Hello, My Name is Doug

My individually-designed concentration is called, "Philosophy and Education." Here's an excerpt from my statement of purpose, which I find I still like quite a bit (despite having written it prior to my UFO research explosion):

"The concentration I have designed allows me to examine education from what I am calling a philosophical perspective. I take this perspective to be composed of a variety of analytic and interpretive tools gleaned from several disciplines--philosophy and education, for example, but also anthropology and English...
As a result of designing my own IDS concentration, I have developed the ability to address two key sets of questions that emerge at the intersection of philosophy and education. The first concerns the institutionalization of knowledge itself in the form of academic disciplines: how does a field of knowledge come to be defined as such, and to whom does this privilege fall? How, when, and why did the body of knowledge that we encounter as students of a certain major or department come into being? In other words, why is this what you study as an English major, this as a physics major, this as a political science major? Perhaps most importantly, what is it about the "lines" that separate these disciplines that causes knowledge to fall, more or less neatly, on one side or another?
The second major set of questions to which my course of study has led involves looking at the way these bodies of knowledge are taught (and learned). What is the nature of the relationship between teachers and students in a classroom? What is the nature of the relationship between individuals and the bodies of knowledge in which we deal? What is it to learn, or to teach? How do disciplinary formations impose upon us the methods by which we teach and learn them?
These kinds of analyses are important for two interdependent reasons: first, because having the intellectual resources to examine and critique one's own educational experience and the system within which it occurs is a vital element in the larger project of social critique in general, which any citizen of a participatory democracy should find not only worthwhile but essential; and second, because the development of these skills with respect to education is precisely what most institutionalized knowledges--K-12 curricula, disciplinary "core" or methods classes--do not teach."