Memories of School

What are the most memorable memories of the school that you have? It can be anything, academic ,co-curricular or not so academic , inside or outside classroom , inside or outside the school itself.

I ask this question for a very specific reason which occurred to me while reading Dewey's School and Society , Child and Curriculum the other day.

On Idealism

Reading on idealism and I can't relate Indian system with this philosophy more. 'Building of character' over scientific enquiry , importance of mind over body in that it translates into lower emphasis on physical education, 'discipline' as means of normativising the discourse and thereby discouraging disagreements ...
The list of corelations is pretty long and obvious and I've just started reading but it's a no brainer that whole structure apparently is 'Idealist' or has tended towards idealism for now. 

Why PoE ?

I say , why not PoE? What else if not PoE?

Oscar Wilde once said that nothing worth learning can ever be taught. One may pass it off as too radical an idea questioning the very basis of 'school' but it's not without a reason, I understand. How many of us are individuals because of the school we attended ? I guess the answer would be unanimously "All of us" . Not many of us would recollect the syllabi from then least of all marks in various subjects unless someone has a pleasant memory of being felicitated because of it. Even if it was felicitation due to marks , was it the medal and the applause or the marks per se' that one remembers ? We all are the 'decisions that we took back then' and also the decisions that we didn't take'.

The way one views the world and her understanding of it ultimately affects the decision making process with all the consequences therein. One wonders if Marx would have come up with Communist Manifesto if he was a church goer or Galileo had questioned the idea of celestial make up had he understood knowledge to be 'belief only'.
It leaves little to imagination then that methaphysical views directly impacts epistemic ones.Taking knowledge as 'revelation' , 'given' et al. It's extremely important for all individuals then most of all educators to engage in philosophical discourse given 'guruji ne kaha hai' culture which exists all around , and if I were to generalize all over the world.
The idea of education can differentiate the laboratory school of John Dewey from that of ,say Sainik school(in case of India).

Gettier Problems

Just to check if I got this funda right .. will this be a case of Gettier problem ? 

'There will be no student in school because it is marriage season' is my belief and it is formed upon previous years' experience of visiting the schools during same time of the year previously. I HAVE to go this year to the same school again upon insistence of a functionary and find 0 attendance !

So this belief becomes knowledge , does it ?? 

Folks I am Puzzled by a sentence which i cam across in a book. I quote 'Plato retained Socrates' faith in rational inquiry'. All this time what I thought was Faith as a matter of religion or irrational approach. Faith as repose on something empirically unjustifiable and Faith in contradiction or opposite to reason or rationality. but, I could not really get the true essence when somebody have faith in rational inquiry. should I understand Socrates understanding on rational inquiry was conviction rather than back-up by proof. Or am I just creating one hypothetical or non-existing question. :) 

Of Trainers and Educators

So did that boring drill, we called P.T. back in school, stand for ??

Doing all those stretching exercises in sync with 100 other batchmates and the most synchronized sub group getting to perform in front of capacity crowd of parents and staff on annual day (popularly called sports day). Bending down and getting up when the drum beats without knowing a thing why we were made to do it. So we were doing P.T., PHYSICAL TRAINING !

The 'sports' teacher , or P.T.I., as the post was and is called, was the most feared "disciplinarian" of the school. No prizes for guessing why ! The 'subject' which he (and it was always a he and not she) had to take was, for some reason beyond the comprehension of most, called PHYSICAL EDUCATION. A physical educator tasked with physical training ?
Did it make any difference to anyone then? Does it make any difference to anyone now ? I guess no.

Making them 'fall in line' and doing as they're asked to do was the task he was assigned and did he not do it well (or should I say 'effectively') no matter the means deployed. I wonder if anyone back then asked the question what IS this subject called 'Physical Education' ? What was to 'study and learn' in that? What was the 'syllabus' , the curriculum? Why was it interchangeably used with the word 'GAMES' in time table and hence brought as broad a smile on boys' faces as on girls' who wouldn't smile as much at the thought of field and courts as at the thought of  free period.

Why Philosophy ?

What is Philosophy ? Why study it seemed the very obvious first two questions. Lack of culture which promotes questions doesn't appear to the hallmark of our society alone. Socrates' execution is case in point. Asking questions and challenging dogmas has never been entertained. So anything which produces a bent in 'space-time' can only do so with the application of external force. It's law of nature(Thermodynamics) for all things to lose energy(lowest entropy)  and settle in a state of lowest energy. Following dogmas, then, no questions asked is but ingrained in all things out there. So don't blame yourself if you've been shying away from all things philosophical in life. Haven't we been shying away from open ended questions always ? Part of the reason why we've matured into restless and impatient society . There are no easy answers , arguably there ARE no answers at all. Logic is something which would find 'application' in real world to begin with. Metaphysical debates can last debaters and hence have been sadly sidelined in modern discourse , one would feel. 

However, along comes a teacher and those ' deductive inferences' ...   ' Nothing changes by making an act. RTE is an act...  hence..  

Why ask foundational questions anyways ? Why bother standing in queue when you can pay the tout and get the thing done that much quicker ???
 

Philosopher

Struggling ....
thanks for the initiative - Ahmed