Debates on Scottish education happened in the past, say between 1820 and 1930 and maybe on three major occasions a fight to stave off the move towards specialism, a kind of a rearguard action. Slowly but surely the English university system was creeping in, in place of the traditional generalist approach of the Scottish system. It’s not some airy-fairy abstract notion. The English system educated people for functional roles, preparing the way for “specialists” who would be more useful in the marketplace, for business. But what this leads to is a kind of general ignorance: you lose your ability to make a judgment, so if you want to know something, call in an expert. The Scottish approach more concerned itself with educating people as citizens, introducing young people to philosophy was considered basic, questions on first principles, the “meaning of life” debates and so on. So if you are used to thinking about this, that and the next thing then you’re better capable of making decisions and judgments; in other words you can think for yourself. 

                                                                  — James Kelman[1]

My father’s mother was herself born of a French-English mother and a Scotts-Irish father, so I always knew I was in some small part Scottish. Until reading the above remarks from James Kelman, however, I never realized how dominant that small genetic part has always been in me. Since the youngest age I can remember, I have always thought for myself, which I’d say in the light of those remarks shows how much Scott there is in me!

I can further attest with certainty that such a strong Scottish component in me is anything but the product of the so-called “education” system to which I was forced to be subjected ever since the age of five. It was at that age that the laws of the state of Colorado, where I was born, raised, and still live, mandated that I be enrolled in Kindergarten.

From the very first day until the end of what seemed like an endless school-year, I hated Kindergarten. I most especially hated being made daily to mold clay with my hands, an enterprise I found stomach-churning. In the early days of my Kindergarten confinement, whenever the churning grew strong, as it always did, I would go up to the Kindergarten teacher’s desk. I would tell her — truly enough — that I was sick to my stomach and needed my mother to come and get me and take me home.

After a few days of my repeated complaints and requests for parental assistance, my Kindergarten teacher wised up and refused to have the school office call my mother to come get me. Instead, that teacher scheduled a parent-teacher conference with my mother, a conference at which I was also required to be present.  In my very presence at that conference, that school-teacher told my mother that if I didn’t “change my attitude” by the start of the next schoolyear,  I would never even graduate from the first grade.

I knew even then that what my Kindergarten teacher said was full of shit — though I did not express myself to myself in exactly those terms at the time. I knew that whatever horse-manure the school-system dished out to me, I’d easily get through all their silly “tests” and  “requirements” until I got through high school, as state laws dictated.

One of the few school-teachers for whom I ever had any respect was my fourth grade teacher, who had the decency and good sense to realize I was ahead of the rest of the class, and who saw to it that I was allowed to skip the fifth grade and go immediately from fourth to sixth. To this day, I am grateful to that school-teacher for letting me get out of the school prison-system one year early.

Bless her memory!

*     *     *

In my final year in elementary school, my English teacher assigned each of us students to do a report to the class on some subject that interested us, and to invite our mother to attend our presentation. What I chose as my topic was the Thomas Pendergast Political Machine of St. Louis, Missouri, during the 1930s — a machine which, among other things, processed Harry S. Truman, the eventual United States President.

I chose that topic because I had recently gone with my family to see the 1956 movie The Boss, staring John Payne in the Pendergast-inspired title role. I was enthralled by the movie and its topic, and read up on Pendergast and his political machine.

When I read my report to the class, my sixth grade school-teacher scowled at me and my mother. When the class-period was over, that teacher took my mother and me aside. She said to us that my mother must have put me up to making such a report, and probably wrote most of it.

Of course, she, like my Kindergarten teacher years earlier, was full of shit.

*     *     *

When I eventually went to high school, during my sophomore year I realized that the call to think to which I had whole-heartedly responded ever since early childhood went, in the European cultural tradition, by the name of philosophy. When that realization sank in, I knew that I was called to do “philosophy.” My vocation — which etymologically literally means just such a “calling” — was to become a “philosopher” myself.

I was not stupid, which is to say willfully blind or ignorant.[2]  So I soon realized that the only way in our sick and sorry capitalist society I would ever be able truly to heed my calling and pursue my vocation  to become a “philosopher,” would be if I went all the way through college and university classes to get a Ph.D. degree in that subject, and then managed to land a university professorship somewhere to teach others to philosophize. Accordingly, that is precisely what I proceeded to do.

I ended up teaching philosophy at the university level for forty-five years, the last forty-two of which were at the University of Denver (DU).  I officially became DU Professor Emeritus of Philosophy when my retirement became official in 2014.    

*     *     *

Way to go!

[1] James Kelman, All We Have Is the Story: Selected Interviews 1973-2022 (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2024), pp. 62-63.

[2] See my discussion of “willful blindness” in my book The Irrelevance of Power, available through the “Store” at the top of this blogsite.