As David Hansen (Hansen 2001 , p. 21) suggests in his emphasis on“the person”in
the role of the teacher,^2 I think the cultivation of this humanistic orientation for
teachers is more urgent today than ever. It is an orientation that can be sensitive to
the predicament of being human in the face of the conflicts of modern life and that
can respond to the increasing yet unpredictable complexity of social relations and
human emotions. This is even more important when unprecedented changes in our
educational environment, against the background of economic globalization, tend to
challenge and frustrate classroom teachers, sometimes to the point of breakdown.^3
Questions that might touch a person’s soul—questions about their sensibility, their
fate, wholly conflicting world-views, the vanity of human existence and so on—
have rarely been the object of ethical or educational reflection with teachers. But it
is precisely this sort of ethical and educational reflection that woulddeepentheir
self-understanding—of the emotions, desires and opinions whose innumerable
cross-currents give point, purpose, and meaning to their lives. And I think this kind
of self-understanding constitutes a core to the kind of humanistic practical wisdom
that teachers need to deal with the difficulties in their everyday school lives.
In contrast to reflective philosophy in the form of action research, I would call
this new form of humanistic practice“philosophy in the form of essay.”As men-
tioned in the earlier chapters, the term“essay”has its origin in the title of the
sixteenth century French Renaissance humanist Michel de Montaigne’s bookEssais
( 1958 ), where its literal meaning is“attempt”or“test.”Montaigne is known for
popularizing the essay as a literary genre in which serious philosophical speculation
is merged with anecdotes and autobiography. Montaigne identifies the essay as a
philosophical form for “trying-oneself-out” or “putting-oneself-to-the-test” or
“self-study”in which philosophical reflection and personal story-telling are held in
balance in such a way as to uncover a deeper sense of things. I take inspiration from
this idea of the essay because it exemplifies theclassicalrelation of philosophy to
life but refracted through themodernistsensibility. It isclassicalin the sense that
the essay as a philosophical practice is also an educational practice in which what
we know of the world is turned to the problem of how to conduct ourselves, as
shown in Socratic soul-searching. It ismodernistin the sense that the essay’s
openness to the unsettling and the unorthodox reflects our modern sense of
(^2) In his bookExploring the Moral Heart of Teaching( 2001 ), David Hansen refreshingly explores
the nature and predicament of teaching that can be well articulated and responded to by the
humanistic sensibility.
(^3) Think, for example, of the kind of classroom setting with students from different ethnic and
cultural backgrounds that is seen in the recently released Frenchfilm,The Class(2009), and the
kinds of challenges that these rebellious students present to the teacher. These wild and uncon-
ventional, yet curious and self-assertive students seem to represent a new kind of challenge to
teachers today. Even in Korea today, well-intentioned young teachers often leave their teaching
career after the disillusionment they experience when confronted by wild teenage students, who
seem completely unintelligible to them.
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