Monday, January 16, 2012

Philosophical Foundations of Human Nature

Happy New Year!

As you can see, I am trying out blogger.com for our English blog.  Though I lose some aesthetic control, it is a bit more convenient than the program I have been using and will also allow more of a dialogue via the comments option.  Hopefully this will work out well.

Since we've returned from break, our eighth grade class has been working through some deep issues relating to difference and discrimination in conjunction with our reading of Night, by Elie Wiesel and our study of the Holocaust.  Below, I've included the responses to an anonymous online survey that students took.  The results were quite interesting and we were able to have some great discussions about the role of discrimination in our daily lives.

We have also been studying the philosophical foundations of our conceptions of human nature.  Students read excerpts from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke and discussed their differing perspectives.  In the coming weeks, we will be looking at the perspectives of some more modern thinkers on the issue, including Stephen Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard, and Richard A. Schweder, a cultural anthropologist at the University of Chicago.  Up to this point, we have worked with the assumption that human nature does, in fact, exist.  Our job now is to move beyond that and question the concept altogether.

Summary of responses from Difference and Discrimination Survey