Philosophy and Education

Philosophy and Education

On Tuesday, we took a journey through the history of philosophy and education. Reaching back well over two thousand years, we looked at what the philosophers Socrates, Plato, Michel Montaigne, François La Rochefoucauld, and John Dewey had to say about education.

As social media, such as Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter become more and more relevant in our society, it may at first glance be easy to criticize reducing our speech to only 140 characters. Yet the seventh century French philosopher, François La Rochefoucauld, a staple of French salons, believed that big ideas could be conveyed in a few words. La Rochefoucauld was a writer of aphorisms, who believed verbosity does not make one’s ideas important, and in fact oftentimes long-windedness is the easiest way to lose one’s audience.

Take a look at this video from the School of Life:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CEvFA7laik

Notice toward the end of the video, how Alain de Botton makes the important point that we cannot assume the way in which we teach (or express our ideas) is inconsequential due to the importance of our subject manner.

So sometimes less is more, to quote Shakespeare’s’ Hamlet “Brevity is the soul of wit.”