CRITICAL THINKING ABOUT TRUTH IN TEACHING

(An Educational Philosophy Perspective)

Eko Ariwidodo

Abstrak : Pemikiran kritis harus disesuaikan dengan kebenaran

yang sesuai dengan kapasitasnya. Boleh jadi beberapa
pertimbangan tentang pemikiran dari tujuan pendidikan harus
lebih dikhususkan sesuai dengan bidangnya, serta lebih
berharga, yang selanjutnya disebut kritis, berhubungan dengan
pertimbangan standar epistemic yang menginformasikan
tentang filsafat Barat melalui Thales, lebih jelasnya sejak
Socrates dan Plato. Tulisan ini akan lebih memfokuskan pada
pertanyaan tentang mengajar kebenaran, pada saat pemikiran
terbentuk di dalam suatu epistemologi kehidupan. Hal tersebut
akan disertai pembelajaran tentang kebenaran, yang hanya
terlihat sama kritisnya dengan pemikiran yang didapatkan.
.
Kata Kunci: Critical thinking, truth, neutrality, teaching,
education, neo-modernism

Introduction
“Teaching is not the lever for changing or
transforming society.
Formal education…cannot really be
the lever for the transformation of society.”
(P. Freire, 1987)

Truth in teaching, however, may very well have been the most
controversial issue in educational philosophy ever since Socrates
confronted the Sophists in ancient Greece. Deepened by Plato to the
issue of the role of knowledge in education, this question of truth in
teaching concerns the nature of knowledge and how it can promote the
good life for the individual and society. What is good knowledge?
What is knowledge good for?
 Critical Thinking About Truth in Teaching

Both questions have remained controversial throughout the ages

because of the debates among philosophers regarding the relative
importance of sensory data and ideas, i.e., of perception and
conception, in the processes of ascertaining the truth. An adequate
consideration of the debate between Anglo-American empiricism and
Continental rationalism persisting since Bacon and Descartes in the
early 17th century, however, requires a brief account of the role of
controversial issues in education—in our own education about the
controversial issue of truth in teaching. This may illuminate the
questions of what is good knowledge, what is knowledge good for, and
truth in teaching, for it will help to establish the moral parameters of
what Suzanne Rosenblith (2004) calls the epistemic ethos.1
Instead of rushing headlong into the matter by choosing either
empiricism or rationalism, depending upon a personal preference for
the perception of sense data or the conceptualization of ideas, and
instead of rejecting both in the postmodern skepticism that questions
the credibility of any normative theory of knowledge as such, only to
substitute semiology or sociology of knowledge for epistemology in a
category mistake of catastrophic proportions, a touch of Socratic
ignorance can encourage one to consider both sides of the issue if one
really wants to know what is good knowledge and what it is good for.
Socratic ignorance encourages one to take a neutral approach to one’s
own education in this matter of legitimate controversy, lest one be
deceived by some sophist who is more interested in defending a cause
than in establishing the truth of the matter. Is not open-minded
neutrality the sine qua non of becoming aware of something new? Of
learning any truth? Of any education?
In other words, neutrality towards the various theories of
knowledge may help resolve the epistemological questions precisely
where the truth is the most difficult to ascertain, i.e., within the context
of the study of controversial issues in education, where the truth is all
the more essential to their adequate comprehension and deserves the
deepest respect rather than the optimistic, false “spin” of the advocates
of their biased perspectives.
1
Suzanne Rosenblith, Cultivating the Epistemic Ethos: On the Necessity of
Adjudication in Religious Education (Tuscaloosa AL : SEPES, 2004)

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Several ways of teaching controversial issues neutrally will be

stated briefly to contrast them with the teaching of valid, non-
controversial knowledge, of the truth, in the school curriculum. Then
teaching the truth will be supported with a version of postmodernism
expressed by Maxine Greene to preserve the valid characteristics of
good knowledge in the epistemic ethos of schooling. A different view
of postmodernism will be rejected to show how the neutrality
appropriate to the study of the controversial issue with which Western
educational philosophy began will lead to a neo-modern perspective of
truth in teaching.

Neutrality and Truth in Education

Neutrality in schooling has been severelly challenged by the notion
of ‘defensible partiality,’ i.e., by the idea that teachers of social studies
should be openly committed to the resolution of social problems in
favor of the majority of the people in society or the world, originally
expressed by Theodore Brameld (1965), who claimed, however, that it
should not interfere with the student’s objective, critical study of social
problems, for their impartial study would lead anyone to accept the
need for social reconstruction2. Why, then, is it necessary to argue that
the teacher should be openly transformative?
The question of neutrality thus arises in a significant way about
matters in which there is considerable controversy in society and in
which the controversy is quite legitimate. It is not whether teachers can
be neutral but whether they should be and how they should go about it.
Six approaches will be specified in order of increasing complexity. At
the first level, the classroom can be said to be neutral in the cognitive
sense when controversial issues are simply excluded from it, following
Horace Mann’s suggestion3. The second level includes controversial
2
We can find the perspective deal with critical study of social problem in: Theodore
Brameld, Education for the Emerging Age, (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), p.88,
154.
3
Horace Mann, The Republic and the School: The Education of Free Men, (ed.) L.
A. Cremin, (New York: Teachers College Bureau of Publications, 1957), p. 97. He
said that: “When the teacher, in the course of his [sic] lessons or lectures on the
fundamental law, arrives at a controverted text, he [sic] is either to read it without
comment or remark; or, at most, he [sic] is only to say that the passage is the subject

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issues but only those aspects that can be dealt with objectively, e.g.,
when students learn information about drugs or sex but do not examine
related questions of value and morality. At the third level, ‘both sides’
of the issue are presented impartially and without comment to enable
students to learn about the different views on the issue. On the fourth
level, the teacher points out the advantages and disadvantages of each
view in turn. These higher levels would do a great deal to promote
critical thinking about the issues discussed.
A fifth level is attained when the teacher makes an internal
criticism of each view and abstracts its partial truth. For example, the
controversy between conservative and progressive educational
philosophies in the West started with Plato’s attempt to have the most
intellectually able students acquire the best knowledge available in
society through his invention of higher education. By the time he
retired from his Academy, its curriculum included the empirical
disciplines that Aristotle said belonged in education, e.g., biology,
chemistry, and medicine, with the focus upon their conceptual aspects
as outlined in the third level of Plato’s ‘divided line’. These are still
emphasized today in what are called academic subjects in honor of
Plato’s Academy. The half-truth that education involves building the
curriculum from the top down, however, was strongly controverted by
progressives such as Rousseau, Froebel, Pestalozzi, Francis Parker, and
John Dewey, who correctly insisted that genuine education depends
upon building the curriculum from the bottom up, i.e., on the child’s
actual development, by starting each lesson with the child’s own.
Thus the greatest conservative and progressive educational theories
ever written each has an extremely important truth: maintain the best
knowledge in society by having elite students acquire it at the
university, but always base one’s pedagogy and curriculum on the
present state of the pupils’ growth. On the one hand, no advanced
industrial society is going to abandon the academic tracks in secondary
schools that prepare students for the university (and other modes of
tertiary schooling), although Plato’s rationalistic epistemology is highly

of disputation, and that the school room is neither the tribunal to adjudicate nor the
forum to discuss it.”

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questionable (even for Plato: see Parmenides). On the other hand,

experienced teachers will always try to begin where the children and
youth are and take them as far as they can go, whether or not they are
university bound, although Dewey’s instrumentalist pedagogy leaves
insufficient room for dialogue with the teacher and the acquisition of
organized knowledge.
An educational philosopher involved in teacher education can
elucidate the strong points of both Plato and Dewey on the fifth level of
neutrality without indicating a preference for either rationalism or
empiricism. This juxtaposition of oppositional viewpoints is very
likely to induce critical thinking, especially if conducted on the sixth
level, where the teacher is like an actor, playing the role of
spokesperson for each view in turn because one truly believes each
view is a legitimate expression of a human being with his or her own
dignity, perhaps following Plato (1956, 1974)4 and Dewey (1916)5, for
instance, with Buber (1965)6 and Freire (1970)7 to consider both
dialogical and problem-posing pedagogies adequately.
The general significance of neutrality to the epistemic ethos of
teaching the truth may become clearer through a brief comparison of
the role of controversial issues and good knowledge in schools. Except
for issues of legitimate controversy, the only knowledge that qualifies
as curriculum content in public, state-supported schools is drawn from
the arts, crafts, trades, sports, professions, and academic disciplines 8.

4
Plato, Protagoras and Meno, trans. W. K. C. Guthrie (Baltimore: Penguin, 1956),
and Plato, The Republic, trans., D. Lee (Baltimore: Penguin, 1974). Originally
written circa 375 B.C.E., Book VI. 509d-511e.
5
John Dewey, Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of
Education (New York: Macmillan, 1916).
6
Martin Buber, Education, and, The Education of Character, trans. R. G. Smith, in
“Between Man and Man “ (New York, Macmillan, 1965), p. 83-117, Originally
published 1926 and 1939.
7
Paolo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. M. B. Ramos (New York: Herder
& Herder, 1970).
8
D. Vandenberg, Education as a Human Right: A Theory of Curriculum and
Pedagogy (New York: Teachers College Press, 1990), or in : D. Vandenberg,
Education in Existential Perspective: The Dialectic of Education for Democracy, in
P. Higgs (ed.) Metatheories in Educational Theory and Practice (Johannesburg:
Heinemann, 1998), p. 141-165.

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Because much of their knowledge is not controversial, it can be taught

and learned objectively. The knowledge of the disciplines, however, is
the most controversial the closer it is to the frontiers, even in the natural
sciences. Teaching controversial things within the disciplines requires
attention to their epistemic characteristics due to their variable basis in
evidence. The student should always learn the degree of acceptance a
fact or theory enjoys within a discipline and understand how well it is
established evidentially because part of acquiring knowledge as
knowledge is becoming aware of the degree of confidence one can
place in it. For example, the theory of biological evolution may be
only a theory, but it enjoys a basis in evidence so massive that complete
confidence can be placed in it. 9 On the other hand, the theory that
human intelligence is reducible to brain processes is speculative and
should be studied along with other speculative theories of the
mind/body relation. 10 Otherwise the epistemic grounding and
truthfulness of such theories are not fully appreciated.
To establish a consensus in the classroom regarding a controversial
issue as advocates of transformative pedagogy often desire changes the
nature of its cognitive components by obscuring the real issue in a
serious lack of truthfulness. This sectarian use of the classroom
manifests the semi-liberated consciousness and is contrary to human
dignity11, especially when it occurs in the teaching of educational

9
Morowitz, H., Hazen, R., & Trefil, J., Intelligent Design Has No Place in the
Science Curriculum, The Chronicle of Higher Education (September 2, 2005), p. 6-8.
10
Do neurologists explain away the truth of their own empirical research by referring
to their own brain processes as causing it? Of course not. As the director of
neurosurgery at John Hopkins Children’s Center, in: Ben Carson , Your Mind Can
Map your Destiny Ledger-Enquirer (Columbus, GA), in Parade section, 2003, p. 30.
He says : “The human brain, as I came to realize, is simply a mechanical component
of an entity of far greater beauty and power: the mind.” This attests to a person’s self-
conscious, free initiative, but it is not meant to deny the embodiment of the living
stream of wakeful consciousness.
11
Please check in : P. Freire, P, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. M. B. Ramos
(New York: Herder & Herder, 1970), p.21-23; and see : P. Freire, & Shor, I., A
Pedagogy for Liberation: Dialogues on Transforming Education (South Hadley MA:
Bergin & Garvey, 1987), p.11-20.

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philosophy through emphasizing one epistemology at the expense of

others, or by denigrating all epistemologies. 12

Teaching the Truth: Neo-Modernism

A loyalty to human dignity--and human possibility--is maintained
when the teacher is loyal to the knowledge and/or skill being learned. It
is maintained in regard to controversial issues when the teacher is
truthful to the various perspectives on the issues, e.g., to both
conservative and progressive exemplars such as Plato and Dewey in
educational philosophy. This constitutes an epistemic ethos that
transcends the nihilism resulting from negative postmodernism and
naïve constructionism, and it makes education possible. The sophistry
of dissident postmodernism is apparent when its major spokesperson
claims that any ‘meta-narrative of knowledge’ lacks credibility, but in a
subsequent publication shows he is a Christian apologist 13, defending
his faith in the doctrines of the Judaic-Christian tradition that have been
falsified by the natural sciences. These doctrines simply cannot be
restored by doubting the truthfulness of scientific knowledge, to which
all teachers should be loyal. Sophistry also shows in Foucault’s
confession, ‘I have never written anything but fictions’14.
One way to maintain the epistemic ethos and truth in teaching in the
face of dissenting postmodernism is found in two claims of Harry
Broudy: ‘Each discipline has its own method of investigation,’ and,
‘To persuade the learner to perceive, classify, and relate as does the
expert in a given domain of knowledge is the unabashed objective of
Realistic teaching method’15. Without a minimal realism, both
teaching and truth are impossible. Teachers in the natural sciences,
social sciences, and humanities, for example, teach about real things in

12
I.Gur-Ze’ev, Adorno and Horkheimer: Diasporic Philosophy, Negative Theology,
and Counter-education, Educational Theory 55, 2005, p. 343, 344-345, 352, 356,
365.
13
J.F. Lyotard, Heidegger and the ‘Jews’, trans. A. Michel & M. S. Roberts
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), p.34, 38.
14
M. Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and other Writings, (ed.) C.
Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980), p.193.
15
H.S. Broudy, Building a Philosophy of Education, Englewood Cliffs, (NJ: Prentice-
Hall, 1961), p. 323, 339-340.

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the natural, societal, and lived worlds, respectively, and they truthfully
disclose them to students16. As Charles Sanders Peirce claimed, the real
is that which is discovered by communities of qualified investigators
when the investigation is carried sufficiently far 17. Referring to it as a
minimal realism allows for subsequent investigations by qualified
investigators, paradigm shifts, etc.
Teachers who majored at the university in the subject they teach in
high school often understand the various kinds of empirical, rational,
quantitative, qualitative, historical, or interpretive methods and canons
of inquiry used in their area of expertise in domain-specific ways
relative to the characteristics of the things or phenomena in the domain.
As Alfred Schütz claimed, each discipline is a distinct province of
meaning with its own cognitive style and epistemic protocols18. Thus
the importance of perception, conception, experimentation,
quantitative, qualitative, historical, or interpretive research19 can vary
by the domain to promote truth in teaching. A meta-narrative of
knowledge that fits all domains is not needed to establish truth in
teaching within a specific domain20.
A second way to maintain the epistemic ethos of truth in teaching
and learning is to accept a loose, flexible combination of the main
theories of knowledge that retains the half-truth of each. Kant, for
example, roused from his dogmatic, rationalistic slumber by David
Hume, claimed that concepts without perceptions are empty, just as

16
D. Vandenberg, Knowledge and Schooling, Phenomenology & Pedagogy, 6, 1988,
p. 63, 70, 74.
17
C.S. Peirce, How to Make Our Ideas Clear, in Values in a World of Chance (ed.) P.
P. Wiener, (New York: Doubleday, 1958), p. 133-134. Or read : D. Vandenberg,
Education as a Human Right: A Theory of Curriculum and Pedagogy, (New York:
Teachers College Press, 1990), p.130-132, 218-220.
18
D. Vandenberg, Phenomenological Research in the Study of Education, in D.
Vandenberg (ed.) Phenomenology and Educational Discourse (Johannesburg:
Heinemann, 1997), p. 9, 11,12.
19
It may be worth noting that this paper engages in interpretive research understood
as a hermeneutic of exemplary texts to bring historically significant understandings to
bear on a contemporary problem.
20
D. Vandenberg, Charlatans, Knowledge, Curriculum, and Phenomenological
Research, in Philosophy of Education (Normal: Illinois State University Press, 1983),
p. 201-211.

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perceptions without concepts are blind. This combination of

rationalism and empiricism can be thought of as an aggregate, rather
than as a synthesis, to allow that some domains of knowledge need to
be more conceptual to disclose things truthfully, while others need to
be more perceptual. The aggregate is compatible with the versions of
postmodernism that can be called late modernism or, preferably, neo-
modernism. It does not try to exalt an empiricism in the footsteps of
Bacon, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Spencer, and Popper, nor a rationalism
in the trail of Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, and Habermas,
although it strongly includes their modernist traditions—both of them.
Unlike Kant, however, the proportion of perception to conception and
the nature of their interrelation to constitute an epistemic ethos that
allows truth in teaching can remain domain-specific, as Broudy
suggests.
Indeed, the epistemic ethos can remain lesson-specific. Perception
of sense data through showing, describing, pictures, demonstrations,
computer imagery, doing something, laboratory work, and field trips
help insure that students are learning about something in the world, i.e.,
that the conceptual framework used does indeed open up something in
the world to the students. This disclosure that is truth keeps concepts
from being empty. On the other hand, conceptualization through
telling, explaining, defining, quantifying, questioning, discussion, quiet
reflection, reading, and writing may open up things in the world that
the students cannot yet discriminate perceptually. Their conceptualized
disclosure keeps the perceptions from remaining ‘blind’.

A Pedagogic Epistemic Ethos

This flexible aggregate is well illustrated in teaching by Maxine
Greene (1973)21. After surveying major theories of knowledge, she
turned to the phenomenology of the child’s world, relying on Merleau-
Ponty22 (1962, 1964) before making her pedagogic recommendations.

21
M. Greene, Teacher as Stranger: Educational Philosophy for the Modern Age
(Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1973).
22
M. Merleau-Ponty, M.,The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. C. Smith (London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), and M. Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception
(ed.) J. Edie, Evanston, (IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964).

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The small child has its being in the world perceptually such that it
comes to live in the primary world of the senses, which becomes
structured by nonverbal activities and the informal language of the
family. This tacit knowing, to borrow a phrase from Michael Polanyi23
(1964), who seems to strongly parallel Merleau-Ponty, persists
independently of school learning, sometimes in opposition to it, unless
a pedagogy brings these pre-judgments of things, these prejudices, up
into explicit awareness by the students’ exploration of their inner
horizons. When the interior exploration leads to the exploration of the
outer horizons in the world through curriculum content, it allows the
child or youth to pursue truth as well as its own being in the world by
letting things in the world be disclosed by the knowledge in the
curriculum--with the teacher’s guidance, of course. After indicating
how the child lives in the primary world of perception that will inform
the rest of its life unless revised through education, Greene suggests:
The crucial concern is for self-awareness and critical cognitive
action for the sake of gaining perspective on personal life and
remaking the social domain. How should the teacher determine
whether this should be his [sic] focal concern? How might the
differences among the philosophical points of view affect his
[sic] practical judgment? Can he [sic] not function on some
occasions as a latter-day rationalist and, on other occasions, as an
empiricist? Can he [sic] not, while functioning as a pragmatist,
pay sufficient heed to the truth of a student’s being to integrate a
notion of liberation with the Deweyan conception of what is
most worthwhile? 24
This perspective is postmodern, for it does not exalt one of the
theories of knowledge as if it were the only valid meta-narrative, but it
does not throw out the baby with the bath water by dismissing them
completely. It is neo-modern because it functions as did the aggregate
of Plato, Dewey, Buber and Freire mentioned earlier in this paper--on
the sixth level of neutrality. It retains the partial truths, i.e., the

23
M. Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (New York:
Harper & Row, 1964).
24
M. Greene, Teacher as Stranger: Educational Philosophy for the Modern Age,
(Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1973), p. 168.

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disclosures, of at least four epistemologies and presumes that public

schools should transmit good knowledge, i.e., truth, throughout society,
which has been a core belief of modernism since the invention of the
printing press and that remains paramount after the invention of the
computer and mass communication systems.
If it seems too progressive for Greene to include Dewey’s and
Freire’s social concerns among the others, the point is, rather, to
include their epistemic ethos. Teachers often hear students ask, after
learning something new: ‘So what?’ ‘Of what use is this?’ ‘What
difference does this make?’ The question of what a bit of knowledge is
good for can be addressed with Dewey’s pragmatism. It is good for the
student’s experienced problems when it is related to these problems.
Similarly, if Merleau-Ponty was correct about how the child’s
development of its perceptual world informs the rest of its life, there
should be frequent consciousness-raisings to insure that previous
mislearnings do not interfere with learning new things through
curriculum content, as in Freire’s pedagogy. The critical thinking
stimulated by these pedagogies, furthermore, is supplemented by the
inclusion of rationalism and empiricism in Greene’s flexible aggregate
because these allow for the presence of factual, propositional
knowledge and its conceptualization in the modes of the standard,
academic disciplines of conservative education when the teacher who is
offering new knowledge finds it appropriate to emphasize the
perceptual aspects of propositional knowledge and/or the conceptual
aspects of theory.
When Greene adds that she is raising unanswered questions, it
suggests they are matters of legitimate controversy, but answers to
them seem implied: ‘Yes, the teacher can sometimes do a, b, c, or d.’
Together the questions constitute the epistemic ethos that requires
teachers to decide when to focus on perception, conception, practical
use, or the student’s existential becoming someone, too. Whereas for
Broudy these questions are domain-specific, for Greene they are
lesson-specific. Not only can the lessons in one subject vary to focus
on perception, conception, practical use, or existential understanding in
turn, these variations can occur within a lesson to help promote truth as
disclosing something in the world. It all depends upon the particular

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teacher in a particular classroom with particular children or youth, i.e.,

upon the exigencies of the immediate situation.25 Further elucidation
requires lesson-specific research to correctly interrelate these aspects,
but the epistemic flexibility may very well fulfill the goals of
multicultural education as well as those of critical thinking.

The Stream of Consciousness

The problem with traditional epistemologies is that their authors
reify perception and/or conception or aspects of them, such as sense
data, hypotheses, quantitative data, clear and simple ideas, primitive
axioms, basic concepts, signs, paradigms, falsifiable sentences, and so
forth, as well as so-called processes such as induction, deduction,
abduction, experimentation, quantification, etc. These reifications, and
their parallels in recipes for critical thinking, have to be put into
brackets, out of play, if one is to grasp and describe
phenomenologically the swift stream of consciousness as
simultaneously perceptually and conceptually conscious of things in
the world, at least when one is wide-awake and possesses a holistic
consciousness of things in the world that is not alienated from the
world nor from its perceptual or conceptual modes of being.
The stream of consciousness, moreover, should not itself be reified
as a thing that exists independently of the embodied disclosure of
things in the world of which an existing person is aware. The teacher
should be perceptually and conceptually aware of the things and
phenomena in the region of the world to which one is introducing
students in order to open them up to the students through the relevant
and appropriate domain-specific aspects of inquiry. The teacher should
therefore use inquiry, expository, didactic, dialogical, collaborative,
and other pedagogies interchangeably, perhaps switching between them
within a lesson, as Greene suggests, to utilize those over-emphasized
aspects of traditional epistemologies that nevertheless truthfully
disclose some partial truths of the epistemic ethos to critical theorists
with open minds.

25
John Dewey, Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of
Education (New York: Macmillan, 1916), p. 201-203.

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This epistemic flexibility requires continual dialogue with students

to ensure the teacher helps them to explore their world, not the
teacher’s world but the world as the students see it out there. Then the
truth disclosed by the teacher will open up the world to the students as
they open to it in a genuine co-disclosure that occurs when the teacher
and students have their being in the world together because they
consciously focus their attention on the same thing or phenomenon in
the world. 26
This description of truth differs somewhat from the notion that
factual statements, or propositions, are true when they correspond to
some aspects of something in the world, for students can learn factual
information verbally without seeing what is referred to if and when the
concepts are empty. They are not in the truth, however, unless the
factual information actually discloses something in the world to them.
As Martin Heidegger said, ‘”Truth” is not a feature of correct
propositions which are asserted of an “object” by a human “subject”
and then are valid somewhere, in what sphere we know not; rather,
truth is disclosure of things through which an openness essentially
unfolds’.27
In other words, propositional knowledge is not truthful because it
corresponds to things or phenomena in the world as if truth were a
property of linguistic statements in and of themselves. This merely
reifies sentences into propositions that are truthful, however, when and
only when they actually disclose things or phenomena in the world to
someone who allows them to disclose themselves through allowing
them to open themselves up in one’s lived world, i.e., through allowing
them to be. These disclosures require the teacher to function sometimes
as an empiricist, rationalist, pragmatist, or raiser of consciousness as
Greene suggests so that propositional and/or conceptual learning allows
things in the world to open themselves up to the students as the

26
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie & E. Robertson (New
York: Harper & Row, 1962), p. 145, 197, 334, and see : D. Vandenberg,
Phenomenology and Fundamental Educational Theory, in A. T. Tymieniecka (ed.)
Phenomenology World Wide (Lancaster, UK: Kluwer, 2003), p. 589-601.
27
Martin Heidegger, On the Essence of Truth, trans. J. Sullis, in Martin Heidegger:
Basic Writings (ed.) D. F. Krell (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), p. 113-141.

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students open themselves up to them. This does not denigrate

propositional knowledge but grounds it ontologically in the being of the
students and in the being of the thing or phenomenon depicted, i.e., in
the being of the world, i.e., in being. It simply brings propositions back
to life.28

Conclusion
Truth in teaching therefore requires that the teacher be neutral in
regard to the controversies regarding various epistemologies, as Greene
recommends. This includes being neutral toward any model of critical
thinking that isolates thinking from a domain and from a domain-
specific epistemic ethos, for truth in teaching requires the flexible,
domain-specific epistemic ethos in the classroom. What is knowledge
good for? It opens one to the world as it opens the world to one. It lets
the being of the world and the being of the students come into being.
At least good knowledge, truth, enables one’s being in the world as it
enables the being of the world. Truth lets the Earth be four and a half
billion years old because it lets it be what it is29 Dis-closing the world
in its beauty and goodness, truth lets being be. Wa Allâh a’lam bi al-
shawâb.*

28
For example, ‘Water freezes at 32 degrees’ and ‘Water freezes at 0 degrees’ are
both true not because they correspond to reality but when and only when they disclose
some possibilities in the world to someone. Either can help one adjust a refrigerator’s
thermostat.
29
E. Jones (ed.), The Atlas of World Geography (London: Octopus, 1977), p. 22. And
see : G.S. Soreghan, Lessons From Earth’s Deep Time, The Chronicle of Higher Education,
July 15, 2005, p. B10.

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