Highschool philosophy teacher

I got an email today from an old friend from highschool, and we were reminiscing about those days. And it occurred to me that perhaps it would be worth blogging about my highschool. American schools are of course really variable, some have a lot of tax revenue if they are in a wealthy area, so the schools are in good shape and there are enough well-qualified teachers to give a real quality education. This is absolutely not always the case, because Americans react very badly to the idea of wealth being "redistributed." Anyhow, my highschool was one of the good ones, in fact the year I graduated we were listed as one of the top 100 highschools in the United States (including both public and private, if I remember right, so it really was quite the honor). One thing that got us that recognition was our "humanities core" program. A group of 50 or so of us (out of a group of 250) that were high achievers (not just good academically, also the best musicians, best drama kids, brightest athletes) met in one big class for two hours, and then divided up different ways different days for different subjects. The students came from junior and senior classes, so that was nice too.

One of the subjects taught in this round table format was philosophy. And the philosophy teacher was quite the cynic. He really loved to challenge all of us, basically never agreed with us about anything. I was not a big fan at first, but some of the things he taught have stayed with me better than anything I learned in any other class. For instance, when we were talking about astrology and other psuedo-scientific things, he threw down his car keys. And then, pretending to be a mystic, he said, "Ah, well, I see that my house key landed upright because there is a plumber coming to the house today, and the key to little Cindy's bike is down at the bottom because she fell off her bike yesterday." Then he picked up the keys and threw them down again, and of course the keys landed in a different configuration. And he said, "My car keys landed on top because I just got the car and am really proud of it. The house key is on the bottom because our plumbing is broken".  To this day, this is how I think of astrology, and other fatalistic belief systems. The kinds of personality traits astrology points out are true, people can be emotional, people can be shy, people can be natural leaders. That they cluster together in any sort of way, or that the way they cluster is  determined by the stars, is not true. We all have all of those traits, but we can pull out the ones we need to pull out when we want to pull them out. A belief in astrology helps us pull out those parts of ourselves so identified. The determining factor comes after the fact.  

This blog I think is probably also a little bit for that whole Vantru crowd. Because I can choose to believe without being fooled.