Multiple lenses

We discussed different educational philosophical thoughts of different philosophers in class. All of them were questioning and answering “what is education” through certain lenses. Socrates/Plato, Aristotle, Rousseau, and Dewey have their lenses, so do those existentialists, phenomenologists, and postmodernists, etc. Mostly because of the certain lens they took, flaws in their theory become very obvious when we critique through another lens.

Then, question comes to me that what is the lens or lenses that we take today when we talk about, question, or try to define education? We know that we must have certain lens, because we couldn’t “see” the answers to our questions with “naked eyes” (no lens, totally unbiased). If we could find the answers with “naked eyes”, then probably the universal-forever-answers could be located. Unfortunately, that will never happen. This might be a way to explain that why we do the same things and ask the same questions again and again and again, because human beings keep changing lenses during the process of growth, every time we change the lenses, we should “repeat” some actions, but these new actions have totally different means.

Then, my question goes on like this: if we know what is our lens today, and we are sure that it will result in certain defects in our theory, then when we know that the results of our inquiry should have certain disadvantages because of inevitable defect in the premise, do we still have the courage to go on? Is it possible that we could see things through multiple lenses (if “naked eyes” are totally impossible)? How can we do that? I admit and used to strongly agree with that people are deeply influenced by their environment and the times they live, but it is true that there are certain philosophers in history whose thoughts (or more precisely a portion of their thoughts) could transcend the limitation of their time. So now I believe that if we are aware of the limitation that our lenses give us, we take it as a serious problem, and we have a strong desire to break the limitation, then maybe we could make it to yield a better outcome of our inquiry, at least we could on some degree break the spatial limitation, if we couldn’t break the temporal limitation of this digital era.

I personally believe there is something deeply rooted in my mind always leading me to break certain limitation given by my lens, especially spatially. However, I want to see things through multiple lenses for better outcome, but maybe the meaning of inquiry is lying in the process. I probably shouldn’t struggle with how to achieve a more unbiased lens; rather, I should learn to live with the beauty of all the confusing questions according to Palmer’s suggestion.

P. S.
I try to be clear and concentrate on the theme of this post, but I am not sure whether I did it using a language I am not good at. Also, I am often distracted by some of other seems irrelevant questions that keep occurring when I want to concentrate on one theme, what presents to me when I finished the writing is always different from what I thought it should be. I should "comb" my thoughts again and again, and it takes time, but eventually my "thought of hair" still looks crazy. I am writing another post about some other questions occurred to me when I was writing the passages above.