| There are many concerns which much be addressed when a teacher develops an educational philosophy. Both teacher and student must have a role to play in the classroom to facilitate learning. Not facilitating that role to the maximum potential or overstepping the bounds of that role on the part of either party can lead to a failure to create a learning environment. Educational philosophies are not set in stone. Each year that a teacher spends in the classroom offers new perspectives and new experiences that alter the predisposed inclinations upon which prior philosophies were formed. Regardless of the abstract ideas a teacher brings into the classroom at the start of their career, experience is going to mold and temper a teacher's ideas about teaching. Teachers do not teach classrooms of clones, they do not teach students of equal intelligence, motivation, or background, therefore any teaching philosophy is only as successful as it is flexible to the needs of the individual student. The metaphysics of an ideal (not idealist) teaching philosophy fall between realism and pragmatism. Reality is first and foremost based on natural law (Ornstein, 2003), but intricate in its infinite nuances of individual, environment, and experience. The exact same person in the exact same environment having the exact same experience is going to be part of the exact same reality every time. It is the infinite variations in individual, environment, and experience that produce different results. Therefore it is not the reality that changes, but merely more of the same reality is being discovered at the slightest variation of variables. Currently our public school system, still obsessed with mathematics and the sciences as the thema dignitas of modern education, fails to grasp the importance of the liberal arts as the underpinnings of a civilized, cultured, highly functioning society. The explosion of technology following the Russian launch of Sputnik and subsequent money to be made in fields heavily dependent on math and science knowledge have relegated the liberal arts, including communication arts, to subjects worthy of fast-food occupations. Two arguments supported by Justin Busch in "The devaluation of reading skills" (Busch, 2004) state that students coming into college the past 30-35 years gradually indicated make money as their goal in choosing their education, and this was reflected in their choice of majors which directly lead to a specific vocation. Busch summarizes that "the culture has changed, and reading and writing skills are no longer valuable except as technical requirements for other career goals." (Busch, 2004) For Aristotle, language was the foundation of education. Within the context of Realism, Aristotle argued that Plato's theory of forums was too mathematical, as it required a form for every thing. (Kimmerling, 2001) But as Plato before him, Aristotle assumed language to reflect reality. Therefore reality could be explained with language, as "is" was the object and not merely a symbolic representation of the object which left room for ambiguity and relativity. Aristotle further developed his epistemology, relating the acquisition of knowledge to sensation (tactile learning), thought (abstraction), and desire (motivation). Aristotle's philosophy as related here is the foundation of the educational philosophy developed herein, with differences and deviances as noted. A modern theorist who attempted to poke holes in Aristotle's assumption of language's relation to reality was S.I. Hayakawa. Based on the theories of Alfred Korzybski, Hayakawa was a proponent of General Semantics, which among other things challenged the objectivity and authority of language, rejecting Aristotle's two-valued reasoning and advocating that a word is, in fact, a symbolic interpretive representation of a real thing. (Hayakawa, 1991) This existentialist theory leaves room to interpret or redefine reality in any context and utterly rejects the notion of absolute truth as one that can be described by language. Despite Hayakawa's theories regarding the relativity of language, such ambiguity in the relationship between the "is" and the thing described can be attributed to the variation in individual, environment, and experience. With this is mind, development of language and communication skills (reading, writing, and speaking skills to be more precise) must be at the forefront of our curriculum focus. Contrary to the emphasis on math and science as the pinnacle of educational importance, it is our communication skills, the ability of every person to relate ideas and express themselves to their fellow man which should be of primary concern for educators. The importance of literacy and communications arts in education in the United States has not been entirely overlooked. Illiteracy has dropped dramatically around the world in the last 50 years, with the United States having only about 1% of its population defined as illiterate by United Nations standards. (Columbia, 2007) As with other subject areas in education, the percentage becomes far less impressive in economically poorer areas. The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 stresses the importance of Communication Arts along with Mathematics, and has attempted to address the discrepancy of achievement among economic and racial subgroups through distribution of grant money and accountability testing. (US Dept. of Ed., 2007) The problem with the No Child Left Behind Act is that it relies on faulty assumptions, a prime example of which is the assumption that a child's lack of motivation to do well in school is the direct result of poor instruction or under-qualified teachers. In his 2007 article, "No Child Left Alone: an education reform run amok," Andrew Ferguson emphasizes three key problems with presumptions made based on the No Child Left Behind Act. Drawing on an article by Myron Lieberman entitled, "The Educational Morass: Overcoming the Stalemate in American Education," Ferguson emphasizes that:
In light of these excellent points Ferguson reiterates in his column, it seems that the Act's attempt to correct the lack of emphasis on communication arts in education over the past few decades might be undermined ironically by a stubborn reliance on oversimplified quantitative data to address learning from a purely mathematical and scientific standpoint. Despite the flaws of the federal government's educational policy, we have no choice as teachers but to embrace this policy for its duration and do the best we can with its framework to improve the education of our students in such a way that they produce more positive quantitative data. That being said, an emphasis in collaboration between teachers and individualized instruction due in part to this educational policy can work to improve our schools and strengthen our pedagogy in ways that go above and beyond the results of a quantifiable assessment test. So from a realist point of view, our axiology demands values that are "absolute and eternal, based on nature's laws" (Ornstein, 2003) yet which reveal the expansiveness of these natural laws and diversity of outcomes in interaction due to variance of individual, environment, and experience. Due to this variance, it is the role of the teacher to take into account the diverse nature of their students, to understand that different individuals from different environments with different experiences will arrive at these absolute values differently. There needs to be flexibility on the part of the teacher to meet the needs of these individuals. One way for a teacher to employ this flexibility in an effort to help students learn is to design and facilitate learner-centered projects which allow the students to work with the material in their own fashion, using their varied experience to creatively process the material so they understand it. It would seem that learner-centered projects rely on the absolute nature of reality, trusting that regardless of a student's methods, that student will arrive at the same knowledge, albeit with some minor guidance from the instructor. While one might argue that learner-centered learning is a more pragmatic method of instruction than realistic, the use of learner-centered learning techniques to allow individuals with varied experiences and home environments to arrive at absolute realities is an invaluable tool for the realist's pedagogy. In reality, it is often impossibly difficult to narrowly define a teacher's educational philosophy to a single definitive point on the philosophical spectrum. It can be equally difficult to translate a philosophy's abstract definitions into the practical language of pedagogy. But despite forming a philosophy which borrows nuances from both idealist and pragmatist thinking, this realist philosophy is centered in the definition offered in the text, that "there is a world of real existence that human beings have not made, [but which] the human mind can know." (Ornstein, 2003) This is the essence of Aristotelian philosophy, of Aquinas's Thomism, which must remain at the core of a successful teaching philosophy. As a teacher, it is important to approach knowledge as something that is real and obtainable. It is important to restore the importance of the liberal arts, especially communication arts, as the foundation of educational curriculum. It is important to take into account individual learning styles and backgrounds of students in order to create an effective, efficient learning environment. This can be achieved in part with the use of learner-centered pedagogy. It is necessary to work within the framework of government education policy, including the No Child Left Behind Act, until such a time as the policy is changed for the better. And most of all, it is important to change one's personal teaching philosophy if prior philosophy does not work and experience dictates that said philosophy must change. With these thoughts in mind, a teacher cannot help but be successful. References Busch, J. (2004) The devaluation of reading skills. Semantic Compositions. http://semanticcompositions.typepad.com/index/2004/04/the_devaluation.html Accessed October 1, 2007. Ferguson, A. (2007) No child left alone: an educational reform run amok. The Weekly Standard. Vol. 13 No. 2 http://www.theweeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/014/118xfsjy.asp?pg=2 Accessed October 1, 2007. Hayakawa, S.I. (1991) Language in Thought and Action. (5th ed.) Harcourt: Orange County, FL. Kimmerling, G. (2001) Aristotle: Reality and Knowledge http://www. philosophypages.com/hy/2p.htm Accessed Sept 30, 2007. North Central Regional Educational Laboratory. (2004) Learner-Centered Classrooms, Problem-Based Learning, and the Construction of Understanding and Meaning by Students. http://www.ncrel.org/sdrs/areas/issues/content/cntareas/science/sc3learn.htm Accessed September 30, 2007. Ornstein, A.C. & Levine, D.U. (2003) Foundations of Education. (8th ed.) Houghton Mifflin Co.: Boston, MA. The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia. (6th ed.) (2007) http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/society/A0858751.html Columbia University Press. Accessed September 30, 2007. U.S. Department of Education. (2007) Student Reading Skills Improvement Grants. http://www.ed.gov/policy/elsec/leg/esea02/pg4.html Accessed September 30, 2007. |