-long love of learning.  There was also — and this was equally important — a large group of students who were absolutely in earnest about reading a wide variety of classic texts, discussing important ideas together, and arguing until the early hours of the morning over fundamental issues. 

 

            During my freshman year, I took a course in which we read Plato’s Gorgias.  After reading Plato, my life was never to be the same; not because I became a devoted Platonist — I am not — but because I saw modeled in Plato’s character Socrates a dedication to clarity of thought and a love of Truth, Justice, and Beauty that awakened my admiration and my desire to be like that great “lover of wisdom.”

 

            What reading Plato’s dialogues gave me was a new self-awareness and a new sense of freedom.  I felt as though, during the time before I went to college, I had been only half-awake: merely “sleep walking” through life or, worse yet, living out a script written by someone else.  Plato’s dialogues gave me a sense of what it was to examine my life with respect to the kinds of choices I was making, and to ask myself the fundamental question: Why?  Why am I making the choices I am making?  Are the choices I’m making, making me happy?  Are they making me better off and more fulfilled as a full and complete human person?  Reading Plato made me consider such questions for the first time.  And I began to understand that Socrates meant when he said at his trial that “the unexamined life is not worth living.”  I didn’t want to go back to “sleep-walking” through my own life.  I wanted to become more and more aware of myself as a human agent, responsible for my own choices and especially the choice of the kind of life I would choose to live.

 

            Eventually, during my senior year of college, I made the choice to enter the Catholic Church.  It seemed to me then, as it still seems to me now, the only viable choice I could have made.  I had developed a deep respect for the great intellectual tradition that stretched from the Greek philosophers and tragedians down through the Fathers and Doctors of the Church up to the present day.  For a person such as myself who admired Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Augustine, and Thomas Aquinas, there really seemed to be only one community I could join. The only place where such thinkers seemed to be taken seriously — “taken seriously” in the sense of providing a serious existential challenge to one’s way of life and view of the world — was the Catholic Church.  Describing my conversion in this way, however, makes it seem entirely too “intellectual.”  In truth, I believe no conversion is entirely intellectual.  Such existential choices are always a matter of responding with one’s whole being to the fundamental human need for wholeness and meaning.  

 

Approach to Teaching

 

            One of the ideas that especially appealed to me then, and has ever since, was Socrates’ statement that he was merely a “mid-wife” who helped give birth to new ideas in his students.  I remember as well how profoundly inspiring I found this same idea enunciated by the famous Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, when he spoke of the value of “indirect communication.”  “Direct communication” means taking the truth as I know it in my head and trying to put it into the head of another. Direct communication of truth is fundamentally untenable for human interlocutors, because my truth (the truth as I understand it) does not become the truth for another person unless he or she understands the thing on its own terms and accept it by means of their own act of both intellect and will.  A student cannot simply “take” my ideas.  At best, they can only be “prompts” for greater consideration.  For the student to hold something as true, he or she must go through his or her own process of consideration and acceptance.   My job is to help my students ask the right sort of questions — that is to say, important questions: questions that have to do with life, human flourishing, and the nature of existence itself — and then guide and coach them to reason well, think clearly, and be absolutely truthful with themselves and others.

 

            Another fundamental principle that I learned from reading Plato was the admonition “Know Thyself.”  It was a statement that I only began to appreciate more fully, however, later in life, when I saw it at the head of an encyclical by a Pope who was to have an immense influence on my life and my teaching.  Pope John Paul II wrote in the opening lines of his encyclical Fides et Ratio that “Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth; and God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth—in a word, to know Himself—so that, by knowing and loving God, men and women may also come to the fullness of truth about themselves.”  Reading this encyclical caused me to want to inspire my students to become more self-aware — that is to “know themselves” — in much the same way that I was given the opportunity to come to a greater self-awareness during my college years.  I wanted my teaching not only to inform my students, but to inspire them.  I wanted my students not only to see the world more clearly, but to understand its importance.  And I wanted them, by understanding the world’s importance, to love it more truly and care for it more faithfully.

 

            Reading Fides et Ratio made me re-think my fundamental approach to teaching theology.  I came to believe that the way to critically reflect on any religious tradition — including one’s own — was to view it as a collective cultural response to what Pope John Paul calls “the fundamental questions which pervade human life,” questions such as: “Who am I? Where have I come from and where am I going? Why is there evil? What is there after this life?”  These are questions, says the Pope, “which have their common source in the quest for meaning which has always compelled the human heart. In fact, the answer given to these questions decides the direction which people seek to give to their lives.”  I want my students to have the self-awareness to see the direction in which their lives are already headed and the courage to face the fundamental questions of meaning which pervade human life, precisely so that they can make free choices about what direction they wish to give to their lives.

 

            An important part of my pedagogy, therefore, involves making my students aware of themselves as free agents engaged in the process of learning.  I want them to be aware enough of themselves as learners that they can engage in fundamentally reflective acts of “meta-cognition”: that is, I want them to be able to think about their thinking and be aware of their own process of learning.  For teaching not to be mere propaganda or manipulation, students should understand what they are doing, where they are headed, and why.  They should choose to learn, understanding (at least implicitly) both the goal and the process.

One of Socrates’ greatest strengths, we are told, is that he, unlike many of his countrymen, “knew that he did not know” things.  An awareness of one’s own degree of knowledge or ignorance is essential to the process of learning.  It can also be essential part of creating a love of learning. 

 

            And creating a life-long love of learning, as well as coaching students effectively so that they will develop the tools for life-long learning, is another one of my fundamental goals.  Such tools include the ability to read analytically, to think critically, and to write clearly and with passion about what is most important to them.  Developing and perfecting those skills is, I am convinced, another crucial way in which students can be empowered and provided the possibility for personal freedom.

 

Nature of Pedagogy

 

            Even when I am presenting basic information, I stress skills.  I teach skills by teaching content.  For me, the two are inextricably intertwined  When my students read, it is very important to me that they learn to read analytically: that they see the connections, appreciate the author’s arguments on their own terms, and understand the relevance and potential importance of what is being said.  I want them to appreciate the beauty of well-crafted words, as well as a well-crafted argument.  I want them to begin to appreciate the power of language. 

 

            It is also important to me when students read that they begin to see connections: connections between premises and conclusions, connections between cultural presuppositions and premises, as well as connections between different world-views and cultural presuppositions.  I have also been profoundly influenced by Pope John Paul II’s assertion that what drives history is culture and especially the ideas that inform culture.  Thus, as part of educating my students’ “self-awareness,” I want then to come to a greater understanding of their own culture and the ideas that have informed their cultural self-understanding.  At the same time, it is also my goal to reveal to them the ways in which the Catholic faith is a living response to the fundamental questions that inform culture.

 

            In the end, however, I believe analysis must culminate in appreciation.  The intellect is fed by a greater and greater appreciation of the truth, but the intellect’s journey is also one that must be animated by love — ultimately, by the love of one another as God has loved us.  My ultimate goal, then, is for the students who have become co-learners with me to find that they have become better prepared for living a life dedicated to the search for wisdom and consecrated to the love of God and neighbor.