Author: Ophelia Benson

What is it about philosophers that they can’t resist pontificating about things they know nothing about? The examples are legion. Mary Midgley and David Stove wittering on about Darwinism and selfish genes. Simon Blackburn and Mary Warnock making a mess even of amateur political commentary. And Roger Scruton demonstrating that there’s no start to what he knows about popular music.

And the latest example? Have a look at this from an article in Issue 22 of The Philosophers’ Magazine (a title which sounds vaguely familiar):

So who wrote this? Maybe a (bad) GCSE student. Nope. Robert Ellis, a philosophy PhD.

Needless to say, it is absolute, utter tosh. Sociology, for example, is rife with theoretical and methodological debate. Even at high school level, students are required to understand that there are huge differences, for example, between the way in which positivists and phenomenologists do their sociology. Method is an explicit part of the A-Level examination. Texbooks have been put together and organised around arguments about what constitutes sociology proper.

And, of course, it’s the same in the other subjects (at least the ones that I know something about.) So, for example, the history of psychology is at least in part dominated by an argument about the appropriateness of behaviourism as a strategy for finding out about behaviour and the mind.

So here’s my Message to Philosophers: Shut up!^* You’re making fools of yourselves.

* You are permitted to talk quietly, amongst yourselves – though preferably not in public – about your own subject.

Well, this is a fun item for the eve of war. Even, or do I mean especially, if it’s not really true that many Jews worldwide are hailing this nonsense as a modern miracle. Perhaps that’s just a bit of casual journalistic exaggeration, hmm? After all there are only two witnesses, and the fish is no longer talking, to say the least. Surely the smallness, the minusculity, of the number of witnesses ought to give the most credulous believer pause. Two. I ask you. At that rate couldn’t any one of us get any other one of us to join in a fun-loving prank and tell the world any old thing? ‘My garden gnome suddenly recited page 7 of the Nebraska State Highway Code in Finnish, a language I don’t speak.’ ‘My electric kettle sang the Hallelujah chorus as it came to a boil this morning.’ ‘My scone has the face of the Blessed Virgin on it.’ Oh wait, that last one really happened.

Not to mention the interesting and poignant detail that the two witnesses’ reaction to the miracle was to kill the fish. Well there you go. Jahweh incarnates himself as a giant carp in order to shout warnings at a pair of fish-cutters (what better audience after all? Not a couple of journalists or pundits or heads of state, oh no, that would make too much sense for our whimsical deity) and what does he get? Whacked on the head, cut up, and turned into gefilte fish. That’ll teach him. Smarty-boots. ‘If you want to send a message, call Western Union,’ as my high school English teacher used to snarl when we searched for the ‘meaning’ of Wuthering Heights.

Still, the shouting carp corresponds with the belief of some Hasidic sects that righteous people can be reincarnated as fish.

Can be? Can be? What, because this is a reward? ‘Hey, you’ve been so righteous and good and all-around what is needed that you have the option of going back as a fish. Top that! Am I generous or what?’

Oh well, never mind, I never have understood these things, obviously I’m far too shallow and boring and scientistic. I gotta go, the kettle’s boiling.

John Sutherland has redeemed himself. I took issue with him a few weeks ago when he wrote a column recommending the UK imitate the US in using athletic scholarships to increase minority access to higher education. I think there are some serious drawbacks to that way of doing things, so I said as much. But I think he’s right on the money here. I’ve nattered about this issue of students as consumers several times on B & W. I’m glad to know other people are noticing. One would think it would be self-evident that 18-22 year olds might possibly want qualities in their teachers other than scholarship or the ability to inspire, and that hence their evaluations would be of limited utility, for the same sort of reason that one doesn’t ask a five-year-old to plan the dinner menu.

It is instructive to note what students rate highly and what royally pisses them off. They like younger professors, generally…Above all, the younger instructors do not “condescend”. Students dislike boring instructors; they avoid waffling instructors who don’t know their stuff; but they loathe, with homicidal intensity, instructors who talk down to them…On the whole, professors know more than a first year undergraduate. How can wisdom and learning “not” condescend when confronted with vacant ignorance? Should you flatter a know-nothing student…?

Exactly so. That is, one would think, what the whole enterprise is about. But of course the idea that a teacher might know more than a student is an awfully ‘elitist’, hierarchical, hegemonic, kind of like colonialist idea, so we’d probably better get rid of it.

The UCLA system demonstrably encourages crowd-pleasing. I have trawled through a few hundred of the review pages and the one criticism which is never made is: “This professor is just an entertainer – there is no substance in his/her class”. Students will happily put up with bad teaching if it is “fun” bad teaching. “Amuse me!”, orders Demos…

Neil Postman wrote an interesting book called Amusing Ourselves to Death. I think he was on to something.

The last women’s college in Oxford has just voted to remain a single-sex college. I’m always interested in these campaigns to keep women’s schools single sex, and the idea (which I tend to believe) that single sex education is good for girls and bad for boys. I went to a single sex school myself, one that combined with a boy’s school the year after I graduated. I regretted it at the time but later decided I’d been lucky. If nothing else, I derived the benefit (at least I think I did) that it never crossed my mind for an instant that women were supposed to shut up and let men do the talking. So when I went to a double-sex university I talked and argued with the best of them, if not more. Maybe I would have anyway, not being a notably compliant person; but I wonder.

It is a difficult question. The whole issue of whether women do better when they’ve had a chance to build up some blithe, unaware confidence in a boy-free zone, or whether that notion merely perpetuates the idea that women are so fragile and malleable and pathetic that they have to live in a bubble to survive at all. Val McDermid chooses the first option in this article by a graduate of St. Hilda’s from last year:

I think the single-sex environment allowed women to flourish in a way that is much harder for them in a male-dominated college. It meant that, when we emerged into the world of work, we had a bedrock of self-confidence that made it far easier for us to compete on the unequal terms we found there.

Former student Katherine Wheatley is definite: ‘Women benefit from a single-sex education, whereas men benefit from a mixed one,’ she says, and that this ‘is borne out by the results at GCSE and A-levels year on year.’ I think it’s probably true, I’m glad St. Hilda’s stayed single-sex, and yet, and yet…I also wish women didn’t need special enclaves in order to flourish. But then I wish a lot of things, as we all do. If wishes were horses.