A bit of armchair developmental psychology, for Saturday morning --
Young children are overwhelmed by their parents. As they grow up, becoming autonomous means getting some distance from that overwhelming influence. The most natural refuge: a peer group with comparable overwhelming power in another direction. Kids come out of high school caught in some complex vector product of their parents' influence and their peers' influence. Colleges offer very strong and well organized alternative peer groups -- ways of getting distance from high school friends by being overwhelmed by the fraternity or the swim team or the debate squad. But college also allows some time for kids to be outside of strong gravity fields, in a state of neutrality. This is frightening and depressing, and it drives some kids to therapy and others to philosophy, for similar purposes -- to find a place to stand, different from just being overwhelmed by one powerful person after another.
If this picture is correct, there are a couple of implications. It seems quite interesting for a philosophy class not to continue the cycle of overwhelming -- to make the student fixate on the philosophy teacher. Fixation is just another boring response in the endless game. Also, it seems interesting for a philosophy class to help people take the measure of the lives of those around them - the potential overwhelmers - in a just way that also maintains distance. After college, students are going to be in yet more overwhelming relationships, and it just doesn't do for college to be a mere respite or vacation from subjection.
Posted by shea0017 at January 22, 2005 11:26 AM