Abstract

This paper delves into the literature of the fool and identifies ways in which the professor as fool can turn the classroom into a place of intimate revelry in order to challenge students to see their lives and institutions in new ways while also learning how to navigate the rough seas of an increasingly violent and authoritarian postmodern world. Metaphors for teachers and teaching date to Socrates in the West, who is presented by Plato as a midwife, helping students give birth to knowledge, and as a gadfly, stinging the sluggish horse of the state into action. Since then, Paolo Freire has critiqued the banking model of education and suggested it be replaced with a liberation approach to education. Connie Ruzich and Kim Phipps argue that we have settled for an economic model of education where students are viewed as passive consumers of knowledge and teachers as checkout clerks and sales people. By contrast, viewing the professor as foolosopher and the classroom as carnival opens the classroom up to making new connections among ideas (ingenium), speculation, imagination, levity, laughter, and creative storytelling.