The crisis of education as a philosophical crisis

Usually, we teachers find ways of avoiding certain questions rather than answering them. What exactly is a lesson? What fundamental differences exist between the objectives of secondary schools, specialist schools and universities? And what should we be teaching or learning first, as the basis for everything that comes behind? This article proposes that the only way to answer these questions—or understand what can’t answer them—is by engaging in a basic process of philosophical enquiry. To ignore the questions can only have negative consequences for the process of maturity and education that our educational institutions are supposed to offer. But instead, in our daily work as teachers, we become sufferers of the pressures of the modern world, the premium on scientific specialization, the division of labour between those who are more or less skilled and various strains of political elitism. Instead of recovering a tradition of philosophical enquiry to deal with this reality, we hurry to bemoan the widening gulf between the formal, natural, human and social sciences and to protest that philosophy is an inadequate means to deal with this. The same thing happens when we discuss business, politics or everyday human relations. For these reasons, the article emphasizes the importance of using philosophical enquiry as a means to battle bureaucracy and to help us understand our objects of study rather than simply letting it become one more object itself.