When I was about 10, I came home from school with a less-than-stellar grade on a math test. Fractions, decimals, and long division were concepts I had trouble wrapping my head around and all three had been on the dreaded test.
“What’s this?” Mom had that look in her eyes - the one that said, Unacceptable.
“It’s ok. I got an A in reading.”
Another look. This one said, Your point?
“Everyone knows girls are good at reading and boys are good at math.”
Another look. Bullshit.
There followed a series of math lessons at the kitchen table, an endless round of word problems that involved provisioning for a tribe of hungry lumberjacks.
“If you have ten lumberjacks and each one needs two pounds of potatoes a day, how many pounds of potatoes do you need to buy to feed them for a week? If you have six pies and 120 lumberjacks in camp and they each want a slice of pie after dinner, how many slices do you need to cut each pie into so there’s no pie left over? If a pie costs 2.99 to make, and a pound of potatoes costs 1.09, what will the camp cook’s weekly budget be in order to keep 127 lumberjacks happy?”
After a bazillion of these lumberjack sessions, I got the answers right more often than not.
But, my mother wasn’t done with me.
“Explain to me how you are figuring out the answers.”
“I’m getting the answers right - most of the time - why does it matter how I do it?”
“Tell me.”
I bumbled my way through a convoluted explanation that revealed I was still relying on a mixture of rote learning /instinct/and luck to get to the right answer.
“If you can’t explain something to your grandmother or a kid in kindergarten, then you don’t really understand it yourself. Sit down.”
More lumberjacks followed, but I then had to speak aloud as I worked my way through each problem.
By the end of the next lumberjack series, I knew fractions inside and out, knew when and how to multiply and divide, and had become a dab hand at drafting provisioning budgets. I could explain my logic and strategy clearly and without hesitation.
Yes, I had mastered some basic math, but I had also learned a more important lesson - that I was never, ever going to use I’m a girl as an excuse for not being able to do something.
Fast forward to my lesson of this week - understanding what on earth Plato meant by his Theory of Forms.
Here’s my attempt to understand what he was on about…
There are certain concepts or ideas (forms) that just are. They can’t be altered. They are ultimate, immutable, unchangeable, and universal.
Take the form of spherical. You may immediately think of a basketball. I might imagine a globe. Someone else might think of an orange. But all these specific examples of sphere satisfy the form of sphere.A form like the sphere example is not so hard to understand. But what about the form of good? Plato had a lot to say about good and seems to have believed that there was such a thing as a universal/immutable/unchangeable/ultimate form of good.
What might that look like? He couldn’t say. According to Plato, the only beings who could see clearly what this good form looked like were the gods who floated around in the ethers just beyond the edge of the universe.
As it happens, that’s also where disembodied souls hung out.These souls could also glimpse and understand good while they were in this state of limbo. Once they were sucked into the body of a newborn in need of a soul, however, they immediately forgot everything they ever know about forms of any kind.
Only through much thoughtful contemplation could people ever hope to remember what their souls had once seen and understood.Once we are seeking to understand stuff like this from the limited vantage point of our human bodies, some forms (like good) can’t ever be seen as clearly as others (like sphere), but we should take it on faith that they exist. Because it feels right.
My mother had another lesson for me. Never trust the guy who says he has all the answers.
Here’s my conundrum this week. I like the idea that there is some ultimate form of good. I like to believe that inside all of us is a desire to understand what that good looks like and, more importantly, how we should strive toward integrating good into our everyday lives and decisions.
BUT, that faith gap is hard for me to get past. Yes, that feels right to me, that there should be some ultimate goodness, but how, then to explain all the awfulness in the world? The petty, unkind, bitter, misery - the unhealthy competition, exclusion, cruelty, division and plain meanness that also exists?
Granted, there are many forms - sphere and good being two of them. But does that also mean there could be a form bad and that those who aspire to be nasty are just doing a good job of aspiring to the highest form of badness?
That does not feel right. But just because it doesn’t feel right, does it make it any less likely to be true?
All of this thinking made me wonder, why don’t we start having these conversations at the same age at which we are learning long division and fractions? A child knows what a ball (sphere) looks like. They have some understanding of good and bad. But much in the way that I didn’t really understand my math fundamentals until I could clearly explain them to my mother, shouldn’t it be part of a standard education to really think about - and try to understand - some philosophical basics?
I’m not the only one asking this question. This article in The Atlantic suggests students should be receiving some education that would help them establish their moral compasses. This piece by KQED discusses how young students can benefit from taking part in ethics classes at school.
I would have loved to take part in an ethics class alongside elementary school math and reading. Though, I shudder to think what the kitchen table conversations with my mother might have been like if I’d chosen to debate a topic on which we held different opinions. While Mom was terrific at explaining lumberjacks and potatoes, when one of her strongly held opinions was challenged, there wasn’t a whole lot of room for back-and-forth conversation.
An ethics/philosophy class before I hit my 60’s might have helped me better understand why people hold onto strong opinions, even in the face of sound reasoning/evidence that might suggest other beliefs are just as viable. Perhaps if all educators integrated ethics into their teaching we could all find ways to have better, more meaningful, and respectful conversations, even about matters on which we disagree.
That would be good, wouldn’t it?
That’s amazing that your mother was able to teach you! Good for her!
My second daughter is a Philosophy major so I kept thinking about her while I was reading. There are some interesting thoughts there that I will have to go back to with more time.
And on another note, my oldest daughter will be passing through Banff sometime around the end of September with a friend. They are talking about trying to do some climbing. Any suggestions?