Dr. Timothy Gutmann recently won the Mississippi Humanities Council’s Teacher of the Year award and was honored to share his winning lecture, “Can Ancient Chinese Philosophy Make America Read Again?” Gutmann combined ancient Chinese philosophy and educational history, along with the European teachings inspired by them, to create this lecture.
“I came up with the idea for this talk, thinking about the bigger issue that is not addressed in scholarly conflict. which at the moment there’s a really, really big issue, which is that we’re just not drawing in people to do readerly things,” Gutmann explains.
“And I was thinking, you know, there are historically a lot of interesting examples of reading cultures like whole societies that are brought together through the sharing of particular books. I wanted to think about what’s the possibility of bringing people together through the art of reading.”
Combining the modern research of fellow scholars and ancient scholars to stress the importance of putting down a phone and picking up a physical book and reading it critically.
Using reading in education and pushing reading for fun, and not just for knowledge, to create communities of people who are educated and enjoy learning.
Students Barsat Khadka and Anjan Poudel share what they learned about how different disciplines combine and how different philosophers studied to become who they were.
Poudel explains how he found it fascinating, “especially like at the end of the lecture, I found how interdisciplinary it was.”
“It started with like things about reading and how to develop and reinforce the practice of reading just for the sake of learning new things,” Poudel shares.
“I was really fascinated by his story and all that stuff,” Khadka explains about a Chinese philosopher who was used as an example during the lecture. “he kind of rejected that and went on his own philosophical learnings about you know how to you know immerse in the scholarly practice.”
Students, professors, and community members attending asked questions afterward about how to implement these practices in schools while continuing to stress the importance of reading outside of it being a grade.
Gutmann explains how it’s still a learning process, but he thinks starting in elementary schools, teaching to read for fun is a way to start, but for college students and adults, it is harder and needs to be worked on, and he plans to work on his classroom to continue trying to implement the philosophy.
The lecture stressed the importance of reading throughout K-12 schooling and for college students. Hattiesburg and USM have many book clubs on and off campus.
