Can philosophy help with the rioting?

The first response to this is that ‘critical thinking’ or ‘reasoning’ is merely the difference between irrational criminals and rational ones. Or, those that get caught and those that don’t!

Here’s an argument for a positive role for philosophy in the context of the motivations behind the riots:

Having conducted many philosophical enquiries with the very children in Lewisham who are – or may one day be – involved in the kind of behaviour we are seeing as part of the London riots, I have also witnessed the following. During (and as a result of) the discussions children very often begin with intuitions and beliefs that they feel strongly about and would clearly be prepared to act upon. However, following a philosophical enquiry that is structured and disciplined, I have also often seen these very children change their mind or realise that their starting assumptions are wrong. I cannot say to what extent this rational reflection impacts on their actual behaviour, but I can comment on what I see taking place with, I believe, sincerely spoken thoughts and reflections from the children.

Now, if it is the case that a child (or anyone for that matter) can change their mind about a belief that they are prepared to act upon through rational reflection then it follows that they may – or may be more likely to – recognise that beliefs they find themselves holding in the future, beliefs they are about to act upon, are also open to challenge and revaluation. They may (or be more likely to) therefore refrain from acting on that belief. They may (or be more likely to) even refine their belief to include other points of view for instance, or logical analysis, or moral considerations etc.

Philosophical enquiry can (and does) provide the tools for the sort of reflection that is clearly not going on when the youths of the August 8^th night act upon what they believe to be good justifications (when there are justifications at all) for looting or rioting.

Crazy as it may sound, I believe that philosophy, for the reasons given above, can help to tackle some of the underlying problems that lie behind the looting and rioting that we are seeing happening at the time this author is writing (from Lewisham!)

By Peter Worley 9/8/11

See also Anarchy in the UK: philosophy a luxury or a necessity by Emma Worley

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Anarchy in the UK: Philosophy, a luxury or a necessity?

It was during the student riots in the late 1960’s in America that the first ‘Philosophy for Children’ novel, Harry Stottlemeier’s Discovery, was written (1969). Matthew Lipman, a professor of philosophy at Columbia University was troubled by the lack of dialogue and dialogical abilities among students (and between students and faculty members!). The book was intended to help further education students learn to reason and dialogue.

At times like these I’m sure many people are not thinking about philosophy and how it can help, or how it could have helped. Philosophy is generally seen as a luxury, some say the Ancient Greeks had time for philosophy because they had slaves. Most philosophers have come from the middle and upper-classes, and today in the UK it is seen as something done in Universities by academics, not something that is practical or even accessible to many people.

However, every description of the rioters includes ‘unthinking’ and ‘mindless’ within them (and if it’s Theresa May then ‘criminal’ and ‘criminality’ are also a running theme). Disaffected youths are rioting and looting the streets at night in numbers that are overpowering the police. A perfect storm perhaps caused by a lack of trust in those running the country, anger at bankers, police, the media, the economic meltdown, austerity, the example of scenes from the ‘Arab Spring’, and the young being taught about rights, but not about responsibilities? And perhaps a great deal more.

Can philosophy possibly help? More rational rioters? “Do you bite your thumb at me sir? No, sir. But I bite my thumb sir.” Perhaps not philosophy in the ‘history of ideas’ sense (although this can come in to it), but philosophical dialogue and communities of enquiry based on reasoning, reflection and critical thinking really can help. A community of enquiry or philosophical dialogue can help build community cohesion: people talking together to consider the best course of action for their own communities. Rethinking ideas as a group, re-evaluating their own and others ideas, learning to listen and to understand each other, to build on other people’s thinking and to internalize this dialogue so they can critically evaluate their own thinking. Philosophical enquiry not only helps a community as a whole, but also individuals within the enquiry.

In Dr Catherine McCall’s book ‘Transforming Thinking’ she talks about her method of Community of Philosophical Inquiry (CoPI) for children and communities. “Engaging in a CoPI over an extended period of time transforms individual participants and improves their life chances. It is not that the participants learn skills that they can use in other settings; rather, they themselves are changed, and everything they then do is different from what it would have been had they not been part of a CoPI. This is why children behave differently in the playground, at home and in the community – not just in the classroom.”

McCall then goes on to describe a community project she ran from 1994-1995 in a deprived area of Glasgow. The aim of the project was to reduce aggression and violence in Castlemilk. Other initiatives had failed and philosophy was a last resort: the funders decided to take a risk and try to develop a Community of Philosophical Inquiry across the Protestant-Catholic divide. Four groups of children and three groups of adults were created with people from across the sectors to engage in philosophical inquiry. Not only was this the first time these people were engaging in philosophy, it was the first time they were engaging in dialogue with those from the opposite sectarian group.

The results? As the groups of children and adults developed their philosophical reasoning skills and became a member of a community with their traditional ‘enemies’ their behavior changed. Violence decreased and the hold the respective gang leaders had over the communities was diminished.

“The results of the project demonstrated the benefits both for individual children and for the community or society. Individual children improved their performance in school, their behaviour changed, and they gained the opportunity to get to know a whole segment of their community they would not otherwise have known. Society benefited directly from the reduction in violence and the lessening of the gang leaders’ power, as well as from the presence in the community of people who now had the skills and disposition to become active citizens and make further changes in their community.”

The importance of individuals questioning society should not be underestimated. Hannah Arendt called Adolf Eichmann’s unquestioning administrative work during the Nazi regime ‘the banality of evil’. His ‘unthinking’ passive life led to atrocities being committed.  But you need to learn how to question, and how to evaluate the answers you are given. Questioning society does not mean throwing bricks and burning down shops and homes. Questioning involves dialogue. It involves listening and it involves thinking.

When we talk of a ‘Big Society’ and communities we also need to consider the individuals within the community and how to help them. It is through individuals learning to think autonomously, learning to question and not follow the crowd, thinking about how their actions will have consequences in their own community and for themselves that we can help develop a more collaborative, cohesive and caring community.

Philosophy has been seen to be a luxury, but it is not. It surrounds us and we cannot escape it, nor should we want to. We should use it to help us. Life: the economy, politics, media, society cannot function without thinking. It is all about philosophy.

By Emma Worley, Lewisham 9th August 2011

See also Peter Worley’s reflection on the riots: “Can philosophy help with rioting?”

The Future Teacher: Learning from the past

This essay was first published on the Teacher’s TV website as a prize-winning entry for a competition entitled Tomorrow’s Teacher. See http://www.teachers.tv/tomorrow for downloadable collection of all the winning entries. At the time I had not read the short story by Isaac Asimov called ‘The Fun They Had’ about a possible future teacher. But I wish I had, so that I could use it to make the point that technology does not necessarily herald progress. I think technology will play an important role in the future of teaching but unless we consider the timeless virtues of teaching that must be embraced by the teacher, the technology will count for little. I have included the complete list of judge’s comments about the ‘think piece’ at the end as only one was included on the website version.

Plato: the virtue of teaching

For my vision of a future teacher I would like to draw upon the past. Nearly two and a half thousand years ago the ancient Greek philosopher Plato wrote a dialogue called the Meno that begins with the question: can virtue be taught? but quickly develops into an extraordinary discussion of the nature and form of teaching itself.  I believe there is a great deal we can learn from Plato even to this day, helping answer what might be our secondary question: what are the virtues of teaching?

 The child-centred questioner

From the perspective of my future teacher some very important principles emerge from the discussion. Socrates, Plato’s protagonist in the dialogue, states that knowledge will not come from teaching but from questioning, he says that the student ‘will recover it for himself’. My teacher will put questioning at the heart of their teaching so that, as much as possible, the student will be able to arrive at knowledge from their own starting point: approaching new knowledge from that which is already known to them. The teacher will not only question but will develop questioning to the level of an art so that they can fashion any part of a curriculum around good questioning and thereby fully engage the students with the learning process. Learning to put the child at the centre of the learning process is comparable to the Copernican revolution of putting the sun at the heart of the solar system in place of the Earth and, as Montaigne, the 16^th century writer acknowledged, this is no easy task:

“It is good to make him [the student] trot in front of this tutor in order to judge his paces and to judge how far down the tutor needs to go to adapt himself to his ability. If we get that proportion wrong we spoil everything; knowing how to find it and to remain well-balanced within it is one of the most arduous tasks there is. It is the action of a powerful, elevated mind to know how to come down to the level of the child and to guide his footsteps. Personally, I go uphill more firmly and surely than down.”

                                              Michel De Montaigne (1533-1592), On Educating Children

And, as Montaigne himself quoted in the same essay: “Obest plerumque iis qui discere volunt authoritas eorum qui docent.” [For those who want to learn, the obstacle can often be the authority of those who teach.]

Aporia

Also in Plato’s Meno he discusses the importance of ignorance and perplexity (aporia in ancient Greek) in the learning process. For many, not knowing and confusion are seen in a negative light, often signifying stupidity or failure. Plato did not think so: only by going through this essential stage of the learning process can one hope to arrive at insight and clarity. The future teacher will celebrate this state and use it to 1) show how this signifies a proper engagement with the subject; 2) communicate how this can be harnessed to reach deeper levels of thought and insight and 3) use aporia to motivate rather than stifle a student. The future teacher will also not be afraid of their own aporia and will use it to collaborate with the students and will use Socratic irony (feigned ignorance about a topic) to encourage the students to think for themselves as Socrates did with his interlocutors in the marketplace of Athens. No longer will the teacher feel that they cannot be wrong and no longer will they feel the need to portray themselves as a fountain of all knowledge.

Aoidos

An aoidos (literally: ‘singer’) was the ancient Greek name for a teller of epic poems and Homer, of The Odyssey/Illiad fame, was an aoidos. The Odyssey itself was told, following an oral tradition, for hundreds of years before it was written down (probably not by Homer). There are many other examples of oral traditions of storytelling in other cultures too, but with the advent of the printed word and now DVDs etc. this skill has been lost to all but a very few as we have learnt to relinquish these skills to technology. The future teacher will revive this tradition with aplomb. Teachers will build a repertoire of stories for young and older students for all sorts of contexts from learning to speak and write to the use of thought experiments to explain Newton’s concept of absolute space in ‘A’ level physics, thereby putting learning into a narrative context – putting the ‘story’ back into ‘history’.

Logos

Also in the Meno Socrates speaks of the difference between true knowledge and true opinion. In other words about knowledge supported by sound reasoning (true knowledge) and the right answer got by some other method such as being told (true opinion). He thought that getting the right answer was all well and good but if it was not arrived at by a reliable method then it was not worth much. The future teacher will prefer a good understanding of the processes and concepts involved in learning rather than simply getting the right answer by any means. This idea is captured in the ancient Greek word logos, which translates as ‘reason’, or, better still, ‘account’ as this translation captures the importance of the process rather than the outcome of reasoning.

Dialectic

The future teacher will encourage logos, in the right sense described above, by encouraging a disposition towards dialectic in his or her students, first of all among the class as a group but then – perhaps more importantly – as an internal process inside the head of each student as if they had transported the whole class into their head. Dialectic is sometimes described as a ‘collaborative search for truth through discourse, questioning and reasoning’. The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle thought that the best character attributes were learned as habits rather than skills, which may or may not be used. If the process of dialectic is learned at an early age both as an external and internal process then the students will carry with them a naturalised disposition towards learning that will feed their natural curiosity as young people and preserve it as older people. The students will best learn this not from books but by having these skills modelled for them by a good teacher who demonstrates these skills each time they stand before their students in the classroom.

Learning to dance

The future teacher will work towards the development of ‘a well-formed rather than a well-filled brain’, in the words of Montaigne. To borrow some more of his words: the future teacher will give the students an understanding but not content with that, she will then aim to make their understanding dance:

 

“Take Palvel and Pompeo, those excellent dancing masters when I was young: I would like to have seen them teaching us our steps just by watching them without budging from our seats, like those teachers who seek to give instruction to our understanding without making it dance…”

                                                            Montaigne, ibid

Judges Comments:

‘Extraordinarily insightful, a brilliant exposition of why every future teacher could do well to learn the lessons of the past’.

‘Far from being conservative, this essay was radical in its ideas’.

‘It was interesting to read a quote from the 16^th century in this piece  ‘For those who want to learn, the obstacle can often be the authority of those who teach’. I would like to feel that teachers would read this piece and learn from it’.

‘Lovely to see the importance of the teacher in this and how the future teacher will work towards the development of ‘a well formed rather than a well-filled brain’’.