A Critical Look at Modern Educational Philosophy

The Philosophy of Education and Cultural Philistinism

One of the most striking elements of American culture is how common it is to be dissatisfied with one’s education. Modern educational philosophy is a term derived from my using search-engine optimization software to find topics to work on, which I will metamorphize into a piece of philosophical jargon; a critical look at modern educational philosophy —one which, in the vast majority of cases, is against the utility (really, the necessity) of data, critical thinking, and the idiosyncratic needs that widely vary from student to student— is one that perceives modern education as still grounded in the assembly line, cultural philistinism, and their intertwined negligence of the individual in each of us.

It is, indeed, a product of this system that led me to the phraseology of this essay’s title —content is driven by the broader culture, whose primary aim is money. In content, the paper trail all must follow is online visibility. And given that “a critical look at modern educational philosophy” is something evidently a lot of people search for on Google, one can detect that my occupation is in content. There is, admittedly, something of our cultural will-to-revenue that has motivated the title —but not the substance of the material. Just because a creation was, in part, motivated by cultural philistinism does not mean that it is, itself, a piece of cultural philistinism. But I digress.

In any case, while modern education seldom teaches the how of personal finances, it does reinforce the what or is of personal finances —or, to be less esoteric, school reinforces the social conventions surrounding money in lieu of teaching students how to make or manage money. And these conventions place the “grind” or the pursuit of “influence” and "wealth” at the forefront of an individual’s worth —hence, schools whose student’s parents have money are more likely to have access to personal finance instruction. In some sense, the title of this essay has come from this convention’s own influence on my behavior, for I would have not the slightest care for SEO keywords and writing articles to increase my traffic online, if it were not for the fact that making content is now tied to my survival. Concessions always have to be made on the basis of the culture you are “thrown” into at birth, and for many creatives —like myself— this means regularly producing content that you would not have otherwise produced without monetary incentives.

However, this does not mean I cannot adapt to these concessions and spin them into something of my own. That is, in fact, what the central doctrine of existentialism asks for. We cannot escape the social conventions of our time, but we can adapt to them such that our experience in relation to them is no longer painful. Modern educational philosophy is the outright failure to teach this lesson to the youth. But that is why I am not writing this article as a “listicle,” a “guide,’ or as anything else other than a “critical look.” Words flow from my head onto the page, despite the initial motive being that of my culture. Originality does not always have to be self-prompted.

The cultural philistinism here being regarded is that which guilts us all into believing that we must be externally prompted and that our internal prompts are a priori casted with suspicion. Contrarily, seeking to cultivate the interior —not necessarily by way of excluding the exterior, mind you— is what the education of the philosopher calls for. But we are not trying to educate the masses to think like philosophers but instead to despise philosophical thinking and those who show any signs of it as children (in school, that is.) Questioning our conventions —mentioning the fact that they exist as conventions, and only as such— is antithetical to modern educational philosophy as it stands.

Making this essay into my own, I can only shudder to imagine what “a critical look at modern educational philosophy” would look like when written by a non-philosopher or by the sort of individual I am talking about that has been taken in by our cultural philistinism, who utterly lacks philosophical thought. A person who, for instance, lacks curiosity outside of “what’s for dinner tonight.” Such individuals have no concern for the philosophy of education and that is because our education system thwarts any such concerns from forming in the first place. After all, what kind of money are you going to make with such concerns?

There is obviously something personal about this essay in its indignant tone, but that tone would not be present if I were a cultural philistine myself. Nor does that tone undermine the veracity of the philosophical case hitherto made. I’ve gone through our modern educational philosophy and the systems that perpetuate it, but I’ve also overcome it to the extent that I can see it for what it is —simply one convention, among many that exist across times and places, which just so happens to govern our time and place. The problem is that these conventions are equated with the eternally true —the average heterosexual in the 20th-century thought being homosexual was immoral, always was, and always will be, for instance. Our reification of ideas —which they are nothing more than— allows these ideas to dominate our lives through coloring the conceptions of reality we hold in manipulatable ways. What most people think where we grew up —indeed, even what most people think globally— are not ideas we have any obligation to attach ourselves to and more often than not, such attachment is incredibly damaging to the individual, who should instead be guided on how to figure things out for themselves. Instead, a prescribed set of ideas on what the world is like are offered, only to the inevitable effect of refutation, by way of experiencing life at some point or another. It is as if they teach us this as a mode of anti-preparation.

For we are taught that the world is one way, but it is really another —and the former is almost always simple, while the latter is complex. Children are not blind to the complexities of reality —they’re just misguided on them by adults, who were themselves misguided. “Man hands on misery to man,” as Phillip Larkin’s This Be The Verse exclaims in a stark truthfulness uncharacteristic of most poets. And the systematic way in which this poetic realism affects humanity en masse, is through modern educational philosophy.