What Philosophy Is; Clip 3 Video Lecture | Philosophy of Education: Introductory Course - Self Help Learning

philosophy was first systematically done
by Greeks I mean probably human beings
have been doing and raising
philosophical issues as long as there
have been human beings we being the
kinds of beings that we are but
nonetheless systematic self conscious
and a self conscious conception of
philosophy as a discipline is something
that originated with the classical
Greeks about 26 or 27 hundred years ago
and it comes then from two Greek roots
to compound word Telos right and Sophia
a filos is someone who is a lover Sophia
is the goddess of wisdom so the idea of
being a philosopher then is to be
someone who is a lover of wisdom that is
to say someone who takes seriously and
is passionate about the kinds of
questions and coming up with the answers
that the kind of kind of answers a wise
person write would come up with on all
of the important questions of the human
condition now philosophers are people
who do this systematically and do it as
a as a matter of professional practice
or if they are our amateurs devote a
significant amount of their life to it
as human beings whether we are
philosophers so conceived or not it's
important for us to be nonetheless
philosophical because as human beings
all of us bump up against these
questions and for us to live a fully
human life it is necessary for us to
have fought these things through and to
have some sort of an answer hopefully
consistent set of answers and hopefully
a thought through set of answers to
guide our lives as human beings and
certainly as professional educators it's
especially incumbent upon us I think
then to be at least philosophical and
then hence the importance of a course
for professional teachers and of course
in philosophy of Education we are as
teachers telling parents to give us
their most prized possessions their
children I don't think there's a parent
that I know for whom their children are
not the most important thing
in their lives and we're saying to their
parents give us your children for a
significant amount of your child's life
and give us lots and lots of your money
and we will undertake this incredibly
important process of transforming them
into adult human beings who are
competent and capable of living the best
kind of lives possible the only way for
us to do that is obviously to take
education seriously as a profession and
we're all going to be specialists as
teachers we might be seventh grade
social science teachers or high school
coaches or kindergarten teachers or
whatever we all have to know our
professional niche and to know it very
well but we can't approach our
profession with our blinders on we have
to know the particular specialized focus
that we are our professionals at in the
context of what's going on in the rest
of the child's education at that point
in his or her educational career and we
have to know what that stage has to do
with the whole rest of the educational
process and that necessarily takes us to
strategic questions about education and
philosophical questions about education
so education is a profession yes there's
lots of detailed specialist knowledge
that's necessary to be an excellent
teacher
yes but also equally essential is a
philosophical perspective on what we are
doing as educators and the only way to
do that is to spend a certain amount of
time doing philosophy and that's what
this course is about