A Philosopher King – Sunset Observer #47

January 20, 2017 Victor El-Khouri 0 Comments

…By Whitney Farmer
@farmer_whitney (Twitter/FLICKR) or farmerwhitney (Instagram) and whitney.farmer.146 (Facebook)
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Un Pop Culture

The best teacher in the history of public education in the United States is William Donahue.

I’m sure of it.

He taught advanced classes – World Classics, Logic – and also beginning English and maybe even ESL and some special education classes at C.L. McLane High School in Fresno, California. In the end of his career, he began teaching at Bullard High School where the rich kids went, which was the only blemish in his stellar record. When you drive by McLane now with your doors locked and see what it has become – seeing what might have inspired every dystopian film ever – Mr. Donahue can be forgiven for not being buried in that tsunami. However, I am convinced that he could have single-handedly stopped the urban blight, if he had just stayed and fought the good fight a bit longer.

In Mr. Donahue’s classes, I read Plato and Shakespeare, Dante and Nietzsche. We studied Ecclesiastes and Job from a teacher who wasn’t sure if God existed, the first time I had been a part of that type of a debate across the aisle. I ended the courses surer than ever that God lives and honoring my academic hero, perhaps because he honored me and all of his students in return.

I confess that I succeeded because God helped me. One day in class, Mr. Donahue asked us what is the difference between knowledge and wisdom, and only I raised my hand. When I said that knowledge is data/information/facts, but wisdom is knowing what to DO with that information, Mr. Donahue said, “Good Girl”. What I didn’t tell him is that in a dream the night before I had heard that answer. The Lord sometimes does that for me – a divine shortcut – like the time He taught me how to do the butterfly stroke. The next day in practice after a dream, I did it perfectly and was moved from JV to Varsity. Or the time He taught me how to French braid my hair.

But shortcuts aren’t the only way we need to travel through this life. Just ask Job. Most of the time, we need to go through the hard work of it, and sometimes the purpose only becomes clear in the end. I say this honestly as someone who is tired of developing character and who looks forward to every oasis in the desert rather than for each pearl of wisdom. I haven’t arrived yet.

So, sometime in the 80s in the hot dusty public school with my feathered hair and lip gloss, I learned from Mr. Donahue about the ideal of a Philosopher King. I learned that Socrates had taught Plato, and that Plato had taught Aristotle, and that Aristotle had taught Alexander the Great who had conquered their known world through war. And then we read in Ecclesiastes that there is no end to learning and that all of our striving is vanity. Unless we encounter God, then it all makes sense.

I learned from Mr. Donohue the characteristics of a reliable witness: Someone of sound mind with all of their necessary senses intact to be able to perceive accurately, AND NOTHING TO GAIN OR LOSE BY TELLING THE TRUTH.

And I learned from Mr. Donahue the ways how diabolical advocates deceive and confuse through logical fallacies to mislead people for their own purposes…

…argumentum ad hominem, attacking the witness personally to discredit their testimony. (This couldn’t have been a rape because she was asking for it – Just look at what she was wearing!)…

…post hoc ergo propter hoc or ‘after this, because of this’. (People eat more ice cream in the summer AND there are more forest fires. So, ice cream causes forest fires.)…

I learned from Mr. Donahue how to construct a syllogism, and heard him speak the words of Socrates: “The unexamined life is not worth living.” And I learned that Socrates was executed by the government for ‘corrupting the youth of Athens’ by challenging them to think for themselves.

Today, I am grateful for Mr. Donahue and I am thinking about all of the books that he made me read. I am thinking about the vision of a Philosopher King.

I’m still in Mr. Donahue’s class.

Quote of the Blog, from Val Kilmer in “Real Genius”, channeling Socrates after being given a fatal dose of hemlock: “I drank WHAT?!?!”

Image of “The Death of Socrates” by Jacques-Louis David.
For the archive of my previous Un Pop Culture blogs, click here.