Yostivanich

Recently the TED Blog high­lighted a study noted by the British Psy­cho­log­i­cal Soci­ety. The study taught 105 chil­dren for 16 months at 1 hour a week philo­soph­i­cal inquiry. The results of the study showed: “Com­pared with 72 con­trol chil­dren, the phi­los­o­phy chil­dren showed sig­nif­i­cant improve­ments on tests of their ver­bal, numer­i­cal and spa­tial abilities”.

Per­haps this is the key to mak­ing our chil­dren smarter and rais­ing the edu­ca­tional stan­dards, teach­ing phi­los­o­phy. I wouldn’t sug­gest that this is the only thing that can be done to improve the edu­ca­tional sys­tem, espe­cially here in the US. How­ever it cer­tainly couldn’t hurt and accord­ing to the study would even help. The logic behind why it helps is cer­tainly pretty clear, philo­soph­i­cal inquiry aims to have the stu­dents ask ques­tions and rea­son out on mostly on their own the answers. This encour­ages sev­eral things among the stu­dents, inde­pen­dence, rea­son­ing, logic and a ques­tion­ing nature. All of these are great things to har­ness in a pro­duc­tive mem­ber of stu­dent. I would love to see the edu­ca­tion sys­tem har­ness this idea and start teach­ing chil­dren philosophy.

I took debate in high school and it was an amaz­ing expe­ri­ence. The sheer expe­ri­ence of being forced to exam­ine an issue from all points of view and make rea­son­able and log­i­cal argu­ments for these dif­fer­ent views was a valu­able expe­ri­ence. It taught me sev­eral things, First to always pro­vide a good rea­son as for what I think or believe in, Sec­ond edu­cate myself on a host of issues for who sounds like an expert may not be and could be wrong. Debate forced me to both gain a firmer stand­ing on those ideas that I believed in and to give up those which when exam­ined came up short.

I am a firm advo­cate in both that edu­ca­tion can solve a host of prob­lems and also that the edu­ca­tion that stu­dents receive should be wide and var­ied. Rather than lim­it­ing say an engi­neer­ing major to just engi­neer­ing core related class, I would like to see engi­neers being forced to take more lib­eral arts classes. There is an impor­tant rea­son that the cul­ture that is widely con­sid­ered the most impor­tant to West­ern Soci­ety is the one that not only dis­played impres­sive engi­neer­ing, sci­ence and archi­tec­ture but right along side all of that was phi­los­o­phy, sculp­ture, poetry and debate. This same cul­ture is also con­sid­ered the mod­ern day root of democracy.

 Also to link back to what I talked about yes­ter­day, stu­dents would be forced to again vet sources. Always con­sider the source of your infor­ma­tion, is it worth even lis­ten­ing to? Far too often the prob­lem isn’t merely bad infor­ma­tion it is bad infor­ma­tion com­ing from bad sources.