I’m reaching the end of a semester-long sabbatical, and will soon have to start thinking about preparing for the courses that I will be teaching in the spring semester. Sabbatical leave is something that we professors cherish. For one semester every seven years (or two semesters if you’re lucky) we are freed from the demands of teaching and the tedium of committee work to catch up on research and writing.

I love teaching. For me, there is nothing more rewarding than cultivating young minds, and I regard making a living by teaching undergraduate philosophy is an immense privilege. So, when I’m nearing the conclusion of a sabbatical leave, or even towards the end of the summer break, I usually relish the thought of turning a new bunch of students on to philosophy.

However, this time I’m rather less enthusiastic about climbing back in the academic saddle. It’s not that I’ve soured on teaching—far from it. It’s rather that, thanks to arecent articleby my spouse on a related issue, I’ve been soberly reflecting on how difficult it has become to teach philosophy to undergraduates, and why this is.

I don’t want to over-generalize. My experiences are all experiences that I’ve had in a particular academic setting, one in which the sciences and health professions predominate, and humanities departments are quite small. I often fantasize that things are different elsewhere. However, although there are obviously variations that go hand-in-hand with variations in academic cultures, I’ve heard enough from colleagues working at other schools to know that the challenges that I encounter are not unique to the university where I work.

The reason why philosophy is getting harder to teach is, I think, part of a much wider problem with American education and ultimately with contemporary American culture. To explain this, I’ll start with a vignette. Here’s a typical exchange that takes place, with minor variations, on the first day of Introduction to Philosophy. After getting the students to introduce themselves, I ask them whether they’ve done any philosophy before. Usually, nobody has—and nobody has the foggiest idea of what philosophy is. They’re in this class because they have to get the pointless humanities general education requirement over with.

I say: “Suppose that this was a basketball class, instead of a philosophy class. What if we began with me telling you that you are going to learn basketball by reading a book entitledHow To Play Basketball? Tell me, do you think that you’d learn to play basketball that way?”

A few silently shake their heads from side to side. The rest remain impassive.

I continue, “Some of you shook your heads “no.” Exactly! That would be a way to learn about basketball, but it wouldn’t be a very good way to learn basketball, would it?”

This time a few more respond, with nods.

“告诉我，”我问，“学篮球最好的方法是什么?””

A student tentatively raises her hand, and says, “By playing it.”

“是的，”我说，然后问她，“你认为你需要学习篮球知识来学习篮球吗?”

“嗯，是的，”她回答，明显放松了一些，“在你会玩之前，你必须先学会规则。你可以通过阅读或别人向你解释来做到这一点。观察真正优秀选手的一举一动也很有帮助。这也是对篮球的学习。”

Then I bring the conversation back to philosophy.

“太棒了!所以这门课是为了学习哲学，而不是关于哲学的知识。就像打篮球一样，你通过实践来学习。但是要研究哲学——实践哲学——你需要了解它。这就是为什么你们要读一些伟大哲学家的哲学著作。这就像观看优秀篮球运动员在比赛中优雅的动作。这个想法是，这将有助于你的学习，尽管这可能听起来很奇怪，但也许你们中的一些人甚至会发现这些哲学家的优雅的智力动作就像优秀运动员的动作一样优雅和美丽。”

通过这次交流，我收获了什么?恐怕不多。学生们已经了解了“学习”和“了解”的区别。他们已经了解了获得关于某件事的信息，获得做那件事的能力，和获得它的“感觉”之间的区别(这些主题我们将在认识论课程的部分探讨)。但我并没有帮助他们接受这样一种观点，即我们将通过实践来学习哲学。

If this were a basketball class, and they were total newbies to the game, they’d get this right away and be jacked about getting down to practice. But this doesn’t happen in my philosophy classes. Even though the students know that the point of the class is to learn philosophy,they continue to behave as though it’s all about learning about philosophy.

How come? I think it’s because what’s expected of them in philosophy class flies in the face of some stubbornly entrenched assumptions. The model of education that they’ve absorbed over the years is one in which the instructor inputs information, which they then output into assignments and tests. In this impoverished framework, education isn’t about the cultivation of the intellect, the exercise of curiosity, the development of intellectual courage, the challenging of orthodoxies, or the playful exploration of ideas. It’s about mindlessly reproducing what one has been told.

This isn’t some weird eccentricity on the students’ part, or some sort of post-millennial moral failing. It is the sort of thing that all but a lucky few have endured throughout their educational careers, so it’s entirely reasonable that this is what they expect from my classes. And it’s also the mindset that animates the current obsession with so-called “measurable learning outcomes” (I make sure to tell my students that I have no idea how to “measure” what I most want them to get out of the course).

The students’ attitude towards education manifests in lots of different ways. I’ll describe a few of them to give you a better sense of what I’m talking about.

其中一个表现是，当学生在课堂上被世界杯赛程2022赛程表欧洲区问到需要他们表达观点的问题时，他们很难大声说出自己的观点。这并不是因为他们无话可说。而是因为他们害怕自己说的可能是错的。尽管我一再向他们保证，没有人知道正确的答案是什么，甚至可能没有正确的答案，而且非常聪明的人对如何回答这类问题存在分歧，但他们似乎对这些保证充耳不闻。他们仍然害怕犯错。

另一个原因是他们很难批判性地理解彼此的观点。这是没有或没有充分接触到尊重和批评对话在教育中的关键作用的结果。毕竟，如果教育的主要目的是记住书本上和教授讲课里的内容，那么花时间进行苏格拉底式的对话又有什么意义呢?

The attitude also shows its face in students’ tendency to be excessively deferential. Even though I constantly encourage them to dispute what I say, and tell them that it’s a philosophical sin to accept a claim just because some authority figure tells them to, it’s a rare student that is able to rise to the challenge. When I ask them why they find challenging me so hard, they often say that that they’ve been taught not to ask instructors skeptical questions. The default assumption, lurking somewhere in the background of their minds, seems to be that expressing doubt or disagreeing with the professor will result in their being silenced or penalized.

I work very hard to turn this all around, but I’m rewarded with only limited success. Success is limited, I believe, because even the most skilled instructor in the world can’t undo a lifetime of conditioning in a single semester. To appreciate the depth of the problem, it’s important to realize that these lovely young people require more than a shift in their consciousness, which would be relatively easy to accomplish. It’s more like the intellectual muscles that would allow them to engage with philosophy more fully have atrophied from disuse. As some of them who start to “get” philosophy begin to understand, they have been cheated out of an education in the name of education.

This is a tragic waste of human potential, and I have no doubt that our nation will one day feel its consequences, as generations of citizens are trained to comply, and to do as they are told,whatever他们被告知。