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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: koan who wrote (201020)	9/11/2012 9:36:19 PM
From: epicure	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 542043

Everyone has a philosophy. In the end it just comes down to personal preference- whether you dress that up with invisible friends, or philosophers you like, or whatever, in the end, there is no way to "prove" who has the right way to live. That's the problem, really We have people in this country who want totally different things out of life, and there's no way to give everyone what they want and there's no way to "prove" to conservatives that liberalism is the way, any more than you can "prove" to a person who likes vanilla ice cream that chocolate is better. That's why I quit talking to conservatives. I don't like them and their ideas. They don't like me and my ideas. Neither one of us will ever convince the other. I don't happen to think either side is "wise"- we just want different ways of life (I know, you think ours is "better", they think theirs is "better"- but I think we all just want what we want. And I'm not really interested in trying to dress that pig up so it looks like anything other than a pig.)

To: koan who wrote (201020)	9/11/2012 11:14:20 PM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 542043

The thesis of this post, koan, is about converting students--read Camus, one is converted. Good teachers, it's my view, don't do that. You teach Camus or Shakespeare or whomsoever who have definite philosophies of life by way of critical thinking. You use them to get students to examine how they already think about their life not to convert them. And in the process of getting them to do that thinking you hope to impart some critical thinking tools. Critical thinking doesn't lead, per se, to liberalism. I read more than a few extremely well done, fairly conservative papers during my time in higher ed that reflected careful thought.