The Legacy of Isocrates and a Platonic Alternative

Political Philosophy and the Value of Education

James R. Muir

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138739178
• eBook ISBN: 9781351730730
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Bringing together the history of educational philosophy, political philosophy, and rhetoric, this book examines the influence of the philosopher Isocrates on educational thought and the history of education. Unifying philosophical and historical arguments, Muir discusses the role of Isocrates in raising two central questions: What is the value of education? By what methods ought the value of education to be determined? Tracing the historical influence of Isocrates' ideas of the nature and value of education from Antiquity to the modern era, Muir questions normative assumptions about the foundations of education and considers the future status of education as an academic discipline.

Part 1
Isocrates’ Idea of the Nature and Value of Education

1
Isocrates and the History of Education

Educationists vs. Everyone Else

Isocrates is one of the most remarkable and influential figures in the history of human thought. The influence of his ideas in the history of historical writing, rhetoric, the visual arts, music, religion and theology, political science, philosophy and, above all, education in Europe, North America, North Africa and the Middle East are well established and widely known outside Educational Studies. Yet there has been little study of Isocrates’ educational ideas in English,¹ and none within Educational Studies, despite the well-established and central role these ideas play in the history of educational thought and practice until the present day. As Aron observed, “Cultural traditions are the more imperious for being the less conscious”,² and Isocrates is a prime example.

Isocrates has been described as “the educator of Europe”,³ “the father of modern liberal education”,⁴ and “one of the greatest educationalists of history”.⁵ On the basis of the most meticulous analysis of the original sources so far, Henri-Irene Marrou, concluded that

The importance of this fact must be emphasized from the beginning. On the level of history Plato had been defeated: he had failed to impose his educational ideal on posterity. It was Isocrates who defeated him, and who became the educator first of Greece, and subsequently of the whole of the ancient world.⁶

Historians of Roman education agreed, arguing that, “in comparison to Plato or Aristotle, the educational program of Isocrates demands closer attention: partly for its intrinsic interest, partly because of its immense and abiding influence on Greco-Roman education”.⁷ Curtius observes that “Despite sporadic theoretical opposition, Isocrates’ standpoint remained authoritative in practice for the whole of antiquity”.⁸

As the influence of Christianity rose in the remains of the Roman Empire, Julian the Apostate sought to counter their intellectual prestige by arguing that the pagans had been wiser than anyone in the Christian Bible. As an example of wise pagans, however, he explicitly chooses two poets and Isocrates rather than Plato or Aristotle:

Is their “wisest” man Solomon at all comparable with Phocylides or Theognis or Isocrates? Certainly not. At least, if one were to compare the exhortations with Solomon’s proverbs, you would, I am very sure, find that [Isocrates] the son of Theodorus is superior to their “wisest” king.⁹

The dominance of the educational thought and practices of Isocrates continued throughout the Middle Ages and in to the Renaissance.¹⁰ Knowles emphasized that

Great and permanent, even in this field, as was the influence of the two philosophers [Plato and Aristotle], the victory and the future lay with Isocrates.¹¹

During the Renaissance of the 15th century, the European recovery of the Greek texts of Plato and Aristotle initiated a renewal of the classical conflict in educational thought between the Socratic philosophers and the Isocratic rhetors,¹² but it was the Isocratic idea of education which emerged triumphant over the Socratic in practice, and it remained the more influential idea of education well into the 18th century. As Powell noted:

Although Plato is better known and more highly regarded today, Isocrates had a much greater influence than his rival during the Hellenistic and Roman periods and down into modern times, for until the eighteenth century education in most European schools was based on his principles.¹³

Generations of classical scholars and historians of educational thought have argued that Isocrates’ educational ideas were—and still are—more influential in the history of educational thought and practice than those of any other classical thinker, from 3rd century bc until well into the 18th century and the beginnings of contemporary state schooling.

The influence of Isocrates’ educational ideas continues to this day. “Throughout education’s history, [Isocrates] this schoolmaster of antiquity had a profound and permanent influence upon the curriculum and purpose of secondary schools”.¹⁴ As Marrou carefully argued,

Isocrates’ ideas and the system of education which put them into practice reigned virtually unchallenged in Western Europe almost to our own generation [i.e. 1984].¹⁵

Practical problems in (state) schooling, such as class inequality, gender inequality, the low status of teachers, difficulties faced by non-traditional students, curricular (over-) specialization and the marginalization of vocational education have been traced directly to the continuing influence of Isocrates.¹⁶ Hadas summarized the consensus of four generations of classicist scholarship in the history of education when he concluded that

It was the program of Isocrates which has shaped European education to this day, which has kept humanism alive, and which has given Western civilization such unity as it possesses.¹⁷

There are fewer historical facts better established and more widely known that the unequaled influence of Isocrates in the entire history of educational philosophy, ideas, policy and practice, from classical antiquity to the present day.

It is astonishing, then, educationist philosophers of education rarely mention Isocrates, and some claim that educational philosophy simply has no history prior to the c. 1750.¹⁸ To mention only a few major reference sources and encyclopedia articles by educationists and philosophers, such as those by Dewey (1913a), Ulich (1954), Castle (1961), Curtis and Boultwood (1965), Nakosteen (1965), Baskin (1966), Boyd (1966), Garner and Cohen (1967), Price (1967), Lucas (1971) Hirst (1971), Bowen (1972), Kaminsky (1993), Cooney et al. (1993), Noddings (1995), Gutek (1995), Curren (1998a), Palmer (2001), Murphy (2005), Cahn (200 1), Dupuis and Gordon (2010), Gutek (1997), Bailey et al. (2010), Cahn (2009, Gutek (2010, Mulcahy (2012), Johnson and Reed (2011), Brooke and Frazer (2013) and The Encyclopedia of Educational Philosophy and Theory provide no discussion of Isocrates’ educational ideas and influence, and few mention him at all. Most tellingly of all, not one of these historical texts examines (or even refers to) any historical evidence or scholarship concerning the nature and influence of the educational thought of Isocrates.¹⁹

The striking differences between educationist accounts of the history of educational philosophy and the accounts produced by scholars in all other disciplines raise a number of questions. The primary question is, of course, how it could be that educationists’ accounts of the history of educational philosophy—the very discipline they claimed to have originated and then made primarily their own—could contain so many and such large omissions and elementary errors? How could it be that well-researched histories of educational thought written by classicists, philosophers, historians of ideas and others all emphasized the unequaled influence of Isocrates while educationists rarely mentioned him, never discussed his educational ideas and, indeed, gave every indication of being unaware of his existence? There are many causes of such differences between non-educationist vs. educationist historical scholarship, but all of them are variants of deficient historiography: conforming to the institutional origins of their specialty, educationists define education as states schooling,²⁰ and then assert that educational philosophy cannot have a history older than state schooling;²¹ educationists wrongly assumed that the greatest figures in the history of educational philosophy must be the greatest figures in the history of ethics or epistemology, and consequently ignored the many major educational philosophers who were not ethicists or epistemologists; educationists deferred to the authority of the “general philosopher”, a non-existent creature wholly of their own invention;²² educationists conformed to what they claimed was a “consensus” concerning the history of educational philosophy, but provided no evidence that such a consensus was supported by historical evidence or, indeed, that a consensus existed at all;²³ and finally, far too many educationists’ came to philosophy and the history of philosophy with no formal education in either subject.²⁴ What all these causes have in common—the unifying cause of the inadequacies of educationist accounts of the history of educational philosophy—is indifference (sometimes distain) toward historical evidence, historical scholarship and even the minimal requirements of historiography and argumentation: for educationists, the question was not what the history of educational is given the evidence, but what it must be given their assumptions.

Evidence vs. Assumptions: Hirst’s History of the Liberal Arts

The historical pronouncements of P.H. Hirst provide an example of how such assumptions have caused deficient educationist historiography²⁵. Hirst assumed that educational philosophy must have originated with the (currently) canonical Athenian philosophers, and so asserted that liberal education and the liberal arts originate with Aristotle.²⁶ The only evidence offered in support of this assertion is a fragment from Aristotle’s Politics, which Hirst extracts from Burnet’s 1903 textbook. If we examine the complete primary text rather than fragments in a textbook, we see that Aristotle is not enunciating the principles of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART 1 Isocrates’ Idea of the Nature and Value of Education
• PART 2 The Historical Transmission and Evolution of the Isocratic Idea of Education
• PART 3 Critique of the Isocratic Idea and Outline of the Parmenidean-Platonic Alternative
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index