USUPhilosophy

The University of Montevallo has a “life raft” debate each year.  They imagine that a catastrophe has eliminated the entire population save the few hundred people in the audience and 6 professors.  There is room for only 1 professor on the life raft, so each has to make an argument for why their discipline in the most indispensable to human flourishing and so is the most deserving of the final seat on the raft.

“Every student getting a liberal arts degree worries at some point that their education might actually be useless.  That’s what makes the life raft idea a funny idea, and a serious one.  It is a forum for the students to say to their professors, ‘Make us believe in the value of what we are doing here.'”

Click here and move to 42:27 of the show for the segment.  Or here for the life raft debate homepage.

Thoughts on radio show?  Thoughts on which discipline is most deserving of the final seat in the raft?

Students of mine know that I am very interested in environmental issues and am, by at least some measures, something of an environmental radical.  While I think environmentalism is best understood as a conservative issue, needless to say many of my fellow conservatives (including Dr. Sherlock!) think I am an environmental kook.

That said, I am not a romantic environmentalist and I think obligations to the environment can be best understood only as they pertain to social justice issues.  Here is an amusing but also substantive attack on the romantic environmentalism presented in the film Avatar (which I have not seen since I don’t really go for big box office orgies of spectacle).

It has long been my opinion that you cannot teach teaching, that at least one essential part of being a good teacher is “innate” and cannot be taught.  The modern tendency is to reduce all things to a “method” or technique, but evidence (see article) is now suggesting that those “teaching methods” do little to improve teaching.  See this article on teaching and the decline of American schools.

An excerpt:

“Yet in recent years researchers have discovered something that may seem obvious, but for many reasons was overlooked or denied. What really makes a difference, what matters more than the class size or the textbook, the teaching method or the technology, or even the curriculum, is the quality of the teacher. Much of the ability to teach is innate—an ability to inspire young minds as well as control unruly classrooms that some people instinctively possess (and some people definitely do not). Teaching can be taught, to some degree, but not the way many graduate schools of education do it, with a lot of insipid or marginally relevant theorizing and pedagogy. In any case the research shows that within about five years, you can generally tell who is a good teacher and who is not.”

I don’t think this was ever officially recognized on this blog – so a hearty congratulations to Prof Huenemann who was promoted to full professor.  While I believe the promotion actually happened several months ago, Huenemann was honored last night (read about that here).

I have great respect for psychology (my wife is a psychologist), but the coming revision of the DSM is cause for comment.  I do not doubt that there are real medical psychoses, and that clinical counseling as well as psychiatry can help people.  But we should be careful to not make everything a “clinical disorder”.  Some of what we now call “diagnosable disorders” (and we give a purely medical or psychological account of these things) are what we used to just call “character flaws”.  Not to put too fine a point on it, but sometimes aren’t those who get tagged with “oppositional disorders” (“negativistic, defiant, disobedient and hostile behavior”) really just assholes?  They don’t need medicine or even counseling, they need moral formation (and maybe a spanking).

George Will remarks on all of this here.