Philosophical Questions about Education; Clip 4 Video Lecture | Philosophy of Education: Introductory Course - Self Help Learning

of course everything in contra is
controversial rather in philosophy
including this particular claim and I
suppose we're all familiar with the idea
that there are many people who will deny
that this claim is is even true they
will say that this destoy Cotta me I'm
setting up between my dog Hamlet and my
brother or between other species and
human beings is a false dichotomy that
human beings are like any other animal
species not beings that have ultimately
moral responsibility because they don't
have a little control over who they are
instead what they are simply more
complicated determined beings by forces
right beyond their control and so there
are various of philosophical and
psychological and biological positions
that will argue that in fact we do not
have any choice instead we have a
determinism as the truth about the human
being but the causal forces that are
operating on human beings are more
complicated than various other species
and they can give rise to this illusion
right that we are beings that are making
morally responsible decisions there are
a number of varieties of determinism we
might make the argument that we are
creatures of biology that is like a dog
or a hawk or a rabbit those species are
all born with a certain genetic for a
package that expresses itself as the
species developed but rabbits are going
to grow up to be rabbits Hawks are going
to grow up to be hawks and human beings
then are just a more complicated
developmental story biologically we also
know there's the position that human
beings are products of their environment
there the claim is that human beings
while they are complicated biological
creatures nonetheless developmentally
we're still left with a lot of
plasticity in our makeup and depending
on the social and environmental forces
that we are exposed to that plastic is
shaped and molded in various ways until
by the time you get an adult human being
the adult human being is primarily a
product of his or her or social
environment and there are certainly also
theological versions that argue that
there are divine forces God or the gods
that ultimately meal the power and
that what goes on here in the human
world is already scripted for us and we
are the puppets of the gods or of God
and they're just simply going through
the motions that the the divine
playwright or playwrights has already
written now if we are then by contrast
determinist stripes of various sorts
that's going to give a very different
cast to our educational process we're
not then going to be primarily
interested in internal motivation in the
choices we're not primarily going to be
too interested in moral responsibility
we're not going to be using languages of
praise and blame because all of that
kind of vocabulary presupposes that the
student has something to be praised for
right or blamed for instead we're going
to simply see ourselves as complicated
cultivators right have a biological
product but that biological product
already has an inbuilt biological
destiny or we're going to see ourselves
as control auras of the environment and
the student is a more passive being to
be manipulated and shaped as we the
teachers think should be done or in
stronger theological versions we will
argue that what God wills will be done
and we are simply passively going along
in that particular direction okay now
notice all of this is taking us into
huge territory and this is not the end
of it but putting all of these kinds of
questions in one box
all of them are questions in one
important branch of philosophy that
branch of philosophy being questions of
human nature and here we're trying to
probe what it is to be a human being
right fundamentally essentially like
most importantly and that set of
philosophical questions right if
certainly those philosophical questions
do also take us into questions of
biology they take us into questions of
theology and they do take us into
questions of sociology and psychology as
well but that philosophical component of
them that we as teachers then have to
address is going to be very important to
how we answer the question of what our
educational output is and that then is
in turn going to determine how
we're going to structure this whole
educational process and we're not going
to be able to do our educational process
well unless we have a clear idea about
what the output and we're not gonna have
a clear idea about what the output is
until we've addressed systematically
these questions about human nature and
made up our minds in an informed way
what we think that human nature
fundamentally is all right
that's one philosophical question that
as it bears on education