I Teach, Therefore I Am (Educational Philosophy‪)‬

There's a strange dichotomy at work on the bookshelf in room 2115. At eye level, the center shelf showcases a handful of wooden knickknacks: a painted mallard figurine and an irregularly shaped basketball flank a fist-sized bust of Socrates. Above the clutter, impressive volumes of Immanuel Kant and Soren Kierkegaard vie for space with the smaller works of Albert Camus, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Jean-Paul Sartre. A few shelves below, books like Basketball FundaMENTALs, Creating a Winning Defense, and Youth Basketball Drills contrast their shelfmates' scholarly tone. Newspaper clippings of the Chicago Cubs' winning season lie scattered among academic journals, social science textbooks, and a set of "Great Philosophers" finger puppets. On the top shelf, in what can only have been a gross organizational error, I spy a copy of Jonathan Feinsteins A Season on the Brink lodged between The Myth of Sisyphus and the I Ching. Contemplating the shelf, I toy with the idea of a cash strapped university asking its philosophy department to share office space with the coaching staff. (Potential for a sitcom? Perhaps.) But the setting of this particular bookshelf is not a university at all; it's Eau Claire Memorial High School in Eau Claire, Wisconsin--one of only a handful of public high schools in the United States that offers an independent philosophy curriculum. And the seemingly disparate book collection is no gag but rather the library of educator Jim Kasmarek, a basketball coach turned philosophy teacher who is leading the charge to introduce philosophy as a relevant and vital part of the curriculum in American high schools.