Content area
Full Text
When starting to read an essay, we usually expect the author to explain, before too long, the problem to be addressed and why it is worth addressing. Having only so much time and energy, each of us has to determine what particular work promises most to repay our efforts, given who we are. Of course, to judge in this way between interesting possibilities, we have to know who we are. But what if we do not, at least not entirely? What if we find ourselves reading something that makes us unsure not only about whether its interests measure up to others we have, but also about what we should be interested in at all? In that case, we would be faced with a problem that undercuts ready, decidedly practical, considerations.
Sometimes, when I read contemporary work in philosophy or in education, I find myself in this predicament. The identity I bring to the text, that of a philosopher of education, suddenly appears insecure. I start to suspect that "philosophy of education" may be a contradiction in terms. By and large, the philosophical community expresses no interest in thinking about education. The educational community does not seem to care about philosophy. The few books or articles that link problems and concerns in one discipline to those in the other tend to address only an increasingly marginal and shrinking community of other philosophers of education. Consequently, the philosopher in me, who has been raised on a specific literature, is embarrassed before an audience with my other half, and vice versa. When I turn from reading to writing, then, I wonder whether as a philosopher of education I have anything coherent to say, anything to say that expresses a coherent identity or reason for being, and to whom.
Is this just my problem? Far from demanding silence, this question, taken seriously, occurs to me as a call from and to a potential reader, intimating that an appreciation of this problem's social dimension may already constitute an incipient, constructive response. For even if the problem starts out as (my) individual, alienated self-consciousness, the key to solving it - or better, dissolving it - would appear to be to turn it into one for a common audience of philosophers...